‘Vulvar vestibulitis.’ The words sounded familiar. Maybe she’d seen them on the internet, before the image of the cautery iron, and the account that drove her from her trawling. She’d not had the courage to resume her online search since.
‘Ten years ago it would have taken much longer for you to be diagnosed.’ The doctor’s voice was wry. ‘Twenty years and you may not have received a diagnosis at all.’ She turned the chart and pointed to the numbers. ‘You see here?’ Alice leaned forward. The posture relieved the pressure on her genitals and bottom; she placed her weight on her elbows and exhaled shakily. ‘These numbers are where I was pressing in the vestibule.’
‘In the what?’
‘The vestibule. The entrance to the vagina. The inflammation is typically focused at these points.’
‘It’s worse at one end.’ Alice saw that the nines were placed towards the front of the vulva, near to what she thought might be the urethra. No wonder weeing hurt so much.
‘Yes. That’s unusual,’ the doctor said. ‘Generally the pain is worse at the back of the vestibule, near the Bartholin’s glands. Maybe your pain is more widespread and that’s why you’re having trouble sitting.’ Her tone was musing, its surface unruffled. ‘Though most women have pain primarily with intercourse, not all the time …’ She smiled abruptly, briefly, and, just as suddenly, Alice realised that the GP relished this twist on the typical. ‘But I think that yours is simply a more severe case. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t respond to treatment.’
‘So, how do you treat it?’ Alice felt her heart thump.
‘Ah, that’s something I’ve had a lot of success with.’ Satisfaction lifted one corner of the doctor’s mouth. ‘I’ve found that the anti-candida diet eliminates any candida in the vulva that might be causing inflammation and lets the area settle down.’
Success. Who with? But Alice’s mind skipped quickly over the idea of other women with this pain – of an inescapably real, established, long-suffering population out there, somewhere – to land on the possibility of treatment. She’d been on the anti-candida diet once, years ago – why, she couldn’t recall. A momentary illness? A youthful fad? She did remember feeling healthy and virtuous.
‘How long does it take?’
‘I’ve had a ninety-five percent success rate in women who stick with it for three months.’
Could this be true? Alice did not know whether to feel relieved or deflated. Three months. She was hoping for a miracle cure. A series of toxic tablets or a nasty injection. It seemed impossible that food could defuse this relentless pain. But what if it could? She felt herself expanding around the new information. Plans began to form in her mind: a visit to the health food shop, whole foods and supplements, meditation.
Shuffling broke into her thoughts. The GP was tidying her papers. Preparing to move on to the next person.
‘What about sex?’ Questions were returning to her now, too late. She felt panicky. ‘We haven’t been able to have sex for a couple of months.’ She didn’t really want an answer; even the question wasn’t hers.
But Dr Gibbs paused with her tidying and looked straight at Alice. ‘Well, you could try an anaesthetic cream. So that you don’t feel the pain.’ Alice thought about Duncan and how pleased he would be. If she told him. ‘But have you thought about why you might have this disorder?’ The question was at odds with the GP’s impersonal manner, but not with the posters and the clothing and the dietary advice. Alice felt a little give in her tense body. Impressions flitted through her mind: communes and rainbows and organic food. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Then the doctor spoke again: ‘What do you think your body is trying to tell you?’
Alice settled on the day bed in a sideways, semi-reclining pose, buttressed by cushions. Bees were buzzing at the orangey-red grevillea flowers. She closed her eyes. Tried to recapture the floating heaviness of sleep. The bees’ hum blended with the touch of the sun, which, for now, was soft.
What do you think your body is trying to tell you? She had no idea. Not because she couldn’t hear it – her genitals now screamed and yelled at her in a ceaseless assault from which she had to block her ears – but because it was a language she could not translate. The only words she could separate from the formless babble were, it hurts. It hurts. It hurts! And the response: oh God, take it away. Make it stop. Oh please, God. She did not know who was doing the screaming, who the begging.
Her mother, when she rang from Melbourne, reminded her of the words of the mediaeval mystic Julian of Norwich: ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’ And when Alice sobbed and moaned, beyond vanity, beyond restraint, This suffering will make you very strong, her mother said. Alice had wanted to demand, ‘What’s more strength when I’m already as hard as stone? as heavy as lead?’ But she kept that anger, almost as great as the pain, sealed inside her body, acting out the violence only in her imagination. Her mother’s head wrenched sideways, cheek flaming. ‘I’ll give you sainthood.’ Her own stinging, satisfied hand.
She opened her eyes, slipped on her sunglasses. In a week or so, even this early-morning sun would be too much for her. And too much for the garden. She scanned the flowerbeds. Saw the remnants of spring flowers, bowing low at summer’s entry. The person she once was would have spread mulch on the beds by now. Kept the little patch of lawn a pristine green. Instead, it was a holey rug patched and threaded by winter grass, and weeds that nodded their tough little seed heads at her, emboldened by her lack of action.
Last night’s dream returned. The house and the dry, flat, barren block of land that, it seemed, was her home. The bed of sand that she combed for the minute seeds of weeds. Dream-Alice picked them out, one by one. Then she uncovered a cocoon. It had a brown creature inside it, so she put the cocoon in a plastic bag for protection, tying the opening closed. But the creature in the cocoon heaved, its movements faster and faster, its hole of a mouth pressed tight against the clear skin that separated it from the world. And suddenly it came to her: because she had tied the bag, the creature couldn’t breathe. She punched a hole and it emerged, gasping for air. She saw it was like a little bat. She dropped the bundle of life in surprise and woke, the tears still wet on her cheeks.
A wattlebird flew industriously in and out of the powder puffs of melaleuca blossom. Snow-in-summer – was that its name? The melaleuca tree that she and Duncan planted to mark her moving into his house. Their home. Over seven years ago now. She sipped her tea and wondered when he would wake. Unusual for him to sleep so late, even over the Christmas break.
Her vulva felt heavy. It dragged against itself, like the lagging anchor of a boat adrift in a storm. She knew that, were she to move right now, it would flare again. Even the outward bulge of her belly as she inhaled seemed to stir it. These days, her chest rose in small, shallow breaths as if she were in the midst of an emergency.
Thank God she’d knocked back next year’s units; deferred the sessional lecturing and tutoring built up over the last few years. She understood, though, that she was saying no to far more than teaching. She was sacrificing acknowledgement and respect, forgoing work with colleagues who sparked passion and ideas, suspending the honorary fellow position bestowed after what was considered a highly successful PhD. She was saying no to this role she had created – with Duncan’s support, of course – saying no to a goal only partially achieved.
Even harder to bear was that other loss: more critical writing on family and fiction, attempts to edit stories already written – to find publication for her collection of families, languishing now for months. This was where her joy rested: in the shaping of ideas, of characters and worlds; in being herself shaped by what she learned. But her imagination was as arid as their garden, her strength and confidence drained by the battle with pain. It was impossible to generate anything new, or to improve anything already written. And so she must release that joy, although loosening her grasp on it was like another death.
But, she remind
ed herself, it was the end of the year. Recovery was more important; she couldn’t do anything until then. She could take as long as she needed – all of 2008, if necessary – to free herself from the pain she had nursed over long months, holding it like a sickly baby against her belly, feeling her shoulders and head slowly curling down and around it.
She looked at the garden through a mist and wondered, who was this Alice who could do nothing but cry? Who was, now, nothing? Nothing without her husband, who must support her, emotionally, morally. Financially.
‘Hello, there.’ A hand on her shoulder. Duncan leaning over from behind. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Oh, the same.’ Alice quickly wiped at her face. She was growing to hate the recurring question and its implicit demand. She wanted to be able to say, ‘Oh, it’s so much better!’ and was angry at herself and, unreasonably, Duncan that she couldn’t. She reminded herself that he was being caring and understanding, and she forced herself to smile at him.
‘Do you want to try a drive today?’ Duncan rounded the day bed and squatted next to her. He was already dressed in shorts and a sports shirt and looked vital and healthy. Years younger than his forty-two years. At that moment, she was older than him. A hag; a crone.
‘No. I just want to lie still.’ That wasn’t quite right. ‘I mean, I would love to go for a drive somewhere. But it would make things worse, so I can’t.’ There was something about saying no all the time that wore away at you. ‘I’ll stay here and read.’
‘Okay.’ A small frown. He walked behind her again, squeezed her shoulders with his hands.
The wattlebird perched on the gutter and leaned over, its head jerking and swivelling. Searching for the juicy spiders that had been colonising the eaves. It swooped suddenly through the net of webs. A fleeting glimpse of black at its beak, then the bird was gone.
‘I might see if Brian is up for some tennis,’ Duncan said.
‘That sounds like a good idea.’ She wanted to be left alone. No, she wanted to be held, nestled into an embrace that asked nothing of her.
He leaned over her shoulder again, rested his cheek on hers. ‘I want to be able to help you,’ he whispered, ‘but I don’t know how.’
CHAPTER 8
LONDON, DECEMBER 1864
He skips down the front steps—freshly scrubbed and whitened; good girl, Mary—and sets off for Lincoln’s Inn with Emily’s pure, clear voice still sounding in his ear. And though it is bleak on the street—a heavy, chill winter with the night’s rain in the day’s puddles and the usual dirty, yellowish fog choking the air—and though other noises nudge the edges of his thought—the shriek of the servant girl trotting across Portland Place as water spills from a pail over her boot; the distant strains of a brass band overlaid by the pealing bells of All Saints; high-pitched giggles and a clatter of hooves left hanging in the wake of a cab—and though this brisk walk is but a prelude to a hectic day with disconsolate clients and papered stacks of unsolvable cases, still, even with all this, “All Things Bright and Beautiful” sings to him in his wife’s voice—his wife, his!—and his feet beat a rhythm to the tune. He knows that if he were to bump into someone—his old Rugby School friend Thomas Lawler, say, freshly qualified as a physician and stepping from cab to kerb, a respectable top hat taming his pale curls—a fond smile would be there, just as it has been on every single morning of their newly minted marriage.
She delights him. Emily. His Emmie. Singing morning songs of praise and thanksgiving, voice and feet tripping, childlike, up and down the stairs. Listening to stories of his clients at breakfast, head tilted, grey eyes narrowing in concentration. Commanding him, mock-imperious, to dinner, where they touch toes under the table. Challenging his serious-minded politics while she sews by the fire in the evening, plump mouth twitching. Calling him to bed, hair undone and swaying like a promise down her back. He wants to make love to her; he wishes to protect her; he would like to shout his unbelieving, unbelievable bliss to the world. Instead, he holds it close, a luscious secret: the world of her and him, into which no-one else can intrude.
When had it been, that moment, that piercing sense of recognition? The knowledge that she was for him and no-one else? Not at the first sight of her, just another amongst the flurry of girls “coming out” like butterflies after their demure presentation at court; he ’d not even properly heard that lilting voice. Maybe he ’d not been ready. It was the following year, 1862 … May—he ’d just come down from Oxford, was reeling in the unfamiliar expectations of Lincoln’s Inn and the befuddled intricacies of the courts—yes, it was May when he first really saw her. The tartan sash bordering her ball dress—Ah, Scottish, then, he ’d thought—the heavy mass of red-gold hair coiled at the back of her head; the slanted eyes and lips like an invitation; the soft, white, intimate hollows beneath the jet beads at her neck and shoulders. He ’d had to look away for a moment to compose himself. And then when she spoke he ’d felt a shock within him, a sensation like something shifting in his chest. That she felt it too was in the darkening of her eyes, the hand to her mouth.
Why, Arthur, Bea had exclaimed the following morning, someone has put a spring in your step! And he ’d blushed and laughed and held his tongue, not ready to trust the sense of revelation, even to his teasing sister.
He pauses for a passing cab at the corner of Weymouth Street, sees a maid shaking a small rug out of a second-storey window, another emptying a bucket into the gutter of the street. A phantom shape in the fog becomes an upright matron shepherding two young women in gay walking dresses and bonnets—one brilliant red, the other a bold blue. A little terrier trots next to them and sniffs eagerly at Arthur’s boots as the group passes behind him, then round the corner. Off for a walk in Regent’s Park, perhaps.
They ’d had to abide by convention, he and Emmie, follow the forms of society. So giddy dancing at balls, then, and urging on horses at Ascot, and partaking in those interminable dinners where ambitious men form alliances and ambitious women plot for their daughters. The evenings only given light and promise when she and he drew together in corners or on terraces, her mother always just a glance away, and shared moments of their lives: losses mourned, futures hoped. That desire for her taking shape, becoming a parching need only eased by little sips that were never quite enough: fluttering touches, quick whispers on staircases. Then, later, when he could dare to believe in her, sightings in Hyde Park, she with her mother—always, always with her mother!—and sometimes a friend, taking the air, and he—why, he was there to accidentally bump into her, of course. On every occasion he sensed her lithe body under the layers of clothing and corsetry, felt it being pulled towards his. The fever for her kept him awake at night but he did not regret the loss of sleep, though it made him bleary-eyed in chambers and short-tempered with the clerks. The memory of the charge that sprang between them was a careering energy that carried him through his training in the bar.
And now, two years later, he is a barrister, and she is his. His new wife in their new terraced home, where the gracious spaces match their happiness and willingly give room for it to grow. Their home on Portland Place, a wide street in which, by day, the trundling cabs, men on business—their wives on visits, their servants on errands—seem to move smoothly and with contentment. Rose-coloured glasses, laughs Beatrice when he speaks of the harmony that haloes their home. But she is happy for him, he can tell. And he is happy that the two women he loves best have become, already, the closest of friends.
The road shrugs to the left. He follows its twist onto Regent Street, skirts a lurching mud cart and leaps a sludgy puddle as he crosses to the eastern footway. The city’s hum becomes a clamour: important-looking men hailing each other at a distance; women clucking at store windows, crinolines ballooning their skirts; a cad inviting a spindle-shanked old gentleman onto an omnibus with the shouted, Plenty o’ room for you, sir! Hard to believe that just a short cab ride—ten minutes with a fast horse—separates him from the sedate Westminster home in which he spent
his summers growing up; that he is but a hop, skip and jump from Savile Row and the quiet home of Emmie’s parents. Quiet now, at least.
It’s a knotted relationship he has with her parents—Edith, he’s been invited to call her mother, and Charles, her father, though the familiar addresses come only with effort and leave his mouth sounding strangely formal. Charles and Edith like him, that much is clear, and are grateful for Emily’s happiness, so obviously the result of love, but they also silently resent him, he feels: he has claimed their daughter, their only surviving child, taken her from them, and their house now rings with her absence.
Then there’s the matter of money. It is Charles’s money from his ironmonger grandfather, parlayed into enormous wealth by his father, that enabled the son to train as a physician and to enter a strata of society otherwise beyond the Reid family, which, in turn, permitted the presentation of his daughter to court and her welcome into society. More recently, it has financed the wedding and set-up of home so she can be secure. Arthur is under no illusions: the money is not so much for them; it is for Emily’s future.
But they don’t speak of such awkward matters. Charles is a no-nonsense man; a man who respects actions rather than words; a self-made man who admires other self-made men—like William Gladstone, for instance, a politician on whom the families see eye to eye. Though Charles had the wealth of his industrialist forebears to start him off, it was he who decided on the family’s move from Edinburgh, where he ’d trained, to a fresh start in London; Charles who built his fashionable practice from nothing and moulded the small, raw, “new money” family into a sophisticated urban presence; Charles who now holidays at their country estate and complains about those messy tailors invading Savile Row.
Yes, funnily enough, Arthur has discovered, the man is a greater snob than many of the Belgravia set. My wife, Edith, God bless her, had some rather radical notions when we first married, his father-in-law declared when the men removed to the smoking room after their most recent dinner together. The Scot had dismissed, with a flicking hand, his wife’s early attempts to befriend their servants. What rot! he ’d blustered through great puffs of smoke, and held forth about not confusing the lower classes. About how knowing your place keeps you satisfied. Content. It was advice, that much was clear, and not just on how to treat servants. It didn’t take her long, y’know, to see sense, Charles had said with an air of finality, then slapped decisive hands to thighs and risen abruptly to his feet. He is a man who announces opinions as indisputable truths; on this occasion, Arthur had thought it wise to keep Emily’s kind friendliness with all their own servants to himself.
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