INTO THE BODY

The morphine had sedated her, her mouth was slack, her eyes half closed, unfocused, seeing the world through the screen of her lashes. Pantaleon stood at her head with his mask and his chloroform drop–bottle. Two theatre nurses with their starched pinafores and frilled caps waited beside the grooved trays of gleaming instruments. Delphine Sieverance lay on the operating table still in her nightgown, having been brought directly to the theatre from her house. There was no time to lose; everything had been prepared with the utmost speed.

Pantaleon looked at him. “The wind is freshening. Time to weigh anchor.”

Carriscant nodded and Pantaleon dripped chloroform on to the mask. She was unconscious within seconds. Carriscant reached for the hem of her nightgown and remembered. A crucial act of preparation…

He cleared his throat. “Would you please leave the room. Just for a moment or two. Everyone, please, Pantaleon.”

The nurses and Pantaleon glanced at each other and left the room without further question. Carriscant closed his eyes and a slow shudder ran through his body. He gripped the nightdress hem and lifted it up, pulling it up her body until it bunched at her ribs. His eye went first to the dense golden-ginger furze of her pubic hair and then took in the paleness of her torso, almost bleached in contrast to the stretched inflamed area of her lower belly where the infection glowed luridly beneath her skin, the fateful roseate blush of incipient peritonitis. He drew a great gulp of air into his lungs, turned and went to search in a cupboard beneath the sink for the implements he needed. He found them and stropped the razor rapidly on the thick leather band hanging above the taps.

Over her body once more he quickly foamed up a lather on the shaving soap with the brush and then, with short circular sweeps, he worked the white spumy suds into the wiry curls of her pubic hair. Reflexively he tested the edge of the blade on his thumb before, with four or five firm passes, he shaved away the hair on her mound. He wiped the remaining soap away with a towel and, unable to resist, he placed his hand there a moment, feeling it smooth and cool, until the heat of his palm warmed the skin. He moved his hand inches to the left and, palpating gently, felt the engorged shape of the abscess. He made tiny marks on her skin with a chinagraph pencil to act as a guide—my marks, he thought, my sign and delineate the area where he would cut. He laid white cloths over her belly and thighs, leaving only the area to be operated on clear, and called the others back in. They said nothing, made no reference to what might have happened in their absence, and took up their positions again.

“Scalpel.”

Carriscant felt the nurse press the slim weighted heel of the knife into his open palm. His fingers closed around it and the sudden terror that sluiced through him almost made him stagger with alarm. In all his years as a surgeon, all the hundreds of times he had stood poised with a knife above a living human being, he had felt nothing but the elation of the job he was about to do. This bowel-loosening anguish was shockingly unfamiliar. He felt a tremor in his hands as he laid them on her taut flushed belly. What was happening to him? Where was this awful fear, this uncertainty coming from?

He forced the curved blade to indent the flesh, just above Poupart’s ligament on the right side, and forced himself to apply more pressure until it bit through the epidermis and the blood came. He drew the knife across, making a cut of about six inches, revealing the blood-flecked fatty tissue and then the nacreous surface of the peritoneum, like a soft red-veined yellow marble. Here was the moment: another cut and the abdominal cavity was exposed. He widened the opening and then reached down with his finger and pushed it into her body to find the appendix. He located it, now enlarged to a swollen suppurating abscess, and drew it gently out of the body. He inserted a rubber tube into the cavity it left and drained the fluid out. The nurses swabbed and cleaned. He tied off the appendix from the caecum and cut it free. He closed the wound and stitched it, dressing the cut with iodoform gauze.

He stepped back and looked at the clock on the wall—only thirty-five minutes had passed. He felt exhausted, ruined. He washed his hands and moved through in a daze to the dressing room. He sat in a chair, elbows on his knees, head hanging, watching the sweat drops fall from his nose on to the hexagonal tiles beneath his feet. He heard Pantaleon come in and felt his reassuring squeeze on his shoulder.

“Very successful,” Pantaleon said. “I think we had an hour or two to spare.”

“I’d better see Sieverance.”

He changed his clothes and went through to his consulting room where Sieverance was waiting and told him that the operation was over and seemed to have passed off well. To his alarm and embarrassment, Sieverance collapsed in his arms, in a kind of weeping swoon and had to be revived with a small glass of brandy.

“It’s all right,” Carriscant said to him. “It’s over. It went well. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

Sieverance clung to him, fingers clutching his biceps, like a drowning man just hauled from the water.

“Bless you, Carriscant,” he said. “Bless you, I’ll never forget this.”

Carriscant said something to him, something bland and consolatory, knowing that there was a double dose of truth in Sieverance’s affirmation. He would never forget, that was for sure, as it was also for sure that he would never cease to regret, either.