“… so your brother must have been mixed up with Nymphs, somehow,” Tess saying. “Maybe he was trying to find out where they come from, or perhaps how they get to the west.”
“No, that wasn’t it.” I leaned back without thinking, and winced when Dixie ’s cigarette burn pressed on the back of the settee. “That’s just what Leo wasn’t doing, I know that from last night. Dixie said I had to be Leo when he found the Nymphs, because no ordinary person would be carrying them. But Scouse saw past that. He said if they were Nymphs I wouldn’t have carried them into the country with me, and anyway that’s not what he was after. Leo was involved in something different — the Belur Package, whatever that is. But not with Nymphs. What else did Sir Westcott say about them?”
“Not too much. There have been four hundred reported cases in this country, with ages from seven to twelve. He thinks that the drug travels overland from Athens , and comes there either from Turkey or one of the Arab countries.”
I shrugged and poured myself a cup of coffee. Neither of us knew it at the time, but Tess and I were very close to an answer. If she had asked one more simple question of Sir Westcott, we would have saved months of work, much pain and suffering, and many lives.
“I told him about you,” she went on. “He’s really pleased. He says that ten years ago you’d have died, and even five years ago, before the Madrill technique, you’d at best be just trying to stand up by now. As it is, the brain integration is the only big hurdle left. He did wonder a bit about the possibility of a seminal reflux from the vas deferens to the epididymis — the X-ray shows a slight residual lesion there.” She laughed. “I told him I didn’t know, I wasn’t equipped to test for that.”
With my mind still on Nymphs and the Belur Package, I hadn’t been listening. It was the medical terms that caught my attention. I did a mental recap and suddenly realized what she was saying.
“Tess! You don’t mean that you told Sir Westcott about us? That we’d been — that we—”
“Of course. He’s your doctor.” She sounded surprised. “He’ll know better than we will if there was anything abnormal, anything that doesn’t fit what he’d expect in a normal recovery. He asked me what happened — somehow he knew we went to dinner — and I told him.”
“God. You make the other night sound like just another medical test — Intermediate Number Twenty-two, Response to Intercourse.” I couldn’t keep the hurt out of my voice. “I’d thought it was more than that. I’m surprised you didn’t take my blood pressure and pulse afterwards.”
Tess had been sitting quietly opposite me, knees together, prim and virginal in her posture. Now she stood up and came to stand directly in front of me. She was wearing a dark blue blouse that gave color to her eyes and made them seem almost violet.
“Lionel,” she said softly. “Don’t be a ninny.” She reached out and cupped my cheek in her hand. “You’ve been through a medical experience wilder than any other patient I’ve ever heard of. You’re alive, but that’s only half the battle. We knew that someday you’d try to make love again, and that might be a time for difficulties — and maybe danger, too. I wanted you to be all right; and you were.”
“You want the best for all your patients.”
“You’re more than my patient. That night was a test, sure it was, but it was a lot more than that for me. You’re the hard one, not me. You never give up much of yourself, do you? Maybe Leo was the same, maybe not. But last night when you didn’t call I was worried out of my head. If I called your flat once, I did it ten times. I thought you might have had a collapse, or be in pain, or all sorts of things. I even called the hospitals in the area, to see if you had checked into one.”
For Tess, that was a very long speech. I sat there in silence for a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” I said at last. I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “You’re right. I’m a selfish bastard, and underneath I guess I’m a prude as well.”
Deep down Tess had touched another nerve. You never give up much of yourself, do you? Maybe Leo was the same, maybe not. Those words stung more because I had had that thought, too. Leo gave more of himself, and more was given back in return.
I reached up to take her hands and drew her gently forward to sit by me on the couch.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “What you did was quite right. Would you tell me what else Sir Westcott told you? I promise I won’t mind.”
“He said that the crucial period is still ahead, no matter how well you feel now. There will be a time when the main integration of brain tissue will happen, and when it does the Madrill technique goes out of control. The information transfer will become very fast — like a hole in a dike, he said, first a trickle, then a sudden flood. When that happens you have to be somewhere quiet. You’ll pass out, and you’ll need good medical care.”
“I’ve had the same sort of warning from him in person.” I turned to look at her. “No point in worrying about that until it happens. But what about — you know. Did he say that it’s all right for me to have sex? Am I well enough for it?”
The frown lines were gone from her forehead, “You had no pain last time, did you?”
“Did you hear me groaning?”
“Yes.” Tess smiled. “But I heard me groaning, too, and I wasn’t in pain.”
“So everything is all right.”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t look worried, but her face wore a softer, heavy-eyed look, almost like a drowsiness. “You’ve had scientific training, too. You know you can’t draw statistical conclusions from a single experiment. You need more data points.”
“How many samples does it take?” I put my arm around her shoulder and drew her closer.
She slid forward to move her body against me. “I think that depends on you more than me.”
For the first time in twenty-four hours Scouse and his gang were pushed beyond even the periphery of my attention. I hadn’t realized it the first night, but Tess must have been holding part of herself in check, watching me for any signs of trouble or discomfort. Now she was willing to let herself go completely. We gave Sir Westcott’s handiwork a severe test, and it passed again. I did have an after-the-fact ache in my right side, but Tess felt around it and diagnosed a simple muscle strain.
By eleven o’clock we were lying together in Tess’s luxurious double bed. I knew from her breathing that she was drowsing, but for me sleep wouldn’t come. A summer storm was on the way, and we lay there with the curtains open and the window cracked to let in the warm night air. The flicker of sheet lighting, far off, and an occasional distant grumble of thunder created in me the postcoital depression that Ovid attributed to all animals.
I brooded again over Tess’s words. You never give much of yourself, do you?, and I thought of John Donne’s much older ones, Love, any devil else but you, would for a given soul give something too.
It hurt all the more because I had suffered the same worry for years. While Leo had found ways to open himself to others, I had travelled the world cocooned in the threads of my music, protected by Bach and Mozart and Schubert. Now Tess was offering me a golden chance to change, to give in return; and I was going to turn away from it. I knew I would. Before I left the bookshop in the afternoon, I had decided. I had to chase Leo’s flicker of memory, to pursue it wherever it led me. If it was unsafe for me in England , a foreign region would be no worse.