square and headed quickly into the Tuileries Gardens.
Children’s voices reverberated through the park. A hoop passed him, closely followed by a skipping boy. Nurses chatted as they pushed large prams lazily before them. A dog leapt up onto one of the scattered benches and was promptly chastised by a small girl in a chequered pinafore.
Ellie had once been like that small girl, all unrestrained activity and certainty of opinion. Brimming with good health. Both the brothers had doted on her. Their father, too. She was the only one who could sway him from his occasional black moods.
Then everything had changed, not irreparably, no. Not even all at once, except when one examined it with hindsight – like one of his cases. He could date it precisely now. It was the summer they had all gathered in Provincetown to breathe the tangy air of the Cape. He had just graduated from Harvard and was preparing to join a firm in Philadelphia. To broaden his experience, his father had said. It was that summer, too, that he had first met Maisie. Maisie who had looked up at him from beneath the wide brim of her sun hat with innocent eyes that singled him out from the crowd and declared, ‘you’.
James walked more quickly. The gravel crackled beneath his feet, coating his shoes with a grey film.
It was in the middle of that hot summer that Ellie had suffered her first episode. She had developed a blinding migraine, so intense and debilitating that their mother had her confined to the coolest room of the house. The shutters there were kept permanently closed. The boys were prohibited from visiting. Their parents took turns sitting by her side. The only outsider who was permitted to enter was Dr Field, who maintained a stubborn silence about any prognosis. ‘Patience,’ was the only word James ever heard him utter to their mother.
The large, bustling, clapboard house developed a troubled hush. There were fewer and fewer visits from his parent’s large circle, the politicians and writers, artists and advocates whose company he had begun increasingly to enjoy that summer. There were no more parties in the spacious living room which spilled over onto the wraparound terrace, where his friends and Raf’s mingled with Ellie’s, and his father, revelling in the young, engaged all and sundry in whiplash political debate. Nor were there any more of those lazy gatherings on the lawn after a day’s boating or on the surf-lapped beach where cool lemonade flowed in time to conversation. Now everyone tiptoed. Speech was confined to whispers. The piano was kept permanently shut.
Only the cries which sometimes emanated from the sick room ruptured the stillness. A cascade of strange, piercing monologues, more sound than sense. Once he had heard Maisie’s name in the midst of one, coupled with an epithet he didn’t like to repeat and was astonished to find on Ellie’s lips. He was glad then to be ousted from the house – as the boys always were when what their mother euphemistically called ‘Ellie’s growing pains’ and their father ‘passing fits’ came on. On their way out, they would see Maria, the plump Irish housekeeper rushing towards Ellie’s room with a bowl of cold water and an assortment of cloths.
After some three weeks, Ellie emerged from her sickbedto take up a position on a chair by the window of the sitting room. It gave her a view of the activity on the street and, in the distance, the ocean. She looked very pale, but rather more beautiful than when she had first been taken ill. Her smile was radiant, her wit more agile than ever as she entertained them with snippets from her reading. She never once mentioned her illness. It was almost as if she had forgotten it. And soon, she was up and about, once more party at least to their less exuberant pleasures.
That summer had marked a turning point in more ways than one. From then on, Ellie’s condition, the possibility of what was always an erratic recurrence, had played an
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