But always, always, Duncan holding his mother ever so subtly away. Did he blame Ena for the traumas of his childhood, those sorrows beyond her control? Somehow, yes, it seemed he did. And Alice had the impression that Ena had stopped trying to persuade her son otherwise years ago. That she understood whatever grudge he held against her she could do nothing to remove. Or was it all just his excuse for carelessly cruel behaviour? Alice chased the traitor-thought from her mind.
‘Alice!’ Right on time.
‘Hello, Ena.’ She relaxed into her friend’s embrace for a long beat.
‘It’s lovely to see you, my dear.’ No-one else she knew could use the epithet without sounding old-fashioned or condescending.
‘You too.’ Alice scanned the room and spotted a small table against the glass, the ocean only long steps away. ‘Let’s grab that one, hey?’
‘But what about you?’
‘I can sit for a bit. I have my cushion.’
It was hard not to sound slightly bitter: that disastrous nerve block, the pinching sear, newly alive and all over her buttocks, the fresh incentive for a ‘special’ cushion. Well, she’d thought, I might as well make adjustments, find relief wherever possible, even as bowing to the dictates of her disorder brought gall to her throat, to her thoughts.
Alice gathered her belongings – laptop, cushion, purse – and followed Ena’s lurching steps. Was reminded, again: the car accident in 1972 that had left its mark. Her friend’s inability to walk far or stand too long. We make a right pair, Ena had said at their last outing.
Maybe, she thought, there was more for her to learn about acceptance, about good grace.
Alice put the silk purse on the table and placed her cushion on the chair so the shape faced as it would on a horse’s hoof: the ‘shoe’ opening at the back. As she sat, a tear of sweat trickled from between her legs, tracing every little skin bump and flesh fold. When would autumn come? It was a hot day out there. Another forty-plus, by the looks.
A quick twist of pain between her legs, then a slow, tingling subsidence. She was gradually returning to her pre-procedure self, but even with the new seat – even with her fanny and the inner cheeks of her bum suspended in air and only touched by pure, organic, undyed cotton – her capacity was still measured in minutes. The cushion was merely special, after all, not miraculous. She shuffled against it, nudging it into some small comfort.
‘How have you been, Alice?’
Ena already knew about the ‘procedure’. The cancellation of another year of teaching. The clawing back to what she thought of as ‘the plateau’: that endurable state she only now realised she’d achieved in the months before the nerve block. Be careful, Sally had warned when Alice decided to go ahead with the procedure in February. It’s hard to improve and so easy to slip backwards. But the gynaecologist had assured her, It can’t do any harm. And she had listened.
In the weeks after, Sally had made repeated visits – Just a quick one to see how you’re doing – and held her as she sobbed, inconsolable. As she wondered aloud if the gyno, the same woman who had thrust a rough hand into her vagina at her first pain clinic appointment, had used the anaesthetic needle the same way, jabbing it like a weapon through the wall of her vagina while she lay there unconscious. Defenceless.
‘I’m okay,’ said Alice. ‘Heading back towards how I was in January, I reckon.’ She’d spoken with Sasha about what her reaction might mean. Let’s just talk while you’re flared up, the physio had said at the last session, putting her hand gently on Alice’s arm. ‘Sasha wonders if the nerve block irritated the pudendal nerve. Maybe other sacral nerves too.’ Had the gyno twisted her pelvis roughly on the pivot of her sacrum? Or had she herself developed a version of Charcot’s ‘dynamic lesion’ in her brain? ‘I’m wondering, though, because it’s spread over such a big area now, whether it’s more a central nervous system problem. The people I see at the clinic reckon it’s a combo of pudendal neuralgia and central sensitisation.’
‘What, a local problem and a brain problem?’
‘Yep. The pain dude thinks the nerve isn’t trapped, but maybe stretched and irritated. And now the brain can’t forget the pain; the sensations have become normal to it.’
She had resolved since, privately, quietly, to listen to her body and her dreams more closely. She thought of the slippery-dip dream she’d had just before the nerve block: dream-Alice’s shattered legs and empty, echoing home.
The naked late-morning brightness sheeted the room and turned Ena’s white hair into dandelion seeds. As if she could be blown away by a single breath. Not like the early days, over a decade ago now, when Ena’s hair was still auburn … and once a brilliant flame, the older woman had told her. Ena means passionate in Celtic, she’d said. Fiery. Then she’d told Alice how she’d been born with wisps of fire on her head. How even her maiden surname told the tale. Reid: red hair or a ruddy complexion. Both of which I had, for my sins, Ena had laughed, and said how she could never keep a secret back then: My red face always told the truth!
Now her face wore a delighted smile. ‘You have the purse. I’m so glad you’re using it.’ Ena put on her glasses and peered at the front panel. ‘Look at that courtly couple. And the colour of the rose.’
Alice could see the rose reproduced in the medallion on the back panel, surrounded by flowers in ivory and peach. The embroidery so fine that the antique blossoms surrendered coloured nuances to the modern light.
‘Yes – oh, I love it, Ena!’ She could still remember the unwrapping. The post-present sex. A different Alice. ‘I was wondering if you know anything about it. Duncan said you might.’
‘Well, I know a little. But not much, I’m afraid.’ A sapphire flash as Ena rolled the rings on her finger. ‘My aunt Elspeth was a very careful woman, so she’d looked after the purse well. She was given it by my grandmother Aileen, who married into the Reids.’ Her eyes turned upward, recalling. ‘Elspeth said to me, I wish I’d written down everything. Her memory was not so good by then, you see. All she could remember Nanna saying was that it had been a gift of love in times of trouble. And that it had come sideways through the Reid family and was passed down. I’m not sure what the “sideways” means.’
Ena swept wisps of hair back from her face. It was hotter in this part of the café, the air-conditioning faltering against the day’s savage, wet heat.
‘My aunt had no children and we were very close, so she gave it to me. That’s all I know, I’m afraid.’ When Ena smiled, her face shone. ‘Except that I am thrilled Duncan gave it to you, my dear.’
Alice’s hand briefly grasped and squeezed.
The tale was filled with so many gaps. She would have to use her own imagination to create stories for the silk purse.
Maybe the lady who had first owned it – she saw a figure, a face turned half-away, a coil of strawberry-blonde hair – had given the purse to a dear daughter, or a treasured cousin, who had put it, for safety, in a display cabinet. There it had sat, half-forgotten for years, in that elaborate room. Then, perhaps, it had been remembered and hung from a wall, no-one noticing the gusset facing the window fading slowly, imperceptibly, as the seasons and years rolled over. Until it was rediscovered and given to Ena’s grandmother, the purse and its history firing Aileen’s passion, drawing her back into life.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about purses lately,’ she said. ‘It must be all the Freud I’m reading.’
Ena laughed. ‘I can guess what Freud made of purses.’
Because of her approachability, perhaps, or the aroma of warm biscuit dough that seemed to travel with her, it was easy to underestimate the breadth of Ena’s knowledge, the keen intelligence that she had also bestowed on her son. So Alice could talk about Freud’s ‘Dora’ case. She knew Ena would understand its appeal, given the site of her own suffering.
‘He loved the jewel case in Dora’s dream,’ she said. ‘Female genitals, of course. Freudian gold.’ She’d been re-reading the case history recently, scribbling
ripostes in the margins. ‘When Dora bucked up – she was quite feisty, really, for her age and the times – he just gave further interpretations. But he was hard to argue with. The ideas sound ridiculous, but they slot into this impenetrable kind of monolith.’ What was it he’d said about Dora’s purse? ‘He reckoned Dora “confessed” her masturbation to him by playing with her reticule in an analytic session.’
Maybe Dora’s small bag had been beaded. Or embroidered, like hers. What was inside Dora’s purse? What was inside her own? Only fragments, it seemed. Disjointed body parts and ideas, rubbing and sliding against each other. Pain stitched through seams and pleats.
‘He did understand metaphor pretty well, though,’ Ena said, ‘from the bits and pieces I’ve read.’ They had discussed Freud and his lingering influence before at dinners, Ena and she laughing and challenging each other back and forth, Duncan animated, joining in and then, impatient to get back to his writing, jingling the keys in his pocket. ‘The way dream images and bodily symptoms act as stand-ins. Even if his interpretations were skewed by culture, and by his own history of course.’
Alice looked out to a rising wind, the icing of the sea flaked and swirling, as if spread by an awkward giant hand. ‘Is anyone not limited by their own baggage?’ The question had been on her mind. She turned to Ena, not really sure what she was asking. Or why she was asking it of her husband’s mother. ‘Sometimes I think about how the past lives on in us, in ways we’re not even aware of.’
Ena thanked a waitress and took grateful sips of coffee. ‘Have I told you the story about my grandfather, Aileen’s husband?’
Alice remembered some of Ena’s tales of the past. Her proud family, with its roots deep in Scottish history. The pressure on her grandfather, as the last person carrying the family name in the area, to produce sons. He and Aileen, who was a tiny little thing – Ena had drawn the petite figure with her hands – parented thirteen children, the last two born after he was paralysed from the waist down. Elspeth had been born before his accident, Ena’s father after.
‘Nanna had a visit from several local church ladies. They let her know that the church disapproved of these last births.’
‘How come? Because he was meant to be paralysed?’ Where had she read that men who were paralysed could still have erections?
‘Because she must have had to mount him, you know … The missionary position was the acceptable thing: him mounting her. But he was paralysed. Anyway, legend has it that she said to the church ladies, Them that are lashed to the post must take the strikes.’
‘What, make the best of a bad thing? Continue to find pleasure where you can?’
‘No, more that it was her duty,’ Ena said.
‘Her duty to procreate?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Maybe, Alice thought, she was too used to the women in the support group and their references to desire and pain. At last Saturday’s meeting, in Atikah’s spick-and-span inner-city unit, Denise had said, I miss pain-free sex. Does anyone else? Maria had started crying, which had set off Jack, Simone’s tiny baby. Many of them still seemed to get horny – a wonder, really – and some seemed able to voice this, to make jokes about big penises and little fannies, even with the pain. Did Aileen imagine pleasure? Did she long for her husband to reach for her or dream of a forbidden touch – her own? a lover’s? Was her role of wife and procreator a prison for desire? Had duty, not lust, overcome Aileen’s Victorian modesty?
Alice imagined Duncan responding to all these questions: ‘It’s just history, Alice.’ Saw her challenges, bright and bold, that darkened his face.
She must leave. Calm the pins and needles that now striped the backs of her legs. The end point, as always, came on suddenly and without the possibility of negotiation.
Ena read the moment in her eyes. They stood and looked out over the sea together. The depths were darker now, and roiling in anticipation.
‘An autumn storm,’ said Ena. ‘The veggies will love it.’
The air was heavy with the expectation of rain.
Alice had the urge to pull off her sweaty clothes and wander the house naked. Why not? The curtains were closed and no-one else was here.
She put her purse on the bed along with – carefully – the fragile book, just picked up. Then she stripped off her top and skirt, unclasped her bra and stepped out of her undies. There, in the full-length mirror: her body. Its long, lithe paleness. Symmetrical, whole, cohesive. The only signs of disorder the dabs of blue, green, yellow and brown along the sides of her bum: marks of the measured violence she enacted against her body to distract it from the thoughtless violence it did itself. The pinches sometimes shifting the pain for a moment. What else to do?
She assessed her body. The curve of her hip, softer than a year ago. Breasts, pert and keen in the cups of her hands. The bush of hair still startling yet, increasingly, pleasing to her. She wondered if she’d ever wax again: define the edges cleanly, groom the small strip neatly. What a lot of fuss for what, these days, served no purpose. More tempting to repel rather than allure. Keep it to herself.
She grasped the hair and tugged fondly, then pressed her fingers through the strands and past the pleats of flesh, her touch hesitant, then surer, the warm softening overpowering that stubborn ache. She’d been able to touch herself recently without triggering the paralysing rawness that self-pleasure had brought in those first months. And, weirdly, the nerve block, by causing her bum and thighs to prickle and buzz, had helped, distracting her body, it seemed, from her clitoris. Though sex was still out of the question – for her, at least.
Perhaps she should consult the male physio Sally had told her about, once her body settled. He appears to understand about desire, Sally had said, explaining how Ashleigh had taken Ryan for a few sessions and how they were now able to have sex again. Ash is over the moon! Alice wondered if Duncan would be open to the possibility. He was not good at taking instruction from others, but hope might be a big enough – she surprised herself by laughing – carrot to dangle.
Who would she make such efforts for? Herself, or him?
The book caught her eye in the mirror and she twisted to it, walked towards the unassailable authority of its title: On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females by I. Baker Brown. The cautery iron. That poor woman. Alice laid on her tummy and slipped the tattered volume from its elastic band. Was Isaac Baker Brown the demon carried by her imagination? Would he detail the atrocities carried out in the London Surgical Home?
The yellowing pages fanned and settled.
Long and frequent observation convinced me that a large number of affections peculiar to females, depended on loss of nerve power, and that this was produced by peripheral irritation, arising originally in some branches of the pudic nerve, more particularly the incident nerve supplying the clitoris …
Pudic nerve? Maybe that was the pudendal nerve. Peripheral irritation? Probably masturbation. She had been reading other nineteenth-century texts that expressed moral horror over the practice; had seen that, on occasion, women themselves acquiesced to certain forms of treatment, even operations, wanting to be rid of a lust that troubled Victorian society’s notions of what a gentlewoman should be. Docile, modest. Asexual, somehow.
She flicked through some more pages: the clitoris is freely excised either by scissors or knife – I always prefer the scissors.
A sympathetic stab in her fanny. She rolled onto her side and pushed a pillow between her thighs. So the operation was Baker Brown’s solution for hysteria and all the associated downward-spiralling conditions: spinal irritation, hysterical epilepsy … idiotcy – a spelling mistake here, perhaps? A hint of the farmer behind the surgeon? – and the last, death. This was how he fixed them. By removing the problem.
By removing the clitoris.
She kept reading, thinking. Stopping each time words snagged her.
… I have been met with many objections, such as unsexing the fem
ale –
Protests from physicians and also other surgeons, from the looks, but no give in Baker Brown’s certain, almost strident, voice.
… irritation about vulva, perinaeum, and anus … sometimes she has to pass her water every half-hour … for the last three years the act of coition has been accomplished without the least pleasure, but with pain –
Vestibulodynia? A recurring UTI?
… subject to fits of violent excitement … ‘she would fly at him and rend his skin, like a tigress’ … became in every respect a good wife –
What choice did she have? What else might they do if she didn’t behave?
… six years she had been confined to a spinal couch … so forward and open in her manners, that she was generally avoided by gentlemen. Never had an offer of marriage –
The phrase italicised, emphasised, as if it were out of the ordinary – a terrible, shameful thing.
… she complained to my son, Mr. Boyer Brown, that I had unsexed her –
A family affair then … And the woman herself insisting, this time, that she had been ‘unsexed’. Alice could have told her that if Baker Brown was not chastened by his colleagues, he was certainly not going to be moved by a woman.
… a great distaste for her husband … managing to free her hands … jacket substituted –
A straitjacket? So, not only hacked at, but also restrained. Moral education, it seemed.
She flicked back a page or two. Stopped suddenly. Here, finally – finally! – the words of the woman. If the note-taker – a nurse? a doctor? – could be trusted.
‘Last March, instead of sliding down a slope, I jumped. This caused displacement of my womb … I was fomented with hot water … I am obliged to relieve the irritation by rubbing … felt as if I did not care for living. I would like to have my hands untied; I will be very quiet … I am very rude – I beg your pardon … I had a baby two years ago: it was not born at the full time … My brain has been affected.’
Eye of a Rook Page 18