His own. Useless. Self.
Stop.
Think on what might help. Steps to take in readiness, for after the procedure: Millie to tend Emily, he and Beatrice to distract her from the pain. Then, after some months, as she improves, how to engage her, bring her out of herself … Herdley from July—short runs in the brougham, the life of the country, the pure air and warm summer sun, and then short walks, the village …
And here the path between Hierde House and the village comes to him and he sees the elm thicket near Herdley, recalls all the times he scaled the biggest trees in his hunt for rook eggs, all the times he raced past the copse as a lad—back from the tomfoolery of the village gang, back from the hustling busyness of the marketplace, with its fragrant dung of cattle and sheep, its shouting hawkers and spiced pies; back to Mother, always to Mother. Later, walking past the elm thicket stolid and unwavering, feet moving, left, right, left, in a sombre march.
And now he is sinking heavy in his bed … then changing … shapeshifting … turning to air and floating away flying away and … the path beside the elms opens before him again, the same as always, yet different too, the grass a fluorescent green, its softness cushioning his bare feet. The elms wave him into their midst and sway above, stately guardians, their branches closing around him like giant arms, the wind through his hair like a woman’s touch. He senses knowledge moving through the sap of the trees like blood, feels it filtering through the veins of their leaves. “What is it?” he cries. “Please tell me!” But their leaves fold in on each other. They will keep their counsel.
The world is utterly, horribly silent.
February 13th 1866
Dearest Bea,
Thank you for offering to have me in Westminster afterwards. I would appreciate this—Mam says I can stay with them, but I don’t think Father has told her a great deal about what is ahead & I don’t want to upset her. It is all very difficult. The operation will be carried out on February 26th, then Father says I will have to make “progress” before I can be released. Are you sure it will not upset your household too much & that you yourself will not be too drawn upon? I do not wish Father Rochdale to be at all inconvenienced, especially when the proposed Reform Bill is causing ruction.
I am trying to be practical & trusting, & to think of how much better life will be after; I try to imagine a time when I will be able to be as I once was & how wonderful that will feel. But I am terribly scared, Bea, & uneasy. When I allow this fear to take hold I feel dizzy & panicked, yet when I think of how it might be not to go ahead, I panic then too. It would be impossible to continue as I am—I just can’t go on like this, I can’t. It might be hard for you to understand & it is hard for me to even think it, but I would rather be dead.
I’m sorry, dear Bea, if this upsets you, as I’m sure it must. I will continue to remind myself of how reluctant Arthur was to proceed & how he now thinks it is for the best, & calm myself with that thought.
Love Emily
February 16th 1866
Dear Bea,
I know you think you are helping, but please don’t I don’t think it does any good to disagree with Arthur at this point. It only upsets him, & me. I’m not sure how I can defend this decision—I hardly even know how to think about what is ahead—but you must see that Arthur & I are talking more now, & deciding things together—he is very tender & caring—& it would help us to have your support. Father says it is only a little procedure & then I will no longer have these troubles, so this is what I am imagining now & counting down the days.
Em
February 20th 1866
Dearest Beatrice,
Thank you for your visit. I want to thank you also for your concern & to agree that you have every right to argue with Arthur, or to persuade me otherwise—I know you mean well & only wish the best for us. As for me, I still have these topsy-turvy moods. Right now I do not know whether to berate you or ask you to save me; sometimes I feel sure & resolved, & then I falter & doubt everything. Can you support me whatever happens? Oh God, I hope we are making the right decision!
Pray for me, sister.
Your Em
February 23rd 1866
Bea,
Arthur looks dreadful—sick with worry—& this makes me doubt us, doubt everything. I think his fears, like mine, will vanish once Monday has come & gone—once it is all over. Can you help distract him in the meantime? Please come to All Saints with us on Sunday, if you can, & then back to our home for a quiet afternoon, the three of us together.
Emmie
CHAPTER 18
PERTH, AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 2009
It was a source of wonder to her, a sweet miracle the way Arthur had formed a personality, decided on a setting, consolidated a history, in that same strange independent way in which he’d first presented himself. The childhood scenes came quickly too – more like remembering a story than creating a character, the recollections like sudden shards piercing her thought, insisting on being recorded.
But now she was suddenly, and without warning, stuck.
Part of the problem – yes, she knew it – was how much she’d fallen in love with the young Arthur, how affected she was by his despair, how she longed to be able to help him. And so, lost in him and with him, she visited the same early chapters over and over again in a reverie, a growing nostalgia for what she’d created. She edited and tweaked, swapping one word for another, moving a paragraph and then shifting it back, seduced by pride and a kind of sensual pleasure.
There were other reasons for the halt.
One was her awareness that having the one narrative voice didn’t work. Arthur must be the central character, this much was indisputable. The story demanded this of her and, she’d gradually realised, for good reason: having a male protagonist was consistent with the times, but having a male character who was compassionate, more ‘modern’ in many ways, might contest knowledge, might redress something of the imbalance that had carried right through to her and to how this disorder was seen now. Yet Arthur’s voice alone was not enough.
A bigger part of being stuck, though, was her palpable reluctance to write an adult Arthur. She didn’t want to deal with the crisis waiting for him … didn’t want to fast-forward to the time when decisions must be made. When she thought about this, her resistance was like stiff connective tissue cladding the front of her body.
She sighed. Looked through her study window at the wind-thrashed trees. Turned to her Victorian paraphernalia – books and pictures and medical articles and photocopied pages scattered over the desk. All those words and all, all, from men. How did they feel without voice, those Victorian women? Did they find any words for their nameless horror? Or was their torment only expressed through the pens of their physicians? Were these gentleladies, these mad, bad inmates, these hysterical crying girls, able to speak of their pain to a close friend? a loving sister? Or did it remain a terrible secret, a ‘female complaint’ that imprisoned them and kept them from the world? If so, what part did men play in their captivity?
What part did that man play?
She plucked the slight text from its place at the peak of her paper stack. On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females.
Would it be possible to write about the women who, once cut, once burned, were tucked away into respectability? Whose wounds disappeared into the fog of history?
I. Baker Brown.
Could she really write about this unfathomable surgeon? Work through her fascination? her distaste? her terror?
She’d started to dream of them, moustachioed men in worsted trousers and jackets. In one dream, an upright physician demanded, with old-fashioned words like ‘decorum’ and ‘diffidence’, that dream-Alice behave herself; on the wood stove behind him, an iron heated. In another, a handsome young man in a frockcoat wielded an antique razor against a trussed Victorian girl-child. Alice could still hear the screams. In the most disturbing one, dream-Alice was menaced by two men wi
th identical sideburns and shrewd mouths. One was Isaac Baker Brown and the other was called Arthur but, horrifyingly, resembled Duncan. The two men operated by night on bound women. They followed dream-Alice with slow, dogged steps, their arms hanging like weights at their sides. She woke with her own arms pushing at the doona, thrusting away these determined zombie-like men and her own question: why Duncan?
When Alice had such dreams she ignored her journal and walked quickly to the shower, distracting herself with daytime thoughts. Where to submit the hysteria essay, now it had been honed; when to contact her uni colleagues about teaching in 2010 – would there still be a place for her after two years away? She scrubbed briskly at her nails and feet. Turned the hot water to high and lost herself, for a moment, in the flood of warmth over her bum and thighs.
Why Duncan? She knew why.
She thought about the support group. She’d been to all their homes several times over now, but not one of them had asked her when she would host a meeting. It was tact, she supposed, an awareness of the tension in her marriage – mainly because she barely spoke about Duncan, had managed to keep the two worlds apart, did not know what she would do if those worlds met. Would Duncan welcome the women or be icy? Would he criticise them after? No, she couldn’t deal with that, not on top of everything else. She didn’t have the strength to choose. Not yet.
A gust pummelled her study, lashed its corner with a ghostly wail. No walk today. Not when the wind would run at her from all directions like a wilful child, pinching and smacking, whipping up the griping soreness that lurked in her, that still needed to be placated, that still categorically remained. No other bodily grumble could compete with that constant complaint: not her legs and feet, weary from standing at raised platforms and against walls and … wherever she went, really, or her knees, aching from kneeling when she could no longer hold herself upright.
Ache. Hurt … throb … sore … sting. The words people used for pain felt empty. Without force. Nor did they garner sympathy from Duncan. He’d had enough of her pain, it seemed. And he’d had enough of her essays. He found it repugnant – that was the word he’d used, repugnant – her determination to write about vulvar pain, was resentful about the possibility that he too might be found out when dots were joined: Alice … painful sex … Duncan. She got it, she truly did, his distaste at her self-exposure, his fear that he too might be tainted, but she also sensed that his focus on sex was a mask, or some kind of smokescreen. Another way of him refusing to believe that this pain – what this ghastly, lingering pain had made her become – was to do with the whole of her, not just her genitals. And, yes, it was scary to risk being identified as a woman with this particular pain, of course it was. But readers must understand, they must. That you could be sensual, even uninhibited, ordinarily, yet still have sexual pain. That you could be smart and insightful, yet still be utterly disabled by seemingly senseless, never-ending symptoms. That you could be creative in the midst of it.
Because, what would he say if she told him the rest? Arthur, Emily and Isaac Baker Brown, the couple’s fateful encounter with the surgeon, a long narrative devoted to this ‘repugnant’ thing –
‘Alice.’
She jumped at Duncan’s voice. Came back to the buffeted room and the notes scattered over her desk, the laptop screen in hibernation.
‘Hi, babe,’ she said. ‘You okay?’ Then swore silently at herself. She’d been working on this, her sweetness, and the self-effacement and appeasement that fed it. Maybe it was the habit of her old self. Maybe it was guilt at her furtive movement away from him. The story that called to her and the quiet but discomfiting self she was becoming. The self that hovered beyond his reach.
‘Just wondering when you were coming out. What you wanted to do this afternoon.’
Duncan leaned against the doorframe, arrested by the unspoken rule: entry to each other’s study only by invitation. He had guarded his workroom jealously when she first moved in and showed her to her own separate room without discussion. She’d gotten the message.
Lately, she’d been escaping to her study on Saturdays. The strategy was partly to avoid Duncan, to delay the momentous talk she sensed they were teetering on the edge of. But it was also because she was a little besotted with it, the story that was slowly, slowly revealing itself, and because that story seemed intertwined with who she was herself becoming, or … no, making possible who she might become – first here, in her study, shaking herself free from her old self in the words she wrote. She wanted to protect this new Alice, shield her from Duncan’s categorical appraisal, and was glad, now, that his insistence on private spaces provided the freedom for her uncertain form to coalesce. Because it was clear who he preferred. The former Alice: the young, diligent, smart-as-a-whip Alice. The – yes, she must admit it – submissive Alice.
Now he lingered on the threshold as if requesting entry.
‘I wouldn’t mind just reading a bit more on those women,’ she said. ‘The ones I was telling you about. At the Salpêtrière in Paris – you know, Charcot.’ It was a lie, but a convincing one. That was what she had been doing, after all, only months before.
His sigh was heavy. ‘All those people are well dead, Alice.’
‘So is Hemingway,’ she shot back.
‘Yes, but his literature is still read. It’s an extraordinary cultural heritage.’ His lecturing mode. ‘The writing is alive; it still affects us. And it’s about all the big questions. Mortality. Love and loss. Redemption through nature, the wilderness.’
‘It’s also phallocentric – all about the male project.’
She’d almost said, ‘He also hated women.’ Duncan might be an expert on Hemingway, but she too knew the material. Her husband had been an effective tutor all those years ago.
‘That’s beside the point.’ His chin had that stubborn set to it. ‘Those Victorian doctors are outmoded, and the women in that hospital may well have been frauds, from what I can see.’
She felt herself reducing. Her conviction ebbing.
‘All those women with vulvodynia aren’t like Hemingway,’ he continued, his voice confident. ‘They’ve been forgotten.’
He’d already rehearsed this conversation, she realised, considered every response. Thought he had her covered, when all she had was heart and conviction. But she drew on that now, and found the truth.
‘Exactly. They’ve been forgotten, and they shouldn’t be. That’s part of my work.’
‘What, resurrecting dead people?’ It was his incredulous tone, the one that usually silenced her.
But not today.
‘Yes. Absolutely. Because they need to be resurrected. Remembered. Taken account of.’ She felt the heat rush into her cheeks. ‘Don’t you get it? Women are suffering unnecessarily and alone. Don’t you understand how unfair that is? How angry that makes me? Something has to be done!’
‘But by you?’
‘Yes, by me. Women are scared to speak about it.’
‘And that’s your responsibility – to speak for them?’
‘Well, yes. But it’s more than that. I’m excited by this work and where it’s taking me. I can’t even imagine going back to who I was, or to the things I used to write about.’
‘But what about us?’ He rushed on: ‘What about me?’
What about me? The words were stones flicked into a pond. In the silence she felt the ripples. Watched as the water settled into a new form.
‘Can you make half of the chapters hers? So you have both Arthur and Emily, maybe alternating?’
Alice scrolled through the pages. Imagined Emily’s words in them: her joy, then her confusion and despair.
‘I could, but I don’t really want the reader to be in her consciousness too much. I think it’ll be stronger if the reader sees the challenges to Arthur’s mindset – sort of … through Arthur.’ Alice considered for a moment. ‘I want Em to have some kind of voice, but a voice that also suggests a lack of agency, because of the times.’
S
ilence for a moment. Alice could almost hear Pen thinking. Then her voice through the speakerphone: ‘What about having chapters from Bea’s perspective, but focused on interactions between her and Emily?’
It was a good suggestion: Em might feel more able to express what she could no longer enjoy – even tolerate – to another woman, and the strategy would have the added advantage of giving Beatrice some kind of voice, presenting her as a feminist of sorts – an early suffragette, perhaps. But would that detract from Arthur’s voice? Dilute, too much, the effect Emily’s pain has on him, a man? Wasn’t that itself a feminist manoeuvre – having this different kind of man? Teasing out what had changed since then, but also what hadn’t?
‘Hmmm, maybe. It would be good to have that relationship between Em and Bea foregrounded … I’ll have to think about it more. Good idea, though!’
‘How’s it going otherwise?’
‘Good. I guess it helps that Arthur and Emily are so happy in the bit I’m writing. You know, newly married and all that. Arthur’s cock-a-hoop!’
They both laughed.
She didn’t really want to talk about what was to come in that world, especially not over the phone. And she didn’t want to tell her friend how the happy scenes that sprang to life in her imagination threw her own marriage into relief. What would Arthur do when he was tested? What had Duncan done?
And deeper even than these questions, others arriving as whispers at the edges of sleep: will Emily have the operation? Will Emily recover?
A knock reached Alice through her mobile. ‘Shit,’ Penny muttered. A man’s voice in the background, Pen’s response to him sifted through her fingers, then a muffled door closing. And Pen, her voice clear again: ‘Have to go, sweetie. Bloody work! See you on Saturday?’
‘Yep – and thanks, Pen.’
Alice saved the writing and turned off the laptop. Stretched her arms up and back, rolled her head on its base. The tension and ache below and within the same – always the same. But now she had another treatment to try. An acupuncturist. I thought you might be interested, Pen had offered, cos of the material on the net about some women responding well.
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