Authors: Candia McWilliam
‘Thank you. I’ll get myself another drink.’
I let her pour the whisky, walk over to the mirror with its golden lion and the standing men in their chariot, check not her face but her clothes, and return to the sofa. I could not see how she had been so obtuse. Then I realised. Hal was not for her the centre of the world. She was the centre of her own world, and I somewhere near it. Hal was there, but he had his place in the cosmogony, somewhere between Bayreuth and guipure lace for importance. Living in a denatured universe, without husband or son, she had come to trust only herself and what she could control; she had allowed me to come close to her and I had introduced a vagrant pull into her orbit, a new, unignorable moon. Poor Anne.
‘Cora is not for me. I want her, and have since your party where I first saw her, for Hal. On the morning of your party, he told me he was going’ – and now
my
voice went out of control – ‘to get married, but he had no one in mind. All he admitted to wanting was breasts and legs.’
‘Oh, darling,’ said Anne, and had I not been afraid of her feelings for me, just in those raw hours, I would have lain on her comfortably undivided bosom. ‘Oh, love. And it’s you who wants the moral keel.’
‘I thought it as well.’
‘Why is that? Surely you haven’t noticed an insufficiency in Hal?’
‘I can’t argue over Hal now, Annie, please, so don’t be ironic at me.’
‘And who wants the babies?’ she asked.
‘I hadn’t honestly thought of them until you started. I’m in the early days, they aren’t married yet, after all, but when you spoke of children I rather cared for the idea.’
‘You rather cared for the idea. Lucas, no wonder you have to go and get violated by Nibelungs, you fool, this is life, the thing which even you can’t sew back into leaky bodies. You have let a dragon out.’ The note of management, of knowing better, which I fear in the voices of my ward Sisters, crept in. ‘No harm done, though, nothing has happened, after all. You can’t ensure they will like each other, let alone marry, and surely if Hal suspected that you were calculating this match, he’d run.’
‘Leave it to me, Anne, please, after all Hal is mine.’
‘He is not, nobody is yours, Lucas, not even those little unborn cherubs. Do you know how crazy you are? You are experimenting with human flesh. You are doing something which, if it were surgical, would be as repulsive and unnatural as . . .’
‘Transplanting the heart?’ I asked, pleased with myself, but on edge.
‘As obscene as what you tell me it is cheek in Gentiles to mention.’
‘Was Mrs Bennet guilty of that when she planned for her daughters’ future?’
‘Do not be disingenuous, Lucas. A natural desire for one’s child’s security is not the same as finding a hale consort for your catamite.’
‘That he is not.’
‘No. He is something worse. If he were that, these complications would not be facing us and half your life would not be lived in either the baleful light of illusion or the dark of rough trade.’
My whole mien discourages criticism. There is a perfect control about me which deflects fault-finding. I am conscious of it because I forged it, link by link.
‘It’s true, darling. If you lived openly with a boyfriend, there would be no fear of discovery because there would be nothing to discover. But then, I think, and I must be quite careful here, it wouldn’t be as thrilling. Also, if you did live with him, you might see him as he is, not the prince in his tower.’
‘So, what do you suggest I do, Anne? Forget it all, let him cut loose, lose my last six years, have no one to live for?’
‘Oh, you great self-pitying thing, who have I to live for, for instance? We live for life. Not for another person. Or at any rate no person to keep us in a sufficient state of misery to endure life. Did your mother and father suffer for you to suffer? They did not. Come into the sun. If I can do it, you can do it. You commit idolatry with Hal. Why not settle for a godless universe if you cannot find a true god? He is a golden bullock. I’d be happier for you living in open sin with a wet fishmonger than this mawkish abdication from hope for the sake of a puppet queen. We have not spoken of this before because I had not wanted to hurt you, but you have gone too far and now I can’t stand by and see you throw a perfectly nice girl to your pet puss. You have drawn his teeth, Lucas, but his claws are there in the paddy paws. Poor little Cora will just be left like a mouse after the cat has played with it, only the skin and spleen left. How dare you do it, Lucas?’
‘I shall do it, Anne, and you will help me. I am sorry to use desperate measures but I must have your co-operation now. I have told you what I intend to do. In the end, you may come to see I was correct.’
‘What, when you and I, in the cere and yellow, see Hal, by now in the fullness of his years and for once at home and upright, dandling little Hal, Cora mysteriously absent, in the home for battered wives?
Please
.’
‘Anne, you told me about Mordred, do you remember? You would gravely dislike anyone else to know. I love you, I am not in love with you, and I ask you to permit me to blackmail you.’
‘Good of you to ask,’ said Anne.
I had won.
The tiredness after that night brought a sleep without dreams, until just before I awoke. There is a vivid crack of bright dreams just before waking up. Whether it is the red of one’s eyelids being interpreted by the brain I do not know. All dreams have to do with love and death.
My dream was of Anne. She and I were fighting over Hal, who was dead. He was not decomposing, but rather flowering. When we pulled at his flesh, it came away, but in drifts and bunches. It was like dismembering a man of petals and fruit, an Archimboldean harvest-festival man. At length, we were tired, and settled among the fruit and flowers to eat. We ate meats brought to us by Cora, who wore no clothes. Anne and I were dressed for a Presbyterian Sunday. She wore mittens of grey lace and her little hands were clawed. When I awoke I was afraid, but pleased when I remembered that I now had an accomplice. I had made Anne swear that she would not include Tertius in my plan. He has a wagging tongue in a small world, with its four corners, trade and sex and money and class, enclosing a formal maze. To introduce a girl into its geometry would be to forfeit entry, and Tertius was not only my friend; he was guide in the maze, the one who told me in what shade next to seek ease, and who held the other end of the thread to tweak me back when I was lost.
I had the false energy of hangover, but my crapulousness was not from whisky but from the gambler’s fear; had I loaded my dice so heavily that I would be caught? I left a note for Concepçión, who came to wash up for me before her day of sluicing Embassy kitchens began. She earned from the Embassies perhaps a sleeve of one of my shirts a week. I gave her the equivalent of a couple of cuffs beside. I liked her boy, who sat and played wherever he would least disturb his mother. He did not like the Hoover, which he called Dog. One day he called me dog and I spent the following morning thinking of ways to win him back. In the end, I chose a box of that coffee toffee the Dutch eat. He put a cube flat in his mouth, flat hand to flat cream face, and Concepçión said, ‘How nice.’ She washed the boy’s hair in dishwasher liquid, she told me. It did shine like black china.
I left for the Hospital. Driving a car before the streets have begun to smell and while there is still pink in the sky is a pleasure. Some women lick their lips when they see a significant car in their mirror, women with coats like troika rugs on the passenger seat beside them, and red nails, and dogs like wigs.
There were seagulls in Hyde Park and deserted groups of green deckchairs. There was an air of recuperation, London treating itself gently before a new day. Cities, more than the country, hold crevices for the irrational to gain a hold, but London was showing a bland face where the spores could not, at any rate in this clear dawn, settle. I wondered how the child with the new part in his heart was. I looked forward to seeing him and his family. At least I was blameless in their respect. No one could accuse me of manipulation save in its literal and curative sense.
The flower man in Belgrave Square had put away his ugly blooms. No more guilty husbands till nightfall.
When I arrived at the Hospital, their flower counter was just opening. We do not encourage visitors to bring flowers. They occupy nurses and vases. Those flowers we do sell are serviceable. Some are not real. They last, are undemanding of maintenance, and do not rot down. Sometimes when I see a patient presented with one of these sterile bouquets, I see through his flesh to the pacemaker or to the plastic valve or reinforced nylon aorta and, according to my mood, I feel gratitude or fear on account of these miraculous or intrusive inorganic spare parts. Like the husband who sees his new bride remove wig, nails, padded brassíre, I begin to wonder whether in the end I shall be left not with a living body but with a machine, a pump and some tubes.
I like to arrive early at the Hospital. Any who have died in the night have been taken away in false-bottomed stretchers, the new batch of nurses take over, once again in love with the job, full of tea and bread and jam; the Hospital is winning. The dark adversaries are at bay.
Hospital life is absorbing; it may debilitate you in the end. To care is impossible, not to care is impossible. Those patients who stay for a long time come to live by hospital time. They quaver for their supper at tea-time, they need the circumscription, they are dependent upon the hectoring way of the nurses. They are afraid of the violent profligacy of choice in the well world. They live in a valetudinarian, half-lit world where all decisions are taken by another. They are children, with no need to pubesce. To believe in the hospital is essential for the patient or he will not mend. Not to believe too much in the hospital is essential for the patient, or he will not adapt to the bright day his well body should now be fit to inhabit.
And then there are the mages. That is myself, and my fellow consultants. Not all have my newspaper notoriety, though the men who give babies to the childless are worshipped in this way. This is understandable; it is after all primitive magic as well as microscopic science of life which builds and shelters these new lives. Those of my colleagues who are given this type of adulation are touched and troubled by it. What they do is misdescribed, made misleading and to them couples come for whom the hope of hope is not even to be hoped for. They come from Anchorage, from Lima, from Dunblane. I have been lucky. My surgery is not arcane and has little of magic, though the heart is like the moon in our minds, and even more so in the shrunken mind of the narrow-vocabulary papers. The moon is made of green cheese, the heart of soft-centred chocolates in red velvet. The moon is for June, to spoon under at the prompting of the heart. The moon takes all women in its tidal tug, the heart has all the best lines. When the first foot was set in the dust of the moon, its silvery disc, the lozenge of love, was not pulverised. Minds baulked at the conclusion of literal events. The first transplanted heart, tucked in by the archetype of all heart-throb surgeons, did not hurt the romance of the idea of heart. It is a soft pump of muscle, but do you not wear it, with no incongruity, upon your sleeve? Does your heart not come into your mouth when you see the whore’s heart cut out by her brother? Heroes are great-hearted, hearts are for lovers, knaves, tarts and queens. The heart has its reasons; it is a lonely hunter. All life returns there repeatedly, and at the end, having reddled the blue gallon of blood for the last time, the great heart breaks.
The heart is an emblem we understand. It is proof love need not be literate. So the meaty seat of my professional endeavour is rich in metaphors. It stands for all we beat for against the tide of what is sure. To consider all this in the servicing or repair of a faulty heart would be as rash as to drive a space rocket on champagne and a driving licence. Professional men must not reflect too much; we delegate this to our universities. The trick of living is to travel light, and too much thought will put wings on your cap perhaps, but set your ankles in stone. If lawyers gave to law the equal balance its practice and philosophy require, no judgement would ever be made. Draco’s bloody stylus would still, ineffably slowly, be approaching the set wax. Seeing illness, sooner or later, we must act, and thought, the instigator of action, is also its great enemy.
I am a man of thought become a man of action.
Hospitals, then. Most people will tell you, as though revealing something quite exclusive about themselves, that they hate hospitals. I love them. Hospital was for me what university had not been. I at last was able to leave home. My parents would not have understood my leaving home while I was at university in London, so I cycled daily from Bayswater to Bloomsbury and took my meals with my mother and father. My first hospital was in Buckingham; even my mother realised that this would make it impossible to share our evenings and our food. It came just in time, for me. My mother had begun to ask about girls. I think she was relieved enough that there were none, in case I should be distracted from my work. Perhaps she imagined that I did all the courting I needed in the refectory or lecture hall. In fact I went to the cinema once a week with a dark medical student named Douglas Hardiman, who wore the same jersey for four years during which it grew tighter over his belly. His flesh raged. Once inside the cinema, we would separate. Douglas would look about till he saw a girl as nearly alone as possible. If there was no single girl, he sat next to anyone female whose flank was undefended. After the film, there would be either Douglas alone and with a story of sally and rebuff, or Douglas with a girl who might even accompany us on a subsequent trip to the cinema. They would not last longer than this, on account of Douglas’s approach, which was an impassive but violent molestation, his face staring ahead at the screen, his hands working like a person trying to get inside a corpse for warmth in a snowstorm. Outside of the cinema, as far as I could see, he could not look at his victims. He was compelled to talk, and to talk about medicine. He was drawn to discuss all that, in the early 1960s, was not pertinent to the wooing of girls. He would glaze over in cafés – the Rumble Tum, the Digest, the Tom Tom – and give monologues on lesions or fluke. The clear beauty of the function of the eye, or articulation of the hand, became in Douglas’s mouth meat and juice and gore. ‘Ooh, isn’t he morbid?’ these girls would say to me, hoping to stir into action the dishy friend of the mad boy talking carnage in the warm coffee-steam. But I liked these cinema outings because I could do what he was doing, in a stealthy way, with boys. Where he paddled and dipped and unhooked, I stared and tested and occasionally found my eye met. Assignations were made, and one afternoon I discovered that there was an end and a means to them which was neither lonely nor procreative. I never wanted to stop. I do not know whether Douglas knew. I was mooning, desiring and not daring to pursue; Douglas even followed the plots of the films, so simply physical was his quest.