“Do you like your room?” said Anna.
“It’s not the most luxurious,” I said, “but I think it’s the best.”
“I think so too. I lived there myself when I first arrived in the city.”
“And where do you live now?”
She gestured with her arm. “Over there. The other side of the cathedral.”
“Is it a nice place?”
“Of course. I had the choice.”
It was dark, and I had only written one page that morning. I felt the typewriter rebuking me.
“Can I come with you another day?” I said. “I enjoy the company.”
“I’m going to look at more places on Friday. I’ll probably come by the brasserie at about the same time. So if you’re there…”
“Do you have a telephone number?” I asked, but she had already started walking and didn’t turn round.
It became my regular afternoon activity, to go with Anna to the rooms and flats, the bedsits and small hotels that needed listing. How lonely can a man be, I wondered, that his only friend is from the tourist office, someone whose home he’s never visited and whose second name he doesn’t know … but I liked the exercise, and I came to know the city well. Sometimes Anna pointed out small restaurants or shops that sold foreign-language books.
Other afternoons I would go to the cinema. It was a good way of resting my mind from The Chosen Few. The national taste seemed to be for gloomy domestic drama or knockabout comedy in which small men ended up covered in whitewash. One afternoon at a cinema “club” where I had bought afternoon membership for the price of a normal ticket, I found I was watching a pornographic film set in a nunnery. Nothing in the poster had given any hint; that was not their style.
* * *
WITHOUT HER SPELLING it out, Tuesdays and Fridays became the days on which Anna would pass by the Brasserie Felix. Sometimes we only had a couple of places to look at, and often a quick glance was enough; at other times we didn’t finish till nearly seven. Our conversation seldom varied. Most of it was about the rooms and flats themselves; the rest concerned the history of the city.
I never asked Anna about her family or her past life, and she showed no interest in mine. After a polite inquiry about how the book was going (“Well, it’s going, at least it’s still going.” “That’s good.”) she’d pull the folded pieces of paper from her pocket and say, “OK. Today we’re going to a part of town we haven’t been before. It’s where the old weavers used to live. Is that the right word? Weaver?”
And then we’d be off, over a bridge, down a cobbled side street. Sometimes we’d take a tram or the rattling elevated railway, from which we could look into the windows of the gray rectangular apartment blocks thrown up to replace the streets destroyed by war.
Naturally, I was curious about her. I speculated silently. She was separated from a cruel husband; she was widowed; her husband was trapped behind the iron curtain, and she worked to send him money. She had two small children living in another country. She was a government informer looking out for illegal immigrants. She was in fact—and this was where my money was—working on her own book, a long historical fiction, and did the tourist job to pay the rent.
Her face intrigued me. As well as the sculpted lips, she had a high forehead and large brown eyes that seemed blank with unacknowledged pain. These were features anyone would have called “strong”; yet it proved impossible to remember her face. On the days I didn’t see her I would, for the fun of it, try to picture her, but all I could get was a vague outline, tallish, slim, the hair to the shoulder. I could bring to mind in detail the faces of children I’d been at the village school with in the 1920s, but of the girl I’d seen the day before, only a suggestion.
Were we “friends”? I wondered. I believed so. There was a bond between us, developed by her passing the brasserie at the same time on those two days; there was tact in the way we both accepted that if we didn’t want to talk about our own past we couldn’t ask the other. I think we liked each other for that. The best thing for me was that she had a story it was not my business to discover: my relationship with Anna was the opposite of the one I had with my patients, and it was exhilarating for me to remain in ignorance of her past life.
One of the things that had bound me most fiercely with Judith Wills and Simon Nash was our recoil from the convenient “solutions” of early psychoanalysis. Those poor girls with their pains and their stammers and their “absences,” all of them clearly suffering from types of epilepsy, to be told that the cause of their illness was an unrecognized desire to sleep with their stepfathers … This was clinical negligence or, in the case of the girl with stomach pains, sent home cured of “hysteria” only to die of stomach cancer, criminal negligence.
And yet … the human desire for a story, for mystery and solution, especially when the ending was not merely that of a detective puzzle but also brought release and happiness—that hunger was always there; it was always a temptation. And if you took away the dogma—the wrenching of the facts to fit the approved pattern that any church demands of its acolytes—you could admit that there were times when in the course of long conversations people could discover things about their past that helped them live their future.
With Anna, I made a friendship based not on intimacy but on its absence. In this void there grew a sense of trust. One day we went to the cathedral district to inspect an apartment whose owners were abroad in Italy for six months. It was grander than the normal run of places: the living room had a fireplace with a marble surround, oil paintings, and velvet-covered sofas; the main bedroom had a four-poster bed and a view of the river. I’d never slept in a four-poster bed or even sat on one. As I propped myself up against the pillows, I said to Anna, who was measuring the width of the room, “Do you think there’s any pattern to the experiences you’ve had? Or are they merely random, unrelated?”
For the first time since I’d known her, she smiled. She put down the tape measure, unzipped her boots, and came and sat next to me on the bed.
The smile persisted as she turned to me. “I see no pattern, Robert. I see days.”
“I’ve never seen you smile before.”
“You’ve never said anything to make me.”
For a moment I thought she was going to laugh, and I was relieved when she didn’t.
She put her hand on my thigh and said, “We can make love if you want to.”
“Have you known me long enough, then?”
“Yes.”
“All right. It’s nice and warm in here.”
She smiled again, stood up, took off her sweater and skirt, and pulled the slip over her head. She was wearing nylon tights with a seam that ran from the groin up to the sternum. I’d never seen these things; I supposed that as well as being warm they were necessary for the shorter skirts which women were then wearing. It made me remember Luisa and how proud she had been of her old-fashioned reggicalze as she pirouetted in the hotel room, the bands of stretched silk and bare flesh alternating.
Anna’s skin had a beige tint, still reminding me of sculptor’s clay; her abdomen was flat, the haunches strong, and there was a pleasing definition to the patella. I took off my clothes as well, so we sat naked side by side on the luxurious bed. She ran her hands over my chest and shoulders and then kissed me on the cheek.
I found her body pleasing from an anatomical point of view but nothing more. I looked at her with the kindness I had never previously been able to muster; I felt proud to have reached the state of detachment in which I saw her nakedness as human, healthy. Her pubic hair was an auburn color but sparse, as though she was sixteen, not thirty-eight. She reached over and touched my penis, which lay dormant, sideways. I remember thinking that these ridiculous terms—pubic, penis, and so on—for once seemed apt. She lifted the limp thing in her left hand as though looking for something more interesting beneath, but there was only the angle of my thigh and groin. I touched her labia and ran my finger between them, inserting the tip gentl
y into her vagina. I wondered why my life was still in Latin.
After a bit, we stopped feeling each other.
We said nothing for a few minutes until eventually Anna spoke. “The next flat is not so interesting.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in the suburbs. We’ll have to take a tram. Has your pass run out yet?”
“No. I’ve still got three days left.”
We lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling.
“It must be costing them a lot in heating bills,” I said.
“I think they’re rich,” said Anna. “They’ve gone to Venice for the whole winter.”
There was another silence, this one a little more awkward.
“While we’re here,” said Anna. “And we’ve come this far. Do you mind?”
She licked her finger, ran her hand down over her groin, and then parted the labia to show the mucocutaneous tissue coming to a point where the tip of the clitoris peeped from its burrow. She began to rub it in a businesslike way. I lay across her and put my arm round her shoulders. My face was in her hair, my lips next to her ear.
“Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking?”
“No,” she gasped. “It’s too … awful.”
She lay back on the bed when she had finished, and tears poured backwards from her eyes down into her hair.
* * *
THE BOOK WENT on at a steady three pages a day, and I began to get a feel for the shape and how much further there was to go. The worst part was the third quarter, when the end was not in sight but it was too late to start again. It began as an attack on my profession, which, I argued, was too interested in disease categories to value what was in front of its nose: the illuminating experiences of the patients. A rapid, two-page history of the discipline so far pointed out that there had been only one discovery of importance: that most of those in chronic wards who believed they were Napoleon or Boadicea were suffering neither brain disease nor personal breakdown; they were in the late stages of syphilis. That was the sum of the advances: almost two hundred years to identify a categorical error.
I had some easy fun with the state of treatments as I found them, especially with the self-verifying claptrap of Freudian psychoanalysis that had brought our profession to its knees. I tried to keep it as light and anecdotal as possible.
It was a wet Yorkshire evening, in October 195—. The rain was running off the full gutters of the huge Victorian building. I was the junior duty doctor when we received a telephone call from a GP surgery in Halifax. He had a young patient he wanted to refer to us. His mother had a car and could bring him in within the hour.
I alerted my superior, Dr. H, a man with long experience. The patient arrived at about 7:00 p.m. He was called Terry and was dressed in a jacket and tie. His mother was a respectable woman, though distraught.
Terry had been a good enough student to go to the grammar school and then to university, where he was in his final year. His parents were very proud of him. He was quiet as a child, a keen reader. He had an older sister, but they were not close; the sister was in good health. A few months earlier he had started to stay out late. He told his parents he had a part-time job because he was saving up to take a girl to Paris. He disappeared for a week, and when he came back, he said he had been followed by the police. He refused to go to his bedroom because he said it was bugged, and insisted on sleeping downstairs. He warned his parents not to listen to the radio in case there were coded messages about him.
Under questioning from Dr. H, Terry seemed stunned. He shook his head, as though to clear it of something unwanted. He spoke slowly, as if sedated, though his mother said he had taken no medication. At other times he was agitated and seemed anxious to warn Dr. H about a plot to involve him with the police.
We spoke further about his feelings for girls and his Methodist upbringing. Dr. H suggested to his mother that Terry would be better off in hospital. We agreed that she would return the following day with a case with Terry’s things. A nurse took Terry away.
When the mother had left, Dr. H said, “A schizophrenogenic mother if ever I saw one.”
I said nothing, though I was appalled. Here was a young man in the first grip of a grave illness, and the consultant proposed to explain it in terms of his parenting. Dr. H talked about Terry’s superego and his id, which had something to do with his asking a girl out.
And here was someone facing the worst moment of her life, and all that we could offer her by way of comfort was to tell her that it was her fault. Dr. H was adamant that this rather ordinary woman was a schizophrenogenic (i.e., madness-inducing) mother.
I wish I could say that Terry was unique, but every new case was considered in the same way. And it was that rainy night in Yorkshire that I swore I would try to give a better chance to those poor souls chosen by genetic chance to bear the weight of our species’ freakish advantages in the battle for survival.
Out of respect to patient confidentiality and the laws of libel, I’d changed Lancashire to Yorkshire, Jimmy to Terry, and so on. This was all very well, but soon I began to encounter problems. The first one was with the language. There is a limit to the number of times a reader’s eye can deal with the word phenomenological. Poor old Greek: hard to read in its own spiky script and repellent to the eye in ours; but if I used words like mad the book could not be taken seriously. This negotiation between the truth and the reader’s tolerance turned out to be a large part of writing; I hadn’t understood beforehand how much of the author’s work was as a runner or an agent—as a broker of the bearable.
Next, I looked at the treatment from the patient’s point of view and showed how bizarre the medical staff’s behavior must appear to someone distressed. I argued that the extreme actions—even the delusions—of such patients were, at bottom, desperate attempts to defend the integrity of what they thought of as their “self.”
As such, it was in line with much other thinking at the time. Where it went further was to point out that the whole idea of the “self” the poor patient was defending to the death was not only the defining mutation that had made Homo sapiens but also a mirage: a freakish neural self-deception that had been embodied because it conferred spurious advantages. These poor souls were madly trying to defend a lie.
From this basis, the second part of the book went on to argue that the events of the twentieth century—the trenches, the death camps, and the gulags—could only be understood as psychotic expressions of the genetic human curse, that they were in a sense delusions made real as humans had tried to remake the world in their own insane image.
It was very hard to write. Each of the technical building blocks—the biology, the genetics, the history—had to be brought off exactly; when I’d finished one I was both relieved that it was done and anxious, nagged by the conviction that I could have done it better. The bits in between posed a different but equal challenge: sometimes I didn’t know which anecdote and case history to use or where it might lead.
Then it was out onto the streets for a walk to clear the mind. I knew the city well by now, its wide shopping streets with plate-glass windows, dummies, and expensive clothes as much as its gabled residential backwaters, cobbled squares, and industrial yards. In some way all cities are versions of a paradigm. The winter afternoon light shines much the same on the cafés of Siena as it does in Nablus or Boston. The lives of others carry on.
Three days after the incident on the four-poster, Anna came past the Brasserie Felix at the usual time. She stayed for some mulled cider before we set off on our travels; she seemed in a more communicative mood than usual and not embarrassed by any memory of our last meeting. This was a relief. Although the attempted sex had not been my idea, I felt the failure was my fault. I should have been able to lift the sleeping organ as one raised a finger, by command. Donald Sidwell told me he’d met a girl in Brussels who thought that was really how it worked.
We were in a flat near the main railway station that overlooked a shun
ting yard. To me the idea of hearing trains at night was an attraction, but Anna wasn’t sure.
“And the view,” she said.
“Don’t you like trains?”
“I prefer gardens. Parks.”
“Yes, but there’s something … companionable about the rattle of coaches on the track, the thought of other people’s journeys.”
She smiled, which I refrained from pointing out.
“Hold this, please,” she said, handing me one end of her tape measure.
Squatting on her haunches with her skirt pulled tight up over thighs and hips, her brown hair falling forwards over the collar of her cream jumper, she was a fine creature, there was no doubt. I did like her.
“So, Robert, how many weeks are you here now?”
“It must be ten.”
“And none of your friends has come to see you.”
“No … I … No. I don’t have that many friends. I have colleagues, two that I’m close to.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Judith. She’s severe but kind. Principled, clearheaded, determined. She has a sort of command. But she can laugh at childish things. She likes silly comedies in the cinema.”
“The other one?”
“Simon? At first he seems … difficult. Pompous? Do you know that word?”
“Yes, like a judge or a headmaster.”
“Yes, but then you see he has another … he has other plans. His mind is running on ahead. The patients love him.”
“Patients?”
I had given myself away.
Anna smiled again. “But no one comes to see you.”
“I don’t want those two to come. I have to write this book alone. Then I’ll go back to work with them again in England.”
“You have no other friends?”
“My best friends were in the army. In the war.”
“What happened to them?”
“Some of them are dead. The others I lost touch with.”
“But during the war?” said Anna.
I gazed out of the window over the shunting yard, then turned back to face Anna.
Where My Heart Used to Beat Page 23
