In Newcastle, New South Wales, they have the highest hysterectomy rate in the entire world. There, healthy organs are whipped out by eager surgeons in the nick of precancerous time. There is even a special laboratory, a special building, where removed organs are stored, in a frozen state, so that students can examine them at their leisure. See, a perfect ovarian duct! See the tiny budding eggs: each one the potential half of a human being, that could have loved and been loved, and laughed and wept and planned and hoped. But what use is half a human being: the ageing female organ, everyone knows, no longer attracts the male. So whip it out: cut, nick, clip and sew: implant a source of oestrogen and the organ’s owner is good as new: a reliable baby-sitter for its grandchildren, not bleeding, given to moods, hot flushes or the distressing growth-gone-wild of cancer. It’s all in the best interests of the community: the operation prolongs life. Statistics prove it.
And here a dozen frozen wombs! Young man, young woman, you, who have no thought of death; of such thawing flesh was your nursery made. Perhaps here, on the slab, is the very one? Did not Mother have her womb out, only last year? And was the surgeon once her lover, when you were ten and she was young? You can thaw and re-freeze the organs only two or three times – after that the texture goes. Never mind: it has served its purpose. Grown a baby or two, and helped in the education of a new race of doctors. Doctors are good people. They do what they can. They have to live, of course, and the more wombs, ovaries and so forth they remove in a year, the richer they are, and the more peacefully the ponies of their little daughters graze in the escarpments that ridge the coast north of Sydney.
Loss and gain, loss and gain! Your loss, my gain.
Tandy was a doctor’s daughter herself: born and bred in Newcastle. As a child she had a pony called Toddy. Doctors’ daughters experience more sexual assaults at the hands of doctors than do the daughters of men in other professions. Now there’s an odd statistic! What can be the look in the doctor’s daughter’s eye? What can the glint be, that cries out for ravishment at the hands of such normally respectable folk? Oh Daddy, Daddy, pay me some attention! No matter what, no matter how unwelcome: anything will do! Anything! Are we to believe it?
Or perhaps doctors’ daughters just go to the doctor more often than other women? Surely that must be it. Doctors don’t usually treat members of their own family.
When Tandy was twelve, a paediatrician laid her on her back, divided her legs, put his hand up between them, tweaked and poked and explained that the sudden, terrifying bleeding signified only a ruptured hymen.
‘Good thing we live in a civilised country,’ he said. ‘No blood-stained wedding sheets required for our little Tandy. It’s riding that does it!’
‘But Toddy’s such a well-mannered little horse,’ said Mandy, Tandy’s mother. She had wide bright eyes and a gentle manner, as did her daughter.
‘Even so,’ said the paediatrician, ‘a sudden bump with the legs parted, and there you are. Virgin no more.’
He came to dinner sometimes. His hair was turning grey. Tandy thought he must have told his wife – a tall woman with hooded eyes – and she no doubt had told her friends. Virgin no more!
When she was fourteen and at school Tandy kept company with a fifteen-year-old boy, John Pierce. Such associations were frowned upon. It was back in the fifties, after all, and Tandy wore a gym slip and a panama hat. They loved each other, filled each other’s skies with a kind of pink sunrise glow.
‘Something’s happened to that girl,’ remarked her father, the doctor, over breakfast.
‘Oh my God!’ said her mother.
John Pierce’s mother complained to the school that Tandy Watson was preventing her son passing his exams. Authority had already observed their affection: the way they held hands, leant into each other. The school buzzed with rumours that they’d gone the whole way. Tandy’s mother’s eyes widened with alarm and fear as the police were mentioned: the possibility of punitive action. Fourteen-year-old girls, in those days, were supposed to be virgins, and anyone who suggested otherwise to them went to prison.
‘Good God,’ said Tandy’s father, ‘let’s find out. Open your legs, girl.’
Tandy did, up on the patients’ couch. Tandy’s father frowned, paled, consulted with Tandy’s mother.
‘But, darling,’ said Tandy’s mother, ‘that business with the horse a couple of years back – had you forgotten?’
He had, of course.
‘Goddamned horse,’ he said. ‘Did you or didn’t you, girl?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t and neither did he.’
‘Why couldn’t you say so before?’ he demanded, irate, although nobody had thought to ask her before. ‘I believe you, girl. Get your pants back on.’
And she did, and her mother, lying, announced her virgo intacta to all the world, but Tandy lost all interest in John Pierce, and had to think hard before saying anything to her father. Nothing seemed to come naturally any more, between him and her. Perhaps he knew it: he hrummed and hraaed a lot when Tandy was in the room.
Tandy wanted to be a doctor but her father said it wasn’t a fit profession for a girl: there were too many terrible sights to be seen, for anyone in that line of business. Tandy went to college to do English literature.
The college gave all its students twice-yearly medical checkups. The rather elderly doctor always had Tandy strip right off so he could palpate her breasts. He gave her internal examinations, too, putting his hand first into a thin rubber glove, then into her to pinch and peek and pry. And then a rectal examination with a light at the end of a metal tube. She’d scream and he’d say crossly, ‘just relax.’ Doctors always seemed to Tandy to be rather cross. After the fourth of these examinations she checked with her friend Rhoda, who had no breasts to speak of, and discovered that Rhoda was allowed to keep her clothes on and that her inside could do without checking, so after that Tandy ignored the official reminder cards and left her health to luck rather than science.
She raised the question of medical training once more at home. She thought there should be more women in the medical profession.
‘Good God, girl,’ said her father, ‘the thing to do is to marry a doctor, not be one. A good doctor’s wife is almost as valuable in the community as a good doctor.’
Tandy’s mother had good solid-thighed legs, from running up and down stairs to answer the telephone. And indeed there was nothing she didn’t know about the early symptoms of mumps, measles and chicken pox, and the management of these diseases. She had a fair, Northern skin, and died rather suddenly from a melanoma, a cancer common in Australia. A mole on her hand changed shape and size and her husband was too busy to notice it until it was too late to be operable. He had become an excellent golfer, and was playing in an interstate competition, and had a lot on his mind.
‘Even if you had noticed,’ said his doctor friends, comforting him, for he was very distressed, ‘chances are she wouldn’t have made it. And how old was she?’
Forty-nine, and coming up to the menopause. Better out of the way, the implication was. After the forties, from a gynaecologist’s point of view, it’s downhill all the way, tinker as you may with a woman’s insides. Bleeding and drying and fibroids and cysts and backache – you name an unhealthy state, the woman has it. She comes to you complaining, fills the surgery with dulled voice and reproachful eyes. The age of child-bearing is past. All meaning gone, for a woman.
Tandy’s father married his receptionist, who was only twenty-nine, and adored him, and raised another family.
‘I want to be a doctor,’ reiterated Tandy. ‘No daughter of mine...’ reiterated her father. ‘I’m not paying for that. Why don’t you be a nurse?’
So she did. One year into her nursing course she became pregnant by a medical student who put his faith in coitus interruptus and could not marry her, for various reasons, and Tandy had to have an abortion; at that time a firmly and criminally illegal act. She went to see the local abortionist, a general practitioner known to feel sorry for girls in distress, when she was eight weeks pregnant. He would not accept money, saying he performed these operations from principle, rather than monetary gain: he believed in sex as the great emotional and physical cure-all, and required her to sleep with him before curettage, in order to speed the healing process. She consented, since it seemed to mean more to him than it did to her. He was very short-sighted and kept his pebble lenses on during love-making, saying that seeing was as important as touching. He reproached her for her lack of sexual response and delayed the operation until he had brought her fully to it. He showed her obscene photographs which failed to move her, though they did quite surprise her. Then he was obliged to call his cousin in to have sex with her while he watched, and she feigned the most enthusiastic response, since by now she was ten weeks pregnant and the operation getting daily more dangerous.
When he finally performed it, he did it safely, painlessly and kindly, and she healed with amazing speed. But then she was a healthy girl, and apart from the intimate relationship that doctors seemed to have with her private parts would never have had to visit one at all.
She qualified as a nurse, then as a sister, and could have become matron before she was thirty; but then, as her father remarked, who would have married her? So she stayed a nursing sister, and married an engineer, Roger, and had two children, and apart from the usual peeking and prying, enemas, shaving, cutting and sewing involved in the safe delivery of babies in Newcastle, kept her insides to herself for a considerable time. Roger was an active and pleasant lover, and did not require fellatio, or practise cunnilingus, and they never had the light on, and she managed to separate out the medical aspects of her reproductive organs from the warm, creative, sexual pleasure they now gave her, three or four times a week, during her thirties and forties.
Perhaps Roger was a little boring: perhaps life was rather quiet? She felt untapped, unused: as if she were the kernel of a walnut, and it was withering in the shell, instead of growing plump and interestingly formed and ripe. Roger watched television and played squash: the two boys played football and tennis. No one talked, she sometimes felt: not really talked. They exchanged information, that was all. Life was lived on the surface: sometimes the flesh between her legs tingled in an expectation that infused her whole body, and made her dance and sing and then weep. The boys thought she was mad, but then everyone’s mother at a certain age went mad. Everyone knew it. Women did.
Tandy took a part-time job at the local hospital, where they specialised in the care of the handicapped; a place where men lived whose legs grew round their necks, or who had no arms or legs at all, and women with hands grown into claws, and children with brains that still thought better than most, and felt more than most, but could not move limbs, or mouths, or eyes.
How lucky I am to be whole, thought Tandy, even though no longer young, and fell in love with Dr Walker, the medical superintendent, who did not get on with his wife. And he fell in love with her and they managed a weekend or so together, which in a way was a pity because after that she knew what she had missed. She saw that the sunrise glow in the morning of her life, which should have grown stronger and stronger, to suffuse her whole life with a brilliant sexual light, had been deflected, and the day clouded over, and now there were just glimmers, in and out, of a muted radiance.
He went back to his wife and Tandy to her husband, but she told him: which was a mistake. You can trust husbands to love you so far, no more. They, too, have intimations of lost ecstasy. He paced; she brooded.
‘Perhaps we would be happier apart,’ he said. He was forty-seven; she was forty-four. Either life was going to go on in the suburban house, ordinary and humdrum, eventually to run down into retirement, ill-health and death: or else he would change his job, move out of Newcastle, gain some new access of health and energy, jolt himself into life again. By sleeping with another man she had broken the ties of custom: she had chosen freedom, now he would do the same.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘Very well, go. But we’ll stay friends?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And I’ll send back the money.’
She had given up the part-time job at the hospital. She found it too painful: not just the sight of so much distressed flesh but the sight of her beloved; the thought of what could have been.
Living apart from Roger was more difficult than she had imagined. She suffered from loneliness, especially in the evenings. Listening to the music she loved, instead of the TV programmes he chose, was not, in the end, sufficient compensation for the simple lack of his presence.
She asked him to come back after six months.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve found someone else.’
Well, she was still an attractive woman. Other women’s husbands sought her out. She decided to become a doctor. She enrolled at the medical school. They hummed and haaed at her age and sex, but accepted her. She loved the work: it came easily to her.
I am happy, she thought. One of her tutors asked her out to coffee, then took her to the pictures. They started sleeping together. He was forty, seven years younger than she, but he said age was irrelevant. They made love with the light on, and she learned to trust him.
One night she had a severe pain in her right side.
‘You’d better see someone,’ said her tutor, Peter, and she agreed that indeed she had better. All her contemporaries had gynaecologists whom they visited, on principle, once every six months, who would check over their insides and pronounce them healthy, or unhealthy, and occasionally would ‘just open them up’ – for they were licensed surgeons too – ‘to see what’s going on in there!’
But Tandy kept forgetting to go: in the end they had even stopped sending the reminder cards.
The women of Newcastle have wonderfully criss-crossed stomachs, what with the caesarians, the appendectomies and a host of openings up. And the ponies are plentiful and plump on the hillsides, and the little doctors’ daughters laugh and sing, and if the grass is spotted with blood, who notices?
The gynaecologist was tall and fair, and well-qualified and new in Newcastle.
‘He’s wonderful,’ her friends said. ‘So kind and gentle and understanding. A conservative surgeon.’ That meant though he opened you up he did not take bits away if he could possibly help it. The women of Newcastle worried a little: wondered why they had more abdomen scars per head of female population than did women anywhere else in the entire world, so conservative surgeons, these days, did better than anyone else. There were a few practising women medicos, but hardly any women surgeons. Women, custom and practice decreed, do not make good surgeons.
‘You look familiar,’ said Tandy to the gynaecologist, as she lay upon the couch, on her side, knees parted.
‘Relax, relax! How can I examine you if you stay so stiff?
‘Good God,’ he said, ‘it’s Tandy.’
Dr John Pierce, the golden youth from long ago, from sunrise days: thin fair hair and lines of disappointment round his mouth, now that the sun was creeping down the sky.
Well, everyone gets older. He was more shocked than she: he had held an image of her in his mind, a beautiful, laughing girl, with long, thick hair. One day she’d loved him; the next she hadn’t. He never knew why. Tossed her head and walked by, and wounded him for ever.
‘Good God,’ she said, ‘it’s John Pierce.’
‘A long time ago,’ he said. ‘Do try and relax.’
She tried.
‘I think it’s just a cyst,’ he said, ‘causing the trouble. Probably benign, but we’d better open you up and make sure: and of course there are a lot of fibroids here. But then in a woman of your age that’s to be expected. How old? Forty-seven? Good God!’
He was forty-seven too. If it’s old for a woman it’s old for a man but that wasn’t the way he wanted to see it. Does anyone? He was married with three children and three ponies, and a receptionist he lusted after, and wouldn’t have to lust after if only he had true love, and hadn’t lost it long ago to Tandy Watson, who’d tossed her head one day and broken his heart. He blamed her.
He opened Tandy up: and took out everything. Womb, fallopian tubes, ovaries. Snip, snip. Forceps, nurse. (The nurse had glowing eyes above her mask, which reminded him of the past.) He sat by Tandy’s bed while she came out of the anaesthetic and told her what he’d done.
‘I thought we’d better be on the safe side,’ he said.
‘But what was wrong with them?’
‘Well, nothing,’ he said, ‘but wombs are a great source of trouble to women your age.’
‘You mean you took out three perfectly healthy organs?’
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘This cyst was benign but the next one mightn’t be. And I gave you an oestrogen implant so you’ll be better off than you were before. Oestrogen slows the ageing process. Well, look,’ he said nervously, for her eyes were enormous and witchlike, ‘what use are those organs to a woman of fifty? They’ve served their purpose. They’re no use to anyone.’
‘Forty-seven,’ she said. ‘Those organs are me. I am nothing, now. You have turned off the light. No one asked you to: no one said you could: you have taken it upon yourself to turn out the light of my life.’
He thought she might sue, but she didn’t. She didn’t want anyone to know what had happened. She was dull and depressed for a good six months, shocked and zombie-like.
She split up with Peter, who of course had to know, and blamed it on the loss of her organs. He was only forty: what would he want with a half-woman of nearly fifty, without womb, ovaries or fallopian tubes? The few friends she told assured her that in fact no harm had been done: that Peter would have gone anyway; that many women sought out the operation: that she looked, thanks to the oestrogen, slimmer and younger and prettier than before. But Tandy was not convinced. She gave up medical school: it was too much trouble. She became a grandmother and was glad it was a boy.
‘They have a better life than girls,’ she said, admiring the contained and tidy infant penis.
When she saw John Pierce in the street she would cross the road to avoid him. He seemed to her to walk in a pool of dark. But then she had, after all, turned the light of his life off, carelessly, long ago. She’d slept with him and then denied it to everyone, and failed to love him, and spoiled his life, and he couldn’t forgive that. Could anyone, really, man or woman, be expected to forgive?