The Tennis Player from Bermuda (37 page)

Later, I read in the newspaper that he had never married.

J
ULY
1968
L
ONDON
, E
NGLAND

After I finished my third year at Hopkins, Father helped arrange a general surgery rotation for me over the summer in London at his hospital, Guy’s. Claire picked me up at Heathrow. Her parents had retired to the country, and Claire, Richard, and their children had taken over the house in Belgravia. I was going to stay with them.

Claire had reluctantly given up her Alfa Romeo roadster for a Jaguar sedan that could hold her children. When I opened the passenger door, I had to brush the Animal Cracker crumbs off the seat before I could sit down.

Claire looked at the crumbs ruefully. “I dole out Animal Crackers to young Fiona to keep her occupied when we drive to the country. Richard says we have to leave off calling her ‘young Fiona,’ or else the double name will stick, and she’ll be burdened with it for the rest of her life.”

I laughed. I was young Fiona’s Godmother.

“So,” Claire asked, “how’s your love life?” She had met my boyfriend on a trip to the States and made no secret to me that she didn’t care for him.

“He’s asked me to marry him.”

“Oh, no! What did you say?”

“I told him I wasn’t ready to make any commitment.”

“Good! Fiona, he’s not right for you. Has he ever been to Bermuda?”

“No,” I admitted. Not only that, I thought, he’d never expressed the slightest interest in visiting Bermuda.

“And I don’t think you should spend your time holed up in a laboratory.”

This wasn’t the first time Claire had said all this to me. Even though I knew the answer, I asked anyway: “Why shouldn’t I do research? It’s important.”

“You need to be around people more. I want you to promise that this summer you’ll be open to meeting new people. It’s time. I’ll find you someone else who’s better for you.” She left unsaid an important part of what she meant, which was that she would find someone
English
for me – not American. Claire and my Mother hadn’t spoken to one another about me, at least as far as I knew, but they both said exactly the same things.

“I promise I’ll be open to meeting people.”

“Fiona,” Claire said when we pulled up in front of the house in Belgravia. “You have a choice. We have a guest room on the third floor, or John’s flat on the ground level is empty. The two boys are on the third floor, and they’ve been known to make a great deal of noise. You’re welcome to stay in the flat if you like.”

I thought for a moment. “I’d prefer the guest room, Claire. The boys won’t bother me.”

My first day at Guy’s, I scrubbed and walked into an operating room to observe one of the senior consultants operate.

The consultant looked up when I came in. He wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses with a strip of white adhesive tape holding them to the bridge of his nose. “Well, a new face,” he said.

The members of the surgical team chuckled. This was a small joke; with my surgical mask and cap, my eyes were the only part of my face visible.

The consultant asked, “Who are you?”

“Fiona Hodgkin.”

The consultant went about his work on the patient and after a moment said, “There was a girl with that name some years ago who won the singles at Wimbledon.”

“That’s me.”

“You’ve had quite a change in vocation, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Where are you training?”

“Hopkins. I start my fourth year in September.”

At the name ‘Hopkins,’ he looked up at me. “You’re English. Why train in the States?” He looked back down at his patient.

He thought I was English because I speak with an English accent. “I’m actually Bermudian. Both my grandmother and mother trained at Hopkins.”

“A family of medical women, I see.” He said this not entirely with approval. “So why are you here at Guy’s?”

“My father did his internship here just before the war. He arranged for me to take my surgery rotation here.”

“What’s your father’s name?”

“Thomas Hodgkin.”

This got him to look up again from the patient. “Quite a famous medical name.”

“My father is descended from the younger brother of the famous Thomas Hodgkin.”

“Is your family Quaker, then?” The famous Hodgkin had been a Quaker.

“No, my parents are Church of England.” “Well, Miss Hodgkin, where did the famous Thomas Hodgkin train?”

“At St. Thomas’s and Guy’s medical school.”

“Correct. And what is the second thing for which Hodgkin is famous?” The consultant was making another small joke. Hodgkin is best known for characterizing Hodgkin’s disease, a lymphoma, in 1832.

“In 1822, he advocated the use of the stethoscope here at Guy’s.”

“Correct. For some reason we were reluctant to take up that handy device. Can’t imagine why.” Then he stepped away from the patient and asked, “Miss Hodgkin, are you scrubbed?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

The consultant glanced almost imperceptibly at the senior anaesthetist, who checked the patient’s vital signs and nodded to the consultant. The patient was stable as a rock, and a few extra minutes on the operating table for the training of a medical student would make no difference.

The consultant said to me, “Miss Hodgkin, have the heirs of William Stewart Halsted at Hopkins taught you to suture?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Then come over here, and we’ll see if you can suture as well as you can hit a tennis ball.”

Then I knew that, even though I was a woman, I had been accepted.

Mark Thakeham was a Senior House Officer at a different hospital, but he heard I was in London through the medical grapevine. His schedule as an SHO was hectic and exhausting. Wimbledon was on, and Mark called the Club and got two seats in the players’ box one afternoon during the first week. It was the first ‘open’ Wimbledon – that is, it was open to professional players. He rang me at Guy’s and asked me to come with him.

I hesitated. I hadn’t spoken to Mark in years, and I hadn’t been back to Wimbledon since 1962. I was on the verge of saying ‘no.’ I would give the excuse of work.

But Mark said, “Fiona. Centre Court.”

He was right; I couldn’t pass up an afternoon on Centre Court.

We took our seats between matches, and there was a ripple of applause around Centre Court, which Mark joined.

“Why are they applauding?” I asked Mark.

“For you.”

After the last match of the day on Centre Court, Mark and I went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant in SoHo. In the six years since I’d last seen him, he’d adopted the calm, unflappable, seen-it-all-twice demeanor many physicians have – I recognized it because I was in the early stages of trying to adopt the same demeanor myself.

When we walked back to the Tube after dinner, he asked me to have dinner with him again that weekend, and I accepted. I met him Saturday evening in Ken High, we had dinner in a pub, and then went on a long walk in Kensington.

One night the next week, he made dinner for me in his flat. He had become quite the chef. I was standing in the tiny kitchen of his flat, drinking a cup of tea and watching him make dinner, when I mentioned that I planned to spend a week in Bermuda with my parents at the end of my surgery rotation.

Mark said, “I need to go to Bermuda myself, but I haven’t found the time. I haven’t been there since we met. But I liked Bermuda. Mostly because of meeting you.” He smiled at me. Mark could be charming when he felt like it; there’s never been any question about that.

“Why do you need to go to Bermuda?”

“Do you remember Tempest? Where we met the first time?”

“Certainly, yes.”

“My aunt passed away last year, and I inherited Tempest. It’s standing empty, and I want to check on it.”

“Oh, Mark, I’m sorry she’s gone. I hadn’t known. How did she die?”

“I was her physician. I could say she died of CHF.” He meant congestive heart failure. “That’s what I put on the death certificate. But probably it’s just as accurate to say she died of old age.”

I thought that Tempest perhaps wasn’t the grandest house in Bermuda, but it was certainly in the running. The land tax alone on Tempest was probably more than the National Health Service paid Mark as a medical resident. But then it occurred to me. The upkeep on Tempest was no doubt looked after by some clerk at the Thakehams’ firm of solicitors in the City. Mark probably hadn’t the slightest idea of what it cost to maintain his house in Bermuda.

That week I found some reason or other to ring Mark just about every day, and we took to eating hurried lunches together in hospital canteens, and talking about our patients. I noticed, a little guiltily, that I never mentioned that I had a boyfriend in Baltimore. But Mark never did anything that would have forced me to make that choice. One day at lunch I was telling Mark about a surgical site infection in one of my patients that, personally, I thought could have been avoided. While listening to me, he reached across the table and took my hand. I took my other hand, put it on top of his and went on talking.

T
HURSDAY
, 4 J
ULY
1968
L
ONDON
, E
NGLAND

On the second Thursday of the fortnight, the Club Secretary rang me at Guy’s and invited me and my guest to the ladies’ final that Saturday. I accepted and telephoned Mark twice at his hospital to see if he could arrange to be off Saturday afternoon to come with me, but I couldn’t reach him either time. He was busy with patients; he had been on duty since Wednesday morning, working flat out the entire time. I finally got off from Guy’s around nine that evening and decided to stop at Mark’s hospital on my way back to Claire’s house.

I took the lift to Mark’s ward and asked a nurse where I could find him. She said he was asleep in the House Officers’ lounge, and she pointed me down a hallway toward a closed door. ‘Lounge’ was an overly grand name for this room. It was the size of a closet, and the only furnishing was a plain Army cot. There was a door to a tiny loo on the side of the room across from the cot.

A row of hooks was on a wall, with a doctor’s lab coat hanging on one hook and a pair of trousers hanging on another. I was relieved when I saw a mop of strawberry blond hair spilling out from under a sheet on the cot; at least I had found Mark and not some other sleeping SHO.