The day wears on. Katlin Gibbie, grown fat and matronly at twenty-six, comes to visit, her fidgeting grabby children in tow. Betty Deatcher stops by, the Reverend MacNibbit. Half the town it seems. And each one with an offering: something for the baby, a bundle of flowers, a loaf of bread, a cup of broth. But Zander isn’t there. Nor Mungo either.
The thought of them is enough to makm her stomach go hollow with a dread that aches like hunger. She tries to focus their faces in her mind — husband and brother — but can picture only Seedy, grinning, licking his chops, a bone thrust through his nose. As she reaches for the miniature on the night table, her brain is suddenly swamped with evil recollections, images long suppressed springing up like toadstools out of the damp grist of her unconscious, images Mungo had conjured in the quiet of their bed, the darkness hanging over them like a blotter, his disembodied voice pushing, pushing, pushing, until she could see every line of Dassoud’s face, smell the spoor of lion and hyena, taste the soothing muck of dried-up watercourses in her aching throat. Could they be in trouble? Sick? Injured? Something is tingling at the tips of her fingers and toes, playing round the periphery of her consciousness, something vague and unsteady, something like a premonition. But no, she’s worked up, that’s all. Just a morbid fantasy, they’ll pull out of it, what can happen with a whole troop of armed soldiers there to protect them?
Sharp and sudden, the downstairs bell assaults the silence like a scream. More activity in the foyer. A murmur of voices, footsteps on the stairs. She doesn’t want to see anyone. Not in this state. Mary’s knock. “Who is it?”
“You’ve a visitor, ma’am.”
“Send them away, I’m exhausted.”
Sounds of shuffling in the hall, an importuning whisper.
“He says he’s come a long way, ma’am — all the way out from Edinburgh.”
Edinburgh? Who—?
At that moment the door cracks open and Mary sidles into the room, apologetic, as the visitor shows himself. A tall man, tall as the doorframe, hair combed back over his ears and gathered in a knot, silk stockings, buckled shoes — could it be?
“Ailie, I—”he stammers, and then steps forward with a package in his hands. “I mean, congratulations.”
“Georgie Gleg?” She doesn’t know what to say. Her first impulse is to pull the covers up over her head, so stricken is she with guilt and mortification. The last time she saw his face was that gray December morning seven winters ago, the morning they were to be married.
Uninvited, Gleg pulls a chair up to the bed and eases into it with a crack of his bony knees. “I was up at Galashiels,” he says by way of explanation, “visiting my mother and stepfather, when I heard the good news — this is your fourth?”
Ailie nods.
“—and so I just had to stop round and, and pay my respects.”
What can she say? Here he is, the man she’s humiliated, the man she’s abused worse than any slave, sitting before her twisting a gaudily wrapped package in his hands, looking as if he were to blame for the whole thing. She suddenly feels herself going out to him. “Would you care for some tea?”
Gleg stays for three hours that first day. Draining cup after cup of tea, as if he were taking part in some sort of contest, crossing and uncrossing his great gangling legs. He fills her in on his past, cocks a sympathetic ear as she tells him of her hopes and fears. “What, what happened between us,” he says finally, and she can’t look him in the eye, “was good for me in a way. I went out and tried to make something of myself. Edinburgh was an oyster waiting to be cracked, and with my uncle’s help I’ve cracked it, Ailie, in these seven years and four months I’ve gone right to the top of my profession.”
He had. After matriculating first in his class at Edinburgh University, he went to study at Surgeon’s Hall under the second Alexander Monro. Driven by an obsessive need to prove himself worthy in some abstract way, Gleg devoted himself slavishly to his studies, excelling at anatomy, chyma and materia medica, sacrificing social life and recreation for papers and books, hoarding his pennies to buy the finest French surgical instruments.
He was rabbinical, monkish, withdrawn. He quoted Boerhaave and Morgagni verbatim, improved on Monro’s paracentesical procedures, wrote treatises on the spleen and sphenoid bone, and for his M.D. thesis he definitively described the sphincter ani. Two years later he was appointed professor of anatomy, and at the same time set up a small private practice in a walk-up just off the Canongate High Road. He was soon driving a coach and sporting au courant London fashions. He’d even found time to take up fox hunting and golf, and to publish a series of articles in the Philosophical Society’s journal.
All this he reveals gradually, over the course of the afternoon, while sucking at a sugar cube or flailing his geometrical elbows as if they were featherless wings. Finally, he comes to the end of his recitation, and the room falls silent. Ailie has brushed out her hair. The infant lies sleeping beside her, still as a portrait. Ailie clears her throat. “And your wife?” she asks.
Gleg looks down at the floor. “I’ve never married.”
♦ ♦ ♦
During the course of the next two weeks. Gleg visits her daily. Ailie is glad for the company. Gleg amuses her — eternally ridiculous — and yet there’s something else there too. She can’t quite pin it down at first, but in a moment of revelation she realizes what it is: gratitude. Gratitude for the fact that he worships her. Still. After all these years and all that’s happened, he worships her. And for her part, a little worship is just what she needs about now. She’s been down in the dumps, hurt to the quick by Mungo’s rejection of her, feeling worthless, unappealing, a woman who can’t keep her man. And then along comes Gleg, almost like a pilgrim approaching a shrine. His eyes tell her that she’s a goddess. That he’s kept her portrait by his bedside through the long lonely years. That he has been, is now, and always will be her slave.
She can’t help but feel guilty, leading him on, consenting to see him, accepting his gifts and attentions. But she’s bored and lonely, and he makes her feel good. What’s the harm in it?
“Listen,” he tells her one day toward the end of his stay at Galashiels, “I know what you’re going through and I’m sure things will work out. . I mean, he’s a fine man, Mungo, and as sure as he came back to you that first time he’ll be back again — I know he will.” Gleg has been turning a book over in his hands, a parting gift, La Vie Réduit by Pierre Menard. He is struggling with his emotions, the words backing up in his throat as if he were trying to speak and swallow dry saltines at the same time. “What I mean is, uh—”
Ailie is embarrassed. The look on his face as he stood outside her bedroom door on that fateful morning suddenly comes back to her. She tries to rise from the chair but he takes hold of her arm.
“—if anything should happen, you know, and you need help — money, emotional support, anything at all — you can always come to me, because I, I—”
She’s touched. Who wouldn’t be? “That’s very kind of you, Georgie.”