Under My Skin by Sarah Dunant

operate if they think they can make a reasonable difference, and if they’re sure that the client understands what that difference will be.”
    “But sometimes the patient still gets a shock when they look in the mirror?”
    “Yes.”
    “So then what?”
    “Then they come back and complain about it. And you do what you can. No one wants a malpractice suit on their hands. So you try and placate them. And if you can’t do that and you think it’ll help, you try another operation or procedure.”
    Maybe she wrote her husband’s lines for him. She’d certainly had her hands on some kind of script. “For free?”
    “It depends. Sometimes. Although even if the surgeon doesn’t charge, there’ll still be hospital costs, and the anesthetist’s fees. But if you really think there’s nothing you can do, you stand firm, suggest they get a second opinion, and hope that will back you up.”
    “You know a lot about it,” I said evenly.
    “Yes,” she said, “I do.”
    Mr. and Mrs. Health and Beauty. Partners in profit. Now. But what about then? Receptionist? Nurse? It seemed a little unfeminist to suggest such a Harlequin type of courtship. But what the hell. We were hardly sailing in ideologically sound waters anyway. So I did.
    “What do you think?” she replied quietly.
    The water beneath the boat got shallower. We could be running aground. Drunk in charge. I let the scotch do the talking. “Well, a bit of me wondered if you might have been a patient?”
    She left a hint of a pause. “Which bit in particular?”
    It was my turn to be embarrassed. “You could always take it as a compliment,” I said, rather feebly.
    She thought about it, and it was impossible to know just how much I had offended her. “You know,” she said after a while, “I’ve learned over the years that the secret is not minding whether people know or not. It’s a very British disease, anyway, being so shocked. Not like America. I once went to a convention with Maurice in San Diego. California’s the home of the profession, of course. It’s perfectly culturally acceptable there. Almost compulsory in some circles. They do a lot of body work, breast augmentation, liposuction, that kind of thing. But the real business is in faces. Sun damage. There must be a million women out there who spent the first forty years of their life trying to get tanned and the second forty trying to get rid of the wrinkles. The best advert a surgeon can have there is his wife. There were almost as many face-lifts at that conference as there were women. I counted them. They didn’t have any trouble with it. They were so proud to be there. Thought of themselves as a walking advertisement for their husbands’ skill.” She paused. “Of course some of them were wrong, some of them looked dreadful. Do you know how you can spot them?”
    I shook my head—my eyes must have been on stalks Iwas so interested. She pulled back her hair from the side of her face to expose a rather handsome little ear with a small but perfect pearl stud in it. “They tend to wear clip-on earrings. To hide the point where the tuck meets the bottom of the ear. The bigger the earring, the bigger the tuck.”
    Stud earring, no tuck. But whether that made her natural or him just bloody good I wasn’t sure. She let her hair drop and poured herself another drink. I pushed my glass in her direction. Maybe it would help to get more drunk. It couldn’t make the story any weirder.
    “You don’t like the idea, do you?”
    I shrugged. “I think I’m just squeamish about somebody cutting up my flesh.” Maybe because someone once did it without my permission.
    “You believe women should just accept their lot and grow old gracefully, is that it?”
    What did I believe? I suppose that depended on how much I wanted the job. I thought about how best to put it. “I suppose I think if God had meant us to stay young, he wouldn’t have invented gravity.”
    She didn’t laugh. But then I suppose she