Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  * * *

  —

  After three days my mother left, returning to that quiet analogue of her life in which I was absent, trying in the earlier years to repair her relationship with my father and later to recover from it, and then I would feel the guilty lightening of relief like an unacknowledgeable weight removed. Released from the entangling strictures of a relationship I didn’t understand I felt as though I had run a swift course into open water and, alone for the remainder of the month with Doctor K, left largely to my own devices, I felt myself free. During the greater part of every day my grandmother worked; I learned to keep doors closed, to leave no personal possessions in the hallway that led past the kitchen and the study to her consulting room—learned, too, to retreat to some deeper portion of the house between five to and five past every hour, those ten minutes during which one client left and another arrived, sitting round the bend in the stairs so that I could listen to the sound that two shadows made sliding past one another and trying to imagine from the sound their footsteps made on the hallway’s wooden boards the details of these incomprehensibly other lives. On hot days when the windows were open and voices carried clearly, the walls of the house responding like a sounding board, I would find myself occasionally startled by the noise of weeping or by a shout, its echoes deadened by the still air of the summer garden.

  At the start of each day—after the breakfast things had been cleared and the floor swept, the papers straightened on the hall table, the mirror that hung above it wiped; those minutiae which, attended to, transformed the lower floor of the flat from habitation to a refuge for paying strangers—Doctor K hung a laminated sign on the door of her consulting room on which the words Analysis in Progress were written in heavy-inked, formal lettering. This, said Doctor K, when I complained that it was unnecessary given that I knew better than to interrupt, was not for my benefit, being used even when, as was more usual, there was no one else in the flat. Rather it was a part of the ritual of analysis, a formal acknowledgement of the pact that she made to be available as absolutely as she was able for the time that she had allotted to those who came to visit her, climbing with what combination of anticipation and anxiety I could not imagine five or six times a week up the stairs from the street. Doctor K was always ready to explain to me the mechanics of her profession, taking my questions more seriously than I ever intended them to be. At such times she would treat me as a sort of proto-adult, stopping what she was doing to speak, and, flattered, I would try hard to concentrate, although lack of comprehension made it difficult, her words slipping past while I squinted to catch the shape of them. I didn’t doubt the truth of what she said. I assumed, then, that knowledge was synonymous with fact—that understanding must bring with it certainty so that, knowing, one would know for sure; and such surety I looked forward to, taking it to be a part of adulthood which would come, at last, when I had earned it.

  Left to my own devices for the greater part of each day, I spent most of my time reading and I was happy, if this is what happiness is, this tendency to be engrossed, an enthusiasm for the drowning out of thought with words; and then each evening, when Doctor K’s last client had left, she would come and find me. This was the only time that I was allowed into her consulting room: when, for half an hour each evening before dinner, we would sit in there together, in a pair of facing armchairs set beneath the window. The room was large and its windows looked, as those of the living room did, out across the garden. It seemed always to be cool, even when hot days stretched on for hours, and it had that kind of heavy, impenetrable quiet which I have since come to associate with National Trust properties: the peace of things that are not used, that are curated, precisely placed, unmoved and untouched by those who pass through. The floor was lime-washed wood, pale and clean, covered for the most part by a large red-and-purple Persian carpet, and besides the two chairs on which Doctor K and I sat, and the bookcases that lined three walls of the room from the floor to a foot off the ceiling, and which housed all Doctor K’s psychoanalytic books, the only furniture was a bureau and a couch, a long, low ottoman upholstered in velvet faded to the washed-out brownish green of a shadowed pond. This couch, low-backed and piled with cushions at one end, I was not allowed to sit on, it being imbued, or so I inferred from the way that Doctor K spoke about it, with some power of compulsion, a mysterious tendency to induce in its occupants a time-consuming and uncheckable catharsis. As a result it became an object of desire for me. I tried to imagine the drama of myself upon it, how I would be laid out, wan and troubled, words dropping from my lips like the fruit of a slow-grown bush, but could only think how awkward it would be to sit on its edge, mute and uncomfortable, and how the thought of lying there while someone watched me would bring panic like the fear of drowning. Often, while Doctor K was absent from the flat, when she walked to the bakery or went on Wednesday evenings to play bridge at the house of the elderly pianist who lived on the top floor of the house opposite, I would stand in my bare feet outside the closed door of the consulting room and try to work up the courage to go inside, daring myself to approach the couch, to lower myself onto it; but if I ever did then I have no recollection of it, and nor do I know what happened to the couch after Doctor K’s death. I imagine that my mother would have sold it if she could, as she sold all the books, not to turn a profit but because she was pragmatic and disliked waste; or if it couldn’t be sold she would have thrown it away as she did the heavy consulting room carpet which, when we lifted a corner of it on the day after the funeral, both of us seeking a way to occupy ourselves in the solitary vacuum that comes when death’s formalities are complete, we found to be so riddled with moths that, disturbed, they flew up in clouds and the carpet began to shred and fall into grainy dust in our hands.

  * * *

  —

  For that half an hour in the consulting room each evening, between the end of Doctor K’s working day and the start of dinner, which we cooked together, her standing over the hob while I sat at the kitchen table chopping potatoes or shredding spring onions for a salad, we sat and faced one another. Through the open window drifted the gentle roar of traffic climbing Haverstock Hill, and mixed in with it the calling voices of people turned out into the freedom of the heath’s open spaces, but we were close together and very far from them and all these outside noises came to us as though through swaddling layers of cloth. Throughout the time that we sat there my grandmother maintained a sort of listening stillness, sat upright and unmoving, her feet crossed at the ankle and her hands in her lap, her eyes focused on me as I fidgeted about and tried, without alerting her to what I was doing, to catch sight of the dial of the watch she wore on the inside of her wrist. Her face was not expressionless but nor did it convey any particular emotion and she gave the impression not of waiting, which would have implied expectation, but rather of an impartial readiness, as though she would attend to anything that might be said but would be equally content to remain as she was, sat in silence, until the seven o’clock chime from the grandfather clock in the hall set us free. On the deep windowsill which stretched between the two chairs sat two corresponding glasses, a gin for Doctor K and for me a glass of lemonade browned with angostura bitters, their outsides sweating, their ice cubes melting slowly in the cool room. These drinks, said Doctor K, were further indicators, like not using the couch and no sign pinned up outside the door, that we were not in consultation. It was, she said, no kind of analysis that we were conducting, a point which she said needed to be emphasised more for her own benefit than for mine, as it was she who had its habit and routines ingrained. Rather than analysis, she said, this was an opportunity for us to talk without any mediating activity. It was an opportunity for reflection. She told me that without reflection, without the capacity to trace our lives backwards and pick the patterns out, we become liable to act as animals do, minus forethought and according to a set of governing laws which we have never taken the trouble to explore. Without reflection we
do little more than drift upon the surface of things and self-determination is an illusion. We lay ourselves open to unbalance. Conversation, she said, helps us to reflect—and although much of what Doctor K said to me I at first failed to understand and then came to doubt, this point I have come back to; and I think that had I remembered it during those lost and lonely months after my mother’s death when the contents of my mind were a formless spread that I could neither abandon nor inhabit, then perhaps things might have been easier for me.

  * * *

  —

  At the time I found these evening talks with my grandmother uncomfortable, a fact that she acknowledged but which, she said, was an indication only that we were engaged in something valuable, as though my discomfort were a call sign, something to be sought and followed. Although for the most part I was little more than bored, there were times when I felt myself trapped. Reticence was no protection. Doctor K was as able to find significance in my silence as in my speech and any act of concealment would itself be considered revelatory. I felt that in the steady light of Doctor K’s compassionate gaze my body, far from being the container and concealer of my mind, had become its compulsive betrayer and I wished that instead of entering the consulting room we might go straight to the easy companionship of dinner’s preparation when, stood side by side, otherwise engaged, we might talk in fragments, about what I was reading or what I had seen, about Doctor K’s friends or her tangential recollections of a childhood that seemed impossibly distant to me then and more so now. Under such conditions, through such circumlocutions, I felt that what was important could be admitted, unsaid but understood; but lately I have found that some version of Doctor K’s routine has returned to me. Each evening, after our daughter is asleep, surrounded by the chaos made from our once-ordered lives, Johannes and I sit together for half an hour and let our thoughts unwind in silence or in fractured sentences, this ritual proximity an attempt to touch one another across a widening space of tiredness and habit, and although we do not confess, are neither priests nor penitents, still it is a kind of undressing and we are better for it.

  * * *

  —

  This was Doctor K’s contention: that the formal work of psychoanalysis, the daily meeting of analyst and analysand, should not be thought of as the elucidation of a person directly but rather as the teaching by example of a skill which, once learned, might be practised internally. It is, she said, easy to see analysis as a kind of laying out, a mental correlate of that physical ordering which occurs after death: the contents of a person unpacked and spread across the patterned surface of the Persian carpet, each artefact itemised, assessed; and then, inventory made, these objects put away again, more neatly now, their relations to one another drawn and understood; but minds repacked will tend, she said, to chaos, with more stuff shoved in lazily on top, the whole swiftly deteriorating into the same shifting mess it started as.

  —It is a common mistake,

  Doctor K told me, her hands lifting slightly from her lap in a gesture of emphasis that I cannot think would have been unconscious

  —to think of the process in such passive terms.

  These conversations—in which my part, if any, was that of unwilling interlocutor, my questions heavily prompted by my grandmother—took place not in the consulting room, where the spontaneous nature of what speech I chose to make was sacrosanct, but in any otherwise unoccupied corners of our days, on Sunday afternoons when it was hot and we would sit out on the lawn, Doctor K in a wicker chair and me on the grass in front of her, or in the evenings, after we had watched together some drama or documentary on the brown, wood-laminate television set that she kept in a small study next to her bedroom, until illness robbed her of the use both of the stairs and the evening hours. The analyst, Doctor K told me, is not a tour guide, leading their client through those vast and vaulted galleries, the cloisters of the mind, and nor is it their task to point out shadows, but rather they must provide an instruction in the mechanics of such shadows’ investigation. It is only, she told me—each summer a different form of words, each summer the branches of the apple trees which grew espaliered against the garden fence a little longer, my legs a little longer on the sofa—when a person has gained the skills necessary to explore the territory for themselves, to unpack their own minds and begin to understand the contents, that they might start the work necessary to make their experience, their behaviour meaningful; and then at last they might start to become transparent to themselves. This, she said, was the original significance of her name, adopted when she was young enough not to find such gestures awkward and kept to since as a way of keeping faith with herself: to mark herself as her life’s subject, a case study in which she was both analyst and analysand, carried on across decades in an attempt to peel away the obscuring layers, the muddying cross-currents of desire, and to live a life which was intentional, directed not by the hidden motivations of a covered mind but by an elucidated self. Her first client, each morning, was herself, and for fifty minutes she would sit at the bureau in her consulting room and write in one of the large, leather-backed notebooks that she kept for the purpose an account of the previous day’s events, her reactions to them, her dreams or reveries; and then she would read back through what she had written and annotate it with the same interpretations she would provide for any other subject. This diary keeping was, she said, not strictly necessary to the task of self-analysis but it was a methodology which she found useful, a way of holding the mind to task, like the use of a rosary in prayer. When, the summer that I was nine or ten, I tried to outgrow my childhood through mimicry, I kept for a while my own imitation of my grandmother’s diary. We went together on a Saturday afternoon to the bookshop at the bottom of the hill, and there my grandmother bought me a smaller version of the notebook that she used and a good pen to go with it, and returning to her flat we moved, between us, a small table to sit beneath the window in my bedroom and in front of it a little round-backed chair. I laid out the notebook and set the pen next to it and the next morning, after breakfast, while my grandmother sat in her consulting room, I sat at the table and tried to write. After ten minutes or so I had managed a list of everything achieved the previous day and given as much thought as I was able to the significance of it. The dormer window was open and I could hear the scratching and cooing of the pigeons who nested on the roof. At the bottom of the page I had been writing on I drew a picture of a witch. After a while I climbed onto the table and stuck my head out of the window to see if I could catch sight, from up here, of any hint of a bald spot in the downstairs tenant’s hair as he stood in front of a bed of roses with a pair of secateurs held loosely in his hand.

  Later, as we sat together in the kitchen over a lunch of ham sandwiches, I felt an inner swell of importance as I waited for Doctor K to ask me how I had got on. All morning, after the tedious execution of the task itself had been got out of the way, I had been imagining what I would say when asked about my diary. Concerned more with an image of myself as diary keeper than with the actual act of writing I was eager to have an opportunity to demonstrate this new facet to my personality; but Doctor K made no mention of it. Even when the next morning, as we cleared away the breakfast things, I loudly announced my intention to go to my room and work and then, half mounting the stairs, turned back to look at her, she did nothing more than nod. It puzzles me still, this peculiar idea of privacy Doctor K had, that all my thoughts and actions, my hidden wants, the ripples of my mind across my face, my skin, should be considered little more than symptom while the act of examination itself was sacrosanct.

  Despite the difficulty in its actual execution I held to the idea of diary writing for the rest of the month, keeping faith with my morning retreat to the table beneath the window, and when my holiday was over and I returned home I made my mother clear out a space for me in the box room, sorting through years of accumulated junk until I could fit a chair in there and an old writing bureau s
he bought at my insistence from a junk shop, and I made a sign to be pinned up on the door. I wonder now if this was some feint on my part, a testing of the waters, to see how it would feel to ally myself to Doctor K, and whether perhaps this was the year that I came to understand, if not what held my mother and my grandmother apart, then at least the presence of their separation. That my mother carried out my instructions without comment or question despite the fact that it must have irritated her was, I think, a testament to her patience, but it was sensible too, because the feeling of importance that it gave me to retreat each morning before school to the box room and hang up the sign and shut the door soon wore off, and I found other ways to entertain myself. The box room drifted back to being a repository for odds and ends of household rubbish, for ironing boards and baskets and spare sheets, for jumpers in need of mending and chairs with broken legs or backs—those things we couldn’t use but couldn’t bring ourselves to throw away; and upon all this its door could be shut, granting us the illusion of a house in order. And when, years later, after my mother’s death, I came to sort through it all again, to disinter object after half-discarded object from the softening dust which lay across the room, each one become through disuse little more than an imitation of itself, I found at the back of the room the bureau and, on it, the leather notebook, neatly placed, the pen set parallel beside it. The notebook I kept, saving it from the skip because it felt a part of me, vestigial but somehow still adjoining, and I expect that it is somewhere in this house now although I couldn’t say precisely where, a part of that silted edifice, built in layers, which is my own paper carcass, a repository the sorting of which will be my children’s task. My grandmother’s notebooks she destroyed as soon as she found out that she was dying, spending an hour each afternoon between naps and medication feeding them methodically through a shredder. They had been, she said, a tool for her analysis and not its outcome, that outcome being, depending on your point of view, either the articles she had written over forty years explaining and defending her project and its method, or her life itself—what she had made of it, its worm-cast trail—but more, her own experience of it, that inner life which, so long laboured over, would soon be lost.