Authors: William Nicholson
‘Well, a little more here would be nice.’ Her hands move in the air before her breasts. ‘And I said to Harry, in for a penny, in for a pound.’ She pats her cheeks, her chin, her neck. ‘Why not go for this too?’
The surgeon nods, writing swift notes in a flowing longhand.
‘I’ve looked in your brochure,’ says Mrs Lazarus. ‘I believe it’s called Facial Rejuvenation Package. Breast Augmentation.’ She raises her voice, a little nervous at naming these professional terms. ‘And I’ve shown Harry what it costs.’
The saint nods silent assent.
‘Guess what he said? He said, I don’t care about the money. I just don’t want you to be hurt. He never thinks of himself. But you do know, darling’ – she touches his knee - ‘I’m doing this for both of us.’ She turns back to the surgeon. ‘It’s our Christmas present to each other.’
A gift. An act of love. Tom Redknapp thinks how little outsiders know of the profound emotions with which he engages daily. Sometimes at dinner parties he comes up against the old distaste for cosmetic surgery, offered up by decent people who are not stupid but have never thought seriously about the matter. Most times he smiles and lets it go, accepting that they see him as a mercenary, a traitor to the caring ethos of medicine, who disfigures helpless women for his gain. Sometimes he teases out the discussion a little further. Do you believe that you must accept the body you were born with, and do nothing to improve it? Would you operate on a face scarred by disfiguring burns? Do you allow the use of make-up? of hair dye? Do you diet and exercise to stay slim? Ah, so it is acceptable to want to manage our body shape so that we look our best. The only area of debate is where we draw the line, and why.
Over the years he has learned humility. He respects his patients even when he thinks he understands their motives better than they do themselves. The relationship between body image and self-esteem is so profound. He’ll give Mrs Lazarus bigger breasts. She’ll feel more sexually confident. Mr Lazarus will be surprised and grateful. She’ll be proud and happy.
We all long to be objects of desire.
No, none of this causes the surgeon a moment’s doubt. And yet all is not well. In recent weeks questions of quite a different order have begun to torment him. Absurd to be kept awake at night by what amounts to philosophical imponderables, but certain concerns have lodged in his brain and will not be dismissed.
What is it that his clients want? Deliverance from shame? The restoration of normality? But he knows there is no normality. So many examinations over the years, so many women standing, trembling, exposed, naked in his office: he more than anyone knows the commonplace oddity of the human body. If only they could see what he sees, the shame would evaporate. But instead they see this fantasy called beauty: a fantasy because no single individual believes they have it, but all believe others have it. Beauty is a state that is always just out of reach. Or you could say there’s no such thing as beauty. We define it so variously that it doesn’t exist. What does exist, what remains constant, is our feelings about beauty: what we seek is a certain feeling about ourselves which is stimulated by the perceptions of others. The entire process actually happens in the mind, in our own minds and in the minds of the people round us. Beauty turns out to be a group delusion. So much is obvious. The plastic surgeon operates on the minds of his patients. So why stop there? What else is illusion? My value as an individual? The meaning of my existence?
The consultation proceeds. The surgeon understands that his client has already made up her mind. After all, it takes courage to come into the office of a stranger and speak openly of your body and its limitations, let alone show that body. She will have scoured the Internet, studied brochures, talked to friends. Now she is fired up and ready to go. Nevertheless, he must take her through the risks: infection, allergic reaction, pulmonary embolism, everything up to and including death.
‘But they’re rare, aren’t they?’ she says. ‘I mean, I’m more at risk driving my car, right?’
She laughs and touches her husband’s knee, to reassure him.
‘That’s true,’ says the surgeon. ‘But it’s important that you’re fully informed.’
He hears the nervousness in her laugh, and feels as always a wave of protective tenderness. Beneath the make-up, behind the quick bobbing glances at her husband, there lies such bravery. All these women were once girls in school, dreading the weekly swimming lesson where they would have to expose their awkward bodies to the cold blue light.
‘Now,’ he says, ‘I think the next step is the examination.’
Mr Lazarus stands up.
‘You’re very welcome to stay, Mr Lazarus. It’s entirely as you and Mrs Lazarus wish.’
Mr Lazarus looks to his wife.
‘Stay, darling,’ says Mrs Lazarus. ‘It’s not like you’re going to get any surprises.’
Her husband sits down again.
‘He’s the one gets the surprises,’ she says, nodding at Tom Redknapp.
The surgeon smiles.
‘Not any more,’ he says. ‘In my business you get to see what people really look like, thank God, not the touched-up fake version.’
‘So hey-ho,’ says Mrs Lazarus, her voice bright. ‘I suppose this is where I take my top off.’
When he first saw Meg naked she covered her breasts with her hands, out of shame.
‘Don’t you wish they were bigger?’ she said.
‘I don’t want any part of you different to the way you are,’ Tom replied.
Does that make me a better man than Mr Lazarus? Not at all. We both act in obedience to our desires.
Here lies the terrible possibility: that my existence only becomes meaningful in the short highly-charged interval be tween the birth of a desire and its satisfaction. That this is what the struggle of my days is directed towards. That this is all there is.
After the consultation he catches up on his paperwork. Then he calls Meg’s office and learns she’s out for the rest of the day. He tries her mobile and reaches her in her car.
‘I was thinking of looking in about six-thirty. If you’re going to be in.’
‘Of course I’ll be in.’
‘I’ll only have half an hour or so.’
‘All right. See you then.’
He attends a management meeting of the hospital board. The planned extension from twenty-five to fifty beds is proceeding on schedule, with the new floor expected to be ready by February. However, bookings are down.
‘December’s always a slow month,’ says Vernon, the finance manager. ‘But we have to assume current financial conditions will affect business going forward. We may not experience the usual mid-January pick-up.’
Tom Redknapp plays very little part in the discussion. His mind is on the mystery of desire.
I desire because I am desired.
A man can have a fine opinion of himself bred in him by a loving family and all the privileges of his class; he can go to a fine university and build an enviable career; he can do all these things and never for one moment believe himself to be desirable.
We’re talking about sex, of course. But does that make it any less significant? There’s nothing shallow about sex, nothing superficial. Marriage, if you like, you can call that superficial: a social arrangement, a bargain struck at a certain moment in time. But sexual desire goes to the very core.
Looking back over his life he realizes that he has always believed in his own desire but never in theirs. Not the desire of the women. He always suspected in them, more than suspected, assumed in them an ulterior motive. The man wants sex and baits it with the chance of commitment. The woman wants commitment and baits it with the chance of sex. So far, so obvious. Except that there are casualties here that lie unremarked on the field of combat: the death of female desire; the loss of men as sexually desirable beings.
We collude. I collude. So frantic in my twenties in the pursuit of sex by any means I fed the hope of something more. Why else would she oblige me? Then the parting, the accusation of betrayal, the guilt. You lied to me! You didn’t love me! After a while the act of lying itself comes to be sexually charged, or at least the intensity of the sexual excitement seems to be contingent on the level of the moral transgression. We collude in the lie that sex is an early way station on the road to love. Even our bodies collude in the lie, because always after the sex comes the revulsion, the sense of worthlessness, the self-accusation: was it for that that I lied?
No, not for that. Not for the short shudder of bliss. For the gathering storm that preceded it, for the rolling thunder that begins low and far away and comes ever closer until it fills the sky and drowns the world. For desire.
‘You’re very quiet, Tom,’ says Vernon.
‘Why aren’t we talking about low-season discounts?’ says Richard Graves.
‘We can’t advertise discounts,’ says Vernon. ‘That’s an inducement, and inducements are illegal.’
‘Bloody stupid if you ask me,’ says Richard Graves. ‘So how are we going to pay the bills when we’ve doubled in size and halved our bookings?’
‘Maybe,’ says Tom, who hasn’t been listening and so says what they’ve all been thinking, ‘maybe we shouldn’t go ahead with the expansion.’
‘But we’ve built it!’
‘So? We don’t have to equip it, staff it, heat it.’
‘That is a legitimate option,’ says Vernon cautiously, looking round the table.
‘So what do we do with it?’
‘I don’t know. Put it to sleep. Wait for better times.’
This precipitates an explosion of disagreement. Tom withdraws once more into his own thoughts. He’s indifferent to the outcome one way or the other. What’s the worst that can happen? The hospital goes bust. He’s a shareholder, he loses his stake. So what? He has a marketable skill. Life goes on.
So I have no ambition any more?
In some strange way he feels as if he’s started his life over again. This time round there’s no drive to achieve, no deferring of pleasure in the interests of later gain. This time, the pleasure.
Yes, she said. Of course I’ll be in.
The other day she asked for a picture of him when he was young. He showed her the photograph his friend Olly took of him dancing at his twenty-first. He’s always liked it because he looks happy though in fact he wasn’t.
‘Oh, you’re so gorgeous!’ Meg said when she saw it.
Looking through her eyes he saw a sweet-faced boy with shaggy hair, a lithe body. It was as if he was looking at a stranger. His own memory is of physical awkwardness, sticky-out ears, narrow chest, freckles, eyes that plead and look away. The musty odour of desperation.
Now, of course, thirty years later, three stone heavier, balding, cheeks sagging, eyes bagging, he can no longer be called gorgeous. But it’s now that he’s desired.
The meeting comes to a conclusion. The hospital expansion will proceed. A new marketing drive will aim to lift patient numbers. Vernon undertakes to brief the marketing team and Pegasus, the retained PR company.
As they leave Richard Graves murmurs to Tom, ‘I should have thought you’d have more to say, with your new-found interest in marketing.’
Meg is in marketing.
‘I leave that to you youngsters,’ says Tom. Richard Graves is at most ten years his junior. ‘In my day only the charlatans advertised.’
‘Oh, the charlatans are advertising, all right,’ says Richard. ‘Any quack can offer cosmetic surgery these days. That’s why we have to get out there, make our case, save the suckers from their own stupidity.’
Tom has now been made aware that his attentions to Meg have not gone unnoticed. What do you expect in a place this size? A staff of a hundred and twenty or so, everyone knows everything. They’ll be joking about it, maybe expressing surprise, Meg isn’t an obvious candidate for seduction in her sober business suit and her sober business face. Not exactly a beauty, they’ll be saying. Nothing to write home about. And there’s the wonder of it. Beauty turns out not to create desire after all. Desire creates beauty.
These things take you by surprise. He has almost no memory of Meg in the first weeks after her arrival. Once she stopped him on the corridor to tell him that she needed case histories to feed to journalists, how rhinoplasty saved my life and so forth. But he paid her no attention until the BAAPS conference in London.
They found themselves in a lift together, in the Waldorf Hilton. It was the end of the last session, they were both tired. He noticed that her hands were shaking. They made polite conversation. Then she closed her eyes. No more than the kind of thing you do if your eyes are hurting at the end of the day. She was telling him how much she was learning, her lips moving, her eyes closed, and he studied her face, and there were her hands, shaking. Then she opened her eyes and met his gaze without her defences in place, and he saw it as naked as a kiss: she desires me.
The lift doors opened. They went their separate ways. But from that moment on he looked at her differently. She changed under his eyes. She became beautiful.
So in a little while, in about an hour and a quarter, he’ll pull in to one of the parking spaces reserved for residents of the Victorian mansion called Ridgewood Grange. There, in a two-bedroom flat with views of the communally-maintained park, Meg will be waiting.
Chloe has to run, dragging her wheeled suitcase with the worn wheels that bang like a machine-gun, and only just gets onto the train before the doors close for departure. She left masses of time to get from Paddington to Victoria but of course no Circle line train came for ever. Now she feels hot and cross and the train is full.
She jerks her suitcase down the aisle through four carriages to get into the half that will go on to Lewes after the train divides at Haywards Heath. The only empty seat is a foursome occupied by a fat young mother and two fat young children. The children are sprawled on the seats in such a way that there’s no room for a fourth.
Chloe stands her suitcase in the aisle beside them and says as sweetly as she can, ‘Any chance of a seat?’
‘Move, Wayne,’ says the mother. ‘Out of the way, Jordan.’
The children don’t move.
Chloe waits, smiling, wanting to smack their fat bored faces. Their mother goes red, raises one hand, and screams.