Free The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer

Witwatersrand University, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, St Mary’s 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 woman’s Angel Gabriel: his annunciation when he reads the scan of her womb—it’s 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 patients’ biological programming, he takes care—in the most conscientious sense—of the intricate system inside them that characterizes their gender and influences—often even decides—the crucial balance of their reactions, temperaments, on which depend the manner in which they can deal with the other man-woman relationships—the recognized ones with lovers and/or husbands.
    Dr Archibald’s 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 patients—his girls, as he refers to them, whether aged twenty or seventy—talk of him to one another as Archie. I’ve got my six-month appointment with Archie due next week. I’ve just come from Archie—everything’s okay, he says, he’s pleased with me. And if everything is not okay, if rose thou art sick , Blake’s 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 women’s bodies. Or that—what about that?—the sight of parted thighs, the smooth heat that must be felt through the latex—all 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 wife’s 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