Under My Skin

by Sarah Dunant

  “Does your husband treat the kind of person who might resort to terrorism?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a private practice. Maurice treats anyone he thinks he can help, as long as they have the money. I doubt he checks their police records first.”

  I had an instant vision of an East End villain whose wife now had one tit bigger than the other, offering to rearrange the surgeon’s face for him. Or worse—a Mafia informer waking up after the operation to find that he still looked like himself. The kind of case to die for. Literally.

  “So, does he have any idea who it might be?”

  There was a pause. “He doesn’t actually know about it.”

  “Doesn’t know?”

  She sighed. “The first one came while he was away at a conference and I was in the office. I asked his secretary to check for more and when she found the second she called me rather than him. Maurice works incredibly hard. He’s under a lot of stress. I thought—well, I didn’t want him disturbed unnecessarily by some lunatic.”

  Absolutely. Making that much money a day must put one hell of a strain on a guy. And he had to keep that knife hand steady. Unlike me who was fast finding both of mine tied behind my back.

  “In which case I presume you haven’t told the police about this either?”

  She shook her head. “As I say, I thought it was a crank. We do get them sometimes.”

  I took a slug of scotch. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. Back to the coal face.

  “So tell me what happens when a patient’s not satisfied.”

  She sighed. “It all depends. How much do you know about aesthetic surgery?”

  I made a face. “I thought it was still called cosmetic.”

  “That’s what the cowboys do.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “They’re the ones who work out of the clinics you see advertised at the back of women’s magazines. Most of them haven’t even finished their basic surgical training. Someone like Maurice is not only fully trained, he’s got ten years of complex reconstructive surgical experience behind him.”

  She made him sound like God’s gift to a Bosnian relief mission. Shame they wouldn’t be able to afford him.

  “At his level the work is incredibly skilled. Aesthetic is the right word to describe it. There are acceptable standards, of course, as for any kind of surgery, but in the aesthetic area there’s a much larger margin for personal taste. And that means, sometimes, overexpectation.”

  “Sows’ ears into silk purses, you mean?” Not like you, I thought but didn’t say.

  “Most respectable surgeons will only operate if they think they can make a reasonable difference, and if they’re sure that the client understands what that difference will be.”

  “But sometimes the patient still gets a shock when they look in the mirror?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then what?”

  “Then they come back and complain about it. And you do what you can. No one wants a malpractice suit on their hands. So you try and placate them. And if you can’t do that and you think it’ll help, you try another operation or procedure.”

  Maybe she wrote her husband’s lines for him. She’d certainly had her hands on some kind of script. “For free?”

  “It depends. Sometimes. Although even if the surgeon doesn’t charge, there’ll still be hospital costs, and the anesthetist’s fees. But if you really think there’s nothing you can do, you stand firm, suggest they get a second opinion, and hope that will back you up.”

  “You know a lot about it,” I said evenly.

  “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Health and Beauty. Partners in profit. Now. But what about then? Receptionist? Nurse? It seemed a little unfeminist to suggest such a Harlequin type of courtship. But what the hell. We were hardly sailing in ideologically sound waters anyway. So I did.

  “What do you think?” she replied quietly.

  The water beneath the boat got shallower. We could be running aground. Drunk in charge. I let the scotch do the talking. “Well, a bit of me wondered if you might have been a patient?”

  She left a hint of a pause. “Which bit in particular?”

  It was my turn to be embarrassed. “You could always take it as a compliment,” I said, rather feebly.

  She thought about it, and it was impossible to know just how much I had offended her. “You know,” she said after a while, “I’ve learned over the years that the secret is not minding whether people know or not. It’s a very British disease, anyway, being so shocked. Not like America. I once went to a convention with Maurice in San Diego. California’s the home of the profession, of course. It’s perfectly culturally acceptable there. Almost compulsory in some circles. They do a lot of body work, breast augmentation, liposuction, that kind of thing. But the real business is in faces. Sun damage. There must be a million women out there who spent the first forty years of their life trying to get tanned and the second forty trying to get rid of the wrinkles. The best advert a surgeon can have there is his wife. There were almost as many face-lifts at that conference as there were women. I counted them. They didn’t have any trouble with it. They were so proud to be there. Thought of themselves as a walking advertisement for their husbands’ skill.” She paused. “Of course some of them were wrong, some of them looked dreadful. Do you know how you can spot them?”

  I shook my head—my eyes must have been on stalks I was so interested. She pulled back her hair from the side of her face to expose a rather handsome little ear with a small but perfect pearl stud in it. “They tend to wear clip-on earrings. To hide the point where the tuck meets the bottom of the ear. The bigger the earring, the bigger the tuck.”

  Stud earring, no tuck. But whether that made her natural or him just bloody good I wasn’t sure. She let her hair drop and poured herself another drink. I pushed my glass in her direction. Maybe it would help to get more drunk. It couldn’t make the story any weirder.

  “You don’t like the idea, do you?”

  I shrugged. “I think I’m just squeamish about somebody cutting up my flesh.” Maybe because someone once did it without my permission.

  “You believe women should just accept their lot and grow old gracefully, is that it?”

  What did I believe? I suppose that depended on how much I wanted the job. I thought about how best to put it. “I suppose I think if God had meant us to stay young, he wouldn’t have invented gravity.”

  She didn’t laugh. But then I suppose she didn’t find it funny. “How old are you, Hannah? Thirty-six, thirty-seven?”

  Not bad. But then she was a pro. Do I get to ask the same question back? I thought. What would I guess? I thought about that gorgeous swimsuit body, every single muscle in tone. A mixture of his work and hers. Forty plus? But how many? I nodded. “More or less.”

  “Then let’s have this conversation again when you’re fifty-five.” She paused. “Or maybe you could ask your mother how she feels about aging?”

  Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. My mother’s perfectly happy about it. But then, of course, she’s never really been young. Or not that I’ve noticed. I picked myself up from the elephant trap I’d fallen into and saw Olivia waiting at the top of the hole. She looked so good, I got grumpy. “I think if the world weren’t so obsessed with what women looked like, we wouldn’t have to worry about it so much,” I said, falling back on ideology.

  “Absolutely,” she said firmly. “I couldn’t agree with you more.” And I couldn’t tell if she was taking the piss or not. “I mean we women are just victims of male stereotyping. Left to ourselves we’d never want to be slimmer or more attractive or even a bit younger, would we? We don’t care about how we look. Ugly, beautiful—makes no difference to us. The whole thing is their fault. We all know that.”

  Fuck you, I thought. I don’t need to take this from a woman who’s been reconstructed. Single malt. It always brings out the Glaswegian in me.

  “And you know the
other thing, Hannah? In my experience, it’s always the women who don’t need it who think like you do. The ones who’ve never felt crippled by their appearance, or who are still young enough to think that age is something that happens to everyone else.” My turn to feel the backhand in the compliment. “Good-looking women can afford to be above it all. But would you feel the same if nature hadn’t been so generous? If at puberty your breasts had sagged like a couple of pancakes, or if whoever gave you that fine little scar above your right eye had hit an inch lower and taken the whole thing out instead? How much confidence would you have then about flirting with some man at a party, or even standing in a queue outside a cinema with a bunch of prettier girlfriends?”

  Well, not a lot I could say to that, really. Except who wants to work for someone you can knock out in the first round? On the other hand, Glaswegians in their cups traditionally don’t have much truck with intelligent women. I’m ashamed to say I behaved rather brutally.

  “And is that who you were, then, Mrs. Marchant? Somebody who was crippled by it?”

  “Who I was is my own business.” She said it like a slap across the cheek. I could almost feel the sting. “Who I am now is what counts. And how much I have to lose. My husband and I have worked long and hard for what we have. Now we’re being targeted by some loony. And I’m scared to death what they might do next. But you’re clearly not interested in helping us stop them.”

  She was angry, but she was also great. Oh dear, here was a sticky one: was I really going to let myself be more influenced by a woman’s body than her mind?

  I wonder how much I’m going to regret this, I thought as I lifted my glass and drained the rest. Frank says it’s my downfall—always wanting the women clients to be feistier than the men. “On the contrary,” I said. “I’ve already taken the job.”

  I left the next afternoon. I would have gone earlier, only I couldn’t be sure that my blood levels would have made it through a Breathalyzer. I had slept till 11:00 A.M. and woken with a mother of a hangover and no clear memory of how I’d actually got to bed. I had a swim, force-fed myself a bowl of bran and three pint glasses of water, then sweated out most of it in the steam room alongside my Cézanne bathers and the museum curator.

  It was her final day as well, so after the heat I treated her to a caffeine-free cup of coffee by the pool to say good-bye. I felt fabulously light-headed sitting there, a mixture of oxygen and my own sense of success. Her stay had left her looking healthy but no younger. It was a glorious day and the sun was pouring in through the roof of the atrium, lighting up her face with its elaborate network of wrinkles and frown lines. Edith Sitwell once wrote how as Elizabeth aged the wrinkles fell like snow upon her face. I’ve always remembered that. Such a gentle image, with its echoes of transformation and silence. It’s sort of what I hope for myself—although with my luck I’ll probably be more like Auden’s wedding cake left out in the rain. Unless, of course, I succumbed to Maurice’s superior cuts.

  I wondered if it had ever been an option for her. Or if this obsession with image was more the preserve of the baby-boom generation for whom youth had been such a definition of life that they didn’t know how to let it go. I wanted to ask her how she felt about growing old, if she embraced or railed against it, but she was deeply preoccupied by government cutbacks in the museum world and I couldn’t see a way to tease the conversation in the right direction.

  As we were sitting there, Martha came out from the massage room in search of her next lucky customer. She saw me across the pool and nodded, a hint of a question in her eyes. Being Martha, she would already have made it her business to know that it was Lola and not Jennifer who had packed bags and fled like a thief in the night. In which case that wouldn’t be the question she was asking.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it. Somewhere on the edges of my drunken sleep I’d had an extraordinary dream about women’s bodies being molded by sets of hands dangling on puppet strings. It had not been without a certain erotic charge, but the message was by no means clear, and if I was going to lie down on Martha’s couch without my clothes on again, I would need to be a little more certain of any impending change in my sexual orientation. Anyway, I was still working for her boss.

  Officially I didn’t start work until after the weekend. It would take her till then to duplicate the list of files that I needed from her husband’s office, a record of all Maurice Marchant’s patients over the last ten years who’d been back to complain.

  It would, of course, have been a hell of a lot easier if I could have talked to the man himself, but Olivia remained adamant: Maurice was not to be disturbed. In the end I stopped arguing the point and decided to use a bit of initiative. I’m a great believer in what the client doesn’t know they can’t grieve about. Maurice Marchant probably saw dozens of women every day. I would just be one more eager for a little advice on a body curve that wasn’t going my way. At least that way I’d get some sense of who he was.

  I was also going to have to track down wherever it was that Lola Marsh had fled to last night, just to see if I could winkle any more out of her bruised, sealed little soul. No doubt that, too, would send my client into paroxysms of paranoia about unwelcome publicity. Ah well, it wouldn’t be the first time the client found the investigation as painful as the crime. Maybe I’d get the sack. I could always apply to go on “Mastermind” afterward. Special subject: cosmetic—oops, sorry, aesthetic surgery. Maybe when I knew enough, I could offer my mother a cheekbone augmentation for her silver wedding anniversary. If we all lived that long.

  My flat seemed altogether dull after the drama of Castle Dean. Usually I like to come home. Find it relaxing being in my own company, pottering about trying to resuscitate the window boxes or cleaning out the bath. But not this time. This time there was a restlessness, almost a dissatisfaction.

  Suspecting the sudden reintroduction of caffeine, I threw my coffee down the sink and made myself an omelette, which I ate with half a loaf of bread. My stomach was so surprised at what felt like the weight of a dead sheep arriving on top of it that it took a while to get working. Gradually, though, the carbohydrates started to kick in, and by mid-afternoon, I felt almost normal enough to work. Although Castle Dean might now be a safer place for its health guests, the job wasn’t over until Frank had the report on his desk ready for his stamp of approval. But try as I might I couldn’t get into it. I looked at my watch. It was after six. I decided to take the rest of the day off. It was then that I remembered Kate and Amy.

  I dug out the envelope of vouchers that Olivia Marchant had left for me at main reception (I think she’d been rather amused that a feminist ideologue like myself had been so keen to give to others what she disapproved of for herself) and wrote Kate’s name on the front. Then I went via the local supermarket and bought a clutch of whatever looked most interesting from the children’s bookshelf. Not forgetting one for Ben, of course, just to avoid the threat of a third world war.

  It was nearly seven by the time I got there. Since Colin hardly ever got home before then I don’t think I even registered his car parked on the other side of the road. In fact, the first realization I had that he was back was the sound of him shouting from inside as I stood with my finger poised over the doorbell.

  I couldn’t hear any words, but it was clear he was pretty upset about something. In general, Colin’s not an angry kind of man (might be more exciting if he was), although I have been known to get his blood pressure up on occasions. But this time he was definitely enraged. So, from the sound of it, was Kate. Her voice rose up and clashed in reply, loud, almost shaky. I found myself rather disturbed—like being a child again sitting on the stairs listening to my parents fighting when they thought we were asleep in bed.

  I rang the doorbell firmly. The shouting stopped. I heard someone fling something down and a door slam. Then watched a figure coming up the hall. The front door opened.

  “Hello, Colin,” I said. “Pleased to be home?”

 
I swear I didn’t mean to. It was more of a knee-jerk reaction really, habit getting the better of me. I regretted it immediately. He looked terrible. Very drawn, and almost out of control.

  “Hannah,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite remember who I was. “Er … We’re … We’re a bit busy at the moment.”

  “Hannah!” From the top of the stairs a little figure appeared, one arm stuck half out in a white-plaster Nazi salute, anxious and pleased all at the same time. “Hannah, Hannah,” cried Amy. “Look, I’ve broken my arm. Come see.”

  Colin gave a little moan and turned to face her. “Amy, you’re supposed to be asleep.”

  “Well, how can I sleep with you guys screaming?” she said, and there was a rather chilling adult tone to the rebuke. By then she was halfway down the stairs and almost into my arms. From the kitchen below, the door opened and Kate appeared. She had been crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just got back and I had something to give you.”

  She nodded. “You always were great on timing. Well, you’d better come in.”

  I wouldn’t call it the most relaxed of visits. Colin’s middle-class manners prevailed enough for him to make polite conversation in the kitchen as we sipped at our glasses of wine. But I couldn’t help thinking that if Amy and I hadn’t been there he’d probably have been throwing the bottle rather than drinking it. Kate, for her part, sat unusually silent, her fingers playing fretful jazz piano round the stem of her glass. It was clear that she was worried about Amy, kept asking if she wanted to sit with her. But Amy was busy exploiting her own power base, choosing me as the favored one, oohing and aahing over the books and egging me on while I carved elaborate felt-tip designs on her virgin-white plaster.

  It didn’t seem quite the moment to give Kate her present. I tried to relieve the mood with tales of health-farm pain and pleasure, but whatever I had stumbled into was too serious for even my clowning to lighten. So I gulped down the wine and said I had an appointment for the night. Amy yelled, but she was already up well past her sell-by date, and when Kate offered her a last bedtime story she didn’t push her luck. She thumped her way upstairs to choose the book while Kate saw me out. Colin stayed in the kitchen.