The Good Doctor by Paul Butler

Author:Paul Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2014-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

— Chapter Fourteen —

She hadn’t intended to go to the lecture, but the crowd seemed to carry her. In the end it was easier to go along than to resist.

Her husband had been fidgety and nervous, waiting for room service to arrive. Experience told her it would be easier for him if she was to take a walk, but once in the corridor she didn’t know where to go. The elevator boy stood at the end of the passage, caged door open behind him. She was walking in this direction and saw no reason not to step in.

“Main floor, madam?”

She nodded. Where else could she go unless she were to wander the corridors aimlessly like a hotel ghost? The cage swung closed, and with an oozing sensation, she felt herself fall. Already danger bumped in her chest. Grenfell was at large. His admirers were about and in numbers. He could easily get into the same elevator, breathe the same air.

Throughout the last two and a half decades, his figure had both shrunk in her mind to a pinprick yet expanded to a colossus. She had fancied herself in love all those years ago in London, and, more importantly by far, she had genuinely admired him. If there was a breach of faith, a betrayal of trust, it was over this point rather than the first. Lovers have parted since the world began. They have met and laughed later in life. But this was altogether different, far more momentous than the raging of a young emotion which seems so real at the time but can suddenly turn into vapour and disappear like a dream. This was about who Grenfell was: a shining image—upright, brave, and honest—flipped like a coin, revealing another side—grubby, mean-spirited, and calculating. He had been a fine actor playing a hero on the stage. But his eye was on the audience, and she had merely been the first to be taken in.

Each time some account of his exploits reached her eyes in newsprint or periodical—his descriptions of hunger and exploitation in the northern fishery, his hospital ships, his clinics along the Labrador coast and in St. Anthony, his fishermen’s co-operatives—it had been like reading about a mythical character. Like some ancient deity of the classical world, vast moral issues, trouble, and conflict followed wherever he went. She knew he was not real yet was awed by the strength of the myth behind him. Meeting his eye earlier carried some of that sanity-threatening trepidation she associates with seeing the spirit of one departed. It was simply impossible that they could be in the same room together. They had grown into two incompatible worlds, and something quite dreadful would happen if they collided.

The elevator lurched and then stopped. The boy rattled the cage open, then stood to attention, white-gloved hands by his sides as Florence stepped out. Confronting the crowds swirling in the foyer, she felt cold and alone. But when she stepped forward, she felt at one with the travelling herd.

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