Art & Lies (2 page)

When I was a young medical student at Seminary, like most of the other students, I tried to use the brothels. We were vowed to chastity, of course we were, but not until we were ordained. It was a regular trip after Sunday lunch, St Agatha’s Day, we called it, in honour of the wobbly brown crème caramel served with a cocktail cherry on the top. Later, as a surgeon, I wondered why only Agatha was fit to be a saint, when so many women freely lay down under me and let me cut off their breasts. I suppose that to be a martyr, one has to suffer for something in which one passionately believes, and they weren’t suffering for anything in which they believed. We were the ones who believed. We were the ones in ritual gloves and masks carrying the sacred surgical steel. So passive, not a spark of resentment, they were grateful to me for throwing their tits into the incinerator.

We don’t do it anymore, the treatment has changed, we regret that we did it so much, but when you tell people you know what’s good for them particularly if you are a doctor, they will believe you. Having no beliefs of their own they believe. It’s a truism that as faith in God has declined, belief in science, especially medical science, has increased. Yet most people know even less about science than they did about God. Science is now incomprehensible to the layman but the layman accepts it, even though one of the arguments against God is that He doesn’t make sense.

‘Come on Handel, get your rubbers on.’ The rallying cry of the operating theatre was the jest of the brothel. We had to protect ourselves. We had to be careful of the body beneath. Protection always involves some sort of loss. Hold back, watch yourself, wrap up, look for cuts, mind the blood, don’t exchange fluid, Now Wash Your Hands Please. The riskiest thing you can do is to be naked with another human being.

I like to look at women. That is one of the reasons why I became a doctor. As a priest my contact is necessarily limited. I like to look at women; they undress before me with a shyness I find touching. I try to keep my hands warm. I am compassionate. I do care. If a woman is particularly young or particularly beautiful, I treat her as softly as I know how. I am very clean, my cologne is sandalwood and olives, and I know that my astringent, ascetic face is reassuring, tempting even. Am I tempted? Perhaps, but I would never break my vows, professional and religious. Isn’t that enough?

When a woman chooses me above my numerous atheist colleagues we have an understanding straight away. I have done well, perhaps because a man with God inside him is still preferable to a man with only his breakfast inside him. I am not a fanatic. I am too cerebral for that. The scholarly doctor, fingers long, voice musical.

I remember my first consultation. The patient and I were the same age: thirty-one. She was nervous I was calm. She was afraid and I was confident. I asked her to undress behind the thin white screen that did not quite reach the floor. I watched her slip off her shoes, lift each foot to take off her stockings. Her feet were bare then, her broad strong feet, ankles slim. Her legs were shaved. I turned to look out of the window.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

‘Then won’t you come here?’ She came out in the silly paper robe we used to supply in those days. I was the first to offer my patients a full silk dressing-gown. Dense raw silk with my initials embroidered on the pocket. I know that women appreciate small courtesies.

‘Would you prefer the nurse to be present while I examine you?’

No, of course not, they rarely do. Another pair of prying eyes, another intrusive presence on a body too much intruded upon. And I am told that women hate to be stared at by other women.

I examined her thoroughly and took her breast in my hands. Her breast was small, dense, weighted, taut to the touch. Pale and with a single fair hair by the nipple. I ran my clean inquisitive fingers over her. She was trembling.

I would have been glad to have trembled too. Suddenly I was afraid of her Irish beauty like a tightened bow. I had my thumb on her nipple. I smiled.

‘There’s nothing to worry about. Go and get dressed.’

She looked at me. I held her breast.

‘Go and get dressed.’

I sent her for a mammogram. In those days we screened women for what we still call ‘Their Own Good’. We made them feel irresponsible if they refused. The Good doctor. The Difficult patient. It wasn’t until 1993, that the best of us admitted that for women under the age of fifty, a mammogram is notoriously unreliable, and that it might even serve to spread any few malignant cells deeper into the body. It’s the way the plates compress the breasts. We did a lot of damage but it will be impossible to prove.

She kept her breasts. I saw her with them from time to time, and too often I saw them on their own, floating towards me in a horrible mixed-up nightmare of Seminary and raucous priests and the mutilated Saint Agatha lying on a silver platter …

‘Come on Handel, Push it in will you? Push it IN man!’ My senior wielding his wild syringe above the torpid body on the slab. We had to administer a muscle relaxant before we could make the first cut. I hate injections.

The patient can hear everything under general anaesthetic. The ripping, snipping, severing, squelching, dripping operation. Our Surgeon liked to listen to opera while he worked but he insisted on Madam Butterfly or La Bohème. He liked to sing the part of Mimi in a cracked falsetto.

‘I get upset when she dies,’ he said, cutting through the pectoral webbing.

The sun had dropped on to the roof of the train and bloodied the grey metal. They were travelling slowly to save fuel. The man twisted his head to watch the spilt sun trickle down the window. The train that had been grey was sheathed in light. The sun made a wrapping of light that gave the dead grey bullet dignity and a purpose other than its destination. The man thought of the prophet Ezekiel and his chariot of cherubim: ‘Go in among the whirling wheels underneath the cherubim; fill thy hands with living coals and scatter them over the City.’

Shall I tell you something about my City? My City, and long trains leaving.

The First City is ceremonial. Ceremonies of religion, monarchy, law. There are palaces in planed proportion built by the Golden Mean. Urgent steeples, pennants, weathervanes, an upward rising of assumption and power. This is the old city and it has been the most destroyed. The churches are empty and many are ruined. When the Church of England was disestablished it was a clever way for a government to ignore the crumbling beauty of a passion no longer felt. The old city was built on faith, vanity, and fabulous piles of cash. We have none of those and the poor in spirit must learn to be humble.

We still build. We build mean houses with low windows resentful of light. An architect can be judged by his fenestration; let it be grand, profligate, various, bold. No, his windows are as regular as clipboards, dull as computer screens, we have no architects now, we have little men who like to simulate. Smart models, they call it, and it has nothing to do with long-legged ladies with degrees, those are still avoided after hours in favour of the dumb kind. No, smart models are a way of constructing the building on a three-dimensional screen. A Virtual Model allows me a tour of the building before the first navvy gets out his spade.

‘Bring me the drawings of the ground plan and front elevation will you?’ I asked the bright young architect in spotted braces. I was in charge of the detail for the new private cancer hospital we were building.

‘Drawings?’ he said, as though I’d asked him to empty bedpans. ‘Here, have a look at the preliminary video, I’ll give you the data-line on the headphones channel and if you get hot about the concept, we can build up a few simulations on the edit channel.’

What?

I saw him later, swinging through the double doors in his American trenchcoat and trilby.

‘How’s the Brief?’ asked his friend.

‘Having a bit of trouble with the old crocodile that’s all.’

The old crocodile. I suppose he means me. Do I look like a Leviathan? Do I look like Hobbes? I hope not. It might be flattering to have a philosopher’s jaw but I’d rather be mistaken for Descartes. I know you’ll think that is because he was a Catholic, it’s not, it’s because he did his best thinking inside a stove. I’ve never had much patience with Hobbes. I can work with a man who is a) an atheist, b) a monarchist, c) a nominalist, d) a materialist, but I can’t work with a man who is all of these things at the same time.

Well, Hobbes’s bastard shade is having its day out in the City. We are all atheists, materialists, nominalists, now. Oddly, we seem to be turning into monarchists too, there’s nothing as effective as abolishing a King to bring out the worst of royalist sentimentality. The antique shops are crammed with fading Union Jacks and coronation mugs. The richer men buy gewgaws from Windsor Castle. It’s too late, can’t turn the clock back, ticks the cliché, although, God knows, we turn it back day and night when it’s a matter of prejudice. No, in the dreary Hobbes world, where religion is superstition and the only possible actions are actions of self-interest, love is dead. That young man in the spotted braces thinks me a fool to listen to opera, to go to Mass, to sit quietly with a book that is better than me. What use is it? What use is it to love God, to dig my hands in the dark red soil of my home, and feel for it a passion which is not possession but recognition? What use is it to believe that beauty is a Good, when metaphysics has sold her in the market-place?

Of course we have romance. Everyone can see how useful romance is. Even the newspapers like romance. They should; they have helped to create it, it is their daily doses of world malaise that poison the heart and mind to such a degree that a strong antidote is required to save what humanness is left in us. I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes their place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.

Isn’t it well known that nothing shocks us? That the photographs of wretchedness that thirty years ago would have made us protest in the streets, now flicker by our eyes and we hardly see them? More vivid, more graphic, more pornographic even, is the newsman’s brief. He must make us feel, but like a body punched and punched again, we take the blows and do not even notice the damage they have done.

Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news? ‘Terrible’ you said at Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, the Indian earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can do, and the fear and unease that such powerlessness brings, trails in its wash, a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pass every day. Hasn’t he got legs and a cardboard box to sleep in?

And still we long to feel.

What’s left? Romance. Love’s counterfeit free of charge to all. Fall into my arms and the world with its sorrows will shrink up into a tinsel ball. This is the favourite antidote to the cold robot life of faraway perils and nearby apathy. Apathy. From the Greek A Pathos. Want of feeling. But, don’t we know, only find the right boy, only find the right girl, and feeling will be yours. My colleagues tell me I need just such a remedy. Buried up to my neck in pink foam nothing can hurt me now. Safe to feel. All I can feel is you darling.

I was standing at the station waiting for the train, when a woman approached me, with a wilting red rose in a plastic wrapper.

‘Buy it for your lucky day.’

‘When will that be?’

‘The day you fall in love. I see romance for you. A tall blonde lady.’

‘Romance does not interest me.’

She stared at me as though I had uttered a blasphemy in church, and I suppose we were in a church of a kind, the portable temple of sentimentality that can be flapping about your head at a moment’s notice.

She walked away, hawking her exhausted roses around the others, some of whom were glad enough to buy. I don’t blame them, the dead world greedy of feeling, but there must be another way.

My own austerity, some might say severity, is like those magic girdles that knights used to wear when fighting dragons. Irrelevant, certainly, but it protects me by reminding me of what things I value. And the things I value are not the fake attentions and easy affections of a world unmoored from its proper harbour. I too long to feel, but feeling genuine and deep. My colleagues think me a remote sort of man, but, if I do not know what feeling is, at least I have not yet settled down into what I know it is not.

My thoughts were lost in the Byronic roar of the 325. The $50,000,000 bullet train braked by permanent oil shortages to a stately fifty miles per hour. Still, it has a romantic pathos, don’t you think?

The man knew that the train was travelling steadily towards the sun. His arms and face were burning. He was becoming the thing he feared. He feared the red rays, the swabs of heat, he feared the scalding tongs on his temples. He feared the hot hard hands pulling him out, pulling him out of the dark carriage, where he had been safe.

He heard the clatter of tin trays and the tinny voice of the obstetrician splitting his mother’s legs into two metal tracks. There was no escape, only the boom boom of the blood in his ears and the blood red sun overhead.

He fainted.

The baby was translucent when born. The doctor held him up against the window and watched the light dappling the tiny liver. The baby was beautiful and for a moment the doctor found himself looking through a lens into an unacknowledged world. But the sun was too bright and he was obliged to close the curtains.

One night I was called out to a mother in labour. It’s not my field. I don’t care for the stirrups and razors, forceps and condom-thin gloves. I had to go, I have an obligation to a charitable trust I try to help, I had to go. It was late, I had returned from the opera, foolishly I still wear white tie.