Father Xavier was waiting with Sister Agnes in the corridor outside Gethsemane Ward. He, too, was a Belgian – a small man with a spherical head, permanently astonished eyes, and eyebrows that seemed to be independently choreographed, so that when he expressed concern, or interest, they would each break into a little dance of their own. He was very clean, and his scalp was shaved so that it was prickly, and he wore a dove-grey cassock, with a plain silver cross. He spoke precise English, so precise that he must have learned it at an English theological college.
‘Mrs West has exhibited a willingness to take confession,’ said Father Xavier, shaking Collis by the hand. ‘I understand that Sister Agnes spoke to her only a few minutes ago.’
‘I see,’ said Collis. He glanced into the open door of the ward, but all he could see was the corner of a bed draped in netting. ‘What did she say? Is she feeling any better?’
Sister Agnes inclined her head a little. ‘She is still feverish, and the headache is troubling her. It is quite certain now that she has yellow fever.’
‘Does she know?’
‘No,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘We find our yellow-fever patients are happier if they are unaware of the nature of their sickness.’
‘What did she say about confession?’ asked Collis.
‘I asked her if she had anything on her mind which she would care to confess, and she indicated that she did.’
Collis swallowed. He had meant to say something, but he wasn’t sure that he could keep his voice steady. Father Xavier’s eyebrows undulated in sympathy.
‘Do you want to talk to her now, Mr Edmonds?’ asked Sister Agnes. ‘I think it would be a good idea, while she is still awake. The illness is exhausting her, and as soon as this is over I think we shall probably give her a sleeping-draught.’
Another nun came to the door of the ward and whispered, ‘Mrs West is still awake, Sister Agnes, but only just. It would be wise to hurry.’
‘Very well,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘Do you want to go in, Mr Edmonds?’
Collis nodded. The nun beckoned him, and he entered the long dim ward, lit only by small orange lamps, where white-faced women lay in two rows of twelve, most of them too ill to sit up or stir. At the very end of the ward, isolated from the rest of the women by gauze-covered screens, lay Hannah, in a white cap and a white robe, her face drawn and her eyes dull.
‘Please don’t be long,’ the nun whispered. ‘She’s very weak.’
Collis drew up a plain wooden chair and sat beside Hannah’s bed, looking at her through the hazy material of the screens. She saw him and gave him a watery, welcoming smile.
‘Collis,’ she said softly.
There was a moment in which they looked at each other through the gauze, and in which they said nothing, nor had any need to say it. That spiritual affinity of which Hannah had spoken was truly there. They hadn’t imagined it. Even now, as Hannah lay ill, Collis felt as natural with her, and as fond of her, as if she had been his wife for years.
‘They asked me if I wanted to confess,’ said Hannah.
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I said yes, I did.’
Collis nervously rubbed at his forehead with his fingertips. ‘It’s not too serious, this illness, you know. Least, that’s what the nuns tell me.’
‘I still want to confess,’ she said. Hannah rested her head back on the pillow. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, in a light voice, ‘how clearly you can see your life when you’re seriously ill. You wonder why you ever worried about anything. All those ridiculous little difficulties that you thought were terrible and impossible tangles. They can all be blown away by one breath of truth.’
‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘I know what happened on the boat seemed serious at the time. I know we talked a lot about your marriage to Walter, and divorce, and all kinds of crazy things, but – well, I just want to say that for us to have any sort of intimate relationship – well, it could never work.’
She lay there for a while as if she hadn’t heard him. Then she smiled and turned her head towards him, her eyes dim and misted through the gauze.
‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ she told him. ‘But you don’t have to lie to me. I know that I’m going to die.’
‘Hannah, that’s ridiculous. You have a bad case of gastritis, that’s all. You’ll have to be here for two or three days, and then you’ll probably be strong enough to leave.’
‘No, Collis. I am not blind, nor deaf. I know what it is that I have. I know that there is very little hope. And I know, too, that you are trying to put my life in order for me.’
‘Hannah,’ insisted Collis, ‘you’re going to live. There is no question of fatality. None at all.’
She shook her head. ‘When I was looking after my mother, I learned two languages, from books. Perhaps I don’t pronounce them very well. But one of them was Spanish, and I know what fiebre amarilla means.’
Collis was silent.
‘You mustn’t think badly of yourself for having tried to deceive me,’ Hannah said. ‘I think I would have done the same, if I had been you. But I know that I will probably die, Collis, and so you don’t have to pretend any more.’
Hoarsely, Collis answered, ‘I didn’t mean to deny what I felt for you. I only wanted to give you the strength to fight it off. I thought that if I was out of your life, you could concentrate all your energy on getting well, instead of worrying about me.’
She lifted her hand to the gauze, as if she were reaching out to him. He raised his own hand, and their fingertips touched through the thin fabric.
‘If I thought that I had nobody in the world to turn to except for Walter, then I should be truly unhappy, and at my weakest,’ she whispered. ‘It is having you here that gives me strength. It is knowing that you could love me that gives me strength.’
He paused. ‘How do you know that I could love you?’ he said.
‘Because I do, that’s all. Dear Collis.’
Outside, in the corridor, he heard the echoing footsteps of a nun in clogs, coming back from the washrooms. And far away, hardly audible in the still equatorial evening, someone was playing a plaintive pipe. There was coughing from the next bed.
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Collis. ‘I hardly know you.’
‘And I hardly know you. But it doesn’t matter.’
Again, there was silence between them. Then Collis said, ‘Father Xavier is outside. Shall I send him away?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I told you that I want to confess.’
‘I thought you wanted to confess your adulterous desire for me.’
‘Of course I do. But I can’t repent of it. Most of all, I want to confess that I married a man to spite my parents, that I perversely flew in the face of the Holy Catholic Church, and that I made a mockery of the sacrament of holy marriage. I want to confess that I was self-willed, and hypocritical, and that I took the love of God and the love of Our Lady for granted.’
Hannah was weeping now. Through the blurry gauze, Collis could see the sparkling tears on her cheeks. He could only sit back and watch, and listen, and feel the deepest grief he had ever felt in his life. This woman, this wife, should have been nothing to him, a passing stranger, a face on a train; and yet he had accepted responsibility for her happiness and her future and, ultimately, for her death. He was stricken with sadness, and he could only sit on his cheap wooden chair, watched by nuns, and hear what she had to say.
‘I want to confess that when I saw you, Collis, I fell in love with you. I had never known such a sensation. I was standing on the deck, and you raised your hat to me, and the feeling I had was so devastating that I couldn’t speak. Then I saw you again, when you came to introduce yourself, and what I felt then was indescribable. Mrs Edgeworth kept telling me to control myself, that I was infatuated, but I couldn’t think about anything or anybody else but you. Don’t you understand how difficult it was for me to turn you away, the night you came to my cabin? Don’t you understand how hurt I was when I
saw you with that girl?’
She turned her face away from him. ‘I love you,’ she said miserably. ‘I love you so much, and now I have to die. All I have to confess is my disappointment in the Lord, that He would not spare me long enough to know you.’
‘Hannah,’ Collis said softly.
She turned back towards him, her face wet with tears. ‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, God, I could have loved you.’
He nodded, wiping the tears from his own eyes with his fingers. ‘Hannah, I could have loved you, too.’
They both cried, separated by the gauze screens. Not for what they had lost, nor for the times they had spent together, but for what might have been, and now would probably not be. They cried silently, in the gloom of Gethsemane Ward, with the dusk gathering in the gardens outside, and the nuns fluttering to and fro in the way that had earned them the name of ‘God’s geese’.
Eventually, Sister Agnes approached and laid her hand on Collis’s shoulder. ‘You must leave now, Mr Edmonds,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to risk infection any more than necessary. Gastritis can be very severe.’
‘Mrs West knows that she has yellow fever,’ Collis said. ‘You don’t have to keep up the pretence any longer.’
‘She knows?’
‘She overheard the nuns talking, that’s all.’
Sister Agnes looked towards Hannah, and Hannah nodded.
‘I see,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘Then you know you are gravely at risk.’
Father Xavier came along the ward on his soft-soled shoes to stand a little way behind Sister Agnes, his eyebrows genuflecting towards the bridge of his nose, his beady eyes bright.
‘Have you renounced your thoughts for each other?’ he inquired.
Collis gave Hannah a last smile through the screens, and she managed a weak smile in return. He was pleased, for her sake, that she was religious, because at least she believed that when she left him she was going on to someplace better, where she would be cared for and contented. He couldn’t imagine what Hannah’s vision of heaven was like, but he was sure that it would, in some mystical way, include him.
‘No,’ Collis told Father Xavier. ‘We haven’t renounced them. Mrs West will tell you why.’
He waited at the Hospital of the Sacred Heart for three days. Most of the time he spent in his plain whitewashed cottage, writing letters to his father and his mother and his friends in New York on leaves of thin onion-skin paper which the sisters gave to him. He had a small desk with a view of the rear of the garden, and he would sit with his chin in his hand, staring out at the rows of plants as they nodded in the Pacific breeze, and at the grey clouds which rolled silently out of the south-east, day after day, and never broke.
He saw very little of Hannah. He understood she was worse, and that she was now suffering from the jaundice which had given yellow fever its name. Sometimes Sister Agnes would let him stand at the open door of the ward and look in, but all he could see through the isolation screens was the indistinct paleness of her face, and that told him nothing except that she was seriously ill.
On the morning of the fourth day, Sister Agnes came across the garden and knocked on his door. He was shaving with his hollow-ground razor and a cake of the hospital soap, which always smelled of cloves. Sister Agnes left the cottage door ajar because Collis was stripped to the waist, and she had no chaperone with her.
‘I’m afraid Mrs West is considerably worse,’ she said.
Collis set down his razor beside the china basin. He saw his face in the small rosewood-framed mirror on the wall, and his eyes were dark and worried. He saw his mouth say, ‘How long do you think she has left?’
‘I don’t know. The vómito negro has not begun yet. There is still a little hope.’
‘May I see her?’
‘She is very ill, Mr Edmonds. It would serve no purpose, and it would increase your own chances of catching it.’
‘I don’t want her to die alone, Sister Agnes.’
Sister Agnes touched her pale forehead as if she had a headache. ‘She isn’t alone, Mr Edmonds. Our Lady the Queen of Heaven is with her.’
Collis wiped his face with the small rough towel that the nuns had given him and picked up his shirt from the back of his chair. At least his linen was all freshly cleaned and pressed, now that the hospital laundry was taking care of it. But in the watery sunlight which shone through the open window of his cottage, he still looked tired and thin, and he would have done almost anything for a New York steak and fried onions, and twelve hours’ sleep in his own bed on Twenty-first Street.
‘Do you think she’ll last the week?’ he said.
‘She may,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘As I said, there’s a little hope. But the fever is very high, and I have to warn you that anything could happen. She could die tonight.’
‘I see. Does she know herself? Is she conscious?’
‘No. She hasn’t been conscious for almost eight hours now.’
Collis nodded. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Sister Agnes waited for a moment, and then announced, ‘I’ve come for another reason, too.’
Collis looked up.
‘The California dropped anchor off the bay this morning. She’s due to sail for San Francisco on Monday morning. I believe that you are probably free of the fever, and that you will be able to sail with her.’
‘That’s four days from now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Supposing – well, supposing Mrs West is still alive in four days?’
Sister Agnes was silent. Collis paced around the tiled floor of the cottage and then turned and looked at her straight.
‘You don’t think she will be, is that it?’
‘The chances are not good, Mr Edmonds.’
He rubbed the back of his neck. He was so tired that he didn’t know what he felt any more. The days were nothing but waiting in his cottage, writing and staring out of the window; and the nights were hot and sweaty and plagued with insects. Whole years could have passed, and he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. The heat and the boredom of the equator seemed to drain away any will to do anything active or useful, and sometimes he stood for half an hour at a time, incapable of deciding whether he wanted to remain standing or whether he wanted to sit down again.
‘I know you’ve done everything possible,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve been very kind. Not just to Mrs West, but to me, too.’
He looked at her. Framed in the doorway, she was as fragile and delicate as a painting by Botticelli. He found it hard to grasp how someone so feminine and attractive could be so spiritual. If she stayed here in this hospital in Panama, she would almost certainly be dead within two or three years. She might not even survive as long as that.
‘I was wondering if you’d ever consider leaving this place,’ he said.
‘Why should I do that? My life is here.’
‘I know. And your death will be here, too.’
‘You’re concerned about my safety?’ Sister Agnes smiled abstractedly. ‘You’re very thoughtful,’ she said.
‘But?’
‘But I couldn’t ever leave the hospital. This is where God needs me.’
‘Even though you probably won’t live to see twenty-five?’
‘If that’s what the Lord wills.’
Collis looked out over the garden behind her. He knew damned well that it was no use arguing. It was ridiculous even to suppose that he could have persuaded her to leave. What had it to do with him, anyway, whether she lived or died? What had any of these people’s lives to do with him? A parakeet settled on the branch of a leafy plant outside, and whistled in the humid morning air. Collis looked back at Sister Agnes and shrugged.
‘I’m beginning to grow very fond of you,’ he said in his softest voice. ‘And I’m not trying to flirt with you. I had a stupid crazy idea that I could somehow make you realise that there’s a whole lot more to the world than what goes on here. You’ve already done more in two years than most p
eople achieve in a lifetime. God can’t be anything but grateful. Why don’t you give it up while you’re still young, and still alive?’
‘You mustn’t fear for me,’ Sister Agnes replied. ‘God and Our Lady look after me always.’
She paused, and then added, ‘I’m an only daughter, you know. My father runs a small patisserie in Lokeren. They were so proud of me, my parents, when I joined the order. They tried to persuade me not to, of course, but once they knew that I was determined, they were proud.’
Collis took her hand. ‘I’m proud, too,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t really expect you to change your mind. But I hope you’ll remember that I tried, and that you won’t think too badly of me.’
‘I have to go now,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘We have three new sisters from France here today. They came on the train from Aspinwall. They have to be greeted, and shown what they will have to do.’
She kept hold of Collis’s hand, and she stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek, her white starched coif touching his shoulder.
‘I think you will be a very famous man one day,’ she said, with great earnestness. ‘My hope is that you won’t forget me, and that you won’t forget the reason I said I must stay.’
‘I won’t forget,’ he said. He opened the door wider for her. ‘Will you call by later and tell me how Hannah is?’
‘Of course.’
He stood by the door and watched her walk through the garden. Her coif disappeared behind the plants like a low-flying seagull. Then he turned back to his bare white rooms, and he was frowning like a man who realises he has just failed to do something important, but isn’t quite sure what. The bell on the hospital roof struck for morning prayers, and disturbed three huge black buzzards that had been perched on the terra-cotta coping. They circled, with rustling wings, and then settled again.
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