Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

The doctor did not lift her eyes from her plate.

“Why do you ask this?”

“Well, he talks to me about her all the time. He always comes early for his session, a half hour, forty-five minutes, and just sits there, talking, while you’re with another patient.”

Dr. Blake smiled at her plate. “Perhaps you should charge him a fee.” She looked up. “What does one drink here? That man has a glass of milk, look. And he is eating stew. There are many things in this country that are still a mystery to me.”

Phoebe toyed miserably with her sandwich. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice, “I shouldn’t have asked about Mr. Jolly.”

“Why not? It is natural to be curious.”

“But it’s unprofessional. And that’s what I want to be, I want to be professional. I want”—she couldn’t stop herself—“I want to be like you.”

“Do you? This is interesting. Why, do you think?”

“Because you’re — because you’re admirable.”

“Am I? In what way?”

“I don’t know. I want to be calm, like you.”

“Calm,” the doctor said, seeming to turn the word over and examine it from all sides. “I suppose that is a good quality. But not very — what shall I say? — not very positive.”

“Oh, but it is!” Phoebe said quickly. “You’ve been through so much, you’ve seen so many terrible things, and yet you look at the world in such a tranquil way.”

“Calm. Tranquil. This is a very interesting view you have of me.” She ate some more of her food. “This salad sauce really is rather unpleasant,” she said. She moved her plate aside and set her elbows on the table. “Yes, Mr. Jolly has a wife, I can tell you that. I can also tell you she is a very aggressive woman.”

“Aggressive? But he tells me that he beats her, all the time.”

Dr. Blake produced an an old little hiccuping sound; it took Phoebe a moment to recognize it as laughter.

“Ah, Mr. Jolly! He is so well named. Such a funny man — funny, and quite sick. Now, I would like a coffee. Is the coffee good here? I suppose not.”

Phoebe saw the manageress making her way between the tables, carrying a bulky parcel wrapped neatly in brown paper and tied with string. She stopped at their table. She was a small, bossy woman with a bad perm that made her hair look like a tightly packed mass of steel shavings. “Are you Miss Griffin?” she asked coldly, consulting the label on the parcel. “Miss Phoebe Griffin? This was left in for you. It’s laundry, I believe.”

“Laundry?” Phoebe said weakly, baffled.

“Yes. This is a restaurant, you know, not a collection depot.” She pronounced it DEEP-oh . “Kindly direct deliveries to your home in future.”

She dropped the parcel on the table with a thud and turned on her heel and marched away.

“Thank you,” Phoebe said weakly to her departing back, and was ignored.

The two women gazed at the parcel.

“I don’t know what this is,” Phoebe said. “I never asked for laundry to be delivered here.”

“How very strange,” Dr. Blake said. “You really know nothing about it? Jung has some interesting things to say on this kind of phenomenon. Otherwise, of course, he is a charlatan.”

They ordered coffee, which, when it came, Dr. Blake, without rancor, pronounced undrinkable. “I’d like to smoke a cigarette,” she said. “Do you permit?”

“Yes, of course. Have one of mine.”

“Thank you. What are they called? Let me see the packet. Gold Flake! What a beautiful name. Are they very exclusive?”

“No, no, they’re just — ordinary.”

“Gold Flake. This I must remember.”

I know what it’s like, Phoebe suddenly thought, being here with her: it’s like Alice in Wonderland. It’s all completely logical, and completely mad.

“What is funny?” Dr. Blake asked.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about you and my father, and how — how wonderful it is.”

“You think so? I am glad.” She had a peculiar way of holding her cigarette, between her middle fingers and resting on her thumb, as if it were a chopstick. And she didn’t inhale, but drew the smoke barely past her lips and quickly expelled it again. “My father gave me my first cigarette to smoke when I was ten years old,” she said. “My mother argued with him, but he said, no, children must be allowed to experience everything as soon as they are ready — sooner, indeed.”

Phoebe wondered, somewhat uneasily, what Herr Nussbaum’s notion of “everything” might have encompassed.

After a few puffs, the doctor stubbed out the cigarette. “Now we shall go back to work, I think,” she said. “Who have we this afternoon?”

“Mr. Doherty is first. You know, I always suspect he’s a priest.”

“Do you? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he give off — what do you call it? — the odor of sanctity?”

“No. It’s the white socks, I think.”

Dr. Blake did her hiccupy laugh again, and stood up. “Let me pay for this,” she said. “You hardly ate any of your food. Was it not good? Perhaps what I told you about your father and me, perhaps that took away your appetite. So difficult, when one is young, to believe that older people also make love. Inconceivable, I should say. Ha! What a word to use. You see? Language is never innocent.” She had produced a tiny leather purse from the pocket of her dress and was counting out coins. “What do you call this one?”

“A half crown.”

“Yes, that’s right. How many years have I been living here and I still do not understand the money. My husband tried to teach me, but he would always get so angry. Now I go into a shop and I say, ‘How much is that?’ and the answer is ‘One pound, nineteen, and eleven pence ha’penny.’ I am baffled. So always I hand over notes, and my purse fills up with coins. You should see, at home, I have jars filled with florins and sixpences — what is this one?”

“That’s a threepenny bit.”

“Ah,” Dr. Blake said, with a look of mock despair, “I shall never learn.”

Phoebe’s eyes wandered uneasily to the paper parcel at her elbow. It was a large, solid cube, expertly packed. She thought of pretending to forget it and leaving it behind, but she knew the manageress would come running after her with it and make her take it. She picked it up. It did feel like laundry. She turned it over in her hands. Certainly that was her name on the label: “Miss Phoebe Griffin, c/o The Country Shop, Stephen’s Green.” She couldn’t understand it.

“It is a package from Dr. Jung, perhaps,” Dr. Blake said. “If it were from Freud, of course, it would be dirty laundry.” She beamed, pleased with her joke. “Come now,” she said, leading the way towards the door, “let us go and deal with the holy man in the white socks.”

* * *

When they got back to the office, Phoebe put the parcel under her desk, at her feet, and tried to forget about it. She could have taken it into the lavatory on the ground floor and opened it there, but she felt an almost superstitious unwillingness to know what was in it. Was someone playing a prank at her expense? That was the kind of thing her friend Jimmy Minor would have done, sending her a package of rags wrapped up in brown paper and tied neatly with string, just for a joke, but Jimmy was gone, and she knew no one else who had his peculiar sense of humor. Could it be a gift from Quirke, a new dress or something? But why would he send it to her at the Country Shop? Quirke certainly didn’t go in for jokes or surprises.

Mr. Doherty arrived then, with that expression of bland blamelessness she believed he put on specially for her, though he still looked furtive. She noticed he was wearing gray socks today, and wondered if it meant his mental condition, whatever it might be, was improving.