The pale hawk next to Dudley said to the ruddy man, It’s that she’s a woman, that’s what it is. You only came in today.
The old man had the beak and the post-mature sandy hair of my grandfather who died in a hotel bedroom.
Tessa and I stood above Dudley’s bed. He said, I’m over it now. I simply didn’t want a woman surgeon. Crazy. But I’ve got one.
The ruddy man said, I’ve known women doctors.
I’ve got to pee, said Tessa softly and strolled away.
Dudley had neatly torn open his letter. I asked why he’d ever got interested in Catherwood.
He said, I can’t explain it — (and at once I knew he was not replying to what I’d said). It must be like killing, you don’t know till you’re face to face with it. I just could not stomach a woman surgeon sticking her rubber gloves into me.
He looked again at the letter from New York, read a bit and stopped. His eyes were glazed-looking. Nothing happened.
I missed you at the pool today, I said.
Dudley seemed to be talking low, not from discretion but fatigue.
Sometimes out of his bulky body and methodical mind he’d say something so frank it made my lack of naïveté seem immature. But he’d been lying in bed in front of me and his wife — and something had touched him, like a telephone ring you think you heard, or someone else’s pain or pleasure that may be yours but you don’t know.
He said, Do you ever think Loma isn’t experiencing as much pleasure in sex as she pretends?
How do you know she pretends? I said.
Actually, Tessa doesn’t. Not now.
Dudley’s cheek was lying on a corner of his letter and his eyes dropped from me to the lines of type as if at that slant he might turn up something.
I should have learned from my life, he said, but I didn’t see how. I mean there I was. Till at last I was with the most fascinating woman you’d ever want to meet on the Orient Express and I suddenly felt odd and looked back. I was an only child, you know.
I said, My sister and I fought like hell, so what you missed may not have been better than what you had.
Did you ever want to have intercourse with her? (Unmediated first words from Dudley.)
We snuggled, I said.
What was she like?
My sister could sit like a cat staring away from me for a long time. She had a couple of beautifully placed moles.
So has Tessa, I think, said Dudley.
Sure, I said.
An only child feels a primacy, you see, said Dudley. But it can go either way. I felt alone, hence odd; I came to feel second-rate.
Tessa hadn’t reappeared.
But, said Dudley, here was Tessa, here was I, from a good Episcopal school in Ohio, a couple of universities, here was her father who thought he’d wanted to be a scholar — and Tessa laughed at me first time we met when I said I’d be happy to stay in England. Later she said it was that she could tell I didn’t say things like that. Which was true. When my mother came over and wanted to go to Windsor, Tessa took her on a canal boat from Little Venice to the zoo, and when they got there my mother said, This isn’t Windsor. Tessa and I used to walk all night, did you know that? I had more stamina. It was what she’d done when she was eighteen and drifting into the University of London and not especially wanting to. It was before Aldermaston, not that she cared in that way.
My sister drifted like that, I said, only into marriage.
I don’t understand Tessa, said Dudley, do you know that? I understand Catherwood better. Sometimes she seems to be replying not to what I say but to what’s in my mind. Do you ever go to a college reunion? I don’t, but I read my alumni reviews — people I never even knew to speak to.
I said as a matter of fact there were some alumni reviews in a stack somewhere at home but I never read them.
We heard Tessa’s heels coming down the ward aisle’s slippery lino. She took my arm.
She and I watched Dudley in bed.
We were about to leave. Tessa kissed Dudley on the forehead and patted that pale hairy hand that stirred then to grasp the letter from New York. I gave Dudley my hand. He said, Have a nice opening. Tessa said, Jane asked where an appendix is. Dudley said, Give my best to your father. Tessa said to me, My father thinks he’s crazy about all those stuffed things at Blum’s — stuffed neck, Kreplach, kishkes, I used to try to cook them but they don’t agree with him.
He never gets fat, said Dudley.
Maybe, said Tessa, the lady surgeon will tuck some hormones into you tonight. I’ll phone later. You’ll probably be asleep.
Dudley gave a grin. Bring Janey tomorrow, he said. And to me he said slyly, What did you do with her?
Mainly dreamt of what I’d do, I said, knowing he meant my sister and wondering if she had come back to mind through Jane, whom I have not introduced seriously to you who have me — a humorous peculiar child just seven then, I think, and growing up between two unfairly married people from whom she seemed to try to learn (and reflect love) equally. When she was six she came into the bedroom one morning and lectured Tessa saying it was bad enough that she herself had to sleep alone but that with Daddy on the couch in the living room now all three of them were sleeping alone and something had to be done about it, and then she went into the huge living room and gave the same lecture with the same giggles.
But it was the twelve- or almost thirteen-year-old Jane whom Jenny thought of when typing the parts about the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed. For she and Reid had met Jane and Dudley in the half-mile-long pedestrian passage that leads from outside the Science Museum down under it to South Kensington Underground station (the dusky tunnel that makes Will think of Behind the Iron Curtain, echoing commuters from one part of the machine to another — I don’t know where Will gets his anticommunism, maybe from me) but Jenny was in any case with Reid and so no doubt happy, but as she said the evening she finished typing Hawaiian Hippie and Suitcase Slowly Packed, earlier at 5 P.M. there approaching from the Science Museum end were the Allotts, father and daughter, and when Jane hailed them and they all came together, Dudley with a small plaid suitcase, Jane showing what she claimed was Dirk Bogarde’s autograph on the cast on her arm and suddenly looking like a woman Jenny said in the calm attention her eyes gave you and she didn’t walk from the shoulders any more like Dudley, and her legs seemed older and Tessa had bought her a pair of low-heeled Italian shoes which Jane wore without that slight pigeon-toed gauche schoolgirl shyness she’d had — though Jane did have her mother’s figure — and the point was that when Reid took Dudley’s ballpoint and Jenny introduced them all, Jane said I know you—in the boldest adult way — just as Jenny noticed under Dudley’s raincoat, which Jane had undone the top button of to get a ballpoint, a V-neck sweater just like the one Jenny with her own hands had packed in our filmed suitcase. Jane said, Don’t I know you? Reid said, Not unless you’re from Ridgefield, Connecticut (which, said Jenny, was nonsense because Reid in fact had masses of friends in London). But Jane said, In the park once and once in Regent Street — and she changed the subject to Jenny, whom she had to show the smashing moccasins her grandma had sent from Massachusetts, and Dudley like a magician’s helper had to hold the suitcase in his arms while with her good hand Jane released the catches and without undoing the ruffled, garterlike ties neatly removed from under a green pleated kilt in one neat-packed side a red-white-and-blue-beaded moccasin like the moccasins in Suitcase Slowly Packed. But Jenny said anybody could buy those right in London. Jenny had been in Scotland with Tessa and had just flown in. Jane, resnapping the case, added that being at the Cromwell Road Air Terminal her father had thought of something he had to check at the Science Museum and so as Reid and Jenny found them here she, Jane, had just (you might say) taken her good boy to the museum—