![]() and your legs must be singing grand opera." He nodded, although the truth was that he could not feel anything - this medication on top of what he'd already given himself was rolling him toward unconsciousness at an alarming rate, and he was beginning to see the room through gauzy layers of gray. "Now let's get you back in bed," she said. She took the urinal away from him and set it carefully on the floor. "Just a minute longer, Paul, and you can take a snooze." There was an old strip of towelling hung from a hook in the entryway, and after hanging up his dripping coat and removing his boots, he used it to towel his dark-blonde hair dry. "Dear old Geoffrey" He spoke it aloud this time as he stepped into the huge and stuporously warm West Country kitchen. It was only after midnight, an hour after Geoffrey had ridden into the gathering storm to try and fetch the doctor, that the midwife had grown alarmed. Her labor had been long and hard, but no longer and no harder than that of many other young ladies she had seen, the midwife declared. Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery. He remembered Geoffrey saying You must not cry in front of her, old man - that is the one thing you must never do He shoved the last under the mattress, then leaned back and looked up at the ceiling, where the W's danced drunkenly across the plaster. Without Misery, there would simply be no life left for him, or in him.ĭistantly, from the parlor, he could hear the rippling strains of Chopin, and he paused with the strip of towel still in his left hand, listening. He loved her so much without her he would die. Geoffrey was right, of course - dear old Geoffrey was rarely wrong - but sometimes when he was alone, the Gearless of Misery's escape from the Grim Reaper came forcibly home to him, and it was nearly impossible to hold the tears back. "To let the medication work?" she asked, and he nodded gratefully. "By the sound o" ye coat a-drippin" out there in the entry, ye nairly drowned between the sheds and the hoose" The layers of gauze kept thickening, moving steadily from gray toward black. I'll just put a few things away and come right back." As soon as she was out of the room he was reaching behind him, bringing out the boxes and stuffing them under the mattress one by one. ![]()
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