The Pickup

Chapter 11

You’ve surely heard of him if you are a middle-class woman, or man who lives with that woman, in this city.

Dr Archibald Charles Summers is the gynaecologist and obstetrician, MBBCh Witwatersrand University, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, St Mary’s London, Fellow of the Institute of Obstetrics, Boston Mass., with a practice which is, so to speak, always over-subscribed. Call him fashionable, but that would not be entirely just; he is much more than that, he gives more than any regular specialist fees could ever cover. Women talk about him to one another with a reverent sense of trust exceptional between patient and doctor even in this branch of medicine in which the doctor is priest, intermediary in the emergence of new life, and the woman is its active acolyte. As an obstetrician, he is each woman’s Angel Gabriel: his annunciation when he reads the scan of her womb — it’s a boy. And his shining bald head, outstanding ears and worshipful smile are the first things she sees when he lifts life as it emerges from her body. Between births and after reproduction is no longer part of his patients’ biological programming, he takes care — in the most conscientious sense — of the intricate system inside them that characterizes their gender and influences — often even decides — the crucial balance of their reactions, temperaments, on which depend the manner in which they can deal with the other man-woman relationships — the recognized ones with lovers and/or husbands.

Dr Archibald’s consulting rooms are a home: the studio portraits of his children as babies and graduates, the blowups of wild life photography, which is his hobby, posters proposing the beauties of the world from museums he has enjoyed on his travels. The bejewelled hands of his Indian receptionist note any change of address of the habituée patient greeted once again, there is a bustle of several nurses with motherly big backsides, Afrikaner and black, calling back and forth to one another, who receive for urine tests the wafers peed upon by the patient in the privacy of a blue-tiled bathroom where a vase of live flowers always stands on the toilet tank.

His patients — his girls, as he refers to them, whether aged twenty or seventy — talk of him to one another as Archie. I’ve got my six-month appointment with Archie due next week. I’ve just come from Archie — everything’s okay, he says, he’s pleased with me. And if everything is not okay, if rose thou art sick, Blake’s invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm and eats out the heart of the rose has invaded with a cancer, Archie with the knife in his healing hand will cut it out so that blooming continues, for Archie is the deliverer of life.

The doctor has been married to and in love with his wife for thirty years at least. His seraglio of patients has nothing in common with the passion for her which has never waned; the penetration of his expert right hand sheathed in latex into the vaginas of his patients, young and desirable, ageing and desexed, reduced to the subject of a kind of gut-exploration in the diagnostic divining of his fingertips, might be thought certain to end in a revulsion against women’s bodies. Or that — what about that? — the sight of parted thighs, the smooth heat that must be felt through the latex — all this should be rousing, a doctor is a male beneath his white coat. But neither professional hazard affects him, or ever has, even when he was a young man. He is unfailingly roused by the sight and scent and feel of his wife’s body alone (she who was so hard to win to himself) and it is the man, not the doctor, who enters her and journeys with her to their joyous pleasure, as if there is always accessible to her an island in warm seas like one of those they have travelled to, together. When he talks to his seraglio women after examination, and sits a few moments on the edge of the steel table where they lie, he may be in contact with the body whose exposure he has reverently re-covered under wraps, he will place a reassuring palm of the hand on the woman’s shrouded hip while he tells her how she should conduct herself, they discuss the pills she needs to take, the exercise essential to maintain herself. They are two human beings equal in their vulnerability to the trials of life (of which his girls often confess to him their own specific ones), considering together how best one may survive. She knows this is not remotely the antenna of sex touching her, and he knows she understands this. He does not need a nurse to be present — a precaution most gynaecologists employ — to reassure his girls of his respect.

‘Archie’ is also Uncle Archie, brother of Julie’s father.

He used to fetch Julie to come and play with her cousins when she was a small girl. If she could have chosen a father, then, it would have been him. It still would be. He was a Gulliver over which children could climb and play. Teasing and story-telling. Her father took her to events on appointed days, to children’s theatre and galas at his riding club; her mother did not think it necessary for both parents to be present, and stayed at home. Or perhaps she went to one of her lovers — but a child can’t be aware of these accommodations in her parents’ lives. (Nigel: poor man: if she happened to think of it, once herself adult.) She no longer had any contact with the cousins, but now and then, infrequent perhaps as her own presence, she would find this uncle among guests at her father’s Sunday lunches. Julie would make for him among the people who were strangers although she might know well who were these components of Danielle’s and her father’s set — someone she was spontaneously pleased to see again, one with whom she felt an understanding that she was out of place in the company of the house built for Danielle. The working lives, the temperaments of the brothers were widely different, but he was still part of her father’s roots and perhaps Danielle was one of Archie’s ‘girls’? Julie herself, of course, had never consulted him; with Gulliver, a gynaecological examination would have seemed, if not to him, to her, anyway, some sort of incest. She’s aware that she retains traces of the well-brought-up female’s prudery, false modesty, despite the free exchange of all the facts of life at The Table.

We must think of everyone, anyone who.

Who?

Before they go to the famous lawyer together — if he can be approached at all on the basis of his association with her father, who must not have the situation made known to him at all — there must be someone. Not a father, but in place of that surely outgrown dependency. Someone removed from themselves — interrogating themselves for a solution even in their silences, removed from her kind of conventional wisdom, the guidance she relies on from The Table. She’s going to speak to her uncle.

What uncle is that?

I’ve told you about him, my favourite grown-up, as a kid.

He knows people?

Well, he’s prominent …

So. If she won’t go to her father, she is showing some sense of family as those his people naturally seek and find action from when you are in trouble. She comes to be embraced by him before she sets out; he holds her a moment as one grants this to a child being sent off to school.

Although she has been privileged to be given an appointment at all she has to wait among women in the bright air-conditioned room with its images of elephant herds, lion cubs and Bonnard boating parties. Among women; but who among them, manicured hands resting secure on pregnant belly-mounds under elegantly-flowing clothes, diet-slim middles emphasized by elaborate belts, young faces perfectly reproducing the looks of the latest model on a magazine cover, ageing skin drawn tight beneath the eyes by surgery, elaborately-braided heads bent together — two black women, wives of the new upper class, laughing and chatting in their language; who, of all these can have any idea of what her version of a female complaint is, why she is here. In this, they are not even of the same sex. One of them smiles at her but her head is turned away as his is, often, in the EL-AY Café. Girls together. His girls. She has been amused at the way she has heard her uncle refer to them. But she is in her isolation.

The white-coated version of the uncle has risen from behind his wide desk and come to meet her with a hug. — At last you decide to see where I hang out, isn’t that it! Shall we have coffee, tea, there’s our little kitchen here, we’ve got them all, Earl Grey to Rooibos, you know, or is it juice, mango, apple—

There is the preamble of her apology for insisting on ousting some patient from an appointment, her thanks for his letting her walk in on him like this. — Apology! My dear Julie, how often do I get to see you! Oh I know from my own brood, the lives of generations fork out all over in different directions, the only crossroads we might meet at is at Nigel’s, and neither your way nor Sharon’s and mine run that route, we know. But that’s fine. Nigel’s such a Big Boy now, he’s done so well, and they’re wonderful together, he and Danielle — you and I must be glad about that, mmh?—

Sharon. At the mention of her uncle’s wife’s name she recognizes why, in her confusion of thinking of someone, anyone, it was not only the childhood bond that has brought her here. Archibald Charles Summers in his day betrayed all expectations of his choice of a girl from well-known Anglican Church families, members of country clubs and owners of holiday houses at the Cape where he was so popular as polo player and dance partner, in the old South Africa; it was when he was actually formally ‘engaged’ to what everyone agreed was a particularly lovely and suitable choice, a show rider, that he suddenly married a Sharon, a Jewess, daughter of a Lithuanian immigrant who had a luggage-cum-shoe-repair shop in the very area where the backroom night clubs, bar hang-outs, the L.A. Café and the garage with its shed accommodation for an illegal had taken over now. Echoes of appalled family reaction to this marriage had drifted to the child’s ears; for her, Sharon was the pretty redheaded mother of the cousins, dispenser of sweetmeats made of ginger and carrots, colour of her frizzy hair, you didn’t get anywhere else, whose embrace was more and more cushioned by plumpness over childhood years.

The coffee he had summoned (Be a dear, Farida, tell Thabi we’d like coffee — with biscuits, eh?) provided the comfortable transition of general interests. What career was she launched on now, she’s always so adventurous, quite right, there are many changes among people, everywhere in the country, new ways to be active, explore. And they laughed together when she dismissed her present occupation, the old con jacked up for what is called ‘new social mobility’, public relations. — Oh and he must tell her — he and Sharon had spent the long weekend at a certain guest farm in the Drakensberg — Sharon and I just became renewed, the walks in the bush, the hot sun and icy pools you can find where there’s no-one — you jump in, in the buff — if you don’t already know of it you two must take off and go there. He doesn’t know who the current partner may be, but he feels he ought to remember, from the most recent news he might have had in encounters with her.

Not much chance of that right now.

In her brief silence, although he never pries — his girls always find in him the right receptive moment when they can speak what must be broached — he finds the delicacy of an open, unsolemn response. — Now — you didn’t come to see me here rather than at home because of my bonny blue eyes—

He makes it easy.

Change. — There’s something — we, the man you perhaps don’t know of or if you don’t happen to have heard from Nigel that he was with me, there, one Sunday — we don’t know what to do about.—

— Oh, that’s it. My girl… All right. — The light from the window behind him, speckled by climbing plants on the sill, shines through those protruding ears, mapping fine red capillaries. That face is still the face of the father you would choose. The one who would do anything to help you.

And then she sees: he thinks she has come to him for an abortion.