In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  Penelope was in the room sitting in a chair next to mine. Villier glanced at her, a searching look on his face, confirming what I’d thought I’d seen through the corner of my own eye. Her head had sunk forward and she was staring at the clasped hands on her lap.

  She stood up and turned to me.

  I ought to leave you alone with the doctor. I’ll wait outside with Emily.

  I don’t mind you staying, I said.

  In fact, I really didn’t care. The whole thing was already quite bizarre. But Penelope insisted. Later, after hearing everything Villier had to say, I understood that her purpose had been fulfilled by being present when he made the statement: You’re here because of Emily. Penelope was there in the room so that Villier could say that in front of her and so that I would know that what he was to go on to tell me, now with her sitting outside, would be divulged with her assent.

  Villier’s demeanor appeared to relax after she left.

  I’ve known the Hampton-Wyverns for a long time. I first saw Penelope as a patient, he said.

  His voice had dropped, but that might only have been my perception because there was now no one else in the room. His formulation raised questions. I first saw Penelope as a patient. Did he mean to say that he knew her now as a friend? And, in that case, could he be trusted to speak impartially, or as impartially as a client has a right to expect of his lawyer or as a patient has of his doctor?

  Let me share something with you, he said. Eighteen years ago, Penelope was in hospital with severe depression. In a terrible state, she won’t mind my saying. By the way, she’s happy for me to discuss this with you.

  I nodded, though it wasn’t asked for, perhaps to acknowledge the implication of an ethical constraint that would apply to any questions I might have. Eighteen years ago, he had said. Eighteen is a very specific number; not fifteen, not twenty, but eighteen. Had he consulted his files to refresh his memory? Or had Penelope reminded him? If so, why was she so closely keeping count of the years since then? Eighteen years. Emily would have been eleven, possibly ten, James a year younger.

  She had been in hospital for three days, continued Villier, before she finally received a visit from her husband.

  The children had always had a live-in nanny, I thought, so her husband wouldn’t have been troubled to find a babysitter.

  I was present at the time, continued Villier. I was curious to know more about their relationship, so when I was informed that her husband had appeared, I went to her room. In these kinds of hospitals, patient visits are carefully controlled.

  What, I wondered, did he mean by these kinds of hospitals? Psychiatric hospitals or private hospitals?

  Do you know her husband—her ex-husband—Robin?

  I’ve met him, I replied.

  Yes, of course you have. Robin—how shall I say this?—Robin was very cold toward her. One could not fail to be struck by the lack of physical affection. He did not once touch her. Now, I don’t suppose that this is entirely surprising in the ordinary course of things. I can say this to you because I think you’ll understand, but the English—in the Hampton-Wyverns’ seam of society especially—they can be a somewhat reserved lot. I’m English myself, of course, but I rather think we could learn a thing or two from other cultures about the salutary effects of physical contact.

  Villier held my eye as if expecting a look of recognition from me. I gave him it.

  Robin brought the two children with him, he continued, and the nanny was also there. Penelope was really very demonstrative with the children. James, as I recall, was quite teary. The nanny brought him in, holding his hand, and then quite sensibly left the room, but that made no difference to Robin. There was no show of affection at all, nothing physical. I was standing outside through all this, off to one side, you see. I daresay it comes across as rather devious, but experience has taught me the tremendous value of a few snapshots with a candid camera, so to speak, eavesdropping, as it were. Nothing illegal, I might add—for your lawyerly sensibility.

  Villier flashed me a smile before continuing.

  I saw them as a group only two or three times during Penelope’s stay in hospital—I mean her first stay. Later, when she came as an outpatient, we arranged a session or two with the family together, while that was still possible.

  For whose benefit was his qualification? I asked myself. I mean her first stay, he had said. It added nothing from my vantage point; if he had paused to think about it, he would have seen that. It was a correction to his own internal monologue. Penelope, it seemed, had been in hospital more than once. Furthermore, from what he said, it was unlikely that during her later stay he met them all together, as a group. Presumably, then, the second stay happened after the divorce. Perhaps, I thought, it was precipitated by the divorce.

  What has all this to do with me? you may ask, continued Villier. The reason you are where you are now is that Emily put you in this position.

  Do you mean in this room? I asked.

  If what Penelope tells me is accurate, you’re not firing on all cylinders, are you? But you know that. You wouldn’t have come here otherwise.

  I’ve seen better days, I conceded.

  I’ve met Emily on a number of occasions, and I also have the benefit of what Penelope has shared over the years. Emily seems to have much of her father’s character in her.

  That may be, I replied, but …

  Do please go on. You can speak in confidence.

  It’s difficult to believe that another person can be responsible for my depression. I don’t mind admitting I carry plenty of baggage of my own.

  I’m interested to hear you say you’re depressed. But first to address the point you make, I myself am rather loathe to use the language of responsibility, which is an ethical matter. I much prefer to think in terms of causation, which is not. You’re a bright fellow. Given your background, you didn’t come as far as you did without wit. Do you follow?

  Questions about my background Villier didn’t ask, not one. Penelope has shared a good deal with him, I thought—given your background—but since I really hadn’t said much to her about my background, she must have formed her own ideas. She must have read between the lines of things. Evidently, Emily had also relayed to Penelope things I’d said, things that were said without any expectation of confidentiality, I should add. By then I’d known them for over three years.

  If mood is like the weather, I said to Villier, I don’t quite see how another human being could affect my mood any more than she could influence the weather.

  It’s a useful analogy, said Villier, this likening of mood to weather. But one has to recognize its limitations. It conveys the idea that at any given moment one has limited command over one’s mood, but I don’t think it captures the sense of what I’m saying here.

  Villier went on to describe further the plight of soldiers, the trauma that affects their emotional well-being. He’d already talked about the old man with arthritis who trips on a broken tread and falls down the stairs. But in fact he was just getting going. He went on to talk about a farmer who fails to lock up a chicken coop at night and loses a hen to a fox: The farmer might have some responsibility, but the fox caused the loss. He talked for a while in this vein. He was possibly used to meeting resistance when he gave a diagnosis of mental illness, but with me I rather think he was pushing against an open door.

  I don’t know if you were wondering, by the way, but in my view Penelope didn’t bring you here in the expectation I would talk you into breaking it off with her daughter. In fact, my impression is that she’s quite fond of you.

  Emily?

  Penelope.

  The two are not inconsistent.

  I’m sorry?

  She could be fond of me and want me to break it off with her daughter. In fact, she could want me to break it off because she’s fond of me.

  Let me ask you why you think she brought you here.

  Don’t you mean what do I think you think is the reason she brought me here?<
br />
  As good a place to start as any.

  Guilt?

  I think so.

  So do I.

  She’s awfully worried about you, that you might do yourself harm. Is that a possibility?

  I don’t want to be difficult, I replied, but … but I can’t help it. I don’t want to be difficult, but since we seem to have gone down the road of exactness, I have to say that I can’t answer that question, and I say that knowing you might interpret it as a plea for help, although I don’t believe that that’s my motive. At any rate, anything that can be imagined must be possible, and most people have pretty vivid imaginations, don’t you think?

  If you feel the need, or even if you don’t—for whatever reason, you can go to the Rectory clinic. I’m going to give you the address and contact information, he said.

  He reached into a drawer at his desk, pulled out a piece of notepaper.

  Just show up, he continued, at any time, day or night. They’ll admit you straightaway. Penelope wants this to be available to you so you needn’t be concerned with practical matters.

  His eyes dropped. He was talking about money, I thought. Villier was being English. His coyness halved his age.

  You’d be under my care. You can stay there as long as you need. You’ll have your own room, of course, and it’s all set in beautiful countryside. I just wanted to put all that before you. Is that all right?

  Thank you, I said. I took the note, folded it, and slipped it into my pocket.

  Now that we’ve dealt with that, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t at least go through the motions.

  Villier’s manner was sublimely English, down to the self-deprecation. I sometimes wonder if the English elites, the upper classes, actually believe themselves when they say these things, their genteel formulations, the qualifications they make at every turn. Their kind of self-belief seems essential to survive what would otherwise assail them as wave after wave of cognitive dissonance, statements of one thing while knowing the opposite, the expression of bare competence while sitting in the leather seat of his clinic on the premier private medical street in Britain, possibly in the world. Surely the dissonance would drive them mad so that the only way through it all is for them actually to believe what they say. But I might be wrong. After all, sallying forth with empire on the brain is a sublimely confident venture.

  Villier asked me a variety of questions in a way that nearly concealed the workings of a checklist. I answered them as accurately as I could. But I knew the diagnosis. There are those who say that depression is a Western malady of affluence. That it may be. But when you are as deeply unhappy as I was … Let’s be precise—when your human functioning has been reduced first to wretched indifference and then to worse, when the thoughts that gather around you, that are your own, have all the tenderness of an audience to a bare-knuckle alley fight, such lofty cultural opinions offer no relief. There is a person and there is suffering.

  And yet, insofar as I knew, I had not come seeking help. I had agreed to Penelope’s request because I thought it would relieve the boredom, even if temporarily. This boredom is something I’d never known and I’ve thought about it quite a lot since. My thoughts and sense experience used to hop from one thing to another, as if the world was just coming at me with meaningless stimuli, one after another. I couldn’t latch on to a thought and then be carried by it as it moved into new territory. To do that, I think you need a narrative self inside you connecting you with experience, telling you how you fit into the subjective encounter with what you’re seeing and attaching whatever significance it might hold for you. In those days, it was as if this narrative self had decided to go on vacation, leaving me without continuity of thought and feeling.

  A few weeks after that visit with Villier, as I was sitting in my bedsit, I saw the dishes mounting in the sink. On the counter next to them was a knife. I glanced at the knife and the glance lengthened into a gaze. When the awareness of what I was doing took hold, I set about picking up a few things from the floor and stuffing them into a canvas bag. I’m surprised I had enough presence of mind to pack some toiletries and my toothbrush. I took a train out of town and from the station a cab to the hospital.

  * * *

  As I listened to Zafar talk about his time in a psychiatric institution, my thoughts did not stray, as they might have done, to what had happened outside, with Emily, but remained with him. He did not seem the least bit embarrassed to talk about it, and at the time I was rather flattered that he felt comfortable enough with me to discuss the matter. I see now, however, that it was I who was in fact uncomfortable, even embarrassed, about such a thing as going into a psychiatric hospital. This fact, here and now as I write, appalls me. I cannot imagine being so hospitalized without having such an overwhelming feeling of failure, catastrophic failure, that I could not possibly talk about it. For Zafar, there was no discomfort because I think there was no accompanying sense of failure. And herein I find myself confronted by that odd envy he has often evoked in me. The Zafar I know, from first to last, has lived life, taking its bare-knuckle blows, if not on the chin then in his long stride. Even going into a hospital, a nuthouse, a mental institution, a loony bin—in him I saw it as just a part of a life that journeyed out into all its corners. These thoughts come to me now, but when I listened to him talk, I thought of what a stage he and I had now reached that we could talk like this, the years passed, life turning up its disappointments, and how much he must feel at ease with me to open up this way.

  * * *

  I used to be skeptical of medication, he said, afraid I would lose myself, lose what is me. Yet what is this self that we so fear to lose? It’s never there. The instant we try to reach for it, it slips away. This self seems nearest when I force my consciousness inward, when I compel it to focus, and then it rises like an apparition. But if it is at its most material when I’m conscious, then that self can never sustain a continuous being because any stretch of consciousness, of awareness of self, is cut short by the intervention of all that needs doing in a minute, let alone a day, curtailed by the steady beat of demands that render us unconscious of self and commit our body to this or that task at hand, to prepare supper or calculate a price for an exotic derivative instrument or pay a bill or do the laundry or draft a legal memo or tend a crying infant. Can medication rob us of something whose existence is tentative at best? Is it possible that the self is not an object, not a noun, but the verb characterizing the search for the object? And even as I talk about this self, even as I try to discuss it as if it were a thing apart, as if I were discussing the sweetness of pineapples that grow in the wild, I feel it is not I who am speaking but someone else through me.

  I felt better with the medication; I compared the man whose body was mine with the man who was there the day before, and this man felt much, much better than his predecessor did. When I was skeptical, whenever I’d considered the prospect of taking medication, I had not been comparing the deeply, dangerously depressed person I was with the healthier and more even person I could be helped to be. Rather, I was imagining that the medication would make it impossible for me to be fully the person I believed I could conceivably be, that it would irreparably blunt me somehow.

  The mistake did not lie in thinking this true. The mistake was to think that it was remotely relevant. It is irrelevant simply because the imaginary ideal human being, the one I believed I could conceivably be, is an unreachable person whom I could only wish to be, unreachable in any circumstance. The real me was always the me I was at any given moment, and not the unattainable me I could fancifully call from my imagination.

  And tell me what could be more humbling than to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon, without a shower in twelve days; to look across the room you live in and see in the corner a pile of pizza boxes; to be afraid of undrawing the curtains and opening the window, so removed from people so as not even to wonder who would care if you did or you didn’t do this or
that; and to find that the day’s only scintilla of hope flickers in the moment you reach for the television remote control.

  * * *

  After five weeks I left the hospital. I stayed in Penelope’s home, in a spare bedroom at the top of the house. Emily joined me there. She herself had decided to move house and had sold her apartment. I never asked her if her decision had had something to do with me. You see, we never discussed anything that involved projecting ourselves into the future further than a week or two. While she was looking for something larger in Notting Hill, in an even more prestigious address—did she think I couldn’t see the endless aspiration?—she moved in with her mother.

  Of course, by this stage I knew about the curious domestic arrangement in Penelope’s house. Penelope Hampton-Wyvern met Dudley Grange years ago, when she was still married to Robin, when Dudley’s building company had been contracted to undertake a renovation of her home. Before breaking out on his own, he’d been a site foreman for a large building conglomerate. Dudley explained to me once, rather proudly, that he’d worked on the construction of what was in its time the tallest building in London, the NatWest Tower—now called Tower 42 after its address, he pointed out—and described how the building was the first of its kind: It had a huge core of reinforced concrete, one piece of concrete poured in situ in a massive operation requiring a fleet of cement trucks running to the site continuously over many weeks, so that as the lower levels hardened, concrete for the next level would be piped up and poured into the shuttered forms that also went up at the same time. From this single solid backbone of concrete, the floors fan out on cantilevers, and, from above, he explained, his eyes widening, the building’s profile is three hexagonal chevrons arranged to resemble the logo of the NatWest Bank. Construction was only the beginning; my genuine interest in his field of expertise seemed to open the doors for Dudley to hold forth on plenty else. Dudley, by the way, was in the house that day when first I met Penelope Hampton-Wyvern. They were his steps I heard coming from the hallway, before the sound of a door being shut as quietly as a sturdy Banham lock would allow.