Patrick White - Voss

No one of all Mrs Bonner’s acquaintance was ignorant of what Dr Kilwinning would dare to charge, and that he was become accordingly the best physician in town.

But the Bonners were not a great comfort to each other as they went towards their niece’s door. Life was exceeding their capacities.

Laura was lying in her handsome bed, looking at nothing and at everything. During the crisis, which no one had explained very well to the perplexed merchant, the aunt had unbraided her niece’s hair. Now, the dark, hot hair appeared disagreeable to the uncle, who disliked anything that suggested irregularity. Nor could he remember when he had last entered his niece’s room, which gave him the impression of being littered with fragile secrets, so that he was forced to walk delicately, his every step an apology, and his thick, fleshy body looked quite grotesque.

Laura had to turn her head. She said:

‘I am sorry to be such an inconvenience to you.’

It was difficult, but her rather thin lips had managed that ridiculous sentence.

Mr Bonner sucked his teeth, and was moving even more delicately to atone for his deficiencies.

‘You must lie still,’ he whispered, imitating somebody he had once heard in a sick-room.

‘It is really nothing,’ said Laura. ‘But one of those stupid indispositions. That are difficult to explain.’

How gravely her jaws contended with speech. Her stiff and feverish form, inside which she could move about quite freely, was by now of little importance; it was, truthfully, nothing. Yet, between bouts of fever, she was idiotically comfortable, and could even enjoy the fumbling sympathies of her uncle and aunt.

‘Oh, dear, dear, dear Laura,’ Aunt Emmy was crying, ‘that we should suffer this. I cannot bear not knowing whatever it may be, but your uncle will bring the good doctor, who will explain everything.’

In times of stress Mrs Bonner transferred her own simplicity to those about her, and would address them as if they were, in fact, little children.

‘You will see,’ she added.

She was touching, and touching her young niece. To cover her up. Or to discover a reason for their suffering.

Looking at those two children from her tragic distance, Laura Trevelyan felt intolerably old. If she could have done something for them, but she could not. Even restored to full health, there would be nothing she could do, she realized, for her uncle and aunt.

Then Mr Bonner cleared his throat. Rescued by his wife’s words, he said in a young man’s voice:

‘Yes. The doctor. I will send Jim round. He will be here in two shakes. Yes. I will write a note.’

‘And if he should be at his dinner?’ remembered his wife.

‘I will make it worth his while to leave any dinner,’ said the merchant.

Given favourable circumstances, he was a man of power and influence.

Now he went about this business, after abandoning on a console table in the shadows of the room the unfortunate pears. These soft, innocent fruit seemed to proclaim a weakness that he would have liked to keep secret.

There the pears were, however, even if they remained temporarily unnoticed by Laura Trevelyan and Mrs Bonner. The latter continued desperately to tend her niece, bringing in succession a little toast-water, a good, strong broth that had slopped over while being conveyed from the kitchen, and a milk jelly in a pretty shape. When all these had been refused the aunt cried out passionately:

‘What more can I do? My dear, tell me, and I will do it.’

As if there had been a grudge between them.

‘I do not ask you to do anything,’ said Laura Trevelyan.

She had closed her eyes, and was smiling a smile that Mrs Bonner would have liked to interpret, but the girl was, in fact, so suffused with fire and weakness that she could not have borne her aunt even an imaginary grudge.

Notwithstanding, her niece’s defenceless eyelids exposed Mrs Bonner to fresh attacks of remorse.

‘It is always easier,’ she complained, ‘for those who are ill. They may lie there, while we who have our health must suffer. We are the weak, helpless ones.’

In the last resort of that helplessness, she held to her niece’s forehead a handkerchief soaked far too liberally in eau de Cologne, while continuing to disinter her own buried sins.

So the evening passed in activity and frustration. Dr Kilwinning came, and Dr Bass returned. Men’s boots commanded the stairs, and much masculine self-importance was expended. If the ignorance of young Dr Bass could at least be blamed, it had yet to be discovered what purpose the knowledge and experience of Dr Kilwinning would serve, although the eminent physician himself did drop several hints, together with many ornamental smiles, that he kept saved up for the consolation of ladies. Mrs Bonner had, in addition, great confidence in his beautiful cuffs, linked by lozenges of solid gold, in which were set rubies, though in most tasteful proportion.

‘And the very lightest diet,’ said the important doctor. ‘Soups.’

He smiled, and it became a mystic word, dimly steaming upon his tongue.

Mrs Bonner was compelled to smile back.

‘So nourishing,’ she sighed, herself by now nourished.

But her husband would not respond to such treatment. He began to look cunning. He was making his eyes small. As Dr Kilwinning remarked in confidence afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance, the merchant spoke with a directness that one would only expect from a very ordinary man. Mr Bonner said:

‘Yes, Doctor. But what is this sickness my niece has got?’

His wife feared at first that his want of delicacy might give offence.

‘It is still too early, Mr Bonner,’ the doctor said, ‘to diagnose the illness with anything like certainty. It could be one of several fevers. We must observe. And care for the patient.’ Here he smiled at Mrs Bonner, who returned his smile devotedly.

‘Hm,’ said the merchant.

‘I still declare it is a brain fever,’ ventured Mrs Bonner.

‘It could well be,’ sighed the doctor.

‘I would like to know the reason for this fever,’ said the merchant. ‘A reason can be found for everything.’

Then the doctor gave one of those jolly, indulgent laughs, and patted Mr Bonner on the elbow, and went away, followed by Dr Bass, whose shamefully honest ignorance Mrs Bonner had by this time forgotten.

That night Laura Trevelyan was racked by her fever, and called out repeatedly that the hair was cutting her hands. Her own hair was certainly very hot and heavy. But soft. Mrs Bonner made several attempts to arrange it in some way that might lessen the patient’s discomfort.

‘Oh, mum, it is terrible,’ said Betty, the new girl, ‘it is terrible to think they may take it off. Such lovely hair. There was Miss Hanrahan had the whole of her hair taken from her for the scarlet fever. But sold it to a lady who wanted to make pads for her own. So it was not quite lost. And Miss Hanrahan growing another lovely head.’

‘Go to bed, Betty,’ said Mrs Bonner.

‘I will sit up with Miss Trevelyan, if I may, mum,’ the girl proposed.

But Mrs Bonner was determined to bear her own cross.

‘I would never forgive myself,’ she cried, ‘if anything were to happen. And to my own niece.’

When the girl was gone, she prepared herself as if for a journey, with shawls, and plaids, and a book of sermons that she always held in an emergency, and presently her husband came, who could no longer sit alone in the desert that the house had become. Not suddenly, not tonight, not to Mr Bonner alone. These two people, looking at each other at intervals, in hope of rescue, had begun to realize that their whole lives had been a process of erosion. Oases of affection had made the desert endurable, until now the fierce heat of unreason threatened to wither any such refuge.