The Ugly Sister (26 page)

‘If I drink all this I shall be drunk.'

‘I don't think so, Miss Spry. In any case it is – advisable.'

I gulped some of it down. It caught at my throat and made me feel sick.

Professor Dieffenbach sat down on the windowseat opposite me and began to speak.

Dr Hamilton said: ‘The Herr Professor Doktor asks me to tell you that in general operations of today speed is of the essence to save unnecessary loss of blood and the suffering of the patient. However in the operation he is about to perform there is another – another factor to be taken into consideration: that this is essentially a cosmetic operation. Though he believes the function of the eye may well benefit from it – in the main the paramount objective is the improvement of the appearance of your face. Therefore a little greater time, a little greater care, is essential. He trusts that you will understand that.'

I nodded. Dieffenbach spoke again.

‘Therefore he trusts you will not object if these straps are put in place. He is sure you are a brave woman, but an unexpected movement on your part might jeopardize the success of the operation.'

I gulped the rest of the brandy. ‘Very well.'

There were mutterings behind me. I noticed that the two students had positioned themselves each side of the window the better to observe my ordeal. Professor Dieffenbach opened a small black case, such as one would use for special silver cutlery, and took out a knife and a scalpel. In his assistant's hand were a number of threads and a fine needle.

The brandy was making me feel swimmy as the leather straps were pulled into place. The Professor took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He had hairy wrists. Someone from behind me put a hand on my head and pressed a compress of ice against the left side of my face. The cold of that was a shock and I automatically shrank from it.

While these deadening influences worked the Professor gave a brief discourse to the two students, explaining about the disfigurement of the eyelid and what he proposed to do. This much I could almost follow. I also noticed a new grimmer tone in his voice, which came perhaps as the operative moment approached.

Five people in the small room. Fetch had asked to be excused and had retired to her bedroom and shut the door.

Rustling and muttering behind me. It had been a fine clear morning but was clouding for rain. From where I sat, my head back, I could see the building opposite with my right eye. Crows were gathering on the roof, edging each other along in friendly rivalry. What was I doing here? Vanity, vanity, saith the Lord. I tried to think of the Canon.

The Professor took a large gold Hunter from his pocket and consulted it. Then he muttered something and the ice pack was whipped from my face. Thereupon gentle fingers on my forehead and a sharp knife began to cut and peel the skin from my upper eyelid.

In my life, although I had suffered the usual childish illnesses, and the long indolent fever which had beset me in my teens, I had not suffered any real pain before – at least, not pain like this. The laudanum, the brandy may have given extra courage and fortitude, the ice had helped to freeze the upper part of the face, but the chill piercing pain of the knife in a sensitive part of my face penetrated these feeble defences. I cried out and tried to get my head away from that fearful pain but hands and a strap held it firmly and the knife went on. I was being skinned alive. The speed with which the scalpel was being used seemed to add to the agony. I bit my lip and clenched my teeth, and then, mouth out of control, it opened of its own accord and I screamed. I took breath and choked and half vomited and screamed again. Warm blood was running down my face, clogging my eyelid, was blinked into and out of the eye. Someone was dabbing my face, trying to keep it clear of the dripping blood.

I wanted to get my hands free. I mouthed: ‘Stop it, let me go! Stop! Don't do any more! Stop! Stop! Stop!' What insanity had got me into this position? I would go now. It was my own
choice
.

‘
Bitte
, Fraulein Spry,' whispered the Professor in my ear. ‘
Bitte beruhigen Sie sich.
'

The knife stopped and an icy compress was put over the eyelid. Then the knife began again cutting at the puckered skin just alongside the eye. An awful sick feeling in the stomach, a giddiness and faintness in the head. I had never fainted in my life but this was it. Going, going. Light was fleeing from the room; the window shrank in size, darkened until all the room was gone. But the nightmare into which I descended was not free of pain: the knife penetrated to my half-unconscious mind, demanding, probing; I was in some pit of hell where demons stabbed me with needles: yes, it was needles now. I should have wept for self-pity but the tears, the healing tears, did not come. It was needles now, and then it seemed like pincers and then a sort of gauze put to absorb the blood.

The knife began again, on my cheek where the sharp cutting edge was less unbearable …

I think, I suppose, I did faint then, for the next thing I was conscious of was being lifted bodily from the chair and put on the bed, with six pillows to prop my shoulders and head. Smelling salts. There were now two more gauze bandages round head and face, and the left eye was blotted out.

The pain had not stopped, but spread to an infinity which included the whole of my head and neck. The knife – even the needle – had been mercifully withdrawn, but the agony was scarcely less. Someone gave me a drink, and I vomited it up. Every retch threatened to split my head far and wide.

Dr Hamilton. ‘It is done, Miss Spry. The worst is over. Dr Dieffenbach is very pleased. In a moment or two the Herr Professor will be leaving, and then it will be for you to rest – or try to rest – until some of the pain has worn off. In a few minutes when your stomach has settled I would advise you to take some more laudanum. This tincture contains a stomach-settling powder as well.'

The two students had gone. The Professor's assistant was folding the bloodstained towels. Someone was emptying blood into a pail. Dr Hamilton had gone to mix his draught.

The Professor. Beaming at me now, as if my struggles and harsh cries had been nothing out of the ordinary.

‘
Gut! Gut! Schön!
You 'ave done well.' He went off into German again.

Hamilton came up. ‘He wishes you good day, Miss Spry. He will see you on Friday. If any untoward symptom occurs earlier I am to see him. He asks if the pain is now better?'

‘No,' I said. ‘Scarcely at all.'

‘He says that is the ice. As the skin unthaws it will be like frostbite. By tonight, he says, with the help of the tincture you will be feeling somewhat recovered.'

I
LIVED
with a fierce smarting pain for weeks. At the end of the first week the gauze bandages were renewed, and a few days after that the stitches were taken out. This was the next biggest ordeal. I wanted to see what they had done for me, but Professor Dieffenbach instructed Dr Hamilton not to let me use a mirror.

Of course I tried, but the scar on which he had operated was not yet healed, and the much more important matter was that my eye was still swollen and swathed with bandages.

Fetch read to me and cajoled me to take nourishing soups. I dressed and moved about the bedroom and the sitting room. I wrote a few letters, to Charles, to my mother, to Tamsin, but carefully avoided any reference to the operation. They knew I was touring Europe, and I said I liked Berlin so had decided to stay on here for another month or so. If they cared to write back the hotel would forward their letters to any new address.

One infinitely depressing result of the operation was that my left eye had again become bloodshot.

I do not think anyone had warned me – certainly no one in Berlin – of the great hazard which existed that the skin from the upper eyelid might fail to ‘take' in its new situation below. Although this skin was in the form of a flap and therefore always attached and drawing life from its connection, there was the risk that it might still refuse to blend into its new position and then mortify. In which case … was the operation a complete failure or – horror of horrors – did we try again?

So it was with profound relief that I heard Professor Dieffenbach's grunt of satisfaction when the final gauze bandage was removed. Even if the improvement was not great, even if I had to suffer a bloodshot eye once again – it was
over
; the worst was over. I could go home, at least no worse – or not much worse – for the ordeal.

‘
Spiegel
,' he said.

They brought a mirror.

Hamilton said: ‘The Herr Professor Doktor says you may look now. But he warns you, that with the scars still raw and the sutures hardly healed this is still a travesty of what you should look like in twelve months' time.'

I stared. The left side of my face seemed to be a mass of scars, mostly red, some still suppurating. The right side was unchanged. Two dark brown eyes, one of them bloodshot. But the bloodshot eye, among the nest of scars, was
not drawn down
. It was level. It was perhaps slightly smaller than the right eye. I could see fairly well out of it. But was my face any
better
for all this? The old scar was still there though slightly different and the marks of what Dr Hamilton called ‘sutures' were prominent down its five-inch length. Would I be any better-looking for all this pain? But, if these scars did eventually heal and almost disappear with time, then certainly no one would have quite the reason to stand and stare. Surely people would no longer have to look elsewhere when they were talking to me. I should be unremarkable, one of the ordinary human race. A woman like any other. Not a beauty. But not a freak. Not someone to be laughed at or pitied. What would my mother think? Or Bram? … Or Charles? Or Tamsin? I would not dare to go near them yet. Perhaps I would stay away another year. Even then I would still be only twenty-six. Cornwall would not have changed. Only my looks and my circumstances. What would the Canon have thought of the use to which I had put the money he had left me but would not himself deign to touch?

I looked at Herr Professor Doktor Dieffenbach, who was still considering my face as a sculptor will a model he has half created.

‘
Danke schön, Herr Professor
.' ‘
Bitte, Fraulein.
But pat-ience.
Über alles.
Pat-ience.'

I
N THE
October I moved to Switzerland, with Sally Fetch in sole attendance. We toured the Alps while the weather was still open, and then settled at a hotel in Zurich on the shores of the lake. I chose Zurich because I liked it as a town and because it was not so fashionable with the English as Lucerne or Lugano.

A reluctance to meet English people. It seemed to me that Europeans were more tolerant of, or at least less interested in, anyone who departed from the physical norm. And at present I was more sensitive about this patched up face than had ever been the case when there was more to hide or remark on. I had taken to using a fashionable veil that made the scars less observable, and in Zurich we took private rooms so that I did not have to mix with others.

Sometimes I looked in the mirror and despaired. The same visage still stared back at me. Fetch kept saying: ‘'Tis much better than 'twas a fortnight since,' but the improvement, after the early gains, was too slow to be worth remarking. The lines of the operation were like the railway lines on one of Uncle Francis's maps.

The hotel ordered a
Morning Post
for me, so at intervals I was able to follow events in England. King William had died and a young Princess Victoria of Kent was proclaimed Queen. Some sort of a war in Afghanistan had broken out, and there were Chartist riots in Manchester. Britain was also becoming involved with another Colonial war, this one with China, which had something to do with the opium that had proved in its tincture form the only useful painkiller of my convalescence.

From Cornwall I received word that Aunt Anna had at last died, aged seventy-one. She was, Mary said, entirely sensible and in her right mind for some weeks before the end. She had been buried beside her husband, mourned by a suitable company of relatives and friends. She, Mary, relieved of her last loving obligation, had left Place for good and come to live in Tregolls. ‘In that letter of last year,' Mary wrote, ‘you explained that Uncle Francis had left you a legacy. The fact that you have remained away from Cornwall for so long, and now seem to be touring the Continent, gives me to suppose that this legacy was larger than I had first assumed. No one had ever supposed that the Canon was anything but a poor man. Or are you working abroad as a governess or a companion?'

A month later, when it was snowing hard, the flakes drifting over the lake like a mottled curtain, came another letter, scarcely, it seemed, answering mine at all.

Desmond has left Place and joined me here. His marriage to your sister was in rags and tatters when I was there. He says he is not returning; he says he cannot continue his life there. I told him it was your sister who should leave, but he says his first consideration must be Celestine. Somehow, between them, I mean between him and Tamsin, they have spent far too much money, and I was startled and shocked when he told me the size of his debt. I do not know if Samuel will help him to discharge any of it. I think Samuel is very angry at the way things have been shaping …

And as a postscript:

Did you know that Meliora Fox had died? She was only thirty-three, but had been in failing health for some time. Like so many of these pretty young women, she was tubercular, and of course her married life cannot have been a happy one.

I sent this letter to my mother. She was so long replying that when the letter came the early daffodils were colouring the lake shores with their half-bent yellow heads.

I have been very unwell this winter, and could have done with a daughter's care. In November some sort of a low fever settled on London, and I was one of its first victims. These things sometimes clear up quite quickly, but at other times the effects, in the form of headaches, neuralgias, migraines and lassitude will continue on for months. And so it has been for me. Also a tendency to rheumatism, which had shown itself before, settled in me, and now sometimes I have had difficulty in getting about.

So in spite of disturbing reports from Cornwall it is only recently that I have been able to visit those parts. Through a friend of Captain Frensham, who is a friend of a Mr Brunel, who it seems is a great engineer, we were persuaded to essay the journey by steamship – from Harwich to Falmouth. The Channel was rough and it was not an easy voyage, but I must admit it was pleasant not to be embayed by a contrary wind and we arrived in Falmouth only six hours late.

You will want to know what I found on my arrival at Place. I was met by Tamsin and Celestine, very smiling and happy-looking, and in good health. It is true that Tamsin and Desmond have separated, but I do not know whether it is to be a permanency or no. It was his decision not hers. It is very sad, especially for Celestine, if this is a permanent break, but these things happen in life. A marriage which starts out with all the auguries of a blissful union can fall apart quite rapidly and for no particular or especial reason. You must know that my marriage to your father was not a very happy one. Drinking and gambling were his weaknesses, and, although he had a modest income from the family, I often found myself at the end of the month paying his debts out of my stage earnings.

Neither drink nor gambling are Desmond's weaknesses. Nor, indeed, are they Tamsin's! But she likes a society life and a convivial table. It may be that Desmond is still feeling the effects of his mother's death, to whom he was inordinately attached, and that when he gets over his bereavement he may return to his wife. I sincerely trust so. In the meantime it would be a mistake to see anything sinister in the estrangement, as Mary appears to. They are lucky, Tamsin and Desmond, to have separate family houses that they may continue to use while their separation persists. And the distance between cannot be more than fifteen miles.

Incidentally the five years since your Uncle Davey died has long since expired, and I understand that his inamorata, Miss Betsy Slocombe, having requested and received from Samuel a three-year extension of her free lease of Killiganoon, has now at last vacated it, so the house stands empty, waiting a tenant. It is quite a handsome place standing in grounds of thirty acres, so I imagine it will soon be let – or possibly sold.

Since I began this letter I have had one from Tamsin, telling me that Slade has left. Of late he had come to have an oppressive presence in the house – I expect you will think it was so all the time we lived there! – but since your uncle died he has been more than ever a disagreeable influence. The rest of the servants I am sure will be happier without him and, although Tamsin sounded upset when she wrote, I am convinced she will be also. Twenty-seven years they tell me he lived as a butler in Place; we can testify to nineteen of them!

Tamsin tells me you have not written to her for a long time. I think you should.

Your loving

Mother