DR. AND MRS. MAUDSLEY

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    On my last day Miss Wiold me about Dr. and Mrs. Maudsley.

    Leaving gates open and wandering into other people’s houses was ohing, walking off with a baby in its pram was quite ahe fact that the baby, when it was found, was discovered to be he worse for its temporary disappearance was beside the point. Things had got out of hand; a was called for.

    The villagers didn’t feel able to approach Charlie directly about it. They uood that things were stra the house, and they were half afraid to go there. Whether it was Charlie or Isabelle or the ghost that enced them to keep their distance is hard to say. Instead, they approached Dr. Maudsley. This was not the doctor whose failure to arrive promptly may or may not have caused the death in childbirth of Isabelle’s mother, but a new man who had served the village fht or nine years at this time.

    Dr. Maudsley was not young, yet though he was in his middle forties he gave the impression of youth. He was not tall, nor really very muscular, but he had an air of vitality, of vigor about him. His legs were long for his body and he used to stride along at a great pace, with no apparent effort. He could walk faster than anyone, had growo finding himself talking into thin air and turning to find his walking panion scurrying along a few yards behind his back, panting with the effort of keeping up. This physical energy was matched by a great mental liveliness. You could hear the power of his brain in his voice, which was quiet but quick, with a facility for finding the right words for the right person at the right time. You could see it in his eyes: dark brown and very shiny, like a bird’s eyes, observant, i, with strong,  eyebrows above.

    Maudsley had a knack of spreading his energy around him—that’s no bad thing for a doctor. His step oh, his knock at the door, and his patients would start feelier already. And not least, they liked him. He was a toni himself, that’s eople said. It made a differeo him whether his patients lived or died, and when they lived, which was nearly always, it mattered how well they lived.

    Dr. Maudsley had a great love of intellectual activity. Illness was a kind of puzzle to him, and he couldn’t rest until he’d solved it. Patients got used to him turning up at their houses first thing in the m when he’d spent the night puzzling over their symptoms, to ask one more question. And once he’d worked out a diagnosis, then there was the treatment to resolve. He sulted the books, of course, was fully izant of all the usual treatments, but he had an inal mind that kept ing baething as simple as a sore throat from a different angle, stantly bbr>..</abbr>casting about for the tiny fragment of knowledge that would enable him not only to get rid of the sore throat but to uand the phenomenon of the sore throat in airely new light. Eitelligent and amiable, he was an exceptionally good doctor and a better than average man. Though, like all men, he had his blind spot.

    The delegation of village men included the baby’s father, his grandfather and the publi, a weary-looking fellow who didn’t like to be left out of anything. Dr. Maudsley weled the trio and listetentively as two of the three men reted their tale. They began with the gates left ope on to the vexed issue of the missing saus and arrived after some mi the climax of their story: the kidnapping of the infant in the perambulator.

    ‘They’re running wild,“ the younger Fred Jameson said finally.

    ‘Out of trol,“ added the older Fred Jameson.

    ‘And what do you say?“ asked Dr. Maudsley of the third man. Wilfred Bonner, standing to one side, had, until now, remained silent.

    Mr. Boook his cap off and drew in a slow, whistling breath. “Well, I’m no medical man, but it seems to me them girls is nht.” He apanied his words with a look full of significe, then, in case he hadn’t got his message across, tapped his bald head, owice, three times.

    All three men looked gravely at their shoes.

    ‘Leave it with me,“ said the doctor. ”I’ll speak to the family.“

    And the me. They had doheir bit. It  to the doctor, the village elder, now.

    Though he’d said he would speak to the family, what the doctor actually did eak to his wife.

    ‘I doubt they meant any harm by it,“ she said, when he had fielling the story. ”You know what girls are. A baby is so much more fun to play with than a doll. They wouldn’t have hurt him. Still, they must be t<big></big>old not to do it again. Poor Mary.“ And she lifted her eyes from her sewing and turned her face to her husband.

    Mrs. Maudsley was an exceedingly attractive woman. She had large brown eyes with long lashes that curled prettily, and her dark hair that had not a trace of gray in it ulled ba a style of such simplicity that only a true beauty would not be made plain by it. When she moved, her form had a rounded, womanly grace.

    The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been married too long for it to make any differeo him.

    ‘They think in the village that the girls are mentally retarded.“

    ‘Surely not!“

    ‘It’s what Wilfred Bohinks, at least.“

    She shook her head in wonderment. “He is afraid of them because hey are twins. Poor Wilfred. It is just old-fashioned ignorahank goodhe younger geion is more uanding.”

    The doctor was a man of sce. Though he k was statistically uhat there was aal abnormality iwins, he could not rule it out until he had seen them. It did not surprise him, though, that his wife, whion forbade her to believe ill of any-me, would take frahat the rumor was ill-founded gossip.

    ‘I’m sure you are right,“ he murmured with a vaguehat meant he was sure she was wrong. He had given up trying to get her to believe only what was true; she had been raised to the kind ion that could admit no differeween what was true and what was good.

    ‘What will you do, then?“ she asked him.

    ‘Go ahe family. Charles Angelfield is a bit of a hermit, but he’ll have to see me if I go.“

    Mrs. Maudsley nodded, which was her way of disagreeing with her husband, though he didn’t know it. “What about the mother? What do you know of her?”

    ‘Very little.“

    And the doctor tio think in silence, and Mrs. Maudsley tinued her sewing, and after a quarter of an hour had passed, the doctor said, “Perhaps you might go, Theodora? The mht sooner see another woman than a man. What do you say?”

    And so three days later Mrs. Maudsley arrived at the house and k the front door. Astoo get no answer, she frowned— after all, she had sent a o say she was ing—and walked round to the back. The kit doo<cite>.9９lｉｂ?</cite>r was ajar, so with a quiock she went in. No one was there. Mrs. Maudsley looked around. Three apples oable, brown and wrinkled and starting to collapse upon themselves, black dishcloth o a sink piled high with dirty plates, and the window so filthy that inside you could hardly tell day from night. Her linty white nose she air. It told her everything she o know. She pursed her lips, set her shoulders, took a tight grip oortoiseshell handle of her bag a off on her crusade. She went from room to room looking for Isabelle, but on the way taking in the squalor, the mess, the uhat lurked everywhere.

    The Missus tired easily, and she couldn’t mahe stairs very well, and her sight was going, and she often thought she had ed things when she hadn’t, or meant to  them and then fot, and to be ho, she knew nobody really cared, so she mostly trated on feeding the girls, and they were lucky she mahat much. So the house was dirty, and it was dusty, and when a picture was knocked wonky it stayed wonky for a decade, and when one day Charlie couldn’t find the paper bin in his study, he just dropped the paper onto the floor in the place where the paper bio be, and it soon occurred to him that it was less fuss to chuck it out once a year than to do it once a week.

    Mrs. Maudsley didn’t like what she saw at all. She frow the half-closed curtains, and sighed at the tarnished silver, and shook her head in amazement at the saus oairs and the sheet music that was scattered all over the floor of the hallway. In the drawing room, she bent down automatically to retrieve a playing card, the three of spades, that was lying dropped or discarded in the middle of the floor, but when she looked around the room for the rest of the pack, she was at a loss, so great was the dislang helplessly back at the card she became aware of the dust c it and, being a fastidious, white-gloved woman, was overwhelmed with the desire to put it down, only where? For a few seds she aralyzed with ay, torween the desire to end the tact between her pristine glove and the dusty, faintly sticky playing card, and her own unwillio put the card down in a place that wasn’t the right oually, with a perceptible shudder of the shoulders, she placed it on the arm of the leather armchair and walked with relief out of the room.

    The library seemed better. It was dusty, certainly, and the carpet was threadbare, but the books themselves were in their places, which was something. Yet even in the library, just when she reparing herself to believe that there remained some small feeling for order buried in this filthy, chaotic family, she came across a makeshift bed. Tucked into a dark er between two sets of shelves, it was just a flea-ridden bla and a filthy pillow, and at first she took it for a cat’s bed. Then, looking again, she spotted the er of a book visible beh the pillow. She drew it out. It was Jane Eyre.

    From the library she passed to the musi, where she found the same disorder she had seen elsewhere. The furniture was arranged bizarrely, as though to facilitate the playing of hide-and-seek. A chaise lounge was turo face a wall, a chair was half hidden by a chest that had been dragged from its plader the window—there w<q></q>as a broad sweep of carpet behind it where the dust was less thid the green color showed through more distinctly. On the piano, a vase tained blaed, brittle stems, and around it a  circle of papery petals like ashes. Mrs. Maudsley reached her hand toward one and picked it up; it crumbled, leaving a nasty yellow-gray staiween her white-gloved fingers.

    Mrs. Maudsley seemed to slump down onto the piano stool.

    The doctor’s wife wasn’t a bad woman. She was suffitly vinced of her own importao believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she roo feeling in her own holio notiy other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

    What was going on in her mind as she sat there on the piano stool, staring into space? These were people who couldn’t keep their flower vases topped up. No woheir children were misbehaving! The extent of the problem seemed suddenly to have been revealed to her through the dead flowers, and it was in a distracted, absent fashion that she pulled off her gloves and spread her fingers on the blad gray keys of the piano.

    The sound that resounded in the room was the harshest, most un-pianolike noise imagihis was in part because the piano had been ed, unplayed and untuned, for many years. It was also because the vibration of the instrument’s strings was instantly apanied by another noise, equally unmelodic. It was a kind of a howling hiss, an irritated, wild sort of a screech, like that of a cat whose tail has got under your feet.

    Mrs. Maudsley was shakeirely out of her reverie by it. On hearing the yowl, she stared at the piano in disbelief and stood up, her hands to her cheeks. In her bewilderment she had only the barest moment tister that she was not alone.

    There, rising from the chaise lounge, a slight figure in white—

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