The consultant had already seen me twice in his hospital clinic, but he had asked me to bring Jonathan to his private consulting rooms in Seymour Place. He liked to do Mr and Mrs together. He talked blandly and interminably over the top of his expensive glasses, intoning soothingly. He himself, he said, could see no striking and tangible reason why Mrs Browne should be unable to conceive a child. He addressed himself to Jonathan who appeared to have dominion, in his eyes, over my substandard private parts. I stopped listening to him from time to time and began to amuse myself by imagining the situation reversed. Were Jonathan to have consulted him, let us say, over a hernia in the groin, or retreating testicles, would he have been addressing me over Jonathan’s head in this way? Does one man ever discuss, over another man’s head, the problem of an incompetent penis? Mrs Browne’s cervix did display evidence of considerable surgical repair, he said. And there was a significant area of scar tissue in what he called ‘the front passage’, but he had known women in such cases go on successfully to bear subsequent children by Caesarean section. Mr Browne would, he hoped, indulge him if he ventured to suggest that it might not altogether be advisable to rule out the possibility of emotional factors inhibiting conception in this case. That, taking into account Mrs Browne’s highly regrettable previous experience of childbirth, and her experience of death – not once but twice (here he folded his hands like a clergyman and paused briefly to cast an eye over his notes) – for we must not disregard the matter of her father’s untimely death, he said, which occurred when Mrs Browne was, ah, was, let me see, was it nine years old? The sentence had no end. It was nothing but qualifying clauses. He clothed his propositions endlessly and skilfully in yards of wool. I had inherited from my mother a habit of treating men of the medical profession with an almost obsequious deference. Clean pillowcases for a home visit and best knickers for the surgery. One always apologised for calling out one’s GP to a fever, making the assumption that what one’s doctor both liked and deserved was patients who didn’t get sick. It was therefore a marvellous joy for me to watch Jonathan calmly take apart this high priest of female plumbing.
‘She didn’t come here to have you iron out her head,’ he said. ‘She came here to have you repair her reproductive equipment. What she wants to know is whether that is a thing which your particular tribe of mechanics can or cannot do. Spare us the O level psychology.’ The consultant, to my very great surprise, was unshakeable in his excessive politeness. He absolutely accepted Mr Browne’s point, he said. Absolutely.
‘Goldman,’ Jonathan said. ‘Goldman is my name.’ The consultant paused for a moment and looked again at his notes. Mr Goldberg was absolutely right, he said, in that he and his colleagues could never, of course, altogether be sure that there were not factors beyond what they perceived, which inhibited conception, but he would like to stress, he said, that in this case, given the circumstances, Mrs Goldberg might, subconsciously (and he would like to say altogether understandably), be balking at the alarming possibility of experiencing, once again, the agony of pain and death.
‘Garbage,’ Jonathan said. Since I assumed we were about to be thrown into the street I gathered up my handbag in readiness and sat on the edge of my chair, but the consultant waited for Jonathan to proceed.
‘You have made no test of her response to pain and her fear of death,’ Jonathan said. ‘You haven’t locked her up with maneating rats, for example, or made her walk the plank. You are fobbing her off with a hypothesis in the absence of knowledge. Nobody will blame you for your absence of knowledge, but the cover-up is dishonest. A collection of Italian butchers, who operate under the badge of your profession, have carved her up incompetently and your instinct is to make less of this and more of her psyche, because you are all members of the same closed shop. Blame the patient and save your face.’ He turned to me. ‘I can’t sit here and listen to any more of this, Kath,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait for you outside.’ He swept out, leaving me behind. Jonathan was always a master of the exit and entrance. Like Mr Knightley, he appears in doorways, knocking mud from his boots. As a card-carrying female masochist, I find both this, and his terrific cheek, quite essential to my sense of wellbeing.
The consultant determined to be protective towards me, which was embarrassing in the extreme. I could see that if I stayed much longer, I would find myself in the marriage guidance department. He hoped I would forgive him, he said, but might he be permitted to ask whether these outbursts were typical of Mr Browne’s behaviour? Poor Mr Browne. He couldn’t have been more innocuous.
‘Only when he’s on acid,’ I said, treading in my master’s steps, before I left. In the waiting room, Jonathan was sitting among a collection of women and reading Cosmopolitan. He was the only man I knew who had always had the confidence to read women’s magazines in public. He was reading the Girl’s Crystal Annual the day I met him. I went up to him and kissed his cheek.
‘Bolshie, aren’t you?’ I said. Jonathan looked up.
‘Hello, Mrs Goldberg,’ he said. ‘What a timorous creature you are. You let a hack like that trample all over your subtle and lovely head. Jesus, I can get psychology like that in the barber’s shop for free.’ Jonathan, being a short-haired male, had developed the conviction that if people got their hair cut more often they wouldn’t need psychiatrists.
‘I took a stand,’ I said. ‘I told him you were on acid.’
‘What?’ Jonathan said.
‘I thought you’d be proud of me,’ I said.
Jane loved my account of Jonathan’s behaviour. She fed us tea and chocolate brownies that afternoon and laughed with delight.
‘Good for you, Jontikins,’ she said. ‘Now tell me, Katherine, why is it that we need men to say “garbage” for us? Why don’t we say it for ourselves? I think perhaps Annie will say it. I have great faith in Annie. And she’ll be utterly charming with it too. Still, I have to say, it’s got you no nearer having a baby, has it? Perhaps you could adopt one? It may well require you to get married, of course, but you couldn’t have any serious objections to that, could you? All it takes is a registrar to mumble a few civic proprieties. You may borrow my ring for the occasion if you’re short of funds.’ Jacob slapped his brow.
‘Jesus, Janie,’ he said, ‘you can’t say these things to people. Have you no sense of decency?’
‘I merely thought it expedient if they wanted to adopt a baby,’ she said.
‘There’s another thing,’ Jacob said. ‘Adopted babies are brown. Brown babies are admittedly very nice, but only in Hampstead. These people are proposing to live in the Irish Republic among the bigoted Catholic peasantry. You want Katherine to carry a brown baby on her hip? She’ll have all the local women crossing themselves in the market-place as she goes by.’ Jane smiled.
‘She’ll have that happen in any case,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t have failed to notice that Katherine is glossy.’
‘But think, Jane, how we’d look in the agency files,’ I said.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said loyally. Loyalty was one of the many good things about Jane. ‘I think you are both perfectly lovely. If I were choosing parents for myself I should have no hesitation at all in choosing you and Jonathan.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Ma,’ Jonathan said. ‘Of course we’ll get married if it’s any use, but Kath is a lapsed Methodist who’s done time in the nuthouse. She’s had an infant, now dead, got upon her out of wedlock by a married Venetian. And me? Look at me, for Godssake. I’m divorced. My kid is halfway across the world. I live off my girlfriend in a dubious attic.’
‘By another reading you are also very respectable, Jont,’ she said. ‘I admit it still surprises me to say it. You are a pleasant young man with a good degree from Oxford. You have a novel in the press. Your girlfriend is manifestly a woman of good sense, for all she’s had a bad time in the past. You own a dear little house. Your father is this dear old white-headed philosopher here. I think all you need do is get married.’
‘And not say “garbage” to the social workers,’ I said.
‘And not say “garbage” to the social workers, of course,’ Jane said. ‘Come on now, Jonathan. Ask her nicely.’ Jonathan laughed.
‘Kath,’ he said. ‘Yellow stockings; hand on heart; Scouts’ honour. Will you marry me?’