The Wonder Worker Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I promised long ago after the first stroke—”
    “I understand. What do the doctors say?”
    “Nothing much nowadays. They probably think I’m nuts even to try to keep her at home.”
    “So it’s a double-headed problem, isn’t it? How do we enable youraunt to live her remaining days in her own home, and at the same time how do we ease this enormous burden on you?”
    “Exactly.” I felt so relieved not only by his acceptance of my stubborn, possibly stupid refusal to break my word that I was able to say: “You’re not going to advise me to dump her?”
    “I don’t think such advice would be helpful.”
    “Because of the moral issue involved in breaking a promise?”
    “That sounds as if morality has nothing to do with common-sense decisions about how to survive the consequences of one’s actions! The truth is that after your aunt’s dead, you’ll have to live with the memory of how you handled her last days and you won’t want that memory to include a crucifying guilt which will blight your future.”
    “So what you’re saying is—”
    “I’d rather meet you where you are, not where other people think you ought to be, and that involves respecting a decision which is still valid for you. In the end only the carer can know when there’s no strength left to cope and when no avenue of help remains unexplored … What exactly is the medical prognosis?”
    “Zilch—but I accept that and I’m not seeking a miracle cure. All I want is for her to go back to where she was before she had the last stroke. Then I could cope on my own again with just the help from the Social Services.”
    Nicholas said evenly: “I’m afraid the likelihood is that no physical improvement is possible and I’d be seriously misleading you if I gave you cause to think otherwise. However, here at St. Benet’s we always make a distinction between a cure and a healing. Even if no cure is possible a healing can still take place.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “A cure is the disabled person who gets up from his bed and walks. A healing is that same disabled person coming to terms with his lack of mobility, transcending his anger and grief and becoming an inspiration to all those who visit him.”
    “Well, Aunt’s quite beyond any of that.”
    “The healing can take many forms … Would you like me to call on her and perform the laying-on of hands? If she’s strongly anti-Catholic I think I’d abstain in this case from administering unction, but the laying-on of hands is non-denominational and isn’t even confined to Christian healers.”
    I was so overcome with gratitude that I could hardly find the words to thank him, but the next moment an unpleasant thought occurred to me. “Will her non-belief in God block the healing?”
    “Not necessarily.”
    “But if she’s basically hostile—”
    He smiled and said: “Obviously I’d prefer a non-hostile patient, but the hostility may be a surface emotion of no particular importance and beneath it the built-in human desire to be well may be burning with an additional intensity … Can your aunt speak at all now?”
    “No.”
    “How much does she still understand?”
    “The doctors say she understands nothing.”
    “And what do you say?”
    With difficulty I answered: “I think sometimes she comes back. I think sometimes she’s still there.”
    We sat in silence for a moment. At last I whispered, still hardly daring to believe he was willing to help: “When will you come to see her?” And straight away he replied:
    “Tonight. What’s your address?”
    VIII
    Five hours
later I was sitting in Aunt’s bedroom and waiting for Nicholas to arrive. I had cancelled the night-nurse. I didn’t want her flapping around and getting in the way.
    Aunt and I lived in a little cottage in Dean Danvers Street, a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. She didn’t own the cottage; she had acquired it by securing a tenancy at a rock-bottom rent