Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘I see. Those are your two windows.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose, for simplicity’s sake, you might say that his guiding light is Charcot and mine is Darwin. For the rest we share a vast amount. I hope that our paths will fully converge again at the next stage.’

  ‘Does Dr Rebière not have the same reverence for Mr Darwin?’

  ‘Respect, but not reverence. One of his reservations, I think, but you must please not repeat this, is that Darwin suffers from a fatal disability in Dr Rebière’s eyes.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘He is not French.’

  ‘Would that make a difference?’

  ‘It might. But it is better this way. If Jacques took on any more theories his head might explode.’

  ‘Do you not think you have set yourself an impossible task? Can you really hope to discover all these things in your lifetime?’

  Thomas listened but could not hear any mocking edge to Kitty’s voice. He ran his hand back swiftly through his hair. ‘Yes and no. In some ways, it does seem impossible. We need much better equipment in the laboratory, lenses a thousand times stronger, new inventions to help us look at microscopic matter. We do not yet even understand how heredity works. I imagine that your parents both had blue eyes, but the precise process by which you have inherited them is still a mystery. Mr Darwin talked about “pangenesis” and “gemmules”, but they don’t really make sense; in fact his theory can be quite easily disproved. So we are in the foothills. Yet, I think we shall find answers. Never have we been closer. There are these sudden jumps and revelations in history. Take Shakespeare, for instance. He not only wrote the finest plays, but he described human motivation and behaviour in a way that had never been done before. You could say that his analysis did more than describe; it actually defined what humans were. From that moment on, the idea was born that each man and woman, instead of being a bundle of primitive desires and unreliable memories, had a consistently motivated psychology. They believed they might make something of themselves and change; they discovered a “self”. Perhaps it was not until Shakespeare that humans really began to behave like humans.’

  ‘Or like characters from Shakespeare, I suppose,’ said Kitty.

  ‘Well, it came to be the same thing. Of course, there are some drawbacks to this model. Some people do act inconsistently, they just do. And our brain cells die at such a rate, Franz Bernthaler assures me, that people do become literally someone else as they age, so in some ways it is not wise to expect them to preserve the same “character”. But it was nevertheless a breakthrough in the sixteenth century, to imagine people to have a consistent and explicable responsibility for their actions. And I do believe that again, now, we stand on the edge of a full explanation of what it means to be human. It is a great moment.’

  Kitty said nothing, but looked out towards the lake, which glimmered flatly in the late afternoon sun. A small village of white- and ochre-washed houses was beginning to grow on its far bank. She turned back to Thomas. ‘Will you be able to do all this without recourse to God? Is He not more likely to provide the answers than hereditary processes we cannot understand and instruments that have not been invented?’

  ‘That has traditionally been His role – the guardian of mysteries. But He is a costive and niggardly keeper. He does not give up any secrets. Humans unriddle them all for themselves. When we have answered the last question, we will have no more need to dignify our ignorance with the name of “God”.’

  ‘My word, you are a true scientist, are you not?’ she said gently. ‘I have never previously met anyone who would give Mr Darwin the time of day.’

  ‘His reputation has fallen because there are some gaps in his theory. The machinery of heredity in particular. But I believe they will be filled. And the process of natural selection, which is the centre of his work – that has been established beyond reasonable doubt.’

  There was a silence, and Thomas thought he had perhaps offended or bored Kitty with the intimate detail of his speculations; but when he turned his head to look at her, he found that her eyes were fixed on him in a kind, almost indulgent gaze.

  ‘I have a favour to ask you,’ he said. ‘I shall tell Dr Rebière that you are becoming my patient and I am certain that he will happily agree. However, if you should happen to run into him and he inquires about your health, as he is certain to do, could you perhaps not tell him about the rheumatic fever?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I feel a little . . . Protective. We do share all our discoveries, but it is sometimes a question of timing.’

  ‘I understand. May I ask you something in return?’ said Kitty.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Are you absolutely certain that you have never experienced any of the same symptoms as the patients that you treat? The more seriously ill ones, I mean.’

  Thomas stood up and walked from the balcony into the room. Kitty’s large brass bed was made up with a quilted cover and two large pillows trimmed with white broderie anglaise; it reminded him obliquely of his room in Torrington, of Sonia sitting on the edge of the bed many years ago, on the day when he feared that he had broken his arm. Something stirred in his mind; he felt the idea move – from one part of his awareness into another, just as he himself had walked from the balcony into the bedroom.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have never recognised it before, I have never allowed it out of the place where it lived. I used to hear a voice. But it was not real. I mean, it was real, but it was not attached to a body. It used to talk to me regularly in a slow, stuporific way. Then it stopped. It went away. I have not heard it for some years now and I feel sure that I never will again. It even said a kind of goodbye.’

  Kitty had come into the room and stood beside him nodding her head gently. ‘And you have never told anyone about this?’

  ‘I have never even told myself about it,’ said Thomas. ‘I have never let it into my conscious mind. It just moved in at that moment, when you asked me.’

  ‘But you were aware of it?’

  ‘I was aware of it very clearly, but only at a certain level of awareness, not at all levels.’

  ‘And you did not question yourself about it?’

  ‘No. It felt like everything that happens to you: it felt like nothing. I discounted it because it had happened to me personally and was therefore valueless. Of no interest.’

  Thomas put his face between his hands. He felt overcome by fatigue, as though some mortal weight, under which he had long been labouring, had been removed; now he barely knew how to stand.

  Kitty laid her fingers on his arm. ‘If you would like to,’ she said, ‘you may put your head on my shoulder.’

  He wrapped his arms round her waist, gently; and as he did so, she ran her fingers up through his hair. ‘I wanted to do that,’ she said, ‘when I saw you doing it to yourself just now.’

  Thomas lifted his head and looked at her. Kitty saw that there were tears on his cheeks.

  She said, ‘It is a hard life, Thomas.’

  He felt himself in pieces before her. ‘Yes, Kitty. Yes it is. But it has its moments of transcendence.’ He took the bare freckled skin of her upper arms, feeling its softness beneath his large hands, and gazed into her eyes.

  The next day, after lunch, Valade approached Thomas in the hall and gave him a picture magazine.

  ‘I found this in town when I went in yesterday. It is a little out of date, but I think you’ll find it interesting. It’s about Mount Lowe in California. They have built a railway up into the Sierra Madre mountains near a little town called Pasadena. It runs to a height of about a thousand metres already and they are going to take it on further. Isn’t that the height of the place you have your eye on?’

  ‘Mount Low,’ said Thomas, smiling. ‘That is a curious name for a mountain.’

  ‘Lowe with an “e”. It is named after the proprietor of the railway, a Professor Thaddeus Lowe. It was previously called Oak Mountain. Though perhaps you also find that amusing
.’

  ‘Less so,’ said Thomas.

  ‘In any case,’ said Valade, ‘you will see that they were able to build an electrical railway with an overhead trolley cable up the gentle incline, then when it comes to a steep lift, the passengers get out of the train and into a cable-car on an incline of roughly one in two.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Thomas. ‘I shall read it this evening.’

  ‘You should do so, Doctor,’ said Valade. ‘You will also find the details of the finance instructive. Perhaps we can talk about it further tomorrow.’

  ‘Indeed. I am unusually busy at the moment and I need to talk to my colleague Dr Rebière, but I shall make time for this. Perhaps you would care to come to our table for dinner tomorrow night.’

  ‘Delighted. I shall speak to your cellar boy straight away.’

  Thomas spent the afternoon with his patients and it was not until the evening that he finally saw Jacques, when they met in his consulting room to discuss the day. Thomas feared that Jacques would be humiliated and in despair, even though they had kept from him the diagnosis of Kitty’s rheumatic fever. He tried not to meet his eye too directly when he went in, yet Jacques seemed strangely unruffled, Thomas thought, as he lit a cigar and looked out over the lawns of the schloss.

  After an exchange of minor news, Thomas said, ‘I saw your former patient yesterday. Katharina.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jacques. ‘So did I. She seemed well.’

  ‘I have taken her on for the remainder of her stay. Merely a formality. Temperature, pulse and so on. I am not trying to—’

  ‘Yes, she told me.’

  ‘Is that all right?’

  ‘It seems . . . Appropriate in the circumstances.’

  There was a pause. Thomas coughed. ‘Jacques, I—’

  ‘Thomas, I am not going to be cast down by a single clinical error – the failure to diagnose an asymptomatic condition. I am not going to abandon or alter the course of my work because one girl’s womb had an impalpable cyst. And we are not going to lose face or lose heart as an enterprise because there was a slight delay in the treatment of a patient before the second opinion of such a highly astute doctor was able to set things right.’

  Jacques’s eyes were glowing, but his manner remained calm. Thomas found his mouth open, then close. This was not the response he had expected and he felt a clutch of panic. Was it possible that all along Jacques had been a fanatic? Perhaps when he was working all night in Paris, while Sonia looked on lonely and anxious, he had not been in a state of scholarly open-mindedness, but had really been driven by a desire to find a closed theory that would be the cornerstone of some personal church.

  Thomas said, ‘I think it is important that we do not panic. Naturally one case proves very little, and I am not suggesting we abandon all we learned at the Salpêtrière in those great days. But we must understand what we can learn from this setback. If we do not examine it properly and—’

  ‘I do not see it as a setback. Fräulein Katharina presented a case of hysteria which has been cured by the techniques of psychophysical resolution. I told you at the outset that I believed it was not quite a classic case and that there were some complications. And so there were. You discovered them. Well done. But it takes more than two invisible sacs full of benign fluid to destroy the work of a decade. I dare say she had corns as well.’

  Thomas found his anger rising, and held hard to the edge of Jacques’s desk. ‘Iam not trying to destroy anything. Iwant to build and progress. Before we can do that, you have to admit something. In the case of Fräulein Katharina, you were wrong, Jacques, and you were dangerously wrong.’

  ‘I was not wrong. She suffered from hysteria, which—’

  ‘She does not suffer from hysteria, and she never has. Furthermore, I sincerely doubt that the disease entity of hysteria will continue to be recognised in ten years’ time.’

  ‘That is an absurd thing to say. It is one of the most completely described neurological—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Jacques, do you not read the papers and journals? Do you not see how Charcot’s heirs are respectfully trying to distance themselves from him?’

  ‘Then they are wrong. Hysteria is a protean disease which can imitate—’

  ‘It cannot imitate every damned thing. I read a paper the other day in which the patient was diagnosed with hysteria, caused by some emotional stress that made her stammer. It was quite clear to any disinterested doctor that she had Tourette’s syndrome, first identified by our old friend and colleague Georges Gilles of that name at the Salpêtrière.’

  ‘Explain to me the pains in Katharina’s wrists and fingers,’ said Jacques.

  ‘I . . . I will in due course,’ said Thomas. ‘But, please, my dear Jacques, please consider that in this instance you may have made a mistake.’

  He saw Jacques struggling with himself. ‘I will consider it,’ he said eventually, ‘but I do not expect to change my mind.’

  Thomas sighed. ‘Let us say no more about it for the time being. We both need time to reflect. Tomorrow night, by the way, Valade is dining with us and we are going to talk about railways. I shall see you in half an hour.’

  He did not trust himself to say any more to Jacques, so left the room and ran upstairs to change. He was sure that the schloss could not proceed and flourish until Jacques admitted his error and examined all the consequences that flowed from it. Thomas knew this process was essential for the wellbeing of the joint venture; but how pure, he wondered, were his motives in thinking so? Perhaps there had always been a rivalry between him and Jacques and this was his chance to assert himself as the senior partner. Maybe he was anxious, too, that there be no taint of mental illness, hereditary or otherwise, in the woman with whom he was now so abjectly yet exhilaratingly in love.

  He straightened his tie in the mirror. At least he was going to see her in a few minutes; presumably she would come in to dinner. Whatever happened to their life’s work, there was the consolation of seeing her across the room. It seemed at that moment, as he stared into his own face in the looking glass, to be enough; and perhaps, he thought, it really was enough.

  He went to examine Kitty the next morning after breakfast. He took her temperature and felt her pulse. She let her arm rest on his thigh, and he dug down between the veins and sinews to feel the small throb through his finger. He let his watch run a full minute to be quite sure.

  ‘You are definitely alive,’ he said.

  ‘I have seldom felt better.’

  Thomas smiled. ‘It took humans a very long time to understand that not being alive was a single thing. They saw people losing blood in battle, or losing breath or losing weight, losing their minds or falling asleep, but they had different words for each cessation. The idea that all these calamities were versions of the same thing – being dead – took them millions of years to understand. That is why they propped them up in tombs and expected them to come back or carry on, depending on what kind of interruption they had had.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Exactly. The only thing common to all these deaths was loss of conscious thought. But since they did not know what conscious thought was, how could they possibly be aware of its absence – least of all in others?’

  Kitty stood up. She wore a long beige skirt, tight at the hip and broad at the hem over buttoned brown boots; on top she had a high-necked blouse with a silver brooch beneath a green woollen jacket.

  ‘Quite soon I shall be ready to leave,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ Thomas tried to sound casual. ‘And where shall you go?’

  ‘I thought I might go to England for a time. My mother’s family is in London. And you?’

  ‘Me? I have an enormous amount of work to do here. Your case has precipitated a certain . . . Crisis of confidence which we have not yet overcome. In fact, we have not even confronted it.’

  ‘In view of that,’ said Kitty, ‘perhaps we should both forget anything which passed between us yesterday.’
/>   Thomas could feel her steady gaze on him. He looked up from where he was sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘I could never forget what happened,’ he said. ‘It was the most extraordinary moment of my life.’

  ‘But since I have been passed from the care of one doctor to another then it would not do—’

  ‘It would not do for you to be passed on so quickly to Dr Bernthaler like—’

  ‘Like a hot potato?’

  ‘Like a parcel.’ Thomas smiled. ‘It has its comic side.’

  ‘It does, Thomas.’

  He stood up, went over to where she stood and took both her hands in his. ‘I have fallen in love with you,’ he said. ‘It is better to say it.’

  There was a slight flush in Kitty’s cheeks, but not the feverish discolouration of the preceding days.

  ‘Be careful, Thomas. You have worked so hard and for so long. I cannot be responsible for some calamity that would affect all of you – Sonia as well, and her child.’

  ‘I would not allow that to happen.’

  ‘I am perfectly prepared to allow any minor indiscretion that may have happened yesterday to be forgotten, and never to make reference to it again.’

  ‘I’m afraid that is entirely impossible.’

  ‘Please be serious. For the pleasure of indulging some whim, you must not risk everything you have dedicated your life to achieving.’

  ‘I would not do that. This is no whim, I assure you.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  Thomas felt Kitty’s eyes searching his own, trying to see through them.

  ‘I could not be more certain of anything,’ he said.

  She held his gaze for a moment longer. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘you may kiss me.’

  She threw her arms round his neck and turned her face up towards his. He kept his eyes open as he touched her pale lips with his, and as he pulled her closer to him, the tip of his tongue accidentally touched the tip of hers. He stroked the fair hair back from her forehead. She looked to him so charged with beauty, so complete and ready for whatever life lay ahead of her, that he could not believe the good fortune of his timing. Why had no one else come before him and carried this woman away?