Testimonies: A Novel by O'Brian Patrick

Author:O'Brian, Patrick [O'Brian, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1995-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

Pugh

It was toward the autumn that I began to feel so continuously unwell. I know it is ridiculous to keep harping on this, but I do insist upon it because a man (myself, at any rate) is ruled by his stomach. If it does not behave well one’s whole outlook on life is changed, and I really believe one’s character changes with it.

My choice of a doctor was not fortunate: Davies had been an Army doctor for a long time and in Dinas he had a very large panel practice. I went to him on a vague recommendation and never after summoned up enough moral courage or energy to change. Changing doctors in the country is a great upheaval, and even if the other man had agreed to it he might have turned out worse. I did not often go to Davies or send for him; I was willing to be impressed, but I had no confidence in his mist. alb. or his brisk “No beef or mutton.” He would have cut off a leg or set an arm with the best, but he was not the man for me. What I wanted was one of those quiet, humane doctors who have few patients: they sometimes go into semi-retirement in country towns and doctor their friends from kindness and a desire to go on being useful; they do take notice of their patients, and even tend to coddle them. I knew such a one in Thame, and I lost a good friend when he died.

If I had been a good physician to myself, I should have refrained from going down to the farm and from spending my afternoons on the Craig y Nos staring down to see Bronwen. It was always worse after that; but if I did not see her there was such a strong impatience in me, a tearing restlessness, that it had the same effect and I would find myself as nervous as a cat, unequal to my food, useless for reading or settling to any sort of work. As for my book, it had dropped into the utter distance; the pseudo-Basil and the nameless monks whose work I had transcribed into so many heavy notebooks for so many heavy years, and who had occupied my slow thoughts for such a dull length of time, they were as far from me now as I was from my old self.

Nothing seemed worthwhile, and I am afraid that I let the household chores slide day after day until I was living in a slum. And how slowly the time passed. I had a little chiming clock that beat the quarters: as each passed after an empty gray space it seemed that I had gained something; and the hours were a victory, each one. I would not have minded so much if I had been able to sleep.

I felt I was a constraint on them down at the farm, but I still went in the evenings: earlier on, when the

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