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When the time comes for him to sail, his wife asks him to stay. God knows, they did not marry for love, but he supposes that she must have some measure of tenderness for him after all. Perhaps, like Calpurnia, she has dreamed that his statue gushed blood like a fountain and men washed their hands in it. Or perhaps it is only that she has no appetite for a second taste of widowhood, when she has so recently found a man to be father to her son.
He stays. It is the rash impulse of a moment, much like his decision to re-marry. His wife is of a phlegmatic temperament. Those two little words, don’t go, are at odds with what he has hitherto believed to be her nature. She has piqued his curiosity. The landscape of this woman’s mind is a greater mystery to him than the whole of the frozen north. The feeling does not last, but, by then, the ships have sailed.
He was to have sailed nine days into his marriage. On the tenth day, he realises what he has done. He married to provide this friendless woman with security, because the whim took him to perform a rare act of charity. He also acknowledges a deeper motive: he had plunged into the blackest of moods at the thought that there would be nobody to regret his absence or await his return. He gave no consideration to anything beyond the moment of departure. Now, he must be a husband and father again.
They remain in the house in Woolwich. There is always work for a man of his profession; if there is any certainty, it is the slow decay of the human body from the moment of birth, and the futile human quest to halt it. He knows that some men of his profession call him idle and say that he always takes the easy path, not the right one, but his patients think well of him. He looks the part of a doctor, in their eyes. They expect a certain callousness, and he does not disappoint. He knows when to drop a smattering of Greek or Latin into the conversation.
They live comfortably, then. Sometimes, at night, the house creaks around him and he could almost mistake it for the creaking timbers of a ship. But he wakes to find himself on solid ground.
The boy grows, as boys do. He is an odd, timid creature, morbidly sensitive to any sharpness of tone. He, Stephen, has to remind himself to be patient, for Mary Ann's sake.
She has never spoken of it, but he suspects that her first husband was a hot-tempered man, perhaps a brutal one. Perhaps this is why she tolerates his own coolness; she knows from experience that there are things harder to endure than ice. And he is not a cruel man, he tells himself. If people could see inside him — peel back the skin, split open his rib cage and probe the cavity — they would understand that he is not cruel.
His heroine is trapped in a remote Italian castle, prey to the machinations of her wicked uncle. Mary Ann is running an errand. The boy lingers, expectant as a dog waiting for crusts from the table. He breathes too noisily for Stephen to ignore him.
"What is it?" he asks, remembering in time to keep most of the impatience from his voice.
"Your book, sir," says the boy. Apparently he wants to know what Stephen is reading.
"This? A mere trifle." He has no desire to explain, even to a child, that he has been engrossed in the sufferings of the hapless Emily.
He takes down a heavier volume from the shelf. A work on anatomy. "This is more deserving of your attention."
Mary Ann returns to find them sitting over a cross-section of a human torso. She is far too sensible a woman to be shocked.
“The student shows some promise," he tells her.
“Please, sir,” says the boy. “I should like to hear the end of your story. About the man you saved from a musket ball.”
He continues his tale. The boy listens, wide-eyed. Mary Ann busies herself with other matters, but occasionally she nods.
It occurs to him that, for a few minutes, he has managed to forget that these people are merely intricate constructions of bone, muscle and organs, unbearably fragile. For a few minutes, he has felt peace.
Between two and three years have passed when he first notices the taste of blood in his mouth. Merely a loose tooth, he tells himself.
It is true that he has been weary of late. He has attributed the spells of weakness and irritability to overwork, the pain in his joints to age. As his own physician, he prescribes himself a course of reading, to be taken in bed.
When he loses a second tooth, he is forced to make a diagnosis. It seems that he has avoided a long sea voyage only to fall victim to the sailor's disease on land. He is rather amused by the irony. On land, at least, the complaint is easily cured. He recommends that the patient make some dietary changes and waits for his condition to improve.
Two weeks later, he notices the bruising.
The medical men are perplexed by his failure to rally. “Of course,” they say, “there remains much that we do not understand about the human body. Perhaps if we increase the dose of lemon juice again?”
(He does not blame them. He is a medical man himself, and he has spent most of his life in a sad state of perplexity.)
Weakness forces him to keep to his bed. In the past, he would not have viewed this as any great hardship, but he can no longer read. The pressure inside his skull does not permit it.
He spends the time sketching. He draws his daughter, as she might have looked. He gives her the delicate features of her mother, his first wife.
He often thinks about blood. Blood from scurvied gums, blood on the surgeon’s tools. Sometimes, he imagines that he sees blood on the white bed linen. (In the end, none of his choices mattered, because he lost them both.)
He sketches a bird. A soul departing, if he believed in the existence of the soul.
On the third day, he can endure it no longer. He insists on rising from his bed, but vertigo hits him as soon as he pulls himself up to stand. Before he reaches the bedroom door, his vision blurs and he hears his own voice, slurred, saying that he cannot bear the heat.
He wakes with his head in his wife’s lap. Poor Mary Ann. He must have fallen his own length, a statue toppled.
He says to her, "I’m sorry."
She holds his hand, her thumb gently circling the rope burn on his wrist.
She is a soldier, he thinks. She does not flinch. There is no foolish sentiment between them, but he is grateful for her unspoken camaraderie. If she were a man, he might call it brotherhood. He thinks, they need to invent new words for all the kinds of feeling that can exist between a man and a woman.
His body opens. The whole world must be able to see inside. His flesh divides along cuts that are as familiar to him as the lines on the palm of his hand. He made those cuts himself, many years ago, upon another man’s body.
When you save a man’s life, it belongs to you. Or so they say. Nobody ever told him that the reverse could be true. That you could save a man — a ridiculous man, brimming over with the vitality that you have always lacked — and, afterwards, a part of you would always belong to him.
He sets the paper down. He is too weak to sketch now. A bird flutters in the corner of the room. He dare not ask Mary Ann if it is really there.
Has his first wife forgiven him? A foolish question, of course. She ceased to exist when she bled to death in the bedroom of their little house, and she no longer has the capacity either to hold a grudge or relinquish one. And yet, approaching the question as a purely intellectual exercise, if something of her consciousness remained, could it ever forgive him for disregarding her wishes?
She wanted their child to live. She told him so, on that first day, before they descended into hell. But on the third day, when she was far beyond the power of speech, he begged the doctors to do anything to save his wife — never mind the child — he wanted her to live. Her wry humour and the solidity of her body against his in their marital bed.
In the end, they both died anyway.
He thinks, perhaps the great choices of our lives — wife or child, London or the Arctic — are not choices at all. The road appears to split ahead of us into two forks. But, whichever we take, we end up at the same destination.
It is a damnably silly way to die, a last great joke against him. Mary Ann is beside him at the end. The boy was there, for a while. He read aloud from one of Stephen’s books, stumbling over the words. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, hamate, capitate, trapezoid, trapezium. He seemed to know that the words would bring comfort. Stephen is glad that the boy will not witness his final struggle.
He can no longer see Mary Ann's face, but he can feel the firm clasp of her hand.
Thousands of miles away, another man’s mind flutters faintly on the edge of consciousness. He senses it, despite the distance.
A man — doctor or priest — asks him if he has any last wishes.
He tries to form words. “My body-“. He does not know what comes next.