Читать книгу Under the Knife - Andrea Goldsmith - Страница 10

31st August, London.

AIM: to restore my former life.

METHOD: analysis of association between Edwina Frye and me. FIRST PHASE: choice of a writer for the biography, initial meeting with Edwina Frye.

No, this is wrong, quite wrong. If ever I’m to return home, I need to know more than I do now. I need to understand how and why Edwina Frye wrecked my life. I need to sort through the mess, impose some logic on a situation that got totally out of hand. I know I should have done this ages ago in Melbourne, but in those crazed days with Edwina, logic didn’t stand a chance. And during these past couple of months in London I seem to have made little headway. I’ve picked over the whole rotten carcass of the past year but to little effect.

I left home two months ago and had hoped to be back by now. But obsession — I loathe the word but I can’t avoid it any longer — is as tenacious as it is portable. Edwina fills my days here, much as she did in Melbourne. I left because I reached an impasse. My life was in pieces, the affair with Edwina was going nowhere, and I worried I’d make a mistake at work. The discovery of her pink pages was simply the last straw.

Pride is a peculiar business. I’ve fallen as low as a man can go, but I remember who I once was. And while I can face my shame privately, I’d hate to watch others gloating over me. So I had to leave. I wanted the anonymity of a big city, but I also wanted somewhere familiar. London was the obvious choice. I did my post-graduate study here and have returned several times since. Cynthia and I always planned to visit for a few months when I retired, to enjoy the city at our leisure. I’ve plenty of leisure now and I don’t know what to do with it. I wander the gardens, walk down by the river, I linger in museums. But it’s a listless business on your own.

I’m confident Cynthia won’t try to find me. I told her to wait and wait she will. So desperate was I and so strong my desire to escape, I was tempted not to leave a note. The dead leave traces, the living can cover theirs; I knew I could arrange it so I’d never be found. But I couldn’t treat Cynthia so badly, couldn’t leave her to wonder if I were dead or alive. And even in the chaos of that last morning, I realised I needed to leave the note for myself. I have to believe I’ll return.

I rent a small flat close to central London, much the same size as Edwina’s. Brown and grey with a hotchpotch of furniture, Cynthia would be appalled and so once would I. But I rely on its deficiencies to remind me it’s temporary. I go out for meals, often walking miles for lunch or dinner just to fill in time. Occasionally there’ll be a deadening effect, a steady flickering of houses and shops, a bit like those psychedelic lights from the sixties, flash flash flash and your mind goes numb. It’s blessed relief, but all too rare. Mostly there’s a continual roar. Edwina, events, conversations, and my own behaviour — the awful longing, the begging, my pathetic loitering in the streets around her flat. And the long past joins in too, sometimes so insistent that all I can do is take a couple of pills and put myself to sleep. And no, I’m not capitulating to the medico’s weakness, the drugs are a last resort and well under control.

The noise has been with me for months, but it was only last week as I was watching some men jogging in the park that I identified it as panic. Strange how connections are made. A couple of years ago, I was in New York for a conference and stayed an extra day for the annual New York Marathon. I’d lunched with friends a few blocks from Central Park, and as the leaders approached the final stage of the race we walked over to watch. There were two men well ahead of the field. A short way from the finish, one of them took a wrong turn and veered back into the park. He quickly realised 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 a batch of medical complaints, nor could I see any reason to choose someone ugly if there was an attractive alternative.

I had moved to the small upstairs sitting-room for her interview, a favourite of mine at the College. Rich and leathery, comfortable and established, it represented everything my own background lacked yet seemed entirely appropriate for the man I hoped I had become. I sat in one of the wing-back chairs, while she occupied a smaller, straight-backed seat. I remember she looked down on me, but I felt calm and in control so it didn’t matter. Although I recall being briefly fazed by one of her early comments. She looked around at the wood panelling, the heavy-framed portraits, the dark leather, the magnificent carpet. Such a masculine space, she said, and I was immediately on the alert. The last thing I wanted was a ball-breaking feminist writing my life. Then I decided that given her appearance, if she were a feminist it was of the benign kind, and I knew I could cope with that.

She was dressed in black and white — short skirt, fitted blouse, cropped jacket. Fashionable clothes with a whiff of raunchiness. She wore bright lipstick, which I like in a woman, but otherwise no make-up. The face and the wild red hair were gorgeous. So, too, the body, large-breasted and all curves, and so luxurious compared with the thin, muscular figures favoured by most of the women I knew. I’ve never been particularly attracted to redheads nor large blowzy women, but when Edwina entered the room she struck me as quintessentially feminine.

That first interview was the only occasion in the whole of our acquaintance when our roles were reversed. Not that I didn’t encourage her in the following months to talk about herself, but she remained very guarded about her own life while she blasted her way through mine. On that first day, she answered my questions with an openness and a professionalism that impressed me. She described herself as a factual biographer, one who left the conjecture to others. Being a factual man myself, this appealed to me. I asked if she had a special interest in medicine. Her response was delightfully blunt. Her last subject, she said, required a knowledge of alternative religion, the one before steel, and the one before that retailing. For you, she said, I’ll hone up on the bowel.

I wanted no complications. It was to be my life in the firing line, my life as fodder for dinner party gossip and dissection at medical meetings, my life squeezed by fresh-skinned ambitious fingers and poked by older more envious ones. Would anyone be interested in the truth? Would anyone judge me on my merits? Or would my colleagues simply peer at me through the pall of their own failed ambitions and use the biography to settle old disappointments? I worried, too, about those closest to me, Cynthia, the girls, my mother. Edwina’s practical approach was reassuring. I offered her the job on the spot, and within forty-eight hours she had accepted.

There were no other stirrings at our first meeting, I’d remember if there were. Memory, so careless with pleasure, has an affinity for pain. Not physical pain, any doctor can testify to that, but psychological discomfort. Any man who has lived life to the full knows what I mean. In twenty-five years of marriage I’ve not been entirely faithful. I’ve been faithful to the marriage, but not always to Cynthia. Nothing too significant nor long-lasting, but other women I’ve enjoyed and at times been reluctant to leave. The pleasure of these affairs is now vague, but the acrimonious leave-takings are etched in memory. And no, there was never any guilt, my marriage was solid and I’m sure Cynthia suspected nothing.

Although I’m not so sure now. I used to be certain of everything, but Edwina changed that. Perhaps Cynthia did know about the other women and hid her distress, perhaps she knew and didn’t care, perhaps she had indiscretions of her own. The man who said knowledge is power must have lived in an ivory tower with only books and the sound of his own voice for company. Knowledge is torment. Before Edwina, I knew enough to lead a satisfying and successful life; after her, I know too much for satisfaction and too little for wisdom.

I hate this confusion. My days are clogged with it and my nights are cluttered with her. Flashes of Edwina standing, seated, arguing, gesticulating, wet with sex, high on power. And a recurring image: a stream of mercury in a blackened landscape, a mysterious silver dream, hypnotic and compelling, which cannot be grasped. And I know it’s deadly. Even while I stretch out my arms and plunge my fingers into the stream, I know it is deadly.

I curse the day she entered my life. I want my old life back. I want Cynthia, I want my daughters, I want my work, I want to be happy.

What claim do you have on happiness? Edwina once asked.

The same as the next person, I wanted to reply. But by then I’d seen the stream of mercury and kept my thoughts to myself.

So what was the pleasure with her? Running on empty as I was, I never stopped to think. You are driven, on edge, you have to keep going. But I’ve stopped now, and the questions, the blame too, are relentless. They’re kicking the man when he’s down, they’re mocking the man weakened by conscience. I told you so, I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen — a cruel voice and it never stops, and the fact that it’s mine just makes it worse. The pleasure then? The returns? It was the intensity of the thing, an intensity I’d not known since the old days with Sybil. I felt alive — not comfortable and I longed for that, but alive. And, as with Sybil, I truly believed I’d have her in the end.

That’s the essence of unrequited love. You’re convinced you’ll be rewarded for your suffering, as if there were some just God with a soft spot for toiling lovers waiting for the right moment to dole out your reward. I’m amazed at my stupidity. I sit here, a stranger in a strange country, a stranger to myself, shocked at what I’ve done and terrified I’d do exactly the same if circumstances were to repeat themselves.

I truly believed that eventually she’d be mine. I would imagine her coming to me full of love, and taking her into my arms knowing at long last she wanted me as much as I’d always wanted her. She’d allow me to undress her, and I’d stroke the lush white skin and make love to her with the deft caress of the lover who knows he is desired. This I imagined, over and over; wherever I went I lugged my romantic baggage with me. Thus the will to continue, and the pleasure. But not the only one. After we had made love, after I had wallowed in her desire for me, after I had gazed at her sweet adoring face, I’d imagine my love shrinking to normal size, then smaller still, until it evaporated completely. Then I’d walk away.

It never happened. I gathered my secrets and my sick, swollen love and fled. And while I realise it’s the sort of act that precludes going back, I hold on to the knowledge that I, and I alone, constructed myself; more than fifty years of selecting, discarding and refining, I made myself as surely as a car emerges from the production line. And I want to believe, even after all that’s happened, I can remake myself, assemble a new life, and happiness — damn Edwina’s theories — will be mine once more.

‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula used to ask Eddie. ‘Are you happy yet?’

Eddie is sitting in the café, the newspaper in front of her. She stares at the photograph, she stares at the newsprint, Paula is back in Melbourne. Slowly and carefully she tears out the article as if that will smooth her puckered nerves. The coffee is cold, she orders a glass of wine, sinks back in her chair willing herself to be calm.

‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula would ask.

And while there were moments, breath-stopping, gilt-edged moments, Eddie never managed to get a grip on happiness. She was happy to sit in the audience while Paula sang and marinate in her honey-rich voice. She was happy in that skin against skin silence in the minutes before sleep, and walking in the strange lemony light before a storm; happy during all those times when Paula was offering the world but not demanding a response. And happy perched in Paula’s fifties-green bathroom while Paula cut her hair. The light touch on her ear, the fingertips on her cheek, gentle and so persistently accidental, and sliding down her neck to the top of her spine to linger in the notches at the base of the skull. Snip, snip go the scissors, and how, Eddie wonders, can Paula play at being a barber when her fingers are making love to Eddie’s neck?

‘The curls’ll hide my mistakes,’ Paula says, stepping back to admire her handiwork.

Don’t stop, Eddie is thinking. Butcher the curls, leave me bald, just don’t stop.

And her mother’s comment: ‘That girl is turning you into a boy.’

‘Are you happy now?’ Paula asked after Eddie had helped her move house. They’d spent the day packing and chatting and laughing together and at last the old place was empty. The mattress was tied to the roof of a borrowed Mini, the cabin was choked with Paula’s possessions. There was barely enough room for one person in the car, much less two.

‘You drive,’ Paula said, and clambered on to the roof to sit Buddha-like on the mattress, her feet looped under the ropes.

‘You can’t do that,’ Eddie said, more concerned about being caught than Paula’s falling off.

‘Just watch me. Or rather don’t. Watch the road.’

It was not the first time they went to bed together, although it easily might have been, the two of them lugging the mattress up a couple of dozen stairs, dumping it on the floor and themselves on top.

‘Are you happy now?’ Paula says, reaching across and touching Eddie’s forehead. ‘My, real sweat. And on a brow that would frown at perspiration.’

Paula’s hand on her forehead a mere fraction of a second, and Eddie is on her feet and fleeing that too-sweet touch she absolutely must not want.

She was happy just to look at her. Paula singing or playing the piano, Paula alone or with friends, luxuriant Paula in her flowing red clothes. ‘You’re my ruby-dazzler,’ Eddie once said after too much wine.

There was an extravagance to Paula. ‘You act as if life’s too short,’ Eddie said.

‘Not too short,’ Paula replied. ‘There’s simply too much of it.’ And would drag Eddie off to see a pair of huge dragon gargoyles atop an inner-city building, and then to the beach to watch the waves in the moonlight. Later still, she’d pull her to the ground in a shadowy park to search the sky for falling stars.

‘This is heaven,’ she’d say. And seeing Eddie wide-eyed and stiff in her arms, ‘Relax sweetheart, there’s no one about, not at three in the morning.’

But how could Paula know?

‘You can’t wait for the orchestra to begin,’ she’d say, ‘not if you want to sing.’

And the next day her mother would fuel her unease. ‘She’s a bad influence on you, Edwina. What do you think you’re doing with your life?’

Paula rode a motorbike with a sidecar. The latter was primarily for Dinah, a playful thirty-eight kilograms of Bernese Mountain dog, although was shared by Paula’s stream of friends. ‘But you’re Dinah’s favourite,’ Paula assured her, as Eddie and Dinah squeezed into the sidecar. And Paula would mount the bike and careen down the road singing above the roar: ‘Eddie, Eddie, give me your answer do.’ As the drive lengthened so the singing became more bawdy, until they would be blistering along the Nepean Highway with Paula embellishing well-known tunes with lyrics to make a libertarian squirm.

Paula’s blood was spiked with explosive. She was wonderful and exhausting, she was exciting and terrifying. Her place was centre-stage and that’s where Eddie had to be if she wanted her wild spark.

‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula would shout, and Eddie would wonder what on earth she was doing.

Before Paula crashed into her life, Edwina always knew exactly what she was doing. It was a situation that did not make her particularly happy, but it supplied the security she wanted, and a measure of comfort. And it was comfort she was feeling one autumn evening as she made her way from a quick dinner at the union to the library and a few hours with Chaucer. Her marks were good, her friendships were under control, she had managed to remove Russell, her latest boyfriend, with a minimum of fuss, her mother was off her back and she’d just had her first short story accepted for publication. Very comfortable indeed. And might have remained so if she’d been watching where she was going, or for that matter, stayed for coffee with friends rather than rushing off to the library. But instead she was in a glazed-eyed walking, books and folders clasped in her arms, and then she was on her knees and hanging on to a pair of crimson legs.

‘Have I killed you?’ were Paula’s first words.

Eddie was very much alive but more than a little winded by the figure in front of her. From red hat through flowing red dress to red stockings and lace-up red leather boots, this vision was foreign to the university circa 1975, and to Eddie no matter what the era. She recognised Paula immediately. For weeks the campus had been plastered with posters advertising the Paula Harding concert. Paula, only twenty-four years old, with several shows to her credit and an opera that had created an uproar among the Puccini and Verdi set, was the music world’s wunderkind and feminism’s favourite child.

Paula helped Eddie to her feet, gathered up her books and notes, then pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. ‘Where in the hell is the Monash Theatre?’

Eddie started to explain, but with the direction part of her brain a ‘black hole’, Paula asked to be guided to the door. And once there Eddie stayed. How could she not when Paula sat her on a stool in the wings promising to soothe her bruised and battered body? As for Chaucer: ‘He’s been around for six hundred years,’ Paula said. A few more hours won’t make any difference.’

Paula Harding filled the stage. A ruby-red figure with red-rimmed glasses, she sang with her whole body. Her head swayed with the music, she sent the words flying, her hands flounced over the keys, her feet danced, and the voice, a magical braiding of loose layabout strands, was pure silk. Edwina sat in the wings, her copy of Chaucer clenched to her chest while her desires took flight. This, she realised, was another way of living.

Most of the songs were Paula’s own compositions. She sang about politics and the ironies of love, she sang the blues and torch-song seductions, and in between she’d talk to the audience with the same ease and intimacy one would use with old friends. Whether singing or talking, she managed to be both outrageous and serious, and the audience loved her. Edwina, with beating heart and Chaucer biting her skin, marvelled that anyone could be so bold, so indifferent to expectation that she could trounce one sacred cow after another.

‘Don’t you ever worry what other people think?’ Eddie asked a few weeks later.

‘Honey,’ she replied in a southern drawl, ‘Ah don’t have the time.’

Paula resented sleep. There was nothing to interest her in unconsciousness, she said, and besides the night was ‘so divinely succulent’. So it happened that a month after their first meeting, at exactly twenty-five past one in the morning, Eddie awoke to music outside her bedroom window. It was a love-song with guitar backing, no pianissimo seduction but a full-throttle, you-can’t-refuse-me, country and western plea. It was Paula, and threatening to wake the neighbourhood. Eddie was out of bed and at the window begging her to stop. ‘Not until you come outside,’ she says. Eddie grabs some clothes, anything, just be quick, a girl serenading her in the wee hours and not what Harry and Beverley Frye have in mind for their daughter. She clambers across the dressing-table and through the window. And how can she be furious when Paula is so pleased to see her?

Eddie begs her to leave. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, I’ll see you any time, just leave now before you wake my parents.’ But having extricated her from the family bosom, Paula is not about to give up. Soon she has Eddie ensconced next to Dinah, and the three are speeding down the highway to the hills. Paula stops at the edge of Sherbrooke Forest. With the bike turned off, the night is dark and fiercely hushed, but it doesn’t worry Paula. She pulls a rug from her pack, a bottle of champagne and a handful of Baci chocolates. She settles Dinah and a jittery Edwina, then opens the bottle.

‘I love you, Edwina Frye,’ she says, dipping a finger in the fizz and running it round Eddie’s lips.

And suddenly finding herself a trespasser in another life where the rules aren’t her rules and she’s no longer responsible, Eddie takes Paula’s face between her hands and kisses the full, smiling mouth, and then is kissing the whole face, the ears the neck, and slipping her cold hands beneath the red clothes to the warm woman’s skin. Another life or her own and it no longer matters, and she is swarming over that body, scooping its softness and warmth, making love in the still, crisp air.

‘I always knew you had this in you,’ Paula says.

It is a moment of absolute clarity, but by the time Eddie is back home it is lost. She’s devastated, she can’t believe what she’s done, she wants to erase the whole event.

‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula used to ask. But how could she be when her old familiar garb was being ripped off her?

Not happy then and not happy now, Eddie is thinking as she finishes her wine. She reads the article one more time before folding it into her purse. Paula always thrived on exposure and clearly has done well out of it. In her dreams Eddie used to be no less outrageous, but life demanded a stiffer spine. And still does. It shouldn’t matter that Paula Harding is back in Melbourne; it cannot matter. Edwina hears the call of her life. She checks the time, drags herself from the café and goes to meet Alexander.

2nd September, London.

I was happy during those first few months with Edwina. Indeed, in many respects it was the best of times. Simone and Greg became engaged and moved in together, Claire was less impossible, and work couldn’t have been better. We’d just completed the pig experiments with excellent results, and the submission for limited human trials was with the Ethics Committee. All very satisfactory.

Edwina and I would meet for an interview every couple of weeks, and in between she’d see my friends, family and colleagues. She also honed up on the bowel as she said she would, studying monographs and journals as well as my own published work, and a formidable task for a layperson. There were days, and I liked these best of all, when she’d shadow me as I went about my work. She even observed me in theatre, proving to be of sterner stuff than a good many of my students.

It’s a quality of any intricate task that it creates its own seemingly airtight world. A dense world and complex too, fired by a shared concentration. This is the atmosphere of the operating theatre and it has always appealed to me. The noise of the machines, the theatre staff, their voices and hands are all components in this world, all working in harmony. So when I’d catch a glimpse of Edwina, it was from another place, as if I were in the cabin of an aeroplane and she out on distant clouds. The shock of it, and a feeling I can only describe as rapture.

She’d keep her questions for an appropriate time and I was surprised how much I welcomed them. In a pleasant, easy way her inquiries provided the impetus for a mid-career stocktake. I felt refreshed, more alert, less likely to perform out of the habit that’s an avoidable side-effect of a long career.

I’ve never been the type to talk about myself. The facts are what matter and the facts are clear: surgeon and medical scientist, leader in artificial intestine research, married to Cynthia for twenty-five years, two daughters, Simone a physiotherapist and Claire in her last year at school. Yet I went beyond the facts with Edwina. She was so receptive, so attuned to me, she made it so easy.

I’ve never attended therapy, have always found repugnant the idea of exposing myself to a stranger, yet in those early months with Edwina I found myself wondering whether biography mightn’t be a little like therapy. You start talking at a familiar point, wander off into unexpected territory, then, when your time is up, you spring back into the present, take up your medical bag and re-enter your life. But the diversion leaves its mark, you feel lighter, invigorated. And your listener, Edwina, has been so focussed on you that you’re convinced she regards you as more than just a job. Certainly she was more than just a job for me.

I looked forward to our interviews. It was not only the career investigations I enjoyed, but revisiting childhood with the unexpected appearance of people and events long forgotten. There was the milk bar man with the missing finger who would always throw in a few extra lollies, and fishing with Charlie Slonim near Port Campbell, and the Guy Fawkes weekend on a farm with the Faines when we stuck sparklers in the cow pats and lit up the whole paddock. Occasionally her questions would lead me to a locked door and I knew to turn away. At other times, I’d be aware of an uneasiness, an event partly submerged in memory’s murky waters. My gropings at these times were half-hearted. I believed then, though I’m not so sure now, that what has been efficiently forgotten is meant to be.

Don’t you have any dissatisfactions? Edwina once asked me.

I didn’t, and told her so, then took the opportunity to turn the question back on her.

Too many to mention, she said with a laugh.

Very guarded about her life she was, as she ploughed her way through mine.

3rd September, London.

Cynthia used to say I achieved more in an hour than other people managed in a week. Now I could spend all day in bed and it would make no difference to anyone except me. I’ve seen it time and again, patients full of fight and against unbeatable odds, but as soon as they take to their bed it’s all over. He won’t get up, a distraught wife will report. He just lies there waiting to die.

And if I stay in bed, the same will happen to me.

Immediately I wake I plan my day, converting all the inconsequential aspects of an active, useful life into work. After you get up, I tell myself, you’ll shower and dress. At eight o’clock you’ll buy the papers and read them over breakfast at the High Street café. At half past nine you’ll return to the flat, select lunch destination, plan route, do accounts, follow up query with electricity company. You’ll leave the flat at eleven, drop off clothes at the laundry, two hour walk, lunch — and so on until midnight, when at last I let myself go to bed. It’s like filling a room with air, these days I fill with nothing.

A few days ago, I realised I was talking to myself. It reminded me of Rosie and I was horrified. Better to talk to a notebook instead, so I started this account. It’s such a relief to have something to do.

A year or so before meeting Edwina, I had a brief affair with one of Cynthia’s best friends. Sally was a woman with too much time on her hands. Her days were full, yet she achieved nothing. She’d jog before breakfast, go to the gym each morning, lunch with friends, play tennis two or three times a week. She spent as much time toning the body as I did repairing them.

What on earth do you talk about? I’d ask Cynthia. Her life’s so empty.

Cynthia must have wondered at my sudden hostility toward someone we’d known for years, but one’s choice of partner, whether wife or girlfriend, reflects on oneself. The sex was good with Sally, bloody good actually, but I didn’t respect her.

Yesterday, while wandering a distant High Street, I came across a public gym. It was a large place, separated from the street by a wall of glass. The patrons faced the passing traffic while they sweated over the machines. I saw them crank up their performance for the people who stopped to watch. There was one fellow, dressed in T-shirt and boxer shorts and wearing a weight-lifter’s belt, who was particularly industrious. The sweat patch on his shirt never dried. Thick-necked with tree-trunk biceps, he went from one machine to the next. He talked to the other customers, he spoke on the phone, he maintained his sweat patch, he never ran out of things to do. I envied him, and was tempted to go in and sign up. I’ve become everything I despise. I’m no better than Sally.

I took a taxi back to the flat, a quick escape before I did something I’d regret. But there was nothing for me here. I read for a bit, I tried writing in this journal, I even toyed with ringing Cynthia. In the end I went out and joined the men in the park. Never have I felt so dissatisfied.

Edwina arrives punctually for her rendezvous with Alexander. She finds a parking space, switches off the engine and sits staring out at the darkening street. As dissatisfied as she felt prior to Paula’s return, she now feels downright precarious. Alexander might think she’s a winner, but Eddie knows better: whatever spark Paula saw in her all those years ago has been well and truly extinguished. But what was the alternative? Within weeks of meeting Paula, Eddie found herself needing some sort of commentary to make sense of her life. Paula would bulldoze through her elegant barriers as if they didn’t exist. She didn’t care who might be watching, she didn’t care who might be listening. ‘I love you, Edwina Frye,’ she’d say, and lavish her with kisses. And when Eddie protested: ‘Let yourself go. We’re not illegal. Queen Victoria couldn’t get her mind around lesbianism, much less legislation.’

Eddie’s manageable life had broken its moorings. She was in the rapids hurtling towards the falls, over the edge and tossing in the foam, but before she crashed into the waters below she’d be back in the rapids, again heading for the falls. Thrilling it was but life-threatening.

Then it came to an abrupt end.

Paula’s opera was being performed in Melbourne. Eddie had accompanied her to rehearsals, had found herself meeting numerous people who, like Paula, needed little sleep, who would work all day and sit at endless tables at night, eating and drinking and being effortlessly entertaining, and while they were pleasant enough to her, Eddie knew it was only because she came with the star. As for the opera, she loved it but did not understand it. Much of the symbolism — sand trickling into a pile on the stage, a devil’s mask that would appear without reason, white-daubed faces and blackened feet — made no sense to her. And the music, more a matter of atmosphere and sensibility than actual melodic lines, slithered over her like hot wax, and she could not understand that either. She was burning up in music, she was burning up with questions, but unwilling to expose her ignorance, she kept them to herself.

The night of the first performance came around. The audience was a mix of worldly Europeans, avant-garde cognoscenti and musical lesbians. Eddie sat alone in her complimentary seat surrounded by critics and patrons. Everyone seemed to know one another, people talked across her as if she didn’t exist; such relief when the lights finally dimmed and she could sink into the anonymous dark.

The opera, performed in a single act, lasted ninety minutes. There were mutterings at the first notes, and by the half-hour mark several people had left. But for the next hour, Eddie could feel the breath of the audience, a unison awe and expectation that, if not for her connection with Paula, Eddie would have succumbed to herself. When the opera finished there was a prolonged silence and then the applause began: for the singers, the orchestra, the director, the conductor and most especially for Paula. She was called to the stage, accepted flowers and applause, and then a microphone was shoved into her hand. She thanked the audience and everybody connected with the production; as for those who had walked out, she’d prefer people to leave in disgust than not be moved at all; a few more thanks, her pleasure at being back in Melbourne, and just when Eddie thought it was all over, the hot wire whipping.

‘This performance is for Edwina Frye,’ Paula said, gesturing to Eddie in the auditorium. ‘From my heart,’ she added, blowing a kiss.

A week later Eddie ejected Paula from her life. It wasn’t specifically the lesbian business, Eddie knew that at the time; Paula could have been a man or an elephant and the problems would have been the same. ‘You must change your life,’ Paula would say, quoting her beloved Rilke. For Eddie it was the hardest demand of all. Keith, her psychology tutor, had been oozing up to her for months. ‘Meet me at home on Saturday afternoon,’ she told Paula. ‘My parents will be out.’

Paula arrived to find Eddie in bed with Keith. Without a word, Paula left the house and her life, left it empty, and no one, not even Nigel, has filled it since. Eddie glances at her watch, and not likely that Otto will fill the gap. She checks her make-up, can’t delay any longer, pulls on her professional persona and heads off to the bar where Alexander is waiting.

4th September, London.

I was aware of my attraction to Edwina from the beginning, but for the sake of the biography I didn’t pursue it. Indeed, prior to that evening when she joined me for a drink, we’d not met for reasons unrelated to the biography. Even a meal at home with the family had been primarily for data collection, although, as it turned out, it had an enormous impact on me.

The meal had been Cynthia’s idea, to provide an opportunity for Edwina to observe the family man in situ. We were all there: my mother, Cynthia, Simone and Greg, and at the last minute and looking as if she’d dragged herself from the gutter, Claire. She was reeking of smoke and probably far worse, but there was nothing I could do as we were about to sit down to dinner. Fortunately she behaved herself, which is to say she spent most of the meal silent and scowling and clearly wanting to be elsewhere. Although Edwina managed to draw her out, and by the time coffee was served, had her talking about her painting. After dinner, she actually showed Edwina some of her work, an invitation never extended to Cynthia and me.

I was very conscious of Edwina’s being in my home. I was extra solicitous towards my mother, very much the attentive husband with Cynthia, the fond father with my daughters. But every time Edwina spoke I felt a rush of adrenalin. She might have been working, but she was in my home, a social occasion with food and wine, it was simply not the same as sitting with her and her tape-recorder in my office. I remember touching her several times, knowing that what was permissible in the milieu of one’s loving family would not be elsewhere.

A night for data collection but so much more. This, I realised, was no fly-by-night attraction. I saw Edwina alongside Cynthia, saw her vitality, her originality, her newness, and knew I’d never wanted a woman so much. I’m not proud of this, and certainly not now when I’d give anything for Cynthia’s warm, steady devotion. But at the time, I looked from my wife to Edwina and knew that Cynthia’s love was no longer enough. I wanted some white water, I wanted Edwina.

Fortunately I had the good sense to put the biography first. Outwardly nothing changed, but privately I exercised no restraint. I imagined the places we’d go, the conversations we’d have, most of all I imagined being in bed with her. Over and over I imagined these things, until they were second nature to me. By the time I rang her for a drink, a real lover could not have occupied me more fully.

I never doubted she wanted me too. I find the digestive tract fascinating but I know it’s not a common interest. Yet from the beginning, Edwina encouraged me to talk way beyond the requirements of the biography. Such a charming inquisitor she was, I truly believed she was attracted to me. I remember when she asked about my choice of specialty, how she leaned forward, her arms resting on my desk, how she was close enough to touch, the fine white skin, the raised pipes of her veins, her perfume, the carved stretch of her clavicle, her gaze so attentive.

I told her about Peter Faine, without whom I might have become a skin specialist or a neurologist, and his sons, both of whom attended my school. The Faine boys never showed any interest in medicine, but they were good company and wild within the acceptable limits of the day. The Faine house was full of all the noise and activity lacking in my only-child home and I visited often.

The sons were my friends, but it was Peter Faine who was the main attraction. He was a gastroenterologist, the sort of doctor quite common in those days who regarded medicine as a public calling. A short, jolly man with a shiny pate and tailored beard, he always found time for me. He used to tell me about medical life — the patients, surgery, the illnesses, students — and I came to admire him in a way I did not my own father. When I thought of being a doctor, I imagined myself just like Dr Faine, taller and younger, but in most respects very similar.

Looking back, I suspect I wanted to be Peter Faine. I enrolled in the same medical school, did my residency at the same hospital, and never questioned I would specialise in gastroenterology. As for my choice of the lower tract rather than the upper, it was pragmatism more than anything else; there was a crowd at the upper end and much more room for a newcomer at the lower.

Pragmatism? I remember Edwina saying. Is that a euphemism for money?

It wasn’t, and besides I found the large bowel more interesting than other areas of gastroenterology. And there was so much to be done. With most of the research having focussed on the upper tract, the lower area was wide open — I actually said that to her, but rather than the snickering it would occasion from most people, Edwina responded with the same regard she reserved for everything I said.

Can I be blamed for thinking she was interested in me? She did encourage me, although now I see her approach as one of calculated entrapment. Harder to explain is my own collaboration, the way in which I filtered all her responses through my own fantasies and desires. So easy to be wise after the event. But at the time I was convinced she was attracted to me, so when an evening meeting was cancelled, I called her at home and invited her for a drink. I was thrilled when she accepted.

I selected the place, a quiet bar attached to a boutique hotel where I’d be unlikely to run into anyone I knew. I planned the evening as if it were the start of an affair, and, as it turned out, it was. The bar was designed like a comfortable lounge room, with couches, armchairs and low tables in small discreet arrangements. I arrived early, sensing that if Edwina turned up before me she wouldn’t wait. I was drinking a second scotch when she appeared.

I have loved many women in my life, but before I met Edwina, romantic love, being ‘in love’, had struck only once. It was an addiction, and a polluted pleasure if ever there was one. Sybil Becker was bad for me and I couldn’t give her up. No matter that I had turned into a pathetic braying donkey, no matter that I had become utterly unlovable, no matter that I was a ludicrous fool, I couldn’t drag myself away.

This was my one experience of being in love and I never wanted it again. Yet when Edwina entered the bar that evening, all the signs were there. It should have been a warning, instead I revelled in it. A man in his fifties and feeling like a kid again. It was wonderful.

She was all creamy skin and creamy clothes, her hair sparkled in the tinted light. She drank red wine and ate chips with sour cream. She enjoyed food and was wary of thin people. They’re mean and hungry, she said, and not to be trusted.

We both laughed, she, because she thought she’d made a joke, and I because I wanted to laugh with her.

And so it began, exactly as I’d imagined. The laughter, the intimacy, the magic, the passion. We sat closer than necessary, she leaning towards me, touching my arm to make a point. And I touched her too, this time without the protective gaze of family. There was no mention of the biography. We talked about films and books, we bantered about nothing in particular, and when we parted two hours later I was in love.