by Melvyn Bragg
It was difficult not to scream.
The platform was much busier than it had been at Shepherd’s Bush and he stood pressed to the wall, protected by those in front. The same complete draining of himself occurred as the sound of the train came out of the black tunnel and despite the protective cordon of travellers he felt compelled once more to hurl himself onto the tracks. It was as if his mind disintegrated. He could feel it inside his skull. But he held on and when the doors opened he prised himself from the wall and went into the lighted carriage. He stood, by the door, rather than take a seat though several were available.
Hampstead underground station is near the crest of the hill and was said to have the deepest lift shaft in London. He remembered that.
The lift was already full and he could have waited for the next one or taken the stairs which is what he most wanted to do. A sense of claustrophobia came out of the lift as pungent as a smell of sulphur. He had not to be a coward. He squeezed himself in.
As the lift clanked its interminable out-of-date way up the shaft and the silent crowd of people pressed it seemed more and more anxiously against each other Joe thought he might suffocate. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. The lift went up slowly and Joe feared it might stop. Then what could he do? His mouth snatched small bits of the air. The lift would never arrive at the surface. He felt he might drown in dizziness. It moved so very slowly. He caught someone’s eye and immediately looked away. They might see into him. He looked down at his shoes, head bowed, an attitude of prayer.
Never was London pavement more welcome but he did not know where to go. He was afraid of everything and everywhere. The Heath was too dauntingly empty and natural and he might go mad in what at this moment seemed its vastness. A coffee bar or a pub were out of the question: someone might talk to him. He was not fit to go home. He trawled up and down the High Street and Heath Street, walking slowly, making sure always to be near people, hoping he would meet no one he knew.
Above all he had to conceal this condition. Yet the strain of both bearing it and concealing it could crush him into a collapse he knew he must avoid.
Time devoted to writing her novel had become a sanctuary. Her analyst had suggested it was entirely a therapeutic activity. Natasha demurred although unusually she could find no substantial arguments to back up her objection and certainly when she told the analyst in any detail what she had written the subsequent silence had a quality of QED.
‘Hector,’ she explained, ‘shares a room with Clément in the asylum. He accepts that Clément is now Father Lointier and adopts him. He becomes a self-appointed protector to Clément and claims him as his best friend. Hector has been an officer in the navy and constantly makes meticulous drawings of ships, scores of them, brilliantly accurate. But he is also obsessed by his wife who, he believes, drove him into the asylum. You said I might read you a passage if I wanted to. I thought that you wanted to more than I did,’ Natasha smiled, a smile unnoticed, and opened the notebook. ‘Hector has been talking about how at first he had missed his wife, and Clément – Father Lointier – says,’ she read:
‘“You missed your wife, Monsieur Hector, that’s sad.”
‘“Sad, no! It was pure imbecility. She admitted, once on a visit, that she missed me too. ‘Life isn’t the same without you, I miss you, Totor,’ she said, and it made me laugh. It isn’t often that Coralie made me laugh, but that time, I laughed . . . Naturally, she could have been lying just to impress the nurse, but I think such considerations were well above her by then. I am fairly sure she missed me. No one to bully all day long, no one to persecute, well . . . she missed me and she absolutely hated me, so there we are . . . Nostalgia is just one of those human characteristics, which is not to say that Coralie was human . . . primates have human characteristics too, they peel bananas before eating them, for instance. Anyhow, that woman hated me and she missed me after packing me off to a loony bin, and I missed her although she had driven me out of my mind. Human failure, Father, that’s what it is in my opinion. If you hate someone, they should disintegrate out of your consciousness altogether. If you hate a relationship, it should become a blank.”
“‘You shouldn’t hate anyone,” Father Lointier said.
‘That’s enough,’ Natasha said. ‘I chose that passage especially for you!’
The analyst stayed silent for some time and in the silence Natasha thought she might have over-tempted providence.
‘Why did I read that to you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to waste our time talking about Hector’s babble. Now that I have read it I wish I had not. I wish I had kept it for myself alone. If we discuss it there will be nothing sacred to me alone and I need that. And yet it was I who brought it to you. I don’t want you to talk about it. Yet I offered it to you. No one should know anything about it until it is finished and ready. I ask you not to talk about it. I have made a mistake.’
It was only rarely that the analyst permitted herself a question.
‘Why do you think you made a mistake?’
‘I think I used the wrong word,’ said Natasha. ‘Not only the wrong word, the wrong explanation. It is a gift. I have brought you a gift, possibly the most precious I could bring you. And you will want to know why I have brought you this gift, or any gift, although you are unlikely to ask another question. Gifts are partly to placate but I do not think I need to placate you. Gifts are gratitude and I am grateful but that is taken care of in the fee you charge. Gifts can be evidence of the richness of the giver and that might be the answer, to show you that whatever I bring you there is more that is just mine, beyond this place, beyond us.’ She paused. ‘I do not think any of those are right in this case,’ she said. ‘I think this gift was to cheer you up, to answer the sadness in your voice, the burdens of others you carry. It is my way to help you.’
Just as the analyst could not have observed Natasha’s smile earlier, so Natasha could not observe the expression near to tears on the face of the analyst. She took her time.
‘What you have said together with what you read to me are very important, Natasha.’
Natasha almost sat up and looked around. This was the first time the analyst had used her name.
‘I will respect what you say about your novel. But you have told me that you believe I need the help of a gift from you. An important line has been crossed here. In essence, we will talk about this further in the next session, in essence you are becoming the analyst. This is a critical stage. You are now employing what you have learned in an apparently simple but a profound way in yourself but showing me directly how strong you are. This is a moment of turning. We have to be careful here. This is new and extremely fragile . . . I thank you for your gift . . .’
‘I spoke to the analyst about what had happened to me,’ Joe told Marcelle, ‘but no one else. I felt that Natasha was burdened enough. More likely I was embarrassed, most likely ashamed of it. In some ways I still am, more than thirty years on.
‘Even to the analyst it was difficult to explain because the attacks quickly moved from being a series of incidents to become the prevailing condition of my mind. The specific and frightening incidents continued to happen: on the underground, or looking out of a window high up in a building, or sometimes walking along a traffic-heavy street, this tidal pull towards self-destruction. Each time it had to be withstood and battled through. Each time left me dizzy and weakened.
‘But the spread of it, the way it infected all that I thought and did every minute was even harder to endure. It was as if whatever it was that held and contained the brain and protected it even against the skull had wept away.
‘It would take another book, Marcelle, so let it rest on these points. The fear that I had forgotten how to breathe became more intense, especially at night. I would lie awake and force myself to breathe in and breathe out but that is not the whole picture, for the truth is that even when I forced myself there were times when nothing happened until a gasp of air would be inhaled or ejected by whatever
that deeply planted biology within us is that will hold onto life until there is no hope at all.
‘So there must have been some hope. It did not feel like it, for time and again, when I was in a script conference or discussing the new television series or in a restaurant with a few friends or in a theatre I would be aware most of all of this terror clawing at me, pulling me into its belly, this threat of darkness, closing around my mind. What I said and did on those occasions was so distant from what I was, I truly don’t know how I endured it. Whatever else I was doing, my fullest effort was to survive. At any moment, I felt I could crack up.
‘Then there was another dimension. Time became so stretched, so unbearably extended. Five minutes could last an hour. This attack at night crawled like a snail. A night could take a month to pass by.
‘As I remember, the analyst talked a lot about total control and losing control: I’m sure he said more than that but I find it difficult to remember. It is as if the struggle to conceal this condition from everyone but him and to continue though with far less energy to do the work I did was so difficult that it wiped out most of the resources of memory. More possibly, like any other fierce pain, once surmounted, it fades so that we do not carry anything like the full weight of it even in recollection. We need to be lightened and freed to move on.
‘It went on at its most intense for months. Every day and most of the night. Years later when I was talking about this to James, who by then had become a psychotherapist, he said he thought that both of us, Natasha and I, around that time were in or verged closely on a state of what he called “clinical depression”.’
Flailing about him as he struggled to hold Natasha, Marcelle and himself together, Joe decided to work Natasha’s first novel into a film script. No one had commissioned it and he did not tell her about it in case he failed to complete it. The Glory of Elizabeth was in production and Joe was on standby to rush to the location and adjust the lines, but there was ample free time. His wish to start a new novel was strong but so far he had made pages of notes without arriving anywhere near a point of departure. His state of mind was too wounded and depleted to allow him to reach down into the wells from which the fiction might be drawn. But he had to work. Indeed the greater the fears and pain the more urgently he needed the structure and diversion of work however he felt when it came to do it. The Unquiet Heart was the perfect project and he still wanted to please and to impress Natasha.
They lay in bed trying to sleep. The windows were open although the night was not very warm and the noisiest hour in the street tended to be this, the post-pub run. But Natasha insisted the windows stayed open – ‘This is where you moved and this is what you must live with,’ she said, again.
Natasha lay on her back finding some comfort. The pain in her lower spine had not diminished and on some days she limped.
The comparative ease of her body seemed to release a flutter of thoughts, like a flock of rooks suddenly rising from a tree and spreading into the air. Her analyst had decided to take a longer summer holiday and broken the treatment earlier in the week. Natasha was already missing her and, as in much else, envied the better luck of Joseph whose analyst stuck to the old rules of vacation. She tried not to feel this longer break as a slight deliberately aimed at her and knew such a conclusion was foolish and yet she felt her resentment held some truth.
She tried to switch to thoughts on her novel. It would not be difficult to engineer the happy ending she wanted with Clément returning to the farm restored to his old self. Hector, she thought, could be her instrument in this. She must find something startling for him to do, something that would jolt Clément out of this adopted personality. He did not deserve an unhappy ending, he was too weak. Only the strong should suffer on their own account in fiction, she thought, tragedy was wasted on the frail.
These two lines of thought were not difficult to pursue. What most fascinated her were the little flashes of light – illuminations of memory or traces of insight, elusive, puzzling, each one a will-o’-the-wisp; a sheaf of lavender, the black swans in full sail, her father laughing with Isabel; but most of them so fleeting they did not even bring an image with them, mere pulses between the stars she could recognise, messages from the dark, infinitely small particles of energy which she longed to grasp and felt that once known could complete the puzzle of herself. Out of the dark, in the uneasy bedroom, Natasha said:
‘How can psychoanalysis claim to know how the mind works?’ She paused to make sure she had caught Joseph’s attention. ‘How can this one method with its few rules and systems based on so little logical evidence be so arrogant as to demand we accept that it has the key to life?’
‘But we do accept it,’ said Joseph, puzzled at her switch to arguments he had used against her zealotry. ‘For the time being anyway, we both accept it.’
‘Proust has a far better idea of how the mind works. Or the neuroscientists my father was telling us about.’
‘Why are you suddenly so angry about psychoanalysis?’
‘Why do you have to interpret an objection as anger?’
‘You are putting your life in its hands.’
‘That does not mean,’ said Natasha, ‘that I cannot criticise it.’
Joseph laughed gently and said no more. The laughter made them feel a little closer to each other, a condition becoming more rare. He wanted to tell her about the film script of her novel but held back. He wanted to talk on. ‘When I was in Oxford Julia reminded me of the two paintings you did, for that exhibition, just after we met, the two you wouldn’t sell.’ He reached out for her hand.
‘The two best ones,’ she said.
‘Yes. She still has them. Why didn’t we ever pick them up?’
‘I like to think of them there,’ said Natasha. ‘In that house. Like us. Like your head.’
‘I looked at them,’ he said. ‘And I think that they’ve changed places.’ Natasha waited.
‘The Icarus figure, sort of based on me, was also, I thought, supposed to be a warning to me. The other figure, based on you, being clawed into the depths was somehow your fears of the past. But it isn’t like that any more.’ He felt the closeness of her attention. ‘You are Icarus, you are the one always going for the truth, flying as high as you can, taking risks with yourself. While I feel I’m being clawed down by my past, whatever parts of it I can produce in the analysis.’
‘I disagree totally,’ said Natasha. ‘They are still as they were and they are also only paintings, not biographies.’
‘But surely the meaning of a painting can change as circumstances change?’
‘Not those paintings.’
‘. . . it was just a thought.’
‘Before I die,’ said Natasha, ‘I would like to know what thought is.’
The conversation was over.
Miraculously soon, it seemed to Joseph, Natasha’s breathing became deep and even. He felt alone. His throat began to choke dryly but he did not want to cough and wake her up. He swallowed, but in doing that the muscles inside his throat seemed to seize up. He opened his mouth and told himself to catch the air, out of the darkness, it was in the darkness, how could this invisible darkness make him live? His head prickled with multiple stabs of anxiety . . . He looked at his watch. Still only ten minutes to twelve. A night could take so long and whenever he woke there was still far to go.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
When at last the morning came for her to go back to her analyst, Natasha realised how hard it had been to hold out. The melting together of so many sensations, provoked by this summer separation, had become a lumpen mass of anger, grief, resentment, dismay, disappointment, fear, fear above all, and it grew inside her, a weight, a ravenous feeder on energy, something that had to be removed before it took the life out of her.
She was early. She had taken care with her appearance. She was excited. The large uncared-for hall and the stairs covered with a faded navy blue carpet were home. She ascended to the first floor, slowly, to squeeze every
ounce of pleasure from this imminent reunion. There was so much she wanted to say, so much, she had realised on her journey into the city, that she had achieved alone in that tormenting period apart. She had survived it, that was the main thing. And although she carried this burden, it would be dissolved when they talked. There was even a sense, as she took the curve in the grand staircase in what had once been a wealthy and fashionable town house, that this would be the beginning of the end, that her course was nearly run, that one more year would see her through and free and whole and with all her life in her hands at last.
The notice was pinned to the waiting-room door with a brass tack. In clear neat handwriting it read, ‘Patients are asked to call . . .’ followed by a number.
Natasha went down the stairs and onto the mid-morning early September London streets even relishing this delay. She was utterly calm, still buoyant in the mood of anticipated release. It was a dull morning but the clouds were high and still and the light grey colour suited these formal streets, she thought, these terraces of riches so placid, an insulated island at the heart of the seething city. She loved too the quietness of the people as they walked or more often strolled with a purpose but with no unsettling urgency. She too strolled until finally she discovered a phone box and entered its small and isolated little space with keen curiosity.
When she came out she was breathing deeply and with difficulty. She leaned against the wall and thought on how to pull herself together. There was a rose garden in Regent’s Park not far from the northern end of Harley Street. With slow steps, almost faltering, she made for it. When she got there she found a bench, sat down with deep weariness, took out a cigarette and would have appeared to any onlooker to be looking calmly, this distinguished woman, and rather curiously at the rose bushes on which so recently so many flowers had bloomed.
