Under the Knife. Andrea Goldsmith
she remembers most is the effort they require, while the secrets themselves lie leaden and stained like rocks at the bottom of the ocean. She looks along the beach to the breakwater and sees her fate reflected there. For all her assets — her work, her sense of humour, her feminist boyfriend, she’s going nowhere. She’s trodden far too carefully, eyes directed always to the final destination, her mask of steel fitted ever more snugly.
‘You’re a control freak,’ Nigel said a few nights back as she hopped on top of him while they were watching the mid-evening news.
Busy with buttons and zips, Edwina did not bother to answer; besides, she knows he likes her to run the show.
‘It’s not necessary to be good at everything,’ Paula Harding used to say. ‘Let yourself go, give those demons of yours a holiday.’
And her mother’s advice: ‘Just do the right thing, that’s all people can ever expect of you.’
Even Alexander Otto has commented on Eddie’s need for control, but like Nigel, he has learned he will benefit. Edwina Frye can be trusted to do a job well, and given her current job is his biography, it’s in his interests she doesn’t change.
‘Pull yourself together,’ her mother used to say when Eddie was unhappy. ‘Just pull yourself together.’
Pull yourself together, Eddie now tells herself, and with a last uneasy glance at the breakwater wanders up the beach to the road.
The flat is stifling. Eddie dumps her mail on the desk and her clothes on the bed, and dressed only in underwear goes to the kitchen for a drink. The tiles are cool; she slides to the floor, sits with legs outstretched and sips slowly. And there’s no miraculous cleansing, no flashes of insight, just too much time wasted and too much work to be done. She refills her glass and goes to the study, sifts through the letters, then turns her attention to the parcel. It contains her author copy, long overdue, of J.M. Walker: Man of Faith, bound in ethereal blue with titles in gold. She flips through the volume — crazy, crass Jim so elegantly reproduced — and places it on the shelf between Man of Steel: The Life of Bernard Pierce, maroon leather with silver lettering, and King of Shopping, green leather, gold print. She runs her hand along the shelf; three biographies since finishing her doctorate, with another on the way. The books look impressive, far more impressive than they really are; stylish exteriors and flawed within, just like their author. And what, she wonders, would a biographer do with her? Simply wouldn’t bother. Which is what she would like to do with Otto. But there is the contract, and her reputation to consider, not to mention the problem of knowing what to do instead.
On her desk is a small pile of manuscript and nearby several folders of raw data. She had hoped to discover the identity of Alexander’s biological parents, but if anyone knows they are not telling, and with no one left to probe she has no excuse but to proceed. She leafs through the manuscript, such a tidy childhood — doting parents, adoring grandparents, the special relationship with the retarded aunt Rosie, friends, prizes, the meeting with Dr Faine and the nurturing of young Alexander’s medical ambitions. An impeccable beginning.
‘Yours was an impeccable beginning,’ she said to him early in the project.
Alexander had looked surprised. ‘Just a normal childhood.’
‘No problems? No upsets?’
He supposed there were but nothing important enough to remember. T was a happy child.’
Pastor Jim had reported a childhood of dingy neglect, Bernard Pierce was sent to boarding school at the age of six, and the king of shopping had to wait until his first job before he wore anything other than second-hand clothes. But not Alexander. His childhood was as slick and sure as his surgeon’s knife.
Edwina leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. She sees the young Alexander, the adored only child, Lorraine fussing over him, the father so proud. And at school, among the bluestone buildings and clipped playing fields, a prized student with a golden future, his name inscribed on honour boards, his photograph in the school magazine. And then is blundering into her own past — different playing fields and different buildings, yet the same sour smell of school. And now her classroom, and in front of the blackboard chilly Miss Dawe freezing the girls into ladylike submission. She turns to Eddie, is walking towards her, holding between thumb and forefinger as if it were filth Eddie’s poem about death. ‘You wrote this?’ Miss Dawe is flapping the paper in Eddie’s face. ‘You wrote this all by yourself?’ And when convinced it is Eddie’s own work, promptly sends her to the school psychologist.
Death, Eddie discovered, was an unsuitable topic for a nine-year-old. And while she had already excised numerous taboo topics under the watchful eye of her mother, she was forced to acknowledge the job was far from complete.
The psychologist was a sweet, shabby woman with no feeling for poetry, but by her own account, considerable feeling for young lives. She was sorry, she said, that Edwina was so unhappy, but if she would only trust her, she would soon feel much better. Eddie was not unhappy, she was furious she had not kept the poem private, but the poem itself had been unbridled pleasure. She had imagined death as a sleek lion with treacly eyes who wrapped her in his tail and lifted her high on his haunches, and together they roamed the jungle for all eternity. It was a good poem, of that she was sure, and if she had been a steel and bravado sort of child like Faye Gilling, might have challenged the psychologist. But she was neither so strong nor so confident, and with a hefty bag of similar mistakes, she realised she had yet to master the knack of childhood. So she decided to exploit the psychologist’s expertise, and posed question after question until she was equipped with knowledge enough to erase taboo from her public repertoire. By the time she was discharged, not only had she acquired a comprehensive list of taboo topics, she had learned that childhood was a barbed-wire cage, and everything she held precious must be kept private.
So the secrets accumulated, the lies too, but she thought them integral to childhood, in much the same way as school milk and compulsory sport. And what was the alternative? With a mind that ranged far beyond netball and ‘The Brady Bunch’, that brought fictional characters to life and saw death as a kind and handsome lion, she was afraid people would reject her if they discovered what she was really like. When you’re the one who is different, you don’t try to change the others, clearly you’ve got it wrong. So you watch and copy and try to be perfect, and you sew up your differences with thick threads of fear. And while you know you cannot become other than who you are, at least you can try and hide the worst.
So pull yourself together, she now tells herself, opening her eyes, just pull yourself together and finish the job. She presses a key and the screen lights up. Alexander is at university, he’s a serious student, top of his class, but nonetheless a ‘good fellow’. Sybil Becker would disagree, but all Eddie’s attempts to find her have failed. She scrolls down the screen.
At the end of 1962, with his second-year examinations just finished, Alexander met Sybil Becker. She was a few months older than he and studying philosophy. A bright girl, according to Alexander, and the only girlfriend to prove troublesome. ‘We were different, too different,’ he recalls. ‘She never understood me.’
Yet she was to have a significant effect on the young Alexander. And to this day, having forgotten the names of his other girlfriends, Sybil Becker enters his conversation frequently.
Edwina expects this section will have to go. Without further information, Sybil is no more relevant than the forgotten girlfriends, at least not to the official biography. But the parallel life is another matter. She reaches for her notebook, makes some jottings under the heading ‘Sybil’, and returns to the main story.
Just before four o’clock, with the university years finished and Alexander about to graduate, the phone rings. It is the man himself and Edwina not surprised. Alexander has often spoken of his ‘standards’, a common approach amongst adulterers, and the word ‘fidelity’ rolls off his tongue far too easily. Oh yes, Edwina has been expecting this phone call. A cancelled meeting, he says, and would she like to have a drink with him. And despite having anticipated this, despite having actually colluded in it, now that he shows his cards, she doesn’t want to play. There were