Where My Heart Used to Beat

by Sebastian Faulks

  Then I plunged it back into the bucket.

  Even in the flayed stage, Martha never seemed embarrassed. I wanted to see the nerves that branched like Darwin’s wondrous tree of life. I suppose it was the dynamism of these parts of the anatomy—the wires through which a vital force had passed—that led me towards neurology.

  A farm boy still at heart, I joined a beagling pack in another college and eventually gained access to a livery stable an hour’s bus ride from town, where on a Sunday, in return for mucking out the stalls and helping about in the yard, I could get a couple of hours on a horse. I signed up for a choral society, even though my voice was no more than average, and a debating club.

  Soon I moved the armchair and standard lamp from my study into the bedroom, so I could read overlooking the river, and I made it a rule not to work beyond nine o’clock, so I always had some time to read for pleasure. At first I read Sherlock Holmes, but in deference to the seriousness of my Calvinist college, I began to work through George Eliot instead. This took me on to German philosophy—Hegel, Feuerbach—and then the more psychological writers, such as Eduard von Hartmann, and the neurologist Moritz Benedikt. I discovered that all the building blocks of Freud’s early work were in print twenty or thirty years before he ever published, if you knew where to look.

  Mary Miller pretty much lived in my rooms, flitting back and forth at hours designed not to antagonize the elders of the kirk. A spare drawer in my roomy chest was given to her slips, jumpers, and suspenders; a nightdress was concealed from the scout beneath the mattress; underwear she brought and took away, as she did bottles of beer or bags of fruit she had bought at the market. One day when there was a suspiciously porterlike footfall on the wooden stair, I looked for an escape. A hatch in the landing opened into the roof space, where a trapdoor led to a flat leaded area among the eaves. In the spring we took a few potted plants up there; I grew some tomatoes in a bag of compost in a sunny corner. They hadn’t ripened by the end of term, but the scent of their leaves hung over our evening picnics. When we grew bolder we’d invite other people: friends from her women’s college, men from mine. Norman Grout was a regular guest, cross-legged on a rug, holding forth with off-color stories and gossip no one believed.

  It was a world within a cloistered world, and Mary Miller made no demands of me beyond good humor. I’ve mentioned how the first time I went into her house she seemed like a woman, such a finished item. Her hips were solid, but her breasts were new, with no rough dimpling at the tip, just a different-colored tissue, soft and filmy. She liked to hold my head there while I fed on them. How did the only daughter of an electronics engineer and a nursing sister from the outskirts of a dull town come to be such a quicksilver girl? Knowing no better, I assumed all love affairs had summer dresses, bottled beer, untiring sex, and dinner on the roof to the sound of a river running by.

  In my second year I made friends with a shortsighted theologian called Donald Sidwell. Donald was a man who talked about his passions—baroque music, horse racing, cricket, France, and vintage cars—with such earnestness that it was impossible not to be affected. He kept an old saloon car in a nearby village, and we bicycled out to it on a Saturday before having lunch in a pub. He liked to spend the afternoon with his head under the bonnet, “tuning her up,” as he put it, but in return for my patience he agreed to learn to ride a horse at the stables where I worked on Sunday. I knew little of his home life; what drew us together was an interest in ideas. I explained to him over bottled beer in my rooms how the nervous system worked and why it was a mistake to think of the “mind” as having an existence beyond the matter that comprised it. This led to some philosophical resistance from Donald, as he hit me with Descartes, Hume, and Locke. I silenced him at last with the idea of a bead of sweat in the palm of his hand when he was frightened—as he had been the previous Sunday, when his horse bolted. I told him the damp palm showed how a purely abstract emotion—fear—could, through the work of the nervous system and the exocrine glands, be turned into water. Mind literally into matter. Therefore there was no mind, only matter.

  Such undergraduate discussions often took place when people read papers to societies, but neither Donald nor I could perform in such a formal setting. I preferred it when he lectured me one-to-one on the nature of French civilization. Many of his theories came back to the belief that “France” was not a natural entity and would be happier if it had remained more than one country. He had extraordinary statistics of how few Frenchmen actually spoke French. As recently as 1900 it was only 28 percent or some such low figure: the others spoke Breton, Occitan, Languedocian, or one of hundreds of other dialects and patois. I had no idea if he was right or wrong, but I liked his grasp of detail.

  We often went to smoking concerts in other colleges. Our own took place in the paneled “junior parlor” and were well attended. Donald occasionally performed, singing comic songs he had written himself to his own piano accompaniment. I became as attached to Donald Sidwell as I had been to Mary Miller—in some ways more so, as there was never any striving or need for sacrifice in our companionship. With Mary, awkward questions about the future and what we wanted from each other had begun to shorten our horizons. She stayed less often, and I seemed not to mind.

  * * *

  MY REVERIE WAS broken by a knock at the door. It was Paulette. “Dr. Pereira is waiting for you,” she said and turned on her heel. I looked at my watch. It was twenty to eight.

  I found my host in the library. To my surprise he was wearing an open-necked shirt and canvas shoes; my suit and tie were out of place.

  FOUR

  “I met a young woman earlier on,” I said to Pereira at dinner. “Down by the sea.”

  “It was probably Céline. She often swims in the calanque.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s the granddaughter of a former patient of mine. An unusual girl, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. What does she do?”

  “She looks after her grandmother, some odd jobs at the port. She helps out here occasionally, if I have guests.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “I first came in the twenties. It was quite unknown. Even Cannes was only just starting to be discovered—by the British, I believe. It was quite heavenly on this island: just a few stuccoed houses in the port where some adventurous colonists had come over—bohemians, nudists, adventurers—and this lovely soft climate. There was a tennis court in those days, a proper fish restaurant, and a couple of family hotels. It all looked like a photograph by Lartigue.”

  “Is this where you practiced?”

  “Yes. I had a private sanatorium here at one time. In the house.”

  “But you haven’t worked for a while.”

  “No. I’m old. I’m ninety-three, and I’ve had a kind of leukemia for years. Most old people have cancer of some kind, as you know. But it’s getting worse, and for a few months I’ve been trying to put my affairs in order. Upstairs I have a huge number of files and papers, which Paulette is helping me go through. A while ago, I came across my diaries from the Great War. I didn’t have time to read them, but I did look at the photographs. There was a group of men and I’d written their names on the back, as we all did. When I saw the name “Hendricks,” it made me start. It was a day before I made the connection with The Chosen Few. Then, as I told you in my letter, it was fairly obvious that you were father and son.”

  “You don’t have children yourself?”

  “Alas not, though I was married for thirty years. My wife died ten years ago. My closest living relative is my nephew—my late sister’s son—who lives in Paris. He has recently retired from a law firm. He’s a fine man and I’m fond of him, but he has no interest in either medicine or literature. He’s my principal executor, but I wanted someone else to see if there was life in my archive—or indeed in my published works. When I discovered my double Hendricks connection, as it were, I had a brainwave. When I read your book again I recognized a fellow spiri
t. It’s a slightly bizarre idea, I know. I risk being laughed at, but at my age one really doesn’t care. Don’t say anything yet. Let’s get to know each other a little more, and then you can tell me what you think. There’ll be no hard feelings if you say no. But do let’s give ourselves a chance.”

  A smile forced its way across my face. A naked girl with sea urchins, a vain old man with a quixotic offer … there were not many such days in a life.

  “You know that little lecture you gave me yesterday?” I said. “About the layers of memory?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a lecture, wasn’t it?”

  Pereira smiled. “How acute of you, Dr. Hendricks. Yes. Those were the preliminary remarks before a talk I gave at a university not long ago. To the first-year students.”

  “Do you remember the rest of it?”

  “I could probably find my notes. If that would interest you.”

  “Yes, it would, if it’s not a nuisance.”

  After dinner, while he went upstairs to search for the notes, I went out into the garden for a last cigarette. I walked over the springy grass to the line of trees. When the cicadas stopped for a moment, I could hear the slap of water in the calanque far below. I emptied my bladder into the pine straw.

  I had once lived in a big house in north London, as a lodger. When the owners were away, I was encouraged to use the whole place, to switch on lights to deter burglars, to make a noise. There was a low box hedge at the edge of the terrace, and I took pleasure in urinating into it each night, though I never extinguished its sharp winter scent. Once in my home village I had been invited to a hunt ball—a first for a boy who just mucked out the horses. After we had eaten, the host led the men outside onto the gravel, where he at once unzipped and sprayed all round his driveway …

  I let these and other memories enrich the moment, and then went back inside, where Paulette was clearing the table. She handed me a buff-colored folder.

  “Dr. Pereira asked me to give you this and to say he has gone to bed. If you’d like to take it to your room, you’ll find I’ve put in an electric lamp.”

  Upstairs, I took off my jacket, tie, and shoes and dragged the newly arrived standard lamp over to the bed, where I propped up the pillows and settled back. The notes were typed onto thick foolscap.

  So I think we have already established that the biggest part of the human personality is determined by the way it remembers. Not by what it remembers but by how it remembers it.

  If you revisit a certain event in your life perhaps once a week over thirty to forty years, you enter into a relationship with that event. The more you revisit, the more you change it. Then you are in a position to tell yourself an evolving story of your past. I would say that, to put it in layman’s terms, this is probably the central process in the formation of personality.

  My work in the 1960s showed me that patients and volunteers used different parts of the brain to store different kinds of memory. If I asked, “What did you have for lunch?” they consulted one address, as it were. The name of the capital of Spain was elsewhere. If I asked them to ride a bicycle or perform some task they had not done since childhood, they had to look to yet another site.

  All this is now accepted, and we will doubtless one day have nice colored pictures from our friends with their big new scanners to illustrate it. When people visit priests or therapists, they talk about the events of their past they believe were important or formative. Often there is an element of trauma, or at least a “before” and “after.” What they discover by talking is—to put it bluntly—that they can change their responses. But I believe one way in which they “come to terms” with things is by changing the neural basis of the memory itself.

  Pereira had clearly struggled to put it all in lay terms for his audience. I flicked ahead to the conclusion.

  My hope is this. First we will see how the brain remembers: which parts of itself it uses, whether memories have a natural lifespan if they aren’t consulted, or whether everything is stored and the question is merely one of access. Next we will work out why some events stick and others appear lost. Then, third, we will work out how our visits actually shape the memory in the nerve cells. Thus we will learn how to find those memories we had thought lost. And by understanding how much of all this is within our power to choose and modify, we may find quite simple ways of making our lives more congenial. We will learn to revisit our memories in helpful ways only, so that the neural basis of the event will be reshaped.

  Some of this material formed the basis of my book, Alphonse Estève: The Man Who Forgot Himself. This was meant to be a “popular” book and was published in English, as I didn’t wish to confuse my academic colleagues …

  I put the folder down and went over to the window. He was no stylist, but presumably these were just expanded notes that no one else was meant to see.

  It was a clear night, and the sky to the south was rich in stars. I went to clean my teeth, returned to the bedroom, closed the shutters, and lay down to sleep.

  * * *

  IN THE VILLAGE house where I grew up with my mother, there were not many rules, but one that was always observed was that you were not allowed to share your dreams. My mother said this was because they were boring to other people, but I think she was wary of giving herself away. She was secretive about her own feelings and prudish about matters of the body. It was almost as though having no husband made her feel I was illegitimate, the by-blow of some passing laborer. She flinched when people looked from her to me and then back again. More even than his presence, I think, she missed the respectability my dead father would have given her.

  True to my late mother’s rule, I therefore won’t recount here the dream I had that night on the island except to say that it was about sex and war, death and peace … But more than that: there was a chance to live again, to write an alternative history of the world beginning a good ten years before Sarajevo. I dreamed of a century less insane.

  There being no sign of Pereira in the morning, I went down the steps to the calanque to clear my thoughts. I do like the metaphors we give to things. How do you “clear” your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; “thoughts,” therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and try to “feel,” which presumes that what we “feel” is more valuable than anything we think …

  Sitting on the rock, watching the white frills of foam on the waves, I thought of Newton’s imagined boy picking up a smoother pebble or a prettier shell while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. I thought of Matthew Arnold on the beach at Dover and of how he in turn had pictured Sophocles beside the Aegean shore and imagined that for the ancient playwright the sound of the sea was the ebb and flow of human misery.

  I remembered the sand beneath my boot at Anzio in 1944, when we splashed ashore from the landing craft, expecting to be eaten alive by German bullets. The ocean to me then was not an overpowering force; it was a freezing liquid in which I made my purpose known: to get ashore, dig in, and kill. I took the trouble to keep my rifle high and dry as I waded through the chest-high water, but that was all the deference I gave the sea that night.

  A problem is only insoluble to the sufferer; to others, it may have a comic or exasperating simplicity. It occurred to me that at this juncture I had become locked in, like one of my wretched patients for whom the moment for an easy solution has passed. I couldn’t go forward in my life—whatever remained of it—until I had a better understanding of what was past. This was the “hard work” that as a young therapist I had glibly recommended to my patients, but for me it seemed better to turn to the old standbys: denial, sensual pleasure, or a change of subject—to Newton or Matthew Arnold.

  Levering myself up off the rock, I began to walk up the steps. From below, I heard a splash. I stopped and went along a ridge of the hill. There was a swimmer down in the calanque, and it was easy enough to recognize the sleek, dark head that rose
through the water. I climbed down a little lower but stayed out of sight. In due course, Céline emerged, naked as before, and clambered up onto the rock. She had no tool for prizing off sea urchins, but she had brought a towel, which she spread out beside her abandoned dress. Then she lay down on her back to dry. She arranged her hair in the sun and lay with her hands flat by her sides. There was a birthmark on her lower abdomen, and she was a little bonier than I remembered. There was a slight self-consciousness in her langor, as though she either knew or imagined she was being watched.

  After a minute, I made my way back along the ridge to the steps, then up to Pereira’s garden.

  * * *

  WE HAD LUNCH on the terrace, which was shaded by a plum tree. Paulette brought a salade niçoise with lamb’s lettuce and a dressing heavy with garlic.

  “I enjoyed your lecture notes,” I said. “So far as I understood, you were aiming to do what a good psychoanalyst might do but using the brain itself to embed the change. Like analysis but biological.”

  “Yes,” said Pereira, as he poured bubbling water into my glass. “Of course, I had to leave out the neuroscience for the sake of the first-year audience. But that was essentially the idea I worked with for twenty years.”

  I nodded. It was far from my own area of expertise, but I could see its attractions.

  “Were you analyzed as part of your training?” Pereira said.

  “Yes. In England in those days, Freud was everything. Psychoanalysis was not only the basis of therapy, but in many hospitals it was the guiding light in diagnosis. Even for schizophrenia.”

  “Who analyzed you?” said Pereira.

  “A woman in Belsize Park. In London.”

  “Did she fall in love with you?”