way of reply, Mr. Thorpe fixes her with an expression so compassionate, she has to look away. But looking away is not enough. The compassion remains in the air, on her skin, seeping into her flesh, inescapable. She stares at his shoulder and her heart crashes. Fear, or attraction? Are they perhaps the same thing?
“I went mad after he was born,” she says. “An extreme form of nervous melancholy. It’s a particular malady and one of Herr Doktor Hermann’s special fields of interest.”
“This Hermann fellow—have I met him?”
“I don’t think so. He’s in the psychiatric section.”
“The loony bin, you mean?”
Elfriede refuses to laugh. Instead she examines the collar of his jacket. The woolen scarf tucked inside, protecting his neck and chest from the damp, cold air. She whispers, “You should be disgusted. You should be appalled.”
“I’m just waiting to hear the rest of the story.”
“There is no rest of the story.”
“Rubbish. Of course there is. Lots of new mothers have a spell of the blue devils after their babies are born. My cousin spent a rough few weeks, as I remember. By God, I don’t blame them. I should imagine the whole affair’s rather a shock to the system, and then you’ve got this child to take care of, this mysterious little being keeping you up all hours and so on.”
“Not like this. I couldn’t—I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t—it was like a shroud settled on me. I thought I was going mad. I should have been joyful, I should have been grateful. I had a rich, loving husband. I had a beautiful baby. Everything for me was perfect. But I felt miserable and terrified. I felt shadowed by doom. I can’t even describe how black it all was. I looked at his face, his little squashed face, and he was a stranger. I thought, I don’t love you, I don’t even know you, who are you?”
“Poor Elfriede … my poor girl … and nobody understood …”
Now Elfriede raises her head to Mr. Thorpe’s kindly, bony face. She defies his kindness. She defies this compassion of his. She defies his freckles and his pale, gingery eyebrows.
“I tried to kill myself.” (She flings the words at his long eyelashes.) “I thought I should kill myself, because I was no use to my baby at all. I was a terrible mother. I was poisoning him with my own bitter milk. I thought I should kill myself before I killed my own baby.”
Mr. Thorpe doesn’t reply. Not in words, anyway. He lifts his arms and puts them around her. Her defiance crumbles. She leans into his ribs, into his shrunken chest, and shudders out a barrage of tears into the left-hand pocket of the Norfolk jacket, the one covering his heart. A shooting jacket, designed to withstand far more serious attacks than this one, thank goodness. His thumbs move against her back. He doesn’t speak. She smells wet wool, and the particular scent she caught two weeks earlier, in the infirmary garden, soap and the salt of human skin. Mr. Thorpe’s skin. Eventually she turns her face to the side and speaks again.
“I spent a month in hospital, and then they sent me home. Everybody pretended nothing had happened, that I had caught a bad cold or something. Except they wouldn’t leave me alone with the baby. My milk had dried up. Everybody was so polite and cold.” She pauses, considers, forges on brazenly. “And my husband—Gerhard—I wouldn’t—I was afraid of having any more babies—”
“Dear me. Poor Gerhard. So they sent you here to recover your senses.”
“Yes.”
“When are you supposed to go back home?”
“When I’m cured,” she says. “When Herr Doktor Hermann decides I’m well enough.”
“Ah, this Hermann again. You know, I’m loath to point fingers at another man, but it seems to me that he’s had two years to cure you. Two years, and you’re clearly in your proper senses, no danger to anybody. Only a lingering sense of guilt, which a loving family ought to be able to conquer.”
“Maybe it’s better if I don’t go back. Maybe my son—my little Johann—I’m a stranger to him—”
“Is that what this Hermann chap’s been telling you?”
“No. He doesn’t tell me things. He only asks questions, for the most part.”
Mr. Thorpe makes a noise that Elfriede will one day recognize as coming from the Scotch side of him. She remains in his arms, laid comfortably against his chest, shielded from his sharp, skinny bones by the woolen jacket. She doesn’t want to move. Has no ability, even, to stir from this place of refuge. His jacket, her Cloth of Tears.
“Anyway, he doesn’t love me anymore,” she says.
“Who doesn’t? Your son?”
“My husband.”
“Did he say that? Did he say he doesn’t love you?”
“No, but I saw it in his face, after I came back from the hospital. I was alien to him. He thought he’d married an angel, and as it turned out …”
“Speaking from the male perspective,” Mr. Thorpe says slowly, “of which I naturally consider myself something of an expert. Perhaps it was something else?”
“No. No. A woman can tell. A woman can tell when a man doesn’t love her.”
“Well—and I’m only speculating, mind you—a man whose wife—how do I put this? A man whose beautiful wife no longer allows him the singular privilege for which he married her—”
Elfriede starts to draw away. But Mr. Thorpe makes a little squeeze of his arms, not to keep her there, not so firm as that, but to let her know she’s welcome to stay, if she likes. So she pauses, no longer pressed against his chest, but close.
“It’s possible, you see, that he thought you didn’t love him. And a chap who believes he’s lost the love of a woman—forgive me—a woman such as you—well, I daresay it might ruin him.” Mr. Thorpe pauses. “That’s only conjecture, mind you. I haven’t met the lucky Herr von Kleist.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Another slight squeeze. Elfriede capitulates. The lure of comfort is too much for her. Warm human contact. Warm human arms, warm human chest. Things for which she’s starved. A famine of touch.
“Thank you for your music,” Wilfred says. “I was afraid you’d stop.”
“I wasn’t sure whether I should. I didn’t want to keep you awake.”
“Keep me awake? Kept me alive, I think.”
“Oh!”
“So why did you? Keep playing, I mean.”
“Because I … well, I …” She shouldn’t say the words, but she must. She might conceal her true thoughts from the doctor, but she can’t conceal them from Wilfred. Oh, his actual heart, thudding under her ear! She whispers, “Because I thought you might be listening.”
“Damn it all,” he says softly.
“What
