Sight
Page 8
* * *
—
After my mother told me that she had ceased to dream I began to find myself lying awake, in my bedroom at home or during the summer in the room at the top of Doctor K’s house, when I should have been asleep—not every night, but maybe once or twice a fortnight. Partly it was a sudden awareness of my own sleeping patterns which disrupted them—the way that, thinking about my mother and the mechanics of her dreamlessness, I would lie with my eyes shut, trying to notice the point at which dreams began—but partly also it was the preoccupying strangeness of it, those dark, imageless hours between sleeping and waking. Having learned the fact I kept it as a curiosity, taking it out during my own solitary night-lit hours to turn it this way and that, trying to make sense of it—this single artefact I had of my mother’s existence apart from myself. At home in the mornings I would sit, tired, my school uniform half-buttoned, on the tall stool in the corner of the kitchen and watch my mother slot bread into the toaster, boil the kettle, reach down a pot of jam from the high shelf in the cupboard where it lived because at one time I had liked to put my fingers in it when her back was turned, and I would feel that, despite the familiarity of these gestures, despite the known quantity of her face and the predictability of her responses to me, the woman I was watching was a stranger; but surely this cannot have been the case. The truth must be that I knew my mother well because, after all, what are we if not a totality of days, a sum of interactions; and a glimpse of what is underneath the surface, the skeleton on which the outer face is hung, cannot undo the knowledge of skin but only give it context, the way it rises and falls, its puckering, its flaws.
* * *
—
One particular summer, sometime between sports day and my French exam, my father left at last, his presence, always tentative, often forgotten, finally ceasing altogether. My parents sat side by side in our sitting room to tell me what I had failed to notice—that my father had gone—and I thought only how unusual it was that we should be all three in the same room. Later, when my mother came to my bedroom to ask if there was anything more that I wanted to know, I could think of nothing to say. It seemed that nothing tangible had happened and that afterwards things went on as before. Term ended. The long holiday began. My father came and went without warning so that, as I had always done, I assumed his absence, tried not to seem resentful of his presence. For a few weeks I wandered from one friend’s house to another while my mother worked, and then my bags were packed and we made the journey to Doctor K’s. My mother stayed for the weekend, and if Doctor K tried less hard to keep us apart than was usual, if I spent more time sat by mother’s side, then I barely noticed it; and then my mother left, and I was alone with my grandmother and the flat and the heath. The weather that year was indifferent, grey and rather humid, and when I climbed to the top of Parliament Hill in the afternoons there was a pollution haze spread out across the eastward city like a caul; or perhaps this is another trick that memory plays, to point and dramatise: the addition of an appropriate backdrop for the mood. I found myself distractible, easily bored, and I seemed to have no handle on what I felt: although I would not have said that I was unhappy small things distressed me without warning. One evening, towards the end of the first week, I sat in Doctor K’s consulting room and wept because I had been unable to reach my father by phone, and although this was not unusual, although he would not have been expecting me to call and so would have had no reason to stay near a phone, although it had been nothing more than a whim which had led me to dial his number and I could think of nothing that I wanted to say to him, still I felt as though my failure to reach him was a suddenly effected, ragged wound. Doctor K poured our drinks and we sat in our usual chairs. Surrounded by the room’s familiar comfort, I was surprised by my own desolation, which came as a longing not just for my own home but for my mother, or for what my mother would have done to treat my unhappiness, tending to it as though it were a fever or a graze, susceptible to the same rules of comfort as any other injury: a bath, hot milk, a kiss; those simplicities which, treating sorrow as a fact in itself, require no act of explanation on the part of one already wounded.
Doctor K:
—It is important that we talk about these things.
My mother, when she asked me how I felt about my father leaving, had offered no platitudes but left instead the complicated state of things arrayed about us like the wreckage of an ocean voyage as we sat, survivors, side by side on the edge of my bed; and if I had any questions beyond the purely logistical I knew better than to ask them.
Doctor K:
—Would you like to tell me how you feel?
I sat in the chair opposite my grandmother, curled over on myself as though to protect an injury to my front or flank, unstopped tears running down my face to wet the knees of my summer trousers, and I shut my eyes so that I would not have to look beneath the surface of things.
Doctor K:
—Sometimes if we are angry with someone we love, it doesn’t feel acceptable to us and so we find other places to put that anger.
Doctor K:
—We might think we are angry with someone else instead.
My mother, as she talked, had held my hand.
Doctor K:
—Or we might feel very sad.
Across the empty acres of the consulting room carpet, Doctor K’s words reached me; but for all the promise implicit in the act of talking we did not touch and I was not comforted.
* * *
—
In my last year at university, sat one evening in my room eating an indifferent vegetable curry for the third night running, two pairs of socks protecting my feet from the cold, and through the window a view of the chapel lit up against the darkness in a way that never failed to make me feel mildly, half-pleasantly bereft, I read for the first time Freud’s account of the psychoanalysis of a four-year-old boy, Little Hans. Although during each of the Augusts that I had spent at my grandmother’s house I had done little but read, having nowhere to go except the heath, nor any friends nearby, and although I had been given more or less free rein of the books in the house, allowed my own pick of what was on the shelves, still I had never read any psychoanalysis. Those books relating to her work my grandmother kept in her consulting room, and although not strictly forbidden them I would never have felt myself able, while she sat and watched, to run my fingers along their spines as I did with those in the rest of the house, waiting for something to catch my attention. Even now, so long afterwards, the thought of what my grandmother’s response would have been, her enthusiasm, the opportunity she would have seen to teach, brings an immediate and indivisible firmness of response: the automatic certainty that I must allow my grandmother no ingress to my mind beyond what she had already granted to herself. Then, after her death, the books were gone; and with an adolescent’s callousness I didn’t think about my grandmother for a long time, or about the past, or anything but my own life and how I might get on with it. Now, though, reading the slightly stilted prose of a decades-old translation of Freud’s case studies, I felt my childhood spread about me like a map to which I had almost learned the key, and for days afterwards I felt myself to be a little out of focus, as though I had been away somewhere and had yet to complete the process of my return. As I walked to lectures or to the library, or sat drinking weak coffee in the college bar, I found myself haunted by the thought of Herbert Graf, anonymised by Freud as Little Hans, who at the age of four and three quarters saw a horse fall down in the street and afterwards became so frightened that he couldn’t leave the house. His subsequent analysis was carried out primarily by his father, Max, with Freud offering support by letter—an extension of a process that was already in place, since Freud had for some time been encouraging those of his supporters who had young children to observe and report on their development, seeking in this way to gain confirmation of his theories of childhood sexuality. Freu
d himself would meet Herbert only once during the course of his analysis, on the afternoon of 30 March 1908, when the three of them—Herbert and his father and Herr Doktor, Freud—would sit in Freud’s consulting room, awkwardly arrayed on chairs about the empty couch, Herbert’s small-boy body uncomfortably still while—perhaps—from elsewhere in the apartment the sounds of freer children filtered through. Herbert was a polite, good-natured boy who tried hard to please, giving the best answers he could to questions he barely understood. Freud asked him if the horses that he was afraid of wore glasses; he said they didn’t. Freud asked him if his father Max wore glasses and, confused, the boy said no to this as well although it wasn’t true. Freud asked him if what he had described as the black around the mouths of the horses that frightened him might be a moustache; and Herbert, hands clasped between his knees, said he supposed it might. It was not, the eminent professor told him, horses that he was afraid of. Nor, as his father had suggested to him, was his anxiety mere synecdoche, the whole of the dreaded animal standing in for its penis. His fear, Freud said, was of his father; and Herbert, just turned five, who had seen a horse fall down and felt the safety of his bounded world eroded, sat quietly, and tried to see how this was true. His fear, for all its power, had previously been a simple thing, susceptible to adult protection; now he was being asked to put in place of it a metastasising complexity—an enforced awareness of the unreliability of thought, the way that one thing can come to stand in for another without us noticing the difference. Even now I feel the horror of it: to be made to feel in ignorance of oneself, to be stripped of those privileges subjectivity brings—a still, sure place to stand; a premise; the right to know one’s mind—and I think of them walking home together, Herbert and his father, hurrying back through busy streets towards the safety of home, the boy whose trust had been opened like a nut, split to see what mechanism it was that made it grow, falling into step beside his analyst father, who far from being the negation of fear was now its subject; and I can think only of how thin the world must have seemed to him, how fragile—what had been that morning a presumed certainty made now into something like a body of water, the taut surface on which they walked a meagre miracle stretched across its depths.
* * *
—
My mother lay in her bed, a barrow’s shape beneath the sheets, her hair, lost on one side where surgery had stripped the skin, and on the other tufty and uneven from the effects of repeated radiotherapy, spread about the pillow like half a greying halo. I sat across the room from her, the book I had been reading held in my lap. I said
—Do you dream, now?
She was at that stage of her illness where the weave between sleeping’s warp and weft was beginning to unpick itself and I hadn’t yet got used to the way that she would drift about, sliding in and out of consciousness, and when she didn’t answer I thought that perhaps she had fallen asleep. Later, though, after I had put the book away and tidied the sheets, held a cup for her to drink and drawn the curtains on the fading summer night, she said
—I dream of you sometimes. Or of your father. It doesn’t—
she coughed
—it doesn’t mean anything,
and she shifted in her bed and turned, and she was lost again.
* * *
—
Herbert Graf was not alone in being the subject of an analysis by his own father. Freud himself would become his daughter Anna’s analyst, albeit in adulthood, and both Jung and Karl Abraham would work analytically with their children, as would Melanie Klein, an advocate of prophylactic analysis for all children, with hers; and although when I first learned about it, my fingers like a voyeur’s eyes running down the indexes of college library books to find examples, it struck me as nothing but obvious intrusion on the children, incomprehensible to me in its motivation, now at least a part of that pity I felt for Herbert Graf is saved over for his father. Sometimes, when in the woods I watch my daughter with indefatigable hopefulness attempt to climb a tree whose first branch is five times her own height above the earth, tiny fingers thrust into crevasses or knots, red wellingtons scrabbling on curved bark for purchase, I feel myself winded by the desire to promise a protection that I cannot give; and if, then, I thought there was a way that I could make her life better than the ordinary—if I thought that I could make it smoother, softer, less fraught with the sudden, troubled revelation that hidden motivation brings, or with the half-rotted-through desire for what will come to haunt or hurt her—if I could give her clarity, self-knowledge, sight—and if, telling her the secret now to stop her searching for it later, I could leave happiness to her like a legacy—then I would; and if afterwards it turned out that she wasn’t happy after all then how would it be possible to say it was my fault?
* * *
—
A month, perhaps, after Johannes and I had been to the V&A, we went together to the Freud museum. We had met a few times during the intervening weeks, for a drink or for coffee, and one weekend we had walked together along the Thames from Cookham to Henley on a day when, after a week of better weather, winter had returned, bringing an icy, rain-flecked wind that tore at buds and stripped petals from crocuses and left us too cold and damp to be more than tolerably friendly. I thought about him often and in the evenings, in my flat with the sounds of other lives leeching through the walls, I wrote him long emails which I edited down to short emails and then didn’t send; and sometimes as I turned off the lights to go to bed my phone would ring and it would be him. Our conversations were awkward. Neither of us are very good on the phone even now and it was hard then to know how we stood, me half-undressed and in the middle of a darkened flat and him elsewhere, his voice emerging in bursts from a background that might have been a party or a bar or only the noise of a busy street drifting through into my empty room.
—Well, goodnight then.
—Yes, I—
—Goodnight.
The Freud museum was my idea. Cookham had been his. I had wanted to visit the museum for years; but also I think that I wanted Johannes to believe that I was something other than I felt myself to be, a person who we both might learn to like: that person who I might have become if my mother’s death and my own uncertain illness which was its aftermath had not intervened to leave my life a shoreless fluidity and myself adrift inside it. I had not visited Hampstead since the day my mother and I had lifted up the Persian carpet in my grandmother’s consulting room to release a cloud of moths, but still I thought of it as in some way mine, and I assumed that recognition would be reciprocal and that it would be as I had left it, waiting. Now, though, leaving the tube at Swiss Cottage, travelling up the elderly escalator with its brass fittings and elegantly fonted signs to be spat out onto the edge of the Finchley Road, turning right towards Hampstead and leaving the churning traffic behind, I found myself wrong-footed. This was a place I hardly recognised, although it can’t have been much changed. The same trees grew from the same pavements and the same houses lined them, high white stuccoed terraces with deep front steps or Edwardian mansions set back behind gardens planted with magnolia or fig, but the worlds their walls enclosed were private and I had no right of admittance to them. My grandmother and all the people that she knew were gone and I would be neither recognised nor remembered; and when, turning into Maresfield Gardens where for the last few months of his life Freud had lived in exile, cared for by his daughter, Anna, I saw in slivers eked out through windows high ceilings and broad fireplaces, bookshelves, paintings, and such gentle order, the uncrowded peace which my grandmother’s flat had possessed, I felt that version of loss which is the sudden understanding of the impossibility of return, our casting out from that which memory tells us was once ours. Such an unexpected grief shook me, and by the time that Johannes arrived to find me, hands sunk deep in pockets, waiting for him in front of the museum, I had worked myself into a sullen, twitching mood I couldn’t shake, my awareness that I was being u
nreasonable only making my sourness worse. I blamed him for my distemper. I felt that something hung between us and I resented it. I felt that perhaps I was wasting my time—here, with him—as I had wasted evenings already on unsent emails, on phone calls both imagined and real, and I wanted to take him to account but knew that in truth none of it was his fault. He, too, seemed aware that we were out of step with one another. His answers to my abruptly practical questions were brief and vague and his eyes skimmed mine, sliding off to rest elsewhere; and when, as we stood side by side to study a photograph, our hands touched, it was he who pulled himself away. In Sigmund Freud’s consulting room ropes held us to a narrow tunnel in the middle of the floor and we stood, staring. The furniture here, the chairs and tables, the books and the crowded cabinets of curiosities, the couch with its drapes and cushions, had been brought over from the family’s apartment in Vienna, a wholesale transportation in the spring of 1938 which had required all the resources they could call upon, both financial and administrative; and when at last they arrived these things had been unpacked and arranged to mimic the lost original so that when, after her father’s death a few months later, Anna had chosen to preserve the house as it was, it was already halfway to a reliquary. I looked at it all and tried to think of my grandmother but couldn’t, and so I tried to think of Anna, living and working for forty years around this preserved monument to her father’s memory, a static starting point, unchallenged, unexamined, but that too slipped away from me, leaving behind Johannes—my awareness of his presence and the feeling that, somewhere in the space between us, the uncertain image of our future shivered. On the landing at the top of the beautiful staircase where a small table and a chair, overhung by a rubber plant, were set beneath a long window, I wanted to say that, one day, I would like to have such a place as this to sit; but even that felt like a presumption and so I said nothing, and neither did Johannes, and we didn’t look at one another, and barely breathed; and when upstairs I found a photograph taken of one of the rooms as it had been in the late seventies, a space inhabited by Anna as an old woman, painted cabinets set against the walls and shelves of books, signifiers of an intellectual life, and between them a rather horrible armchair and, sat closely facing it, the same sort of television set that Doctor K had owned, when I remembered how towards the end of my grandmother’s life the trappings of old age had intruded on her house, the television brought downstairs, electrically reclining plush armchairs placed in the rooms, and how I had felt pre-emptively bereft at the thought of what it was now too late for, the learning of that which she had been so eager to teach—the underlying, animating shape of things, the way my own cogs bit and turned—I said only