The law was changing that year, to allow the desires of people like me some legitimate expression. If I selected my partners with great care (screening out under-21s and members of the armed services and Merchant Navy, and one at a time, please), making sure everything happened in private, I could have a sexual life all of my own, within the law. Oh, as long as I waited three years or so without jumping the gun.
I had heard mention among the nurses of a Mr Peever, who had been in the hospital and was ‘queer as a coot’. They had to watch him in the toilets. They had to watch me in the toilets, too, in case I fell down, but I realised this was different. He had been loitering with intent — tottering with intent, really — more or less from the moment he could stand up after his surgery. Sister Wright, who smoked eighty Consulate a day, sniggered and said ‘Who’d go with him?’ Well, I would. And wouldn’t anyone rather ‘go with him’ than kiss her mentholated mouth?
I started to pray to Mr Peever in my head, Please, Mr Peever come back to hospital and I’ll go with you. Please, Mr Peever. I asked as discreetly as I could when he’d been in the hospital and they said about six months previous. And will he be coming back soon? Of course they looked at me as if I was mad. I’d come back to CRX myself after an absence, but of course I was a special case. I had a season ticket, I was a hospital yo-yo. Mr Peever never did come back, or not while I was there. Meantime I broadcast on all frequencies to Mr Peever, Mr Peever, please, Mr Peever. I wore a track in my mind with my prayers. We can be flitty together, Mr Peever, just the two of us. Apart from anything else, his name was so perfect, an unimprovable compound of pervert and peeper. It seemed unfair for God to make such a creature and then withhold him from me. It was a big day when I could finally go to the lavatory under my own steam. That was the proper chapel for my prayers.
Physiotherapy was unrelenting. Eventually they broke it to me that the right hip, despite having the more mobility of the two preoperationally, would never have the final mobility of the left. I managed to act surprised. Gosh, that’s a pity. Nobody remembered that I had predicted this outcome, and I never knew how I knew.
Before the pins I tottered, afterwards I came closer to hobbling. Those aren’t technical terms but approximations. My walking also was an approximation. The later motion was sturdier and less precarious. It could cover more ground — but it looked worse. A crutch and a cane advertised the deficiences of what doesn’t altogether qualify, even now, as a gait. Strangers have never found my progress reassuring. They look on in alarm.
Equals futility
No one helped me understand the disappointment of the second operation. Perhaps they didn’t understand themselves, just shrugging it off as one of those things, but I worked to get to the bottom of it myself. There was a gain of movement in both axes, from side to side and also backwards and forwards, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The problem was that I couldn’t control the lateral component. However much work we did, the physiotherapists and I, there wasn’t enough muscle to support me reliably. All the calculations were correct, but the sum didn’t work out as it should have, and I did indeed become bendy in the middle, in very much the way I had feared. The basic arithmetic was off. The sum didn’t go ‘one successful hip operation plus another successful hip operation equals fully ambulant and permanently cheery chappy, praising the National Health Service with every newly bouncy step’. It went mobility minus stability equals futility. I was worse off than I had been before the second operation.
There was no second honeymoon after the second intervention in my bones, since it marked an estrangement, a widening of the asymmetry in my bodily competence. To guarantee my balance I now needed to use my new crutch (with a sort of padded gutter on which to rest my arm) as well as a stick. The right side, the second one to be operated on, was much the weaker, which was quite convenient, since the right arm was the one with enough flexibility to fit comfortably into the gutter of the crutch.
Medical science had over-corrected matters and created new problems. The intermediate stage between operations, with one hip newly flexible, the other still rigid, had actually offered the best compromise and the closest approximation to normal human walking. Dimly I had sensed this at the time, but hadn’t been able to overrule the authorities around me. Instead I had agreed to a painful setback disguised as a technical improvement.
I managed never to say ‘I told you so’ to Ansell or anyone else about the relative failure of the second operation. I’m capable of suppressing my baser self on special occasions, though there’s something about my expression which makes people assume I’m constipated when I do, and I had taken enough Senokot on the children’s wards of CRX to last me several lifetimes.
I didn’t point out that I had been right, and no one ever apologised or repeated the offer of re-doing the operation so as to leave my leg fixed in the position of my choice. I wouldn’t have taken up such an offer anyway. I’d learned that there was a tariff to be paid even on a free offer, and I accepted that no amount of tinkering would make my legs keep in step. The whole pattern of my progress (if progress was what I was making) seemed to be one step forward and one step back, which would never be more painfully clear than it was now. One hip forward. And one hip back.
I was still sinking deep roots into Gardening for Adventure — Mrs Pavey would only ask Mum for a book back if someone requested it. Despite Menage’s enthusiasm I couldn’t get excited about orchids at this time of my life, perhaps because Dad was such an enthusiast.
Hobbies were a sort of battleground for us. I loved the challenge of imposing one of my interests on Dad (he being far the most hobby-minded of the tribe), having it supersede one of his own. He in his turn tried to interest me in his obsessions, but I was oddly resistant, so that the net flow of hobbies was in the other direction.
Dad found orchids full of fascination and charm. I went on finding them rather boring — just a load of leaves coming out of bulb-things in pots which sometimes offered you flowers. Perhaps I was working up to a phase of resistance to Dad, and practising on a small scale by rejecting his interests.
If Dad had really wanted to sell me on orchids, he would have told me that they are like ideas. Or perhaps ideas are like orchids. They’re born from almost nothing, in sterile conditions — the faintest contamination prevents them from germinating. Then, once started, they depend on getting exactly the right balance of nutrients. They need moisture, but almost more than that they need a breeze. They flourish in the crannies of other plants, not dependent but simply sheltered, in the crook of a tree, say. From a million spores only a few plants will establish themselves — but then they can assume an astounding range of sizes and shapes, from the barely visible (Platystele jungermannioides, its flowers barely a hundredth of an inch across) to the towering (Sobralia altissima, which can grow nearly thirty feet tall).
I had one particular idea in my head, of all the mental spores, cradled and moistened, scrupulously blown on, which refused to die altogether. After the first hip operation (or rather, between the botched first attempt and the agonising second) Dad had tried to cheer me up, telling me that once my hips had been fixed I would be able to do many more normal things. ‘You could travel,’ he said. ‘Why not? You could even fly, if I said the word,’ Dad said.