Hidden Symptoms

by Deirdre Madden

  “How interesting,” said Theresa politely, fixing her strange eyes upon the writer and smiling. He stared back coldly. Kathy, while grumbling about having to remain in Belfast during the entire summer, removed a pen and a little notebook from her handbag. “Come and see us next Tuesday,” she said, leaning on a pile of Royal biographies to scrawl down the address. “Seven o’clock, I’ll make dinner.”

  “Thank you,” said Theresa, taking the proffered little page. She smiled again at Robert and this time he smiled back, but thinly.

  Theresa was glad to see that the address given was evidently that of Robert’s flat, and not of Kathy’s home in Harberton Park, where she lived with her mother. Theresa’s confidence, vacillating when concerned with anything save matters literary, became suddenly and surprisingly firm when faced with the phenomenon of Mrs. O’Gorman. In short, she had the lady nailed, and on the strength of one brief meeting would have said that Mrs. O’Gorman was a ghastly woman with the same conviction with which she would have affirmed that Ulysses was a good book.

  The account of Paddy Dignam’s funeral in Ulysses always brought Kathy to Theresa’s mind. When she read of the unidentified figure by the grave whom a reporter later erroneously named as “McIntosh” (because the unknown gentleman was wearing one), she always thought of her friend who, at college, by simple non-appearance at lectures and tutorials, made a mystery of herself. Kathy who? Her very sex was in question: a notice pleading for an essay appeared on the departmental noticeboard for a Mr. O’Gorman, written by a tutor who thought that the K. O’Gorman who was on his class list but who had attended no tutorials was a lazy young man instead of a lazy young woman. Meanwhile, Kathy’s presence was adding sparkle to parties, plays, concerts, wine bars and bedsits: she was in evidence everywhere but the Arts library. She made it a point of honour to read as few of the set books as possible, preferring in their stead things obscure, obscene, quaint and curious, so that she had read Barrack-Room Ballads, but not The Prelude; Fanny Hill, but not Wuthering Heights; and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but not King Lear. She also kept an astute eye on the Belfast cultural scene and in conversation would make claims to the friendship of writers, artists and actors with whom, in reality, she was merely acquainted. Possibly her only sincere friendship was with Theresa, who cared nothing for Kathy’s considerable prowess as a social climber but who was immensely fond of the kindhearted and sensible person whom she perceived under the exuberant exterior.

  In the summer exams every year, Kathy would scrape a minimal pass, dependent always on the copious notes which Theresa gave her to photocopy and cram. It was through the operation of this favour that Theresa had the misfortune to meet Kathy’s mother.

  Kathy and Theresa never socialized in each other’s homes at Theresa’s implicit request, and so when she went to Harberton Park one day to retrieve some lecture notes which she needed urgently, it was the first time that she had ever seen the large, elegant detached house which was the O’Gorman home. As Theresa ascended the steps, the mirthful sounds of half a conversation were audible through the open door, drowned suddenly by a peal of barks, both deep and shrill, as three dogs rushed out of the house and began woofing and snapping at her ankles. One was a Dalmatian, one an Afghan hound, and one an ugly little thing with a mashed face, like a genetically defective cat; and all three barked constantly, the Dalmatian jumping up and putting its large paws on her skirt. She was too shocked to run or scream and only realized how frightened she was when a fourth bark joined in: “Toby! Prince! Down, boy!” Mrs. O’Gorman called off the two larger dogs and scooped up the ugly little one in a jewelled hand. “Who are you?” she snapped. “What do you want?”

  “Kathy, please,” said Theresa weakly, conscious mainly of the blood booming in her ears, and the startled beats of her heart.

  “She’s not in.”

  “Poetry notes,” Theresa whimpered, and the woman turned her back and went into the house, returning a moment later with the tatty folder of yellow cardboard which contained almost everything Theresa had ever learnt about Augustan poetry.

  “Thank you,” she said, but she was talking to air. The woman had gone and the telephone conversation was resumed. Theresa left quickly, for the two large dogs were still on the top step, panting and slavering hungrily.

  Kathy later apologized for her absence.

  “You did get the notes?”

  “Yes,” said Theresa, too embarrassed to elaborate, although she soon discovered that such conduct was not without precedent. Mrs. O’Gorman was an ill-mannered snob who treated her daughter with scant regard, much less her daughter’s friends, and so Kathy tried to keep friends and mother as far apart as possible. Although the two lived together, it was in a constant state of acrimony. Kathy was an only child: she told Theresa that her father had died when she was a baby and she had an inferiority complex about her lack of family life.

  For a long time after the incident with the dogs, Theresa had a perverse fascination with the event. Such conduct in a mother was so strange. Common sense told Theresa that being a mother did not automatically free one of ill-temper and boorishness, and so of course she knew that it was wrong of her to use her own mother as a rule-of-thumb for the world — as wrong as it was irresistible. Everyone could only but be found wanting.

  One day, years previously, a hoary old man named Harry, six foot two and with hands like a mole, had come to do odd jobs in the house, and when Theresa returned from school she saw in the kitchen a plateful of enormous scones, each one about four inches across.

  “Sufferin’ Isaac, Ma, what’s wrong with the scones? Did you lose the small cutter?”

  But her mother had replied no, that their size was intentional, because she had made them for Harry and she had thought that big scones would be easier for him to manage than dainty little normal ones. Theresa always remembered setting down her school-bag and gazing at the scones with something approaching reverence. Universal love on a thick delft plate with puce roses: she had thought then, “I shall never be better than this, I shall never be anywhere nearly as good.” Thoughtfulness to the humble level of an old man’s dexterity in eating scones. Never neglect the little things in life. The rest of the poor world could only fall short.

  (Mrs. O’Gorman fell further than most: Theresa imagined her forcing Harry to eat his own sandwiches outside. In a thunderstorm.)

  The day before the dinner party, Theresa phoned Kathy.

  “You are coming, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course, Kathy.” She paused nervously. “Kathy, you haven’t told your friend about Francis yet, have you?”

  “Who, Robert? No, not yet,” she replied.

  “Well, don’t,” said Theresa quickly. “I mean, I’d rather you didn’t. I — it’s hard to explain — I hardly know why — ”

  “Forget it,” said Kathy’s voice, disembodied and kindly. “He’ll never hear about it from me, if that’s the way you want it: I promise.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.”

  “No problem. See you and your appetite tomorrow at seven. Don’t forget now. ’Bye.”

  Theresa replaced the receiver, feeling foolish. It was almost as if she were ashamed of what had happened. Anyway, she thought bitterly, who cared now except her mother and herself? Who else had ever truly cared?

  The evening evolved strangely. Theresa brought a bottle of Blue Nun and complimented Robert on his flat. “It says a lot about you.”

  “Thank you,” he said, genuinely pleased, not sensing the irony. The room screamed of the persona he had created for himself: short of whitewashing the walls and writing I AM AN INTELLECTUAL in large red letters, it could not have been made to “say” more. Kathy, in a dress of burgundy velvet with an antique lace collar, served out a vegetable stew which they ate with brown rice as an accompaniment and the Chieftains as background music.

  “We’ll have to go over to Queen’s in a week or two to collect our exam results,” Kathy said. “It’s barba
ric, pinning them up like that. It reminds me of those old B-movies about Oxford, jostling to see if you got through: ‘It’s beastly luck, Carruthers, Mater’ll be so disappointed at my being sent dhine.’ God, I wonder if I’ll make it again this year?”

  Robert said that exams were always a temptation to destruction for him: he had been fascinated by the simplicity with which he could undo a year’s study, just as when, on a clifftop or at a high window, he was attracted by how simply his life could be ended. “One little step forward and I die. If I leave this room and do something utterly mundane for the next three hours — browse in a bookshop or eat sausage rolls in the Union — I can quickly end forever my university career.”

  Theresa agreed. Exams inspired her, too, with a feeling of awesome power rather than of knowledge. They talked about the university and about literature until the door was aggressively knocked and a friend of Robert’s entered, uninvited and inebriated, his eagerness to contribute to the conversation equalled only by his thirst. He was a struggling playwright with manic eyes and a belligerent manner.

  “You,” he said, taking the glass of Blue Nun offered by Kathy and stabbing his finger at Theresa. “D’you write plays, you?”

  “No,” she said, “but I write lots of prose.” (Something which Robert had not known until then.)

  “Prose is nothin’. Prose is useless. Ye ought to write plays. Plays is the only useful art.”

  “Useful? In what way?”

  “Useful! Bloody useful! D’ye know what useful means, even? Plays are social, they’re about people, so they are, you get things done with plays. People see themselves on a stage and then they know,” he added mysteriously.

  The discussion became intense thereafter.

  The newcomer drank all the wine at an amazing rate and Theresa deliberately baited him, saying flatly, “Drama is the bastard child of literature,” and “Drama is, of all art forms, the most unsatisfactory and the most inferior.” Robert was amused by her total coolness while, visibly tongue-in-cheek, she drove the playwright almost to tears of anger and frustration, and each statement was a goad, calculated, and honed to cruel sharpness before being lunged with heartless success at its target. When Robert tried to join in, the playwright told him to shut his bake, he was only a critic, what did he know; later he asked Robert where he had dug up this “bourgeoise hoor” (Robert, oddly, thought at first that he meant Kathy), and eventually told them all that they were a pack of fascists before lurching off drunkenly, taking the empty wine bottle with him.

  “Oooh, that was funny,” said Kathy, as Robert sat a bowl of fruit before them. “He’s a lot less interesting when he’s sober, but he’s rarely that.”

  “He’s decent enough,” said Robert, “just a terrible bigot.”

  “That’s not what’s wrong with him,” replied Theresa. “It’s the direction his bigotry takes. All great writers were bigoted — Joyce and his like — but bigoted about their art. If writers get too obsessed with other things, like politics or the state of the world, their art becomes less important to them. Your man doesn’t take his plays seriously enough. He only thinks of them as tools to serve some end, not as ends in themselves, and the plays suffer; they’re bound to.” She took up an orange and began to peel it. “Fascists, indeed; he’s a half-fascist himself for all that talk of ‘the people.’ He judges too much, he wants to change things, change people. This is wrong and this is wrong, I say so, I say that it must be changed and this is how. If he had any intelligence and ability, he’d be downright dangerous.”

  “Aren’t all great social reformers just as you’ve described him?” asked Robert.

  “All great dictators, rather. What is a dictator, anyway, but a misguided social reformer? And an artist is something different again.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “An artist,” she said, “is a person who composes or paints or sculpts or writes.”

  “Oh, come on, Theresa,” said Kathy, who was lying on the floor languidly chewing an apple. “That’s a rather elitist view, isn’t it?”

  “No, I don’t think so — just rather traditional. People like your man make it sound very easy to be an artist. I think that it must be difficult — very difficult indeed.”

  “What do you write about?” Robert asked. Theresa waited for a few moments before answering, and when she did she looked at him in a calculating manner, as if to register the effect which each word had upon him. It made him doubt her sincerity.

  “I write about subjectivity — and inarticulation — about life pushing you into a state where everything is melting until you’re left with the absolute and you can find neither the words nor the images to express it.”

  “It sounds frightening.”

  “It is.”

  “I don’t understand that,” said Kathy.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Theresa, suddenly brisk. “It’s late, I must go home.” They had difficulty in persuading her to stay, and eventually she remained only for a quick cup of coffee; she then thanked them and left.

  Kathy and Robert remained in the flat, cradling their warm, empty coffee cups in their hands and listening to the soft music of the stereo. It was a long time before Robert spoke.

  “Kathy?”

  “Yes?”

  He stroked her head as one might stroke a cat.

  “Are you going home tonight?”

  She raised herself up from the floor and he leaned down from his chair; she kissed him and said, “No,” pulled herself up to his lap, kissed him again and said that if her mother was not used to unannounced absences by now, then she ought to be; then kissed him long and deeply, sighed and murmured in his ear that she loved him. He did not believe this, but he kissed her back.

  *

  They made love and Robert lay awake for a long time after Kathy had fallen asleep beside him. He tried to understand what Theresa had been getting at when she spoke of subjectivity: he could think only of evil and violence. He was not sure that he understood anything about evil, but by God it was easy to assimilate! Every day he could take huge mysterious lumps of evil into his consciousness and the only worrying result was that he did not worry. That very day he had been upstairs in a bus which had been overtaken by a lorry carrying meat from the knacker’s yard. For well over two miles he had looked down into the tipper, which was full of skinned limbs: long, bloody jawbones; jointed, whip-like tails. It had been a horrendous sight, but he had not averted his eyes from the mobile shambles: he had gazed unflinchingly down into it. This was how things were. He had looked at so many ugly and evil things, unsubtle as a lorryload of dead meat, and he had said in his heart that this was how things were. He had accepted that lorry. He accepted too much.

  He remembered television news reports, where the casual camera showed bits of human flesh hanging from barbed wire after a bombing. Firemen shovelled what was left of people into heavy plastic bags, and you could see all that remained: big burnt black lumps like charred logs. And he could look at such things and be shocked and eat his tea and go out to the theatre and forget about it. He could cope when it did not involve him personally. Now he found himself wondering how he would feel if it was Kathy whose flesh was hanging from barbed wire in thin, irregular strips and shifting in the wind like surreal party streamers. How would he feel if the soft little body beside him was to be translated into an anonymous black lump and shovelled into a plastic bag? He tried to tell himself that it was only a ghoulish thought, but he knew that for so many people this sudden change was a reality in the people whom they slept with, ate with, lived with and loved, and his own lack of empathy saddened him. In the darkness he touched Kathy’s sleeping shoulder, and suddenly felt as lonely as Adam.

  Gently he awoke her, kissed her and stroked her; whispered lies in her ear. She murmured and giggled, half-awake and half-sleeping. He desperately wanted to bury his fearful loneliness in the blackness of the room and in her thin, warm body, but sex solved nothing: there was only panic and the illus
ion of union; nothing could protect him. Now he hated himself for having visited his morbid thoughts of violent death upon this innocent person beside him, for he had not really been thinking about her, nor even about how much her death would mean to him. He was afraid that his own innocent body might be destroyed violently and quickly and he had been too cowardly even to imagine such a thing, visiting his fear upon Kathy instead. Suddenly, incredibly, he wanted to cry.

  “Robert? Robert?”

  But he did not answer her and he did not cry, because he was ashamed and embarrassed and he did not love her.

  They kept lumber up in the attic and Theresa found there, on the day after the dinner party, a dead Red Admiral caught in a cobweb. Other cobwebs were spun in arcs across the windowpane, catching the sunlight in their fine rainbow strands. Mentally, she recited a fragment of poetry which she had learnt for her exams:

  Upon the dusty glittering windows cling,

  And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies

  Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies,

  A couple of nightmoths are on the wing.

  Is every modern nation like the tower,

  Half dead at the top?

  She half-remembered a legend from somewhere which said that butterflies were the souls of the dead. She touched a little wing with the tip of a finger and some of the bright colour dusted off; the brittle corpse shifted in the web. “The souls of the virtuous are in the hands of the LORD and no torment shall ever touch them.”

  She sat on the edge of the tin trunk and wished that she could talk with Francis, for she wished him to help clarify a dream which she had had the preceding night. It concerned the school which they had both attended as children and, with the weird particularity common to dreams, the dominant feature had been the school’s radiators, covered with chipped magenta paint and always tepid. Above the radiators were tiled window-sills, ranged along with pots of geraniums. The dream had been so vivid that she had even seen and heard the grit of the soil grate between the pots and the saucers placed beneath them to catch the drips. She had also glimpsed, briefly, the overall layout of the school, and on waking she had been puzzled, for she had dreamt of doors and windows in places which she sensed were not quite right, and now she could not remember what the school had really looked like. Was her waking memory accurate, or had the dream been the truth rising to the surface now after the passing of years? Everything was confused: never again would she be able to picture the school to herself with any confidence; now all was a jumble of dream and supposed reality. And never again could she ask Francis for confirmation or clarification, because Francis was dead. She was alone now, and at the mercy of her own memory and imagination.