B07BDJY6Y9, page 19
At some point, a doctor arrives, and prods my stomach, and asks me to rate the pain out of ten.
‘It is a ten when I am there,’ I say.
‘When you’re there?’
‘I’m not there right now.’
‘OK.’
Later, a doctor appears with a medical student. ‘We’re just going to take a look at your tummy. Is that all right?’ She directs the young man to examine me.
He is nervous and uncertain. ‘Should I expose the patient?’ he says, to her, and she says, ‘Well, ask the patient.’
‘May I expose you now?’ he says, and I agree contentedly to let him lift my shirt up, because I am not there, and in any case, I am wearing a bra underneath it. His cold fingers prod my ribs, my diaphragm and then hit the site of the pain. For a brief moment, I come back to myself enough to yell. ‘Does that hurt?’ he asks. ‘How much out of ten?’
Later still, my father is there, staring into my pupils. I tell him I’ve had morphine and he says, ‘Yes, I can see you have.’
I fall asleep, and when I am next awake I hear my father talking to a man. ‘There are no beds,’ the man is saying. And at some point even later – my father says it is still Saturday – I am wheeled on my trolley into a lift, and then along some corridors, and then into a small room, past another woman on another trolley, and left there.
‘We think it’s your appendix,’ a doctor says, ‘but we need to send you for a scan. When was the last time you ate?’ he asks.
‘Yesterday,’ I say.
‘And drank?’
‘This morning.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘We’ll have your scan done, and then get you into surgery as soon as we can.’
But the scan is not done. Someone arrives and reports that it cannot be done at the weekend; there is nobody who will do it. I hear a whispered, irritated conversation between two voices on the other side of a curtain.
‘We have to operate without the scan.’
‘We can’t operate without the scan.’
I lie on the trolley for three days. They are always just about to operate, which means I can’t have food or drink, but then, at the last minute, there is always a reason why they can’t. At one point on the Sunday evening, they decide they really are about to take me to theatre and just need to do some blood tests before I go, but discover somebody forgot to replace my drip that morning, and I am so dehydrated that the doctor can’t find a vein.
By Monday, I am unsure where I am. My parents and friends have come in and out, and each time I open my eyes I am not sure who will be there. It is for this reason that when I look up to see Mrs Gaskell perched at the end of my trolley, I am not really surprised. She is one of many visitors, real or otherwise.
‘Mrs Gaskell?’ I say.
‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘Just look at you. What a state.’
‘You really need to work on your trolleyside manner,’ I say.
‘And you really need to brush your hair.’
‘I wrote about you,’ I tell her. ‘I wrote all about you in Rome.’
Her face softens then, and she says, as I knew she would, because, of course, she is in my head and I am making it all up, ‘It was the tip-top point of my life.’
When I come round from the surgery I am shivering. I can’t stop. My teeth are chattering and I am shaking so hard that the side of the trolley is jangling against the drip stand. A nurse brings a tube that blows hot air under the covers, and it feels almost like having the morphine again: a cocooning relief. I let my head fall back. Gradually, the trembling subsides.
‘Did it go OK?’ I ask the woman who is standing by my pillow. ‘Did they take out my appendix?’
‘The doctor will come and speak to you soon,’ she says, and I know at once that something is wrong, from the way she won’t meet my eye, from the way she doesn’t say, as I overhear someone telling the patient on the other side of the curtain, ‘Everything went well. It was all fine.’
‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘Please can you tell me what happened?’
I wait all night and half of the next day to find out. Then a consultant comes round with my file, and explains that the cause of the pain was not, in fact, my appendix, but my right ovary, which had swollen to the size of a grapefruit and twisted five times on the fallopian tube.
‘Have you noticed any other symptoms recently? Frequent urination? Back pain?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, both of those things.’
‘That’s fairly typical if you have an ovary the size of a grapefruit,’ she says.
There seems to me nothing typical at all about having an ovary the size of a grapefruit. ‘How do we fix it?’ I ask. ‘What happens now?’
‘We had to take it out,’ the consultant says. ‘It was dead. It was gangrenous. There was no viable tissue left.’
‘You took out my ovary?’
I think I might cry – I want to cry – but at that moment, my entire torso seizes up with pain and all I can do is lie there, paralysed, trying not to breathe. This ‘discomfort’, the doctor says, is normal after the kind of surgery I’ve had, and will pass. I wait. She waits. And then it does pass, and the tears come.
‘I still have one left?’ I ask, and she says, yes, I do, and that as far as they know it is healthy, but that, because I have all my eggs in one basket, it would be wise to consider, as a matter of some urgency, my ‘fertility options’.
‘A grapefruit,’ I tell Mrs Gaskell, who is back, standing beside my trolley, close enough this time that I can really scrutinize her. ‘A grapefruit. I did not see that coming.’
‘Nor did I,’ she says.
Everything about her is strange: her clothes, the cut of them and the way they sit around her body; the shape of her waist and bust, sculpted with stays; the way she smells, musty and sweat-tinged.
‘I must seem so bizarre to you,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says, casting her eyes over the hair I already know she finds unacceptably messy, over the hospital gown, which is still blood-stained from the surgery; nobody has come to change it yet.
‘I’m a single woman with a single ovary,’ I tell her. ‘I’m thirty years old. I have to consider my fertility options as a matter of some urgency.’
‘I see.’
‘Max is gone. My right ovary is gone. Should I just have a baby by myself, Mrs Gaskell? Is that the right thing to do?’
‘I think an unmarried life may be to the full as happy, in process of time, but I think there is a time of trial to be gone through with women, who naturally yearn after children,’ says Mrs Gaskell. I have heard this from her before, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton.
‘That’s not true any more, though,’ I tell her. ‘Unmarried doesn’t have to mean childless. What I’m saying is, should I do this alone? Should I use a sperm donor, and have a baby, alone?’
There is no way Mrs Gaskell can comprehend the question I am asking. From where she sits, beside my trolley, and yet still, somehow, deep inside the nineteenth century, there is no such thing as sperm donation, there is no such thing as a baby without a man.
My gynaecological situation, it occurs to me now, is a perfect metaphor for my position on reproduction. Half of me, the left ovary, is primed and ready to go: I want to have a baby; I have always imagined that I would eventually be a mother, although until recently I have also assumed that Max would be part of the process; I am ready, nonetheless, for that ‘eventually’ to be now. The other half of me, the right ovary, is a twisted, agitated mess that has contemplated the same questions – motherhood, single or otherwise – and reached a different conclusion; has not yet adjusted to the breakup, or the recalibration of my future that it prompted; is convinced that having a baby alone will mean the end of my career; is in pain.
Perhaps I have said all this aloud, because Mrs Gaskell murmurs, ‘The right ovary isn’t there any more. The right ovary died. It’s gone.’
The right ovary is gone.
‘What would you do, Mrs Gaskell? If you were doing it all over again, would you marry Mr Gaskell, and have children? Would you do it, looking back, knowing what you know now?’
She sits down in the chair by the window, and folds her hands in her lap. ‘All I wanted was to tell stories,’ she says. ‘I was a writer. I would have been a writer no matter what had happened, Mr Gaskell or not, Marianne or not, Meta or not. It was as unchangeable as any solid fact – as unchangeable as Mr Gaskell’s hatred of foreign food, as unchangeable as factory smoke over Plymouth Grove, as unchangeable as a dead ovary.’
‘Yes, I can see that.’
‘That is not true for everyone, of course. There are countless women who would have written if their lives had only been different: if there had not been a man, or if there had not been a baby.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you have a hand in all of this. You have a choice to make, true, but once you have made it, there are more choices still: how you will act, how you will write, and when. What I meant to suggest is that you can address these questions as the author of your experiences, rather than just the critic.’
The word she alights on, so out of place in the fluorescent-lit, sanitized hospital room – critic – makes me half sit up in bed, only to discover that post-surgery this is not a movement I can easily make. I yelp with pain.
‘What’s the matter?’ she says.
‘Mrs Gaskell!’ I say. ‘I have to leave the hospital!’
‘Whatever for?’
‘My viva! My viva is next week. I have to go home and prepare. I have to be ready to answer questions about you.’
2016
Viva
‘The viva voce,’ reads the King’s website, ‘(literally: live voice, or by the living voice) is an oral examination whereby your Ph.D. work is examined by two examiners, usually specialists in the field.’ By my living voice, I will defend my thesis against the attacks of an art historian who has published a book on the relationship between contagious diseases and artistic influence in nineteenth-century Rome, and a Romanticist who specializes in female travellers in Italy.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ asks Joyce, when I call her to let her know I’ve been in hospital. ‘We can postpone.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘I want to get it done. I need it to be done.’
Much as I’m dreading my viva, I’m appalled by the idea that it could be cancelled at the last minute. The three years of labour, anxiety and anticipation I spent working on my Ph.D. are irrevocably bound up in my mind with my relationship with Max. I am desperate to move on from my stultifying days in the library, and equally desperate to move on from him. So, the week after I am discharged from hospital, I shuffle into the Virginia Woolf building, into the same office where, eighteen months previously, I had my upgrade interview, and submit to another round of questioning.
‘We understand you haven’t been well,’ says the Romanticist, as I take my seat.
This gives me hope that my examiners will take pity on me, and go easy on my work. In this, and in many other things, which I wrote in my thesis, I am rapidly proved incorrect.
Issues my examiners have with my research:
— Inadequate justification for choice of subjects: why have I chosen to write about Gaskell, Hosmer, Browning, Barrett Browning, Hawthorne, Story and not, say, Powers, Akers, Landor?
— Inadequate justification for choice of timeframe: what is significant about the mid-century as opposed to, say, the first half? Why does it tail off so vaguely in the 1890s?
— Inadequate demonstration that Rome was different to other sites of artistic collaboration in Italy. And why, in a thesis that claims to be about Rome, is there a peculiar and irrelevant section towards the end about Rodin and modernist sculpture in Paris?
— Inadequate critical distinction between fiction and non-fiction sources.
— There are some strange, misplaced commas in my bibliography.
I listen to their complaints, and tell them why I think they are wrong, although I do not say what I believe to be the correct answer to most of their questions, with the exception of the comma issue: ‘Mrs Gaskell.’ I have chosen to write about Mrs Gaskell, and the people she knew and met in Rome. I have chosen to write about the mid-century because that is when Mrs Gaskell was there. I have focused on Rome because Mrs Gaskell was focused on Rome. It was the tip-top point of her life. Right at the beginning of this process, three years ago, I picked a subject, and that subject, it became clear, was Mrs Gaskell.
The examiners do not seem pleased. I am not putting up a particularly good fight; I’m still on a lot of painkillers and my jeans, as I sit at the table, are digging into the incision in my stomach through which my ovary was removed: a zig-zag that descends from my belly button.
The hands on the clock on Joyce’s shelf have leapt forward since I last looked. We have been doing this for nearly two hours, this back-and-forth of aggressive question and defensive answer. I realize that it is not going well, that they don’t like the thesis, that three years of work, and all that time I spent with Mrs Gaskell – the days in the Rare Books Reading Room at the British Library, at Columbia, at the Harry Ransom Center – were wasted. Those reasons I gave Max as we wandered through the Louvre (a Ph.D. will help my writing; a Ph.D. will help me get a job; a Ph.D. will mean I’m an expert in something); none of them will mean much if, at the end of the process, I don’t actually get my Ph.D.
‘I think we’ll leave it there,’ says the Romanticist, and then, suddenly, it is over, and they have left the room.
They haven’t told me the outcome, which I expected they would do at the end. I sit at the table for a moment, letting it sink in: they haven’t told me the outcome because they consider it perfectly obvious, from the issues they have raised and the tenor of the interrogation, that I have failed. I have failed.
I push myself up to a standing position, a slow and painful process, and limp to the bathroom, where I lock myself in a cubicle to cry. I can’t face Joyce, or the other Ph.D. students, who will be waiting in the graduate student lounge, anxious to hear what happened, what I was asked, what it was like. I wish Mrs Gaskell would come to me again, but I’m not nearly spaced out or drugged up enough to summon her, and instead I sit on the toilet and confront the fact that I have let her down.
My phone buzzes in my bag. I don’t want to look at it. My parents, brother, friends, are waiting to hear how the viva went, and I am going to have to tell them that I failed.
It’s a text message from Joyce: ‘Congratulations! Can’t find you to tell you in person, but you passed. Apparently the examiners forgot to let you know?’
1865
Mortis
Two things happened after you died.
First: Meta wrote to Mr Norton, clarifying, not that clarification was required, that you had always loved him. ‘She was so faithful to you – so unswerving in her affection, not only to you, but to all that she had known through you; in her [ . . . ] longing for freedom and right to triumph in her “dear America”.’
Second: Mr Norton’s daughter was born and named after you. You never reached America, but Elizabeth Gaskell Norton was a true child of the New World. She grew up in a big wooden house called Shady Hill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent her summers in Ashfield, roaming the dark American forests you dreamt of. Like her father, like you, she grew up to have famous friends: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling.
I was going to write, ‘It never occurred to you that you were going to die.’ I was going to point out how busy you were, writing your new novel, Wives and Daughters, which was being serialized in the Cornhill Magazine. You were in the middle of purchasing and renovating a house in Hampshire called The Lawn, which you did without Mr Gaskell’s knowledge or sanction. He wouldn’t approve, so you planned to present it to him as a fait accompli: it was a way of forcing departure from Manchester after more than thirty years of barely tolerating your residence in the city.
You wrote to Mr Norton to tell him about it: ‘I did a “terribly grand thing”! and a secret thing too! only you are in America and can’t tell. I bought a house and 4 acres of land’. It was bullish and deliberate of you, using your own money for your own ends; you lived to the last at the very boundaries of what was acceptable within the kind of marriage people did not gossip about.
You were busy looking forward, but it’s possible this was because you were looking beyond yourself, your own lifetime. The Lawn would be a home for your unmarried daughters after you were gone – would provide the security that enabled Meta to paint, and to become a mountaineer, and never need a husband to provide for her. You were busy looking forward because your mind, increasingly, dragged you back. Your perpetual nostalgia had become chronic over the past year.
Perhaps, after all, in the midst of your projects and plans, it had occurred to you that you were going to die. The last letter you wrote to Mr Norton seems so self-consciously a last letter, but it’s possible I only read it that way because I can see there are no more pages in the book, that after your sign-off on that final note – ‘with dear love to you all believe me ever your true and affectionate friend, E. C. Gaskell’ – is the back cover, red and fraying.
Sometimes I dream I go over to Boston and see you and Susan and the little ones. But I always pass into such a cold thick damp fog, on leaving the river at Liverpool that I never get over to you. But my heart does; and I send my dear dear love.
Those were very happy Roman days – I have loved America ever since.
But life never flows back, – we shall never again have the old happy days in Rome, shall we?
In the absence of touch, taste, smell, sound, all you shared with Mr Norton were memories and words. Across the Atlantic, you wrote to each other, you read each other from afar, and still, sometimes words failed. When Mr Norton read Sylvia’s Lovers, along with its American dedication, he sent you a letter of praise. But even then there was a gap in his writing, in place of what he meant to say. Words, he wrote, were insufficient:
