My cousin is a surgeon. I do not understand what it is about surgeons. But not just surgeons - doctors too, anyone associated with medicine. I don't know what it is about him and his brother either, who is also a doctor. They were like that ever since they were children. It wasn't that you guessed what they were going to be; it's that they were already doctors, from birth. They took on more, and so there would be less to give those around them. The moment of their attention would be constantly divided, shared out among the many. And they didn't see this; even if they had seen it, they wouldn't really have understood what I am getting at. It would be as if I were asking for something selfish.

"You'd better have one of these," he said in that abstracted way of his. I knew really he was thinking about something else that had to be done, some arrangement which even now he had to get underway, though he was instead taking his time entertaining me, pretending - but not doing a very good job of it - that I was the only thing on his mind. I realised that perhaps some of his professional practice came into play here - to be involved with his patients, without seeming to promise the needy ones too much attention.

"You'd better have one of these," he had said, and handed me a full-size human hand, made out of black plastic. Almost immediately though I realised that there was something wrong with it - and then I saw that it had six fingers.

He emitted a vague sound which could have been interpreted as anything; I held the hand in my palm and turned it over, trying to look at it approvingly, utterly incapable of understanding why I had been given this thing or what I was supposed to say about it. I assumed it must have been some early experiment of his, the consequence of some anatomical workshop. I even imagined that the grotesque thing might first have seen the light of day in a joke shop somewhere, purchased by a friend for his stag-night.

During the festivities I was to stay in his own bedroom, since I was family. He had tidied away a few things, just enough to make space for me. But it was the neat curtains, inconspicuous against the walls, that seemed to characterise the room. Unassertive, utilitarian, they were part and parcel of the kinds of places he worked on a daily basis. It was as if, in some way, he always carried the hospital about with him, - as if this house itself, in which he had grown up, were always the potential hospital, waiting to find its home through him.

Now he raised his voice. There were people in the hallway; they seemed to stream endlessly through the front door, like distracted beams of light, half in, half out of the house.

"I summoned you admirable gentlemen and no less admirable spouses, partners, hangers on, or what you will, as one’s audience dictates, to witness my formal wedding ties to a very wonderful young lady," he was saying with a voice that instinctively I appreciated as "genial." He endowed the voice with a sense of affectionate irony, so that, even if there were nothing ironic in what he said, it seemed that he was reaching carefully for each word, disregarding other words that might have done just as well.

"All of us have some claim to fame. Well, my young lady's claim to fame is this - she has eleven fingers," he added matter of factedly. Evidently the admission was important; it was clear this was something he would presently build upon; nevertheless, its indecorous objectivity sat uneasily with the somewhat grandiose adddress which had preceded it.

This may sound a little ghoulish to some of you," he went on in explanation, "but those who don't want to hear it don't have to.” The briefest pause that followed brooked no dissent: “The fact is, she was born with a birth defect; her left hand had five fingers, but two of them were thumbs. Well, three weeks ago, all that was to change. After a few - very painful and tense - " (he laughed, to show that he, too, was human) - "very painful and tense hours with me in the operating theatre, I should like to present you with my wife."

I realised that a good part of this was the intimacy he clearly felt that he owed us, and that we, in turn, owed him, in being here and sharing something personal with a man who seldom has anything of the personal to impart. This must be why he was telling us things which, anywhere else, should have been private between the two of them. Admittedly, it seemed possible his wife might have been unable to conceal her deformity, but, all the same, I found it odd that he was talking about it quite so openly. Instinctively I wondered why he could not just have left things alone. Somehow, I was convinced, he would just have given an awkward laugh, clearly offended, and retorted drily "So the world will choose magnanimously to overlook what my wife must have before her every day. May I ask why?"

Now the crowd of people in the hallway had subsided a little; it was like a flood of sunlight becoming covered in dust. Then, near the doorway to the library, he was bobbing up and down, handing out the little black hands again, like prayer books at a church. As if unconsciously recalling similar ceremonies, the guests in turn bowed formally, respectfully receiving their hand, and perhaps slipping it into a pocket or a bag. Each one shiny, each one too heavy for itself, it was as if it were really an actual human hand that had been painted.

At last I saw what it was that he had been getting at - that strange mixture of horror and tenderness, which we all seemed to have accepted with an equanimity that astonished me. At last I realised the awful logic of the thing he had done. The fourth member of that hand was a grotesque appendage with no skeletal continuity, inserted next to the second thumb, and bizarrely swollen toward its base. Then I realised that what I was holding was an actual cast of his wife's hand, and there, on the newly added fourth finger, was the wedding ring.

But touching that hand’s original, beyond the fact we carried away its likenesses as unquestioningly as our clothes, there seemed nothing further to be said. Indeed, I vaguely felt there was something too terrible about its bearer to endure the light of day.