The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

Author:Penelope Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780007521418
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The doctor drove up bringing with him his wife’s widowed sister, who lived with them and was a nurse, or had been a nurse. Tanner came out of the bedroom covered with blood, something like a butcher. He told the doctor he’d managed to deliver the child, a girl, in fact he’d wrapped it in a towel and tucked it up in the washbasket. The doctor took him back into the bedroom and made him sit down. The nurse put down the things she’d brought with her and looked round for the tea-tin. Brinkman sat there, as solid as his chair. ‘You may be wondering who I am,’ he said. ‘I’m a neighbour, come over for dinner. I think of myself as one of the perpetually welcome.’ ‘Suit yourself,’ said the sister-in-law. The doctor emerged, moving rather faster than he usually did. ‘Please to go in there and wash the patient. I’m going to take a look at the afterbirth. The father put it out with the waste.’

There Tanner had made his one oversight. It wasn’t the afterbirth, it was a second daughter, smaller, but a twin. – But how come, if both of them were girls, that Mr Tanner himself still had the name of Tanner? Well, the Tanners went on to have nine more children, some of them boys, and one of those boys was Mr Tanner’s father. That evening, when the doctor came in from the yard with the messy scrap, he squeezed it as though he was wringing it out to dry, and it opened its mouth and the colder air of the kitchen rushed in and she’d got her start in life. After that the Tanners always had one of those tinplate mottoes hung up on the wall – Throw Nothing Away. You could get them then at the hardware store. – And this was the point that Mr Tanner had been wanting to make all along – whereas the first daughter never got to be anything in particular, this second little girl grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well.

All the time Brinkman continued to sit there by the table and smoke his pipe. Two more women born into the world! It must have seemed to him that if this sort of thing went on there should be a good chance, in the end, for him to acquire one for himself. Meanwhile, they would have to serve dinner sometime.

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