Free The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald Page A

asked to put up his horse for a while, and come in.
    Like most people who live on their own Brinkman continued with the course of his thoughts, which were more real to him than the outside world’s commotion. Walking straight into the front room he stopped in front of the piece of mirror-glass tacked over the sink and looked fixedly into it.
    ‘I’ll tell you something, Tanner, I thought I caught sight of my first grey hairs this morning.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
    Brinkman looked round. ‘I see the table isn’t set.’
    ‘I don’t want you to feel that you’re not welcome,’ said Tanner, ‘but Kitty’s not well. She told me to be sure that you came in and rested a while, but she’s not well. Truth is, she’s in labour.’
    ‘Then she won’t be cooking dinner this evening, then?’
    ‘You mean you were counting on having it here?’
    ‘My half-yearly dinner with you and Mrs Tanner, yis, that’s about it.’
    ‘What day is it, then?’ asked Tanner, somewhat at random. It was almost too much for him at that moment to realize that Brinkman existed. He seemed like a stranger, perhaps from a foreign country, not understanding how ordinary things were done or said.
    Brinkman made no attempt to leave, but said, ‘Last time I came here we started with canned toheroas. Your wife set them in front of me. I’m not sure that they had an entirely good effect on the intestines. Then we had fried eggs and excellent jellied beetroot, a choice between tea or Bovo, bread and butter and unlimited quantities of treacle. I have a note of all this in my daily journal. That’s not to say, however, that I came over here simply to take dinner with you. It wasn’t for the drive, either, although I’m always glad to have the opportunity of a change of scene and to read a little in Nature’s book. No, I’ve come today, as I came formerly, for the sake of hearing a woman’s voice.’
    Had Tanner noticed, he went on, that there were no native songbirds in the territory? At that moment therewas a crying, or a calling, from the next room such as Tanner had never heard before, not in a shipwreck – and he had been in a wreck – not in a slaughterhouse.
    ‘Don’t put yourself out on my account,’ said Brinkman. ‘I’m going to sit here until you come back and have a quiet smoko.’
    The doctor drove up bringing with him his wife’s widowed sister, who lived with them and was a nurse, or had been a nurse. Tanner came out of the bedroom covered with blood, something like a butcher. He told the doctor he’d managed to deliver the child, a girl, in fact he’d wrapped it in a towel and tucked it up in the washbasket. The doctor took him back into the bedroom and made him sit down. The nurse put down the things she’d brought with her and looked round for the tea-tin. Brinkman sat there, as solid as his chair. ‘You may be wondering who I am,’ he said. ‘I’m a neighbour, come over for dinner. I think of myself as one of the perpetually welcome.’ ‘Suit yourself,’ said the sister-in-law. The doctor emerged, moving rather faster than he usually did. ‘Please to go in there and wash the patient. I’m going to take a look at the afterbirth. The father put it out with the waste.’
    There Tanner had made his one oversight. It wasn’t the afterbirth, it was a second daughter, smaller, but a twin. – But how come, if both of them were girls, that Mr Tanner himself still had the name of Tanner? Well, the Tanners went on to have nine more children, someof them boys, and one of those boys was Mr Tanner’s father. That evening, when the doctor came in from the yard with the messy scrap, he squeezed it as though he was wringing it out to dry, and it opened its mouth and the colder air of the kitchen rushed in and she’d got her start in life. After that the Tanners always had one of those tinplate mottoes hung up on the wall – Throw Nothing Away. You could get them then at the hardware store. – And this was