If symptoms
persist. . .
I REMEMBER as a child hearing my elders and betters say that accidents, such as plane crashes, come in threes. I still don't know whether they were right, but what I can say with some authority is that maltreated women appear on my ward in threes.
The first of last week's crop was a lady whose boyfriend of two years was the insanely jealous type. He cross-ques- tioned her about where she had been and what she had done, even if she had left the house for only five minutes; he regarded all telephone numbers with the utmost suspicion, searched her bag for evidence of her infidelity and so forth. This behaviour is so common as to be almost normal; but where my patient's boyfriend out-Othelloed Othello, as it were, was in his method of securing her fidelity during his absence for the day. He handcuffed her left wrist to her right ankle.
When she told her father, a respectable man, and he protested to the boyfriend, the latter replied in that charming tone of voice which I know so well, 'You don't frighten me. I can pay twenty pounds and have you killed.'
The second maltreated woman was a young Muslim lady whose parents had taken her recently to Pakistan. They had never permitted her to attend school for any length of time, though secretly she wanted to go to university, because they feared it would corrupt her. She attend- ed school only long enough to keep the school inspectors at bay.
When she arrived in Pakistan, it was announced that she was engaged to be married — next day. The groom was a young man brought up in her household whom she had supposed until then to be her brother. In fact, he was her first cousin. When she said she did not want to marry him, her father beat her with a stick and stamped on her chest. Then he almost suffocated her by sitting on her.
She insisted, however, that she would not marry her fiancé. Her father then threatened to divorce her mother, which in the circumstances would have left her destitute and with an abominable public reputation. My patient surrendered to the blackmail.
After the wedding, the happy couple could not make love, as it seemed almost incestuous to them to do so. But the rel- atives on both sides were aware of this reluctance, and were moreover impatient for an addition to the family, and so they locked them in a room together for ten days. Still nothing happened; the rela- tives installed a tape-recorder and said that if at the end of a further period they were not satisfied that intercourse had taken place, they would adopt other, sterner measures.
Autres temps, autres moeurs. And last, though not necessarily least, was an overdoser whose second husband, like her first, was a drunk. She told Me how he had one day tried to strangle his stepdaughter, her 15-year-old daughter by her first marriage. 'That was because you said I fancied her sexually,' interposed the husband. 'Then when I tried to stop you, ru, strangled me. I went unconscious, doctor. 'But it was only a one-off.' 'That's true, doctor,' she said in his defence. 'And he only drinks for social- ism.'
Drinkers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shakes!
Theodore Dalrymple
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