Under the Knife. Andrea Goldsmith
the private account containing the dirt. And has used the same system ever since. When each job is finished, the raw data, notes and drafts of the public life are deposited in a filing cabinet, while the much smaller wad of private musings — the parallel life — is crammed into one of the cartons she keeps in the pit of her wardrobe. The wardrobe is her version of Dorian Gray’s attic, the dirty overflow of successful lives shoved in with her own failed scribblings. Here, in letters never sent, unfinished short stories, first chapters of half a dozen novels, gnawed-on poems, is the real Edwina no one ever sees. She never reads the stuff, couldn’t bear to, just every now and then adds a new wad to the latest carton, folds the flaps, arranges her shoes in front, drapes an old blanket on top, and shuts the door on her mouldering dreams.
Not knowing what else to do she persists with her private account of Alexander Otto, but it’s a scant document. She finds herself fingering the public version, dirtying the edges, fighting the temptation to topple him. The Otto biography is biting the hand that feeds it; somehow his hidden beasts are providing a feast for her own.
The problem with Otto is he has never suffered, not as an adopted child, nor a conservative student in the sixties, and certainly not as a physician and surgeon. She has tried all her techniques. She has prodded and poked, she has listened and encouraged, but apart from Rosie, the retarded aunt, and Sybil Becker, the failed love of his student days, his life has been as perfect as if it had been planned down to the last detail. Just like her own. Yet he is happy and she is not, he is a success and she seems suddenly very ordinary.
She turns around, the wind whipping her face and fear whipping her guts. And no point in blaming Otto; Edwina Frye, aficionado of fear, has engineered her life with elegant precision, but while Alexander, who has done much the same, possesses a life all sparkle and song, hers has been a gradual extinguishing of the lights. It is possible, she is now thinking, to be too thorough, for she finds herself a straggler, not in the life she planned, but the life she really wanted. Is she always condemned to trail in her own shadow? And who is it who marches up ahead flanked by success and admiring friends? It’s the person she put together piece by piece, the person she devised according to the rules. But it’s fake, exactly as she planned and true to the blue-print, but fake nonetheless. Follow your dreams, follow every rainbow; it works well enough in popular songs but not in real life.
Edwina has left a trail behind her as definitive as an engraver’s mark. She went from A to B to C, she did exactly as she intended, but somehow, and without realising it, she has backed herself into a corner. To arrive at the wrong destination inadvertently is bad enough, but to have plotted each move, to have made a journey both arduous and short on pleasure only to find herself in a place no better than that she was trying to avoid is failure of the worst sort. As for the fear, it remains as fierce and nebulous as it has always been.
All she ever wanted was to manage; quash her renegade self, so she believed, and she would be rewarded. She was born with an imagination that kept breaking its banks, and raised in a family lodged firmly in the high ground. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself,’ punctuated her childhood, and ‘Concentrate on what’s in front of you,’ when she shared her imaginings. She acquired friends whose expectations seemed to change from one occasion to the next, and later came lovers wanting more than was safe to give. But still she managed. Yet now she finds herself staring into the smooth-skinned face of banality. Her work is competent but ordinary, her flat, described as a studio apartment to puff a scrap of bohemia into a beige and dun box, is ordinary, her appearance is ordinary — medium height, medium build, medium attractive — and while her hair is distinctive, the hairdresser says the red will fade and the curls will frizz, and she is thirty-nine which is the most ordinary feature of all.
But not the worst. Edwina envies Alexander Otto. Not his success, but the ease he enjoys. His dreams, far from rotting in the bottom of a wardrobe, have been realised, every single one of them. They’ve shaped his life, while Edwina’s have ambushed hers. At the most difficult times, she has been tempted to unburden herself to Nigel, but he wouldn’t believe her. Together with all her friends, Nigel is convinced that Edwina Frye need envy no one. Look at her, they say, as they sit at her dining table delighting in her food; look at her, they say, as she regales them with tales from the high and mighty; look at her, they say, as she does a fulminating Pastor Jim offering to save their souls for a price. Pastor Jim, chief minister of the Church of Universal Connection and the most interesting of her subjects, was on a comet to God and eager for others to ride with him. ‘All of you,’ Eddie says to her guests, ‘all of you come fly with me, it’s not too late to collect your boarding passes.’ And pulling out her shirt tails, ‘See,’ she says, ‘I’ve room for you all.’ And the friends laugh at the performance and savour the food and linger for more entertainment, and when at last they leave, Nigel takes Edwina in his arms. ‘My little comet,’ he says, ‘my own Hailey’s princess,’ and suggests they fly away to bed and leave the cleaning up for the morning.
Edwina writes her biographies, she cooks her banquets, she makes people laugh, and when her friends in more sombre mood download their troubles she knows how to listen and empathise. Edwina Frye need envy no one, so of course she does not confide in Nigel. She suspects that if she were to write a proper biography, plunge with the obsessive abandon of a lover into a life safely over, she would feel less of a fake. But she is not the type to plunge, she tests the water, she treads gently, she enters each day as if it were infested with crocodiles.
Edwina Frye has shaped herself with care, and this from her earliest years, as if she were born knowing the penalties of being different. And she was different, too clever for happiness, or so her parents thought, and too big for easy femininity. A big, clever girl, and her parents, or rather her mother — her father, a silent presence on weekends and family holidays, always gave the impression of being absent — would have preferred a daintier, less clever version. Born imperfect, she set about rectifying her faults, and those that couldn’t be fixed she was determined to hide. But it was far from easy. Among her earliest memories is her sense of bewilderment at kindergarten as she sat at the tiny table, the miniature chair cutting into her spine, while she watched the other children. It was like peering through one of those stereoscopic viewers, the scene so real and inviting and she trapped on the wrong side of the lens. She takes a step forward but is no closer, she puts out a hand but it closes on air, she sees what she most desires but is forced to remain at a distance. Bewilderment and the threat of exclusion. So she watched and she copied. She learned to cut and paste, she learned to climb the monkey bars despite her terror, and she kept her big-girl dreams and clever-girl desires hidden like jewels in a velvety box to glitter for her alone.
These days her external life is as decorous as a Flemish interior, and any doubts or discomforts she stuffs into notebooks and shoves into the depths of her wardrobe. The wardrobe is bursting, her neatly pressed clothes fighting for air. Edwina, who writes parallel lives for her prominent men has, she realises, constructed much the same for herself.
She wants to blame Alexander Otto, she wants to blame the blistering heat, but it was she who sucked the life out of her. Alexander has managed much better; no suffering, no fear, he knew what he wanted and tolerated no diversions.
‘He was always going to be a doctor,’ his mother said at their first interview. ‘He knew his mind from the beginning. It was one of the qualities that made him so special.’
Lorraine Otto, a youthful eighty-four-year-old, thrives on love for her son, gardening and bowls, in that order of preference. Every detail about Alexander’s life has been lovingly preserved, remarkable details from Lorraine Otto’s perspective, chronically numbing from anyone else’s. She has stockpiled her son’s life: school reports, scrapbooks, countless snapshots, university assignments, even a brace of home movies that take Alexander from his first day at school through annual prize-givings, holidays at the coast, visits to the zoo, weekends at the snow, birthdays, Christmases, parties, graduations. The peculiar feature of the movies is that their star, despite the passage of time and the changing backdrops, remains fundamentally the same. His gaze is always directed to the camera, he winks, he smiles, he cavorts, he always gives a perfect performance. And he was always going to be a doctor.
‘Alexander was fascinated by the body, even as a baby,’ Lorraine Otto said on a later occasion. ‘Blood,