Reading Madame Bovary by Amanda Lohrey Read Free Book Online Page B

a destructive love affair and it was killing me. That’s why I got sick. For a brief time, propped up in my hospital bed, I thought: Let me die.
    How pathetic. Not long after, something happened that made me ashamed of this morbidity.
    It began with a bout of pleurisy. My GP examined me and said it would go away. There were too many antibiotics dispensed now and he did not think they were called for in this instance. Not that I blame him, Dr. Richard Wesley-Cameron: tall, slim, handsome, English, mellifluous vowels, a certain edgy manner. Always a little hurried, harassed even, but willing to make home visits, he had come to my flat at around seven on a very dark mid-winter’s evening, and found me scarcely able to move from the pain in my chest.
    I was in a destructive love affair and it was killing me.
    I heard him drive up the long avenue of dark elms that lined the driveway and it was an effort for me to get up from the bed and open the door. A double door, a double lock. I sat tentatively on the edge of the bed in my pink cotton nightdress and black shawl while he examined me. ‘You have pneumonia,’ he said. ‘You live alone here?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    It was late when the taxi delivered me to the private hospital on the hill overlooking the city. Inside there was an institutional hush. The lights had been dimmed, the corridors were empty. In the front office I registered with a young nurse; the receptionist had long gone home. Then I was led to a room on the second floor, a single room with a high bed. It was after midnight. My suitcase stood unpacked in the corner. I hoisted myself, gasping with pain, onto the high bed and sat upright, my back against four firm pillows, and I sat like this for a long time. No-one came. Outside I could hear the distant traffic, the wind in the trees.
    Finally a nurse arrived, stocky and middle-aged. ‘You should be lying down,’ she snapped.
    â€˜I can’t lie down,’ I snapped back. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
    When I awoke from the warm, drifting sleep brought on by sedatives, a man was standing by my bed. He introduced himself to me as Victor Parish, a cardiac physician, and then he sat on the chair beside my bed. ‘The type of pneumonia you have,’ he said, ‘is called pericarditis. The pericardium is a membranous sac enveloping the heart. It’s the covering of the heart, the heart’s capsule. When it becomes inflamed, usually through a bacterial infection, friction arises and that’s the pain you are experiencing now. When I listen to your heart I can hear these friction sounds.’
    How clear he is, I thought, how lucid.
    â€˜It’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘All you need to do is rest.’
    For three days I slept through the afternoons in a sleep I have never experienced before or since, a blissful, restorative trance. Dozing in and out of consciousness, floating, light. For three days I slept like this and it seemed as if, each time I awoke, Dr. Parish was sitting by my bed. One afternoon I dreamed that the sac around my heart had swelled up like a balloon and was carrying me off up into the sky. It was not an alarming dream. No danger. Only the sensation of flight, of drifting upwards.
    Would it be possible, I wondered, to drift up into death?
    Every day he came to see me. Each day he would sit by my bed. Each day it seemed as if he were there a long time, though he was probably present only ten minutes, at most. Dr. Parish, or Mr. Parish, in the protocols of his profession; my heart’s rescuer. He was not handsome like Wesley-Cameron but short and plump and bald, with rimless glasses and a quality of immense stillness. He sat with me by the window and looked out. Was he with me only five minutes? It seemed like thirty … an hour … endless. He had golden, freckled hands that lay composed on his lap, and sometimes he gazed out through the glass of the hospital