Tales of the Unexpected

letter. She hesitated, fighting hard now against that old ingrained sense of duty that she didn’t quite yet dare to shake off. Then, slowly, she got to her feet and crossed over to the phone on the worktable. She found a number in the book, dialled it, and waited.
    ‘I want to speak to Mr Landy, please.’
    ‘Who is calling?’
    ‘Mrs Pearl. Mrs William Pearl.’
    ‘One moment, please.’
    Almost at once, Landy was on the other end of the wire.
    ‘Mrs Pearl?’
    ‘This is Mrs Pearl.’
    There was a slight pause.
    ‘I am so glad you called at last, Mrs Pearl. You are quite well, I hope?’ The voice was quiet, unemotional, courteous. ‘I wonder if you would care to come over here to the hospital? Then we can have a little chat. I expect you are very eager to know how it all came out.’
    She didn’t answer.
    ‘I can tell you now that everything went pretty smoothly, one way and another. Far better, in fact, than I was entitled to hope. It is not only alive, Mrs Pearl, it is conscious. It recovered consciousness on the second day. Isn’t that interesting?’
    She waited for him to go on.
    ‘And the eye is seeing. We are sure of that because we get an immediate change in the deflections on the encephalograph when we hold something up in front of it. And now we’re giving it the newspaper to read every day.’
    ‘Which newspaper?’ Mrs Pearl asked sharply.
    ‘The
Daily Mirror
. The headlines are larger.’
    ‘He hates the
Mirror
. Give him
The Times
.’
    There was a pause, then the doctor said, ‘Very well, Mrs Pearl. We’ll give it
The Times
. We naturally want to do all we can to keep it happy.’
    ‘
Him
,’ she said. ‘Not
it. Him!
’
    ‘Him,’ the doctor said. ‘Yes, I beg your pardon. To keep him happy. That’s one reason why I suggested you should come along here as soon as possible. I think it would be good for him to see you. You could indicate how delighted you were to be with him again – smile at him and blow him a kiss and all that sort of thing. It’s bound to be a comfort to him to know that you are standing by.’
    There was a long pause.
    ‘Well,’ Mrs Pearl said at last, her voice suddenly very meek and tired. ‘I suppose I had better come on over and see how he is.’
    ‘Good. I knew you would. I’ll wait here for you. Come straight up to my office on the second floor. Good-bye.’
    Half an hour later, Mrs Pearl was at the hospital.
    ‘You mustn’t be surprised by what he looks like,’ Landy said as he walked beside her down a corridor.
    ‘No, I won’t.’
    ‘It’s bound to be a bit of a shock to you at first. He’s not very prepossessing in his present state, I’m afraid.’
    ‘I didn’t marry him for his looks, Doctor.’
    Landy turned and stared at her. What a queer little woman this was, he thought, with her large eyes and her sullen, resentful air. Her features, which must have been quite pleasant once, had now gone completely. The mouth was slack, the cheeks loose and flabby, and the whole face gave the impression of having slowly but surely sagged to pieces through years and years of joyless married life. They walked on for a while in silence.
    ‘Take your time when you get inside,’ Landy said. ‘He won’t know you’re in there until you place your face directly above his eye. The eye is always open, but he can’t move it at all, so the field of vision is very narrow. At present we have it looking straight up at the ceiling. And of course he can’t hear anything. We can talk together as much as we like. It’s in here.’
    Landy opened a door and ushered her into a small square room.
    ‘I wouldn’t go too close yet,’ he said, putting a hand on her arm. ‘Stay back here a moment with me until you get used to it all.’
    There was a biggish white enamel bowl about the size of a washbasin standing on a high white table in the centre of the room, and there were half a dozen thin plastic tubes coming out of it. These tubes were connected with a whole lot of glass piping in which you could see the blood flowing to and from the heart machine. The machine itself made a soft rhythmic pulsing sound.
    ‘He’s in there,’ Landy said, pointing to the basin, which was too high for her to see into. ‘Come just a little closer. Not too near.’
    He led her two paces forward.
    By stretching her neck, Mrs Pearl could now see the surface of the liquid inside the basin. It was clear and still, and on it there floated a small oval capsule, about the