Antarctica Read Online Free PDF Page A

not come down. For a long time afterwards she sat there, insisting she would jump if the doctor would not tell her the truth.
    ‘Are you in love with her?’
    ‘No,’ said the doctor.
    ‘She’s obviously in love with you.’
    The doctor did not answer.
    ‘Are you going to stop?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Are you going to leave me?’
    ‘Of course not.’
    Eventually his wife was lured down. A splendid fire throve in the hearth, for the doctor, out of nerves, had thrown shovelfuls of coal on to the flames. Before dawn, in the presence of her husband, she slowly burned every one of Cordelia’s letters. The doctor watched as fire devoured the pages, Cordelia’s lock of milky hair singeing in the blue heat.
    ‘She’s a blonde,’ said the doctor’s wife and breathed deep the scent of another woman in the cashmere scarf before throwing it to the fire.
    The doctor called Cordelia into his surgery and in a low, sensitive voice, informed her their affair was over. He joined his hands and pushed his thumbs round in small, anti-clockwise circles. This must be what it’s liketo be informed of a terminal illness, she thought. He talked and talked, but Cordelia had stopped listening. She was reading the eye-test chart behind his head. She could read down to the seventh line. Maybe she needed glasses.
    But then the doctor’s voice changed. He put his head in his hands.
    ‘Oh Cordelia,’ he said. ‘I can’t leave my wife.’
    ‘How romantic.’
    ‘You know I can’t leave. Think of the children. Think of them asking, “Where’s Daddy?”’
    ‘Would you leave if you hadn’t children?’
    ‘Wait for me,’ he said. ‘In ten years’ time the children will be grown and gone. Promise you’ll meet me on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the century. Meet me that night and I will come home and live with you,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
    Cordelia laughed outrageously and that was the last she saw of him. She passed patients in the waiting room; was everyone waiting for this man? The snivelly middle-aged woman with the tissues, the pale man with his bandaged arm, the wounded.
    *
    Gradually, the bad dream faded. The green curtain and the window furled backwards into memory, but the promise stoked like a bright blade in Cordelia’s head. Cordelia coveted her solitude. She started reading late into the night, playing her piano, practising uncomplicated airs. She talked to herself, speaking disjointedsentences freely in the empty rooms. Slowly Cordelia became a recluse. She covered the TV with a tablecloth and put a vase of flowers there; she threw the transistor radio away. She made lists, paid her bills through the mail. She got the phone in, realised the turfman, the grocer, the gasman, anyone she wanted, would call round and deliver. They left the cardboard boxes, the gas cylinders outside the house, took the cheques from under the stone. She rose late, drank strong tea, made a ritual of cleaning out the grates. She stopped attending mass. Neighbours knocked on her door and peered in through the windows, but she did not answer. A powder of rust-coloured ash fell over the house, accumulated on the sills, the curtain rails. It seemed that every time she moved she raised dust.
    Evenings, she lit the fire, watched the whoosh of flame around the turf, and listened to the rhododendron hedge, the leaves of the Virginia creeper rubbing against the window panes. Cordelia imagined someone out there in the dark, licking a finger, a thumb, rubbing a peep-hole in the dirty glass to see in, to see her, but she knew it was the hedge. She had always kept the garden, stayed out in summer with the clippers, trimmed it all back and raked the ear-like laurel leaves off the sandy path, mowed the grass, lit small, inoffensive fires whose smoke poured down beyond the clothes-line. The neglected hedge began to intrude upon the house, grew so thick and close that all the downstairs rooms loomed in constant shadow, and when the sun was going down,strange,