The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (14 page)

"Nerve power?" She repeated the unfamiliar phrase.

"It is brought on by peripheral irritation. It is all too common among women of every position in life."

"But—but why?"

Mr. Baker Brown shook his head sympathetically. "You know from your own experience that the female body is an exquisitely sensitive mechanism. This loss of nerve power, this hysteria—"

She flinched from the word.

He put his warm hand over hers. "I don't use the word in the layman's sense of female delusions. Hysteria is all too real a disease. You are a respectable young woman who has fallen victim to a terrible, but curable disease."

"Curable?" she repeated.

"Yes, indeed. By means of a revolutionary new treatment that I first pioneered in this very clinic two years ago. Recently I treated a working woman like yourself, a dressmaker from Yorkshire who had been so ill with paralysis of the arms as to render her unable to do any work for five years."

"And what happened?" asked Miss F., knowing the answer.

His face shone like a preacher's. "Two months after she entered this clinic she left it, restored to health."

"No."

"She has never had a day's illness since," he said, marking off each syllable with his finger.

Her head was whirling. Could it be true? "And, and what is this miraculous treatment?"

Mr. Baker Brown smiled, almost shyly. "My dear Miss F., I doubt your education—though clearly not negligible—has been such that you would understand the technical terms."

"Of course not," she said, mortified.

"But what I can assure you is that under my personal care you will soon become a happy and useful member of society, and the sister your brother deserves."

"You can cure me?" she asked, like a child needing to hear it again and again.

"Trust me," he said softly.

Often a great disposition for novelties is exhibited, the patient desiring to escape from home. She will he fanciful in her food, sometimes express even a distaste for it, and apparently (as her friends will say) live upon nothing.

She didn't want any dinner, that first afternoon; all she asked for was a cup of tea. It was bliss to lie in this snowy white bed and be exempt from all responsibilities. She fancied her back felt a little better already. She had a moment's guilt when she thought of what all this was costing her brother, and another when she wondered who would wash his collars and cuffs for next week, but then she put all that out of her mind. As Matron kept saying, "What you need is quiet."

There was a curtain hanging round her bed; it reduced her world to a pure rectangle. Behind her curtain, several paces away behind their own curtains, lay other women, she knew, but she had no idea of their names; Matron called them all
Miss
or
Ma'am.
In the next room was someone Matron spoke of to a nurse as
her Ladyship,
imagine that!

Mr. Baker Brown advised against conversation between the patients, according to Matron; when they gossiped they only increased each other's anxieties.

Quiet, that's what Miss F. needed, what all the intricate bones and muscles of her back needed, what her whole body and mind had needed for years.
Nerve power;
she thought of it, bubbling up in her like hot punch. Was this absolute rest the treatment, she wondered; was the miracle as simple as that? Her empty stomach gurgled; she felt light as air.

Later, the lights were extinguished. In the fragrant dark, Miss F. rolled over onto her front, to ease her stiffness. She was tired, but not sleepy. The hard mattress pressed against her chin, her ribs, her knees. She thought of that strange thing the doctor had said about touching herself, the question he had put to her after the examination. She thought of the examination. She moved, but only a little, back and forth against the mattress, as if rocking herself to sleep; so infinitesimally that someone looking in through a gap in the curtain would have noticed nothing. She thought of the doctor's hands.

Mr. Baker Brown visited Miss F. twice on the first morning she woke up in the ward, and twice again on the second day. He asked her about her memories of when she was a girl, and wrote down all her answers. She had never felt so interesting.

On the third day Matron woke her very early for a warm bath.

"Is this part of the treatment?" Miss F. asked eagerly, rubbing the small of her back to loosen the night's stiffness.

A brief nod from Matron. "It clears the portal circulation."

"What's that?"

"Nothing you need worry about."

Miss F. lay back in the enormous bath and let the water ease her aching spine.

Afterwards Matron helped her onto a trolley and wheeled her through the corridors. The wheels squealed. In her torpid state, Miss F. heard voices leak from rooms as she rolled past them. She thought she was being moved to another ward, one closer to Mr. Baker Brown's own office, perhaps, so he could keep an eye on her state of health himself from hour to hour. Perhaps he would lay his hands on her back to feel if the healing had begun. She had no objection. She had no objection to anything.

There he was, the doctor himself, broad and magnificent in his black jacket. He was pouring something onto a pad of gauze; perhaps some kind of ointment. Miss F. smiled up at him from the trolley.

"Are we ready?" he asked her, and she opened her mouth to answer, to tell him that she had always been ready, that she had been waiting for him her whole life. He brought the pad down over her nose.

The patient having been placed completely under the influence of chloroform, the clitoris is freely excised either by scissors or knife—I always prefer the scissors.

In her dream, she was walking up the aisle on her brothers arm. Mr. Baker Brown stood facing the altar, looking straight ahead, but she could tell by the set of his shoulders that it was her he was waiting for. She turned to smile at her brother but found that he'd put on his policeman's uniform, for some reason, and he was angry with the doctor, and he was pulling his long leather truncheon out of its loop. She tried to get between the two men. She felt the truncheon come down and smash her head into pieces.

In her dream, she woke and went to lift the vast kettle of syrup off the fire. As she set it down she lost her balance and slipped in headfirst. Through the burning she could taste the sweetness. Her screams made no sound.

In her dream, she woke and found herself walking through London to her old house, where she was cook, because she knew she'd lost something. She'd left it behind her, whatever it was; she must have tucked it under her mattress or hidden it under a floorboard. But when at last she got to the right house, instead of going up and knocking on the door, she found herself walking right past. Her legs wouldn't take her up the steps. They wouldn't take her where she needed to go. She looked down and she had no legs, no body at all; she was a ghost.

This time she really did wake. Someone held a tube to her lips, and she sucked, and it was cool water.

"What?" croaked Miss F. at last. "What's happened to me?"

"You've been in a delirium," said Matron professionally. "It's the opium. It's usual, after an operation."

"What operation?"

"You'll be alright now."

The time required for recovery must depend, not only, as has already been hinted, on the duration of illness, also on the peculiar temperament of the patient.

Miss F. was kept in a small private room, far from the others. There was a nurse hemming sheets beside her bed, every minute of the day.

"Why won't you answer my questions?" she begged.

"I'm not here to tell you nothing, Miss," repeated the nurse. "I'm only here to make sure you don't touch that bandage again."

"I just wanted to see. I don't know what's happened to me. I never bled like that before in my life."

"That's because you touched the bandage," said the nurse.

Miss F. was prescribed bread in milk, strict quiet, and no visitors. She had olive oil rubbed into her chest, for strengthening. When she tried to look under the bandage again, her hands were pulled back and tied to the bed. She couldn't stop weeping. "Something must have gone wrong."

"It couldn't have done," said Matron sternly. "Mr. Baker Brown is a most celebrated surgeon throughout the Empire."

"Then what has he done to me?"

No answer.

"Why won't he see me?"

One morning Miss E woke up alone. The bandage had been taken off and her hands were untied. She did touch herself then, slowly and deliberately, for the first time. She learned her new shape. There was no pain, down there. There was nothing at all.

The next morning when she woke from her drugged sleep Mr. Baker Brown was there. She thought at first he was only another hallucination. She lay looking up at him, his smooth, unworried forehead. Then she flung herself at him.

But her nails must have been cut short while she was asleep, she realised, because she didn't manage to leave so much as a scratch on his face, only a slight pink mark under one eye. As if the doctor had brushed against some rouged lady at a ball.

She lay flat, feeling a tide of pain surge up and down her spine. He held her hands flat against the mattress—gently, as if she were a child—and called in Matron to tie them down again.

"Why have you mutilated me?" Miss E howled.

"I have done nothing of the sort," said the doctor. His eyes were full of hurt. "I have performed an operation to prevent you from harming yourself, from making yourself gravely ill to the point of epilepsy, lunacy, and death."

She stared at him, her eyes throbbing.

"An operation, I might add, which has earned me the admiration of my peers, and material success, as well as the gratitude of countless women and their families."

"I want my brother," she said.

The strictest quiet must be enjoined, and the attention of relatives, if possible, avoided, so that the moral influence of medical attendant and nurse may be uninterruptedly maintained.

For six days she was quite alone. She lay on her pillows as limp as an old dress. Sometimes she lay on her side, either the right or the left, it didn't matter. On the seventh day, Air. Baker Brown came in to look at her again. "My dear Miss F., you strike me as rather better. Your skin, your circulation—Matron reports an improvement in your digestion—"

"My back hurts," she said, her eyes following him around the tiny room. "My back hurts as much as it ever did."

He shook his head at her, almost playfully. "You sleep well these nights; you eat," he coaxed her. "Why won't you admit to being a little better?"

"Because I'm not," she said through her teeth. "I demand to be let go. I want to go home to my brother's house."

"Come now, Miss F., you must know that's impossible. Alatron has told you, I never discharge a patient till she is fully cured. Not just cured in body, but in mind."

Her eyes locked onto his.

"Why don't you do a little knitting?" he suggested. "Or try to walk to the window and back?"

She cleared her throat. "How can you bear what you do?"

He spoke with a forced calm. "Miss F., I must tell you frankly that I believe I have rendered you more truly feminine—more healthy in your natural instincts—more prepared to discover real happiness in marital intercourse, if marriage is to be your lot in life, and why should it not, now?"

He meant every word he said, she could see that in his burning eyes. That was the worst thing, that was the pity of it, it struck her now: that he believed absolutely in his mission. "I'm going to tell my brother what you've done to me," she said levelly.

A cautious look came over Mr. Baker Brown now. "I think not. These are delicate matters," he advised her. "I have found, in other cases, that the relatives and friends of my patients do not care to pry into the details of treatment, either before or after."

"When my brother hears my back is no better, after all he's spent—"

The doctor spread his hands. "He understood from the start that I could make no guarantees about any particular symptom."

She lay watching him. "The minute you let me see him, I'll tell him just what you've done to me."

"I very much doubt that," said Baker Brown mildly.

She stared.

"For a woman of your pretensions to modesty and respectability, Miss F., to attempt to convey such intimate information to a young man—her own brother—who would be mortified, I imagine—who would cover his ears at such shamelessness in a sister, or run out of the room—what words would you use to make your complaint, may I ask?" He waited.

"I would tell him—," she growled at last.

"Yes?"

She imagined the conversation; her brothers face. All the words that came into her head appalled her. "I would tell him ... that part of me has been damaged. Stolen. He could have you charged with assault!"

"I'm afraid he would not understand which 'part' you mean. He is not a man of much education." A pause. "How would you describe the 'part' to him. Miss F.?" Another moment went by. "Would you point, perhaps?"

She tried to gather her spit but her mouth was too diy.

"My dear girl, we really mustn't quarrel," said the doctor, sitting on the edge of her bed. "At this early stage of convalescence, such confusion, such delusions of having been harmed are not uncommon among my patients. But let me assure you that every note I have written down over the years, every piece of evidence I have gathered with the full force of scientific rigour, proves that my operation works." His voice was evangelical again; there were tiny beads of sweat along his hairline. "I swear to you, Miss F., I have seen women who were morally degraded, monsters of sensuality—until my operation transformed them. Women have come to this clinic in a state of desperation, complaining of pain in one organ or limb or another, or even in a state of rage, talking of divorces, and afterwards I send them home restored, to take up their rightful places by their husbands' sides. There are many countries in the Empire, Miss F., where a primitive form of my operation is done on every girl at the age of puberty, to ward off the disease of self-irritation before it has a chance to take hold! Why, some might say—"