Witwatersrand University, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, St Maryâs London, Fellow of the Institute of Obstetrics, Boston Mass., with a practice which is, so to speak, always over-subscribed. Call him fashionable, but that would not be entirely just; he is much more than that, he gives more than any regular specialist fees could ever cover. Women talk about him to one another with a reverent sense of trust exceptional between patient and doctor even in this branch of medicine in which the doctor is priest, intermediary in the emergence of new life, and the woman is its active acolyte. As an obstetrician, he is each womanâs Angel Gabriel: his annunciation when he reads the scan of her wombâitâs a boy. And his shining bald head, outstanding ears and worshipful smile are the first things she sees when he lifts life as it emerges from her body. Between births and after reproduction is no longer part of his patientsâ biological programming, he takes careâin the most conscientious senseâof the intricate system inside them that characterizes their gender and influencesâoften even decidesâthe crucial balance of their reactions, temperaments, on which depend the manner in which they can deal with the other man-woman relationshipsâthe recognized ones with lovers and/or husbands.
Dr Archibaldâs consulting rooms are a home: the studio portraits of his children as babies and graduates, the blowups of wild life photography, which is his hobby, posters proposing the beauties of the world from museums he has enjoyed on his travels. The bejewelled hands of his Indian receptionist note any change of address of the habituée patient greeted once again, there is a bustle of several nurses with motherly big backsides, Afrikaner and black, calling back and forth to one another, who receive for urine tests the wafers peed upon by the patient in the privacy of a blue-tiled bathroom where a vase of live flowers always stands on the toilet tank.
His patientsâhis girls, as he refers to them, whether aged twenty or seventyâtalk of him to one another as Archie. Iâve got my six-month appointment with Archie due next week. Iâve just come from Archieâeverythingâs okay, he says, heâs pleased with me. And if everything is not okay, if rose thou art sick , Blakeâs invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm and eats out the heart of the rose has invaded with a cancer, Archie with the knife in his healing hand will cut it out so that blooming continues, for Archie is the deliverer of life.
The doctor has been married to and in love with his wife for thirty years at least. His seraglio of patients has nothing in common with the passion for her which has never waned; the penetration of his expert right hand sheathed in latex into the vaginas of his patients, young and desirable, ageing and desexed, reduced to the subject of a kind of gut-explorationin the diagnostic divining of his fingertips, might be thought certain to end in a revulsion against womenâs bodies. Or thatâwhat about that?âthe sight of parted thighs, the smooth heat that must be felt through the latexâall this should be rousing, a doctor is a male beneath his white coat. But neither professional hazard affects him, or ever has, even when he was a young man. He is unfailingly roused by the sight and scent and feel of his wifeâs body alone (she who was so hard to win to himself) and it is the man, not the doctor, who enters her and journeys with her to their joyous pleasure, as if there is always accessible to her an island in warm seas like one of those they have travelled to, together. When he talks to his seraglio women after examination, and sits a few moments on the edge of the steel table where they lie, he may be in contact with the body whose exposure he has reverently re-covered under wraps, he will place a reassuring palm of the hand on the