Inside, in the atmospheric pressure of the rising storm she sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on him in a way that asked of him what it was that he wanted.
You can go to your father. He knows many things. They don’t know about anything. If they know, they can’t do.
Oh no! No. No. That’s impossible. No. He doesn’t know about such things. No, no.
He moves swiftly into her recoiclass="underline" afraid, after all, little girl afraid of father. — I don’t mean this of me, mine. But other things that are not easy, straight. He knows. Believe it.
Almost weary — You can’t understand.
And then she is taken by remorse because by saying this she has made him understand: it’s because he is not one of them. He himself said it only a day ago, of the one, anyone, entitled to divest him of the overalls and take his place under the vehicles: even this I’m wearing, this dirt, even a shed, a corner in the street to sleep in, that’s his, not mine … whatever I have is his: any one of them, those with the legal birthright, place in the social hierarchy, share of investments advised. Such a man. Already said: Whatever I have is his: you, your father’s daughter are his, not mine.
How could he admire them, those other friends, her father’s Chairmen of the Boards, Trustees of the Funds, Director-spiders at the centre of the websites that net the Markets, and at the same time not realize this? For the father, what a timely end to this latest crazy, impossible behaviour on the part of a daughter! The man deported—finis, the whole affair solved without any need of parental argument, father-daughter conflict of values, souring of relations, the usual result of any necessary interference on the part of the father. The law will do it. Save her from herself, thank God. Her father need only be there to help put together the pieces of her bereaved state, if she’ll accept his love after her pickup (God knows where she found him) is once and for all out of the picture.
They went to bed before long. The kindest thing for both surely would have been to make love. But that’s his right, that’s his—the suitable young man who belongs at the Sunday terrace lunches, the inside talk of the men the lover beside her admires so much.
The end; end of a winter, theirs together. The first rain of another season beat on and about the cottage like a surrounding crowd. After brittle months of dryness all the stuff of which their shelter was made — wood, iron roof, plaster on brick — came alive and creaked and shifted as if it crumpled them in a giant fist; as if the hammering of water and the materials given tongue by pressure and expansion were voices of the curious, the interfering, the scornful, the spurious sympathizers and the judgmental, the curt rejectors dictating the piece of paper, gabbling all about them in mimic travesty of the familiar café babble.
In the morning while she lay in the bath and he shaved carefully round the glossy pair of wings on his upper lip, he turned to her without seeing her nakedness. What about that lawyer? He did something for someone who killed. I heard a woman talking about it. You know him — he was there at your father’s, he knows who you are. You could find him. The black man.
Well. It touches her with relief like gratitude that he has accepted she will not — cannot — go to her father. Yes, I suppose he would have been someone … but does he still practise law? I think he’s given it up for money-making, you saw how he was one of the cronies.
You can find out.
Oh I can do that easily. But there’s so little time, no time. We must think of everything, anyone who—
Three days of the edict gone by. He is looking at her, placed directly before her as she gets out of the bath aware of her nakedness, wraps her body in a towel. Think, think. She must: because he is there with her, hers; and not there, no name, no address, no claim on anyone.
Chapter 11
You’ve surely heard of him if you are a middle-class woman, or man who lives with that woman, in this city.
Dr Archibald Charles Summers is the gynaecologist and obstetrician, MBBCh Witwatersrand University, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, St Mary’s London, Fellow of the Institute of Obstetrics, Boston Mass., with a practice which is, so to speak, always over-subscribed. Call him fashionable, but that would not be entirely just; he is much more than that, he gives more than any regular specialist fees could ever cover. Women talk about him to one another with a reverent sense of trust exceptional between patient and doctor even in this branch of medicine in which the doctor is priest, intermediary in the emergence of new life, and the woman is its active acolyte. As an obstetrician, he is each woman’s Angel Gabrieclass="underline" his annunciation when he reads the scan of her womb — it’s a boy. And his shining bald head, outstanding ears and worshipful smile are the first things she sees when he lifts life as it emerges from her body. Between births and after reproduction is no longer part of his patients’ biological programming, he takes care — in the most conscientious sense — of the intricate system inside them that characterizes their gender and influences — often even decides — the crucial balance of their reactions, temperaments, on which depend the manner in which they can deal with the other man-woman relationships — the recognized ones with lovers and/or husbands.
Dr Archibald’s consulting rooms are a home: the studio portraits of his children as babies and graduates, the blowups of wild life photography, which is his hobby, posters proposing the beauties of the world from museums he has enjoyed on his travels. The bejewelled hands of his Indian receptionist note any change of address of the habituée patient greeted once again, there is a bustle of several nurses with motherly big backsides, Afrikaner and black, calling back and forth to one another, who receive for urine tests the wafers peed upon by the patient in the privacy of a blue-tiled bathroom where a vase of live flowers always stands on the toilet tank.
His patients — his girls, as he refers to them, whether aged twenty or seventy — talk of him to one another as Archie. I’ve got my six-month appointment with Archie due next week. I’ve just come from Archie — everything’s okay, he says, he’s pleased with me. And if everything is not okay, if rose thou art sick, Blake’s invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm and eats out the heart of the rose has invaded with a cancer, Archie with the knife in his healing hand will cut it out so that blooming continues, for Archie is the deliverer of life.
The doctor has been married to and in love with his wife for thirty years at least. His seraglio of patients has nothing in common with the passion for her which has never waned; the penetration of his expert right hand sheathed in latex into the vaginas of his patients, young and desirable, ageing and desexed, reduced to the subject of a kind of gut-exploration in the diagnostic divining of his fingertips, might be thought certain to end in a revulsion against women’s bodies. Or that — what about that? — the sight of parted thighs, the smooth heat that must be felt through the latex — all this should be rousing, a doctor is a male beneath his white coat. But neither professional hazard affects him, or ever has, even when he was a young man. He is unfailingly roused by the sight and scent and feel of his wife’s body alone (she who was so hard to win to himself) and it is the man, not the doctor, who enters her and journeys with her to their joyous pleasure, as if there is always accessible to her an island in warm seas like one of those they have travelled to, together. When he talks to his seraglio women after examination, and sits a few moments on the edge of the steel table where they lie, he may be in contact with the body whose exposure he has reverently re-covered under wraps, he will place a reassuring palm of the hand on the woman’s shrouded hip while he tells her how she should conduct herself, they discuss the pills she needs to take, the exercise essential to maintain herself. They are two human beings equal in their vulnerability to the trials of life (of which his girls often confess to him their own specific ones), considering together how best one may survive. She knows this is not remotely the antenna of sex touching her, and he knows she understands this. He does not need a nurse to be present — a precaution most gynaecologists employ — to reassure his girls of his respect.