No, thought Thomas. He would not lose his temper with this man.
Thomas stitched the tear while Silja held the lamp close, as he directed. She was a blockish girl, stubborn-looking in the same way the man was stubborn-looking. She could have been his daughter.
"Hold that lamp still," he said sharply. The girl was gaping at her mistress as if she were a cow in a field. But no doubt they worked her hard enough, these Nordströms. Silja’s hands were red and raw.
He finished the stitching. The husband was right, Mrs Nordström wouldn’t take the brandy even when he called it medicine. She turned her head aside mutely as he brought the glass to her lips. He wasn't going to force her.
Thomas went downstairs. "I’ll call again tomorrow," he said to the husband. The man looked at him with his shrewd money-making eyes, and nodded. "All the same, Doctor," he said, "you don’t know my wife."
Thomas knuckled his forehead to get rid of the tension there. His eyes closed briefly, wiping out the room and the man. Red sparks crowded into thick, velvety darkness. He wanted to stay there inside that darkness, but he must open them.
"She won’t flinch, when it comes to it," said Nordström. "Remember what the Good Book says: 'In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children'.”
Don’t send for me, then, when she’s in labour with the fourth, Thomas thought, but he would not say it. He could vent his anger, but once the words had passed this man would stick to them. Nordström would nurse the grudge. He would let his wife die in her bed without relief, and then say that the doctor wouldn't come.
Outside the house, Thomas breathed in the smell of pine resin again.
I won’t take his money, he thought. I'll tell him to make an offering of it to the church, to give thanks for his wife’s survival. That’ll make him angry. He walked fast, relishing the crunch of his boots on the shrivelling crusts of ice.
"You ought not to walk when you visit patients," Johanna used to tell him. "It lessens their respect for you. You should always ride, or take the carriage."
"By the time the horse is saddled and out of the stable I could be halfway there."
"That’s not the point, Thomas. A doctor shouldn't arrive with mud on his boots."
But a patient had said to him once, "I can smell the spring, Doctor. It’s come in with you." No wonder, in those tightly sealed sickrooms that smelled of urine, sweat and medicine.
*******
The sawmill was less than a mile from his house. He’d be home in quarter of an hour, if he walked fast. And he wanted to walk fast. Walking between patients was the only time he seemed to get to himself, when Johanna...
No. He was not going to think about Johanna.
The sun was dropping; it lay big and red between the trees. He kicked at a crust of ice and it splintered like glass. Beneath it, the snow was open and porous in texture. Late-winter snow. Soon it would be gone. Spring was coming, and this year he felt less afraid of it.
He’d repair Johanna’s garden swing-seat. It only needed new canvas webbing. He could do the job himself. He could sit out on summer evenings, reading, smoking to keep the midges away.
Suddenly an image assaulted him. He stood still. It was Johanna again, frowning with concentration as she smeared Minna’s plump wrists with citronella oil, so that the rnidges wouldn’t bite her. As her mother screwed back the top of the citronella bottle, Minna twisted free from where Johanna had been holding her firmly between her knees. The child ran to the swing-seat and plunged herself into it, head down, frilled underwear flapping, the plumpness of her calves bulging above her tight little boots.
"I’m hiding!" she screamed.
"She thinks that because she can’t see us, we can’t see her," said Johanna. Her face was soft with pleasure. For a moment that pleasure bound them: their shared child, their shared life.
He shivered all over at the memory, like a dog, and began to walk home quickly, through the snow.