by Weldon, Fay
The college gave all its students twice-yearly medical checkups. The rather elderly doctor always had Tandy strip right off so he could palpate her breasts. He gave her internal examinations, too, putting his hand first into a thin rubber glove, then into her to pinch and peek and pry. And then a rectal examination with a light at the end of a metal tube. She’d scream and he’d say crossly, ‘just relax.’ Doctors always seemed to Tandy to be rather cross. After the fourth of these examinations she checked with her friend Rhoda, who had no breasts to speak of, and discovered that Rhoda was allowed to keep her clothes on and that her inside could do without checking, so after that Tandy ignored the official reminder cards and left her health to luck rather than science.
She raised the question of medical training once more at home. She thought there should be more women in the medical profession.
‘Good God, girl,’ said her father, ‘the thing to do is to marry a doctor, not be one. A good doctor’s wife is almost as valuable in the community as a good doctor.’
Tandy’s mother had good solid-thighed legs, from running up and down stairs to answer the telephone. And indeed there was nothing she didn’t know about the early symptoms of mumps, measles and chicken pox, and the management of these diseases. She had a fair, Northern skin, and died rather suddenly from a melanoma, a cancer common in Australia. A mole on her hand changed shape and size and her husband was too busy to notice it until it was too late to be operable. He had become an excellent golfer, and was playing in an interstate competition, and had a lot on his mind.
‘Even if you had noticed,’ said his doctor friends, comforting him, for he was very distressed, ‘chances are she wouldn’t have made it. And how old was she?’
Forty-nine, and coming up to the menopause. Better out of the way, the implication was. After the forties, from a gynaecologist’s point of view, it’s downhill all the way, tinker as you may with a woman’s insides. Bleeding and drying and fibroids and cysts and backache – you name an unhealthy state, the woman has it. She comes to you complaining, fills the surgery with dulled voice and reproachful eyes. The age of child-bearing is past. All meaning gone, for a woman.
Tandy’s father married his receptionist, who was only twenty-nine, and adored him, and raised another family.
‘I want to be a doctor,’ reiterated Tandy. ‘No daughter of mine...’ reiterated her father. ‘I’m not paying for that. Why don’t you be a nurse?’
So she did. One year into her nursing course she became pregnant by a medical student who put his faith in coitus interruptus and could not marry her, for various reasons, and Tandy had to have an abortion; at that time a firmly and criminally illegal act. She went to see the local abortionist, a general practitioner known to feel sorry for girls in distress, when she was eight weeks pregnant. He would not accept money, saying he performed these operations from principle, rather than monetary gain: he believed in sex as the great emotional and physical cure-all, and required her to sleep with him before curettage, in order to speed the healing process. She consented, since it seemed to mean more to him than it did to her. He was very short-sighted and kept his pebble lenses on during love-making, saying that seeing was as important as touching. He reproached her for her lack of sexual response and delayed the operation until he had brought her fully to it. He showed her obscene photographs which failed to move her, though they did quite surprise her. Then he was obliged to call his cousin in to have sex with her while he watched, and she feigned the most enthusiastic response, since by now she was ten weeks pregnant and the operation getting daily more dangerous.
When he finally performed it, he did it safely, painlessly and kindly, and she healed with amazing speed. But then she was a healthy girl, and apart from the intimate relationship that doctors seemed to have with her private parts would never have had to visit one at all.
She qualified as a nurse, then as a sister, and could have become matron before she was thirty; but then, as her father remarked, who would have married her? So she stayed a nursing sister, and married an engineer, Roger, and had two children, and apart from the usual peeking and prying, enemas, shaving, cutting and sewing involved in the safe delivery of babies in Newcastle, kept her insides to herself for a considerable time. Roger was an active and pleasant lover, and did not require fellatio, or practise cunnilingus, and they never had the light on, and she managed to separate out the medical aspects of her reproductive organs from the warm, creative, sexual pleasure they now gave her, three or four times a week, during her thirties and forties.
Perhaps Roger was a little boring: perhaps life was rather quiet? She felt untapped, unused: as if she were the kernel of a walnut, and it was withering in the shell, instead of growing plump and interestingly formed and ripe. Roger watched television and played squash: the two boys played football and tennis. No one talked, she sometimes felt: not really talked. They exchanged information, that was all. Life was lived on the surface: sometimes the flesh between her legs tingled in an expectation that infused her whole body, and made her dance and sing and then weep. The boys thought she was mad, but then everyone’s mother at a certain age went mad. Everyone knew it. Women did.
Tandy took a part-time job at the local hospital, where they specialised in the care of the handicapped; a place where men lived whose legs grew round their necks, or who had no arms or legs at all, and women with hands grown into claws, and children with brains that still thought better than most, and felt more than most, but could not move limbs, or mouths, or eyes.
How lucky I am to be whole, thought Tandy, even though no longer young, and fell in love with Dr Walker, the medical superintendent, who did not get on with his wife. And he fell in love with her and they managed a weekend or so together, which in a way was a pity because after that she knew what she had missed. She saw that the sunrise glow in the morning of her life, which should have grown stronger and stronger, to suffuse her whole life with a brilliant sexual light, had been deflected, and the day clouded over, and now there were just glimmers, in and out, of a muted radiance.
He went back to his wife and Tandy to her husband, but she told him: which was a mistake. You can trust husbands to love you so far, no more. They, too, have intimations of lost ecstasy. He paced; she brooded.
‘Perhaps we would be happier apart,’ he said. He was forty-seven; she was forty-four. Either life was going to go on in the suburban house, ordinary and humdrum, eventually to run down into retirement, ill-health and death: or else he would change his job, move out of Newcastle, gain some new access of health and energy, jolt himself into life again. By sleeping with another man she had broken the ties of custom: she had chosen freedom, now he would do the same.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘Very well, go. But we’ll stay friends?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And I’ll send back the money.’
She had given up the part-time job at the hospital. She found it too painful: not just the sight of so much distressed flesh but the sight of her beloved; the thought of what could have been.
Living apart from Roger was more difficult than she had imagined. She suffered from loneliness, especially in the evenings. Listening to the music she loved, instead of the TV programmes he chose, was not, in the end, sufficient compensation for the simple lack of his presence.
She asked him to come back after six months.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve found someone else.’
Well, she was still an attractive woman. Other women’s husbands sought her out. She decided to become a doctor. She enrolled at the medical school. They hummed and haaed at her age and sex, but accepted her. She loved the work: it came easily to her.
I am happy, she thought. One of her tutors asked her out to coffee, then took her to the pictures. They started sleeping together. He was forty, seven years younger than she, but he said age was irrelevant. They made love with the light on, and she learned to trust him.
One night she had a severe pain in her right side.
&
nbsp; ‘You’d better see someone,’ said her tutor, Peter, and she agreed that indeed she had better. All her contemporaries had gynaecologists whom they visited, on principle, once every six months, who would check over their insides and pronounce them healthy, or unhealthy, and occasionally would ‘just open them up’ – for they were licensed surgeons too – ‘to see what’s going on in there!’
But Tandy kept forgetting to go: in the end they had even stopped sending the reminder cards.
The women of Newcastle have wonderfully criss-crossed stomachs, what with the caesarians, the appendectomies and a host of openings up. And the ponies are plentiful and plump on the hillsides, and the little doctors’ daughters laugh and sing, and if the grass is spotted with blood, who notices?
The gynaecologist was tall and fair, and well-qualified and new in Newcastle.
‘He’s wonderful,’ her friends said. ‘So kind and gentle and understanding. A conservative surgeon.’ That meant though he opened you up he did not take bits away if he could possibly help it. The women of Newcastle worried a little: wondered why they had more abdomen scars per head of female population than did women anywhere else in the entire world, so conservative surgeons, these days, did better than anyone else. There were a few practising women medicos, but hardly any women surgeons. Women, custom and practice decreed, do not make good surgeons.
‘You look familiar,’ said Tandy to the gynaecologist, as she lay upon the couch, on her side, knees parted.
‘Relax, relax! How can I examine you if you stay so stiff?
‘Good God,’ he said, ‘it’s Tandy.’
Dr John Pierce, the golden youth from long ago, from sunrise days: thin fair hair and lines of disappointment round his mouth, now that the sun was creeping down the sky.
Well, everyone gets older. He was more shocked than she: he had held an image of her in his mind, a beautiful, laughing girl, with long, thick hair. One day she’d loved him; the next she hadn’t. He never knew why. Tossed her head and walked by, and wounded him for ever.
‘Good God,’ she said, ‘it’s John Pierce.’
‘A long time ago,’ he said. ‘Do try and relax.’
She tried.
‘I think it’s just a cyst,’ he said, ‘causing the trouble. Probably benign, but we’d better open you up and make sure: and of course there are a lot of fibroids here. But then in a woman of your age that’s to be expected. How old? Forty-seven? Good God!’
He was forty-seven too. If it’s old for a woman it’s old for a man but that wasn’t the way he wanted to see it. Does anyone? He was married with three children and three ponies, and a receptionist he lusted after, and wouldn’t have to lust after if only he had true love, and hadn’t lost it long ago to Tandy Watson, who’d tossed her head one day and broken his heart. He blamed her.
He opened Tandy up: and took out everything. Womb, fallopian tubes, ovaries. Snip, snip. Forceps, nurse. (The nurse had glowing eyes above her mask, which reminded him of the past.) He sat by Tandy’s bed while she came out of the anaesthetic and told her what he’d done.
‘I thought we’d better be on the safe side,’ he said.
‘But what was wrong with them?’
‘Well, nothing,’ he said, ‘but wombs are a great source of trouble to women your age.’
‘You mean you took out three perfectly healthy organs?’
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘This cyst was benign but the next one mightn’t be. And I gave you an oestrogen implant so you’ll be better off than you were before. Oestrogen slows the ageing process. Well, look,’ he said nervously, for her eyes were enormous and witchlike, ‘what use are those organs to a woman of fifty? They’ve served their purpose. They’re no use to anyone.’
‘Forty-seven,’ she said. ‘Those organs are me. I am nothing, now. You have turned off the light. No one asked you to: no one said you could: you have taken it upon yourself to turn out the light of my life.’
He thought she might sue, but she didn’t. She didn’t want anyone to know what had happened. She was dull and depressed for a good six months, shocked and zombie-like.
She split up with Peter, who of course had to know, and blamed it on the loss of her organs. He was only forty: what would he want with a half-woman of nearly fifty, without womb, ovaries or fallopian tubes? The few friends she told assured her that in fact no harm had been done: that Peter would have gone anyway; that many women sought out the operation: that she looked, thanks to the oestrogen, slimmer and younger and prettier than before. But Tandy was not convinced. She gave up medical school: it was too much trouble. She became a grandmother and was glad it was a boy.
‘They have a better life than girls,’ she said, admiring the contained and tidy infant penis.
When she saw John Pierce in the street she would cross the road to avoid him. He seemed to her to walk in a pool of dark. But then she had, after all, turned the light of his life off, carelessly, long ago. She’d slept with him and then denied it to everyone, and failed to love him, and spoiled his life, and he couldn’t forgive that. Could anyone, really, man or woman, be expected to forgive?
The Bottom Line and the Sharp End
‘I’ll get my pennies together,’ said Avril the nightclub singer to Helen the hairdresser. ‘I’ll come in next week and you can work your usual miracles.’
Helen thought the time for miracles was almost past. Both Avril’s pennies and Avril’s hair were getting thin. But she merely said, ‘I’ll do my best,’ and ran her practised fingers through Avril’s wiry curls without flinching.
Avril was scraggy, haggard and pitifully brave. Helen was solid and worthy and could afford to be gracious. Avril had been Helen’s very first client, thirty years before, when she, Helen, had finally finished her apprenticeship. In those days Avril had worn expensive, daring green shoes with satin bows, all the better to flirt in: Helen had worn cheap navy shoes with sensible heels, all the better to work in. Helen envied Avril. Today Avril’s shoes, with their scuffed high heels, were still green, but somehow vulgar and pitiable, and the legs above them were knotted with veins. And Helen’s shoes were still navy, but expensive and comfortable, and had sensible medium heels. And Helen owned the salon, and had a husband, and grown children, and savings, and a dog, a cat and a garden, and Avril had nothing. Nothing. Childless, unmarried, and without property or money in the bank.
Now Helen pitied Avril, instead of envying her, but somehow couldn’t get Avril to understand that this switch had occurred.
With the decades the salon had drifted elegantly up-market, and now had a pleasing atmosphere of hushed brocaded luxury. Here now the wives of the educated wealthy came weekly, and the shampooers were well-spoken and careful not to wet the backs of blouses, and decaffeinated coffee was provided free, and low-calorie wholewheat sandwiches for a reasonable charge, and this month’s glossy magazines in sufficient quantity – and still Avril would walk in, unabashed, and greet Helen with an embarrassing cry of ‘darling!’ as if she were her dearest friend, in her impossibly husky and actressy voice. And she’d bring wafting in with her, so that the other clients stirred uneasily in their well-padded seats, what Helen could only think of as the aura of the street: and what is more, of a street in rapid decline – once perhaps Shaftesbury Avenue, and tolerable, with associated West End theatre and champagne cocktails, but now of some Soho alley, complete with live sex shows and heroin-pushers.
Sometimes Avril would vanish for a year or so and Helen would hope she had gone for good, and then there she’d be again, crying ‘do something, darling. Work your usual miracles. My life’s all to hell!’ and Helen would pick up the strands of brown, or red, or yellow or whatever they currently were, and bleach them right down and re-colour them, and soothe and coax them into something presentable and fashionable.
This time Avril had been away all of two years. And now here she was, back again, and the ‘do something’ had sounded really desperate, as she’d torn at crisp dry henna-and-grey curls with ringed f
inger-claws, and Helen had been affected, surprisingly, with real sorrow and concern. Perhaps you didn’t have to like people to feel for them? Perhaps if they were merely around for long enough you developed a fellow-feeling for them?
She remembered how once – way, way back – when Avril’s hair had been long and smooth and shiny, the rings had had diamonds and rubies on them. Then, at the time of her auburn pony-tail there’d been engagement rings and remembrance rings: and later, once or twice – at the time Avril’s hair was back-combed into blonde curls – a wedding ring. Helen could remember. But nowadays the only rings she wore were the kind anyone could buy at a jewellery stall in the market on Saturdays; they came from India or Ethiopia or somewhere ethnic, and the silver was base and the stones were glass. ‘Cheap and cheerful,’ Avril would cackle, from under the dryer, waving them round happily for all to see, as the other clients looked away, tactfully. They didn’t wear much jewellery, and if they did it was either real or Harrods make-believe, and certainly quiet.
Avril came in for the latest, desperate miracle on Friday evening. She had the last appointment, and of course wanted a bleach, a perm, a cut and a set. Helen agreed to work late. It was her policy to oblige clients – even clients such as Avril – wherever possible, and however much at her own expense. It was, in the end, good for business. Just as, in the end, steadiness, forbearance, endurance, always succeeded whether at work, in marriage, in the establishment of a home, the bringing up of children. You made the most of what you had. You were not greedy; you played safe; and you won.
Helen rang up her husband Gregory to tell him she would be working late.
‘I’ll take a chicken pie from the freezer,’ he said, ‘and there’s a nature programme on TV I want to see. And perhaps I’ll do a little DIY around the house.’
‘Well, don’t try mending the electric kettle,’ she said, and he agreed not to. Still she did not hang up.
‘Is there something the matter?’ he said, and waited patiently. He was wonderfully patient.
