The Darts of Cupid: Stories by Edith Templeton

Author:Edith Templeton [Templeton, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428387
Google: RU7qHaXbaMEC
Amazon: B000XUBG1O
Barnesnoble: B000XUBG1O
Goodreads: 9777852
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2002-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

The Blue Hour

"And don’t flatter yourself, Louise," said Edmund, when I asked him to examine me, and to behave like a doctor, a "practical doctor," as he liked to call it. "He does this to every woman he meets."

"Surely not," I said. "Let’s say, to every other woman. There must be some choice."

"How do you know?" said Edmund. During his twenty years in India, he had been a celebrated cardiologist, and though we’d now been married for twenty-five years, he had rarely treated me. Once, when I had what he thought might be a nettle rash, he had insisted on taking me to be looked at by one of these "real practitioners," saying that it was too much to ask of him to tell urticaria from scabies.

"I don’t know," I said, and began to describe my sufferings: "I feel stabbed by every deep breath I take, pierced with every clearing of my throat, laughter impossible—not that I’d want to laugh—every movement like bending and stretching a torture"—while speaking, I kept my hand over the source of the pain, on my right side. I had waited until now, when Edmund was in pajamas and dressing gown and facing me across the long, low marble-topped sofa table on which he kept stacks of the Lancet and the Herald Tribune, to tell him what had happened that afternoon with Clarence, my cousin Sylvia’s husband.

"He’s contused my liver," I said. "What if I now get jaundice? The bile comes out of the liver, doesn’t it—"

Edmund started to laugh. "Never mind your liver. I can diagnose you without getting out of my chair. He’s cracked your rib. And there’s nothing one can do about it. If you were one of my former patients, say, a maharajah or an estate owner—one must give the rich the idea they’re getting their money’s worth when they call me—I’d now have them run up so many X rays from so many angles that they’d need a lorry to cart them away." He went on, "Clarence is a fool and he is not quite normal. In my young days we had a name for it in psychiatry. We called it moral insanity. And the worst of it is, you’ve been unlucky in your bad luck. Because you got caught on the cartilage. Instead of on the bone. Bones heal fast because they’ve got what the cartilage hasn’t got— well, never mind. But cartilage is the devil to heal."

I refrained from asking what cartilage had not got as opposed to bones. One did not query Edmund. I had learned my lesson early, during the first week of our honeymoon. In a small hotel, near Malaga, owned and run by an English couple for an entirely English clientele, Edmund had called room service and ordered a bottle of mineral water. It was brought by a waiter, a thin, pale, hollow-cheeked young man. It was obvious that before coming to our room, he had looked up our entry in the register and had

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