Under the Knife. Andrea Goldsmith
his mistake, but by then had dropped back a good thirty metres. That moment of registering what he’d done, the confusion and horror, years of work obliterated in a moment is how I feel all the time. It’s panic and I’m stuck with it.
I want my reason back. Such a logical man I used to be and no longer in control of my thoughts. But if I write them down, separate them from the maddening noise, perhaps some sense will emerge.
I’ve tried other ways. When first I arrived, I dressed with care — suit, tie, brief-case, the full regalia. Clothes maketh the man, I thought, except they don’t. Wandering the streets and gardens I’d see other men in suits, often the same men day after day. Later I learned to vary my destination, but initially I was unaware of all but the most obvious signs of failure. The men tended to avoid one another, but occasionally as we passed on the paths or sat on the park benches with our newspapers, one or other would strike up a conversation.
I said I was in London for medical research, and must have been believed because the others hurried off once I’d told my story. Except for one fellow with much the same tale as the rest. He’d lost his job, couldn’t bring himself to tell his family, left home at the same time each morning, filled in the twelve or fourteen hours of his usual work day, then returned home at night with a bunch of recycled office stories. The money wouldn’t last much longer, he said, neither for that matter would his stamina. Pride is a lot more durable, he added. But I expect you’re well aware of this.
I was furious. I’m not like you, I wanted to say, and reached for my wallet thinking to put him in his place with a couple of pounds. Then stopped myself, for I was just like him, only less honest.
And there was another man, hand-tailored and well-groomed, who would kneel on the muddy grass in his expensive suit whispering to the flowers. For ten, fifteen minutes at a time he’d kneel there, touching the stems, bending his ear to the petals, occasionally laughing. He upset me more than the others. His beard was just like my old beard, his clothes could have been mine, and we were much the same age. Something had driven him mad. He still had money as do I, but something had driven him out of his mind.
These are my only colleagues now, and I don’t want them, so I’ve discarded my suits and make a point of varying my walks. There’s no use pretending, not if I’m to find a way out of this mess. I wish I could have stayed in Melbourne, but events had gone too far. It was not simply Edwina, although I despised the way I felt about her, it was the re-emergence of the Rosie business from long ago, a grey threat at first, and then the shame, crushing and persistent and never letting me catch my breath. And finally the remorse. What sort of man was I that I had never before suffered for my sins, had never before even regarded them as sins? What sort of man was I?
If something is not remembered it ceases to exist. A retarded aunt simply did not figure in my sort of life. So I forgot Rosie and she remained forgotten until Edwina came along. Now she and Edwina have joined forces, and they’re merciless. They remind me of a couple of tough boys at my old grammar school; outwardly I was dismissive of them, but privately they terrified me. And with Rosie and Edwina now I’m terrified. I walk in the gardens and they’re there, I sit alone in cafés and they’re there. They find me at my flat, in the cinema, on the bus, they find me wherever I am. I imagine tearing my hair out — one of Cynthia’s expressions — with Rosie and Edwina trussed up in the roots, tearing my hair out and tossing the lot away. The thought makes me cry; I, who in my former life never cried, but am now caught wet-eyed and choking almost every day.
I’ve always been a practical man, one who sees the world as it is, but with so much time and a mind on fire, I’m bombarded by such nonsense as women trussed up in my hair. And no matter how exhausted I am, my mind can still manage an extra shot. Just yesterday it fixed on Tom. I was walking back from lunch and I thought I saw him. We haven’t spoken for years, not since the day I observed him preparing two syringes, one for the patient the other for himself. It was I who made the complaint. Not that he ever knew, and anyway with the flood of pethidine in his body he didn’t stand a chance. Now I wish I’d left him alone. His addiction was of several years duration and his work had always been impeccable. I thought I was doing the right thing, a simple matter of medical ethics and patient safety. But he was a good friend and a fine anaesthetist, and the right and wrong of it is no longer so clear. I thought I saw him and ducked into a side street. Of course it wasn’t him.
This life of mine has become as mysterious and unpredictable as a virus fresh from the jungle. It’s my life, but I don’t understand it, my life yet I have no control. Even facts have become suspect. When you describe, say, a tree according to its facts, when you give it leaves and trunk and branches it sounds much like other trees. So, too, with people. They’re male or female, younger or older, successful or not. But it’s not these qualities that lend them their significance. It was not that Edwina was in her late thirties and a biographer that made me fall in love with her. It was not even that she was beautiful, intelligent and attentive to me. Perhaps little about her made me fall in love with her and everything about me.
And even if I were to identify the essential facts and put them in some sort of order as I am trying to do in this account, can I write myself into clarity? More crucially, can I write myself into change? Are words little truths? Are sentences bigger truths? Can words actually equal what happened?
And does it really matter? The fact is I have nothing to lose. The awful truth is I have nothing.
1st September, London.
So back to the beginning and my first meeting with her, the upstairs sitting-room at the Royal College and Edwina Frye the last of the short-listed candidates. I can still feel the pleasure of that hour, my anxiety over the biography briefly forgotten. And I was anxious. A biography of my life and the life barely half over, with no guarantee that my work would proceed from the promise it displayed to the eminence to which I aspired. I’d expressed my doubts to the College members, but they’d brushed them aside. They knew where I was going and wanted to go with me. Still I remained unconvinced. I was a gastroenterologist, a bowel specialist, surely people would prefer to read about a brain surgeon or an eye man. But that was the point, my colleagues said. With the dramatic increase in the incidence of bowel disease it was important to break down old taboos, and the best way to do it, so they believed, was to use the human interest angle. Cynthia was thrilled, my mother saw it as incontrovertible proof of a future Nobel Prize, while I, and I’m not a superstitious man, believed a mid-life biography to be courting fate. In the end, it was not vanity that decided me, although that wasn’t irrelevant, I thought I knew where I was going too, but would never be so foolish as to reject the company of my colleagues.
Still I was uneasy. Many people have ended their lives in shameful obscurity after displaying early promise. Surely it was wiser, I said to Edwina when I knew her better, for a biography to be delayed until death has rounded off a life, when there can be no doubt that the whole life is worth documenting. Look at Linus Pauling, I remember saying, a marvellous mind warped by the sunny promises of vitamin C. And the thalidomide man, McBride, brilliant to begin with and later charged with fraud. And Harry Bailey, championed for his deep-sleep therapy only to be disgraced when he was not much older than I. She said my focus was wrong, that the problem lay less with early promise than a long life. A premature death works wonders for fame, she said. Look at the romantic poets — Keats, Shelley, Byron, all dead in their prime, and who knows if they would have gone the same way as Wordsworth or Coleridge.
Which way was that? I asked.
She curled her lip and eyed the ground. Down, she said, definitely down. And then — I remember every touch of hers — she reached out and took my hand: That won’t happen to you, Alexander.
So sympathetic, so seductive, yet she probably already despised me.
On that Saturday when first we met, I’d spent the afternoon interviewing the short-listed candidates. All were experienced biographers, all would have done a creditable job. So, why did I select Edwina? She was young but not so young, her past work was impressive, she’d never experienced any bowel problems, and she was stunning to look at. These were my reasons and I’m not ashamed of them. We’d be spending a lot of time together and I didn’t want to be saddled with a biographer with