Double Blind

by Edward St. Aubyn

  How had it come to this? There was an unwelcome Sophoclean intensity in discovering that a potentially hostile stranger turned out to be a close relation; to the possibility of his daughter meeting her mad brother for the first time as her father’s patient, or the possibility of his newborn grandchild provoking the anger and the envy of his gravely deluded uncle. A troubling entanglement of family and therapy was part of the foundations of Martin’s profession. Anna Freud, who was famously analysed by her father, remained unmarried for the rest of her life; no man could match up to the hero who had helped her to acquire the treasure of self-knowledge and see into the depths of her unconscious mind. The incestuous implications were clear, or at least should have been clear to a man so alert to incestuous implications, and yet who else could Freud have sent his daughter to see and how could he deprive her of the revolutionary benefits of the discovery he was in the course of making? Since those early untrammelled days, more and more boundaries had been put in place to protect the analytic process from the corruption of indiscretion, misuse of authority, countertransference, inadequate training and all the other difficulties attendant on forming a secure attachment to a therapist in order to turn that successful dependency into a successful independence for the patient. As one of the most careful guardians of those boundaries, Martin was disturbed to think that he might have inadvertently breached them, and yet the origins of all this explosive Arsenal-borne complexity were simple and well-intentioned enough: Martin had arranged to see Sebastian in his home consulting room because he felt he needed more sessions. His room had a separate entrance and usually the only other person at home was Lizzie, working with her own patients at the top of the house, with two entirely private floors in between. Olivia usually came to stay in the evening or at weekends, when the whole house was private. She was also the seasoned daughter of two psychotherapists, although Martin had only started working at home when the children went to primary school and Lizzie had waited until they had left home altogether. When he took Sebastian on as a patient, Francis had just been the rumour of Olivia’s new boyfriend, who Lizzie and Martin had yet to meet.

  He was also confident that Sebastian was not a source of danger. Schizophrenia’s reputation for violence was exaggerated, except in the case of suicide, which about half of the schizophrenic population attempted, with one in twenty succeeding. Martin had worked with psychotic patients throughout his career and was certain that Sebastian was not criminally insane. He hadn’t just emerged from Broadmoor Hospital; he was an ambulatory schizophrenic who might have been frightening or repellent to some people, but to Martin, who was not easily frightened, he was a patient with a reasonable chance of recovery, who it would be unreasonable and unkind not to help.

  He settled back into his armchair, realising that although he had needed to get up to make a cup of coffee, he didn’t especially need to drink it. He had caught himself being a little buffeted by these unexpected developments, but now he was returning to his professional centre of gravity: his basic conviction that it didn’t matter what conundrums arose in an analysis, as long as the practitioner was stable and had internalised his own analysis enough to continue reflecting and not to act out under pressure – at least, not more than he had just done by making an unnecessary cup of coffee, moving between the professional armchair in which he saw all his patients and the private cupboard that he never opened when his patients were present. This tiny enactment of his dilemma was forgivable. What would not be forgivable would be to betray either his family or his patient, but both those outcomes could be avoided. Sebastian was only in the house for a hundred and fifty minutes a week, his analysis was progressing well, and Martin only had to tell Lizzie and Olivia the times of his sessions, explaining that he had an especially vulnerable patient who might be confused or perturbed if he saw or heard the baby. The truth was that in practical terms, it was quite manageable; the intensity of his initial response had come from imagining the potential impact of a collision between Sebastian and Olivia. The birth of her child was bound to resurrect Olivia’s deepest feelings about her own rejection at birth, but if she met her psychotic twin at the moment that she was standing squarely against the contagion of trauma, then any sense she might have that she could not prevent the shadow of her history from falling on another innocent generation would become that much more daunting.

  There was also the fact that, while Martin was not analysing his own daughter, like the founding father of his profession, he was writing a paper with her about different approaches to schizophrenia. It was a subject on which both their professional interests converged, so why shouldn’t they collaborate in writing about their findings? This particular entanglement of family and therapy seemed to be taking place at an impeccably academic level of discussion, but the fact that Sebastian was suffering from the complex disease he had urged her to focus on created a secret familial overload that only Martin was aware of. From a certain point of view, it might look as if an adopting father and an adopted daughter were repressing the genetic Caliban of a mad twin for their own convenience and peace of mind. This would of course have been an illusion. They were both aware of the weakness of the evidence for a genetic basis to schizophrenia and the startling contrast between Olivia’s mental health and Sebastian’s reinforced that view. Still, in the underwater world he had spent the last half-hour exploring, the world of incongruous encounters and potential unravelling, the subject matter of their paper seemed to be wrapping its tentacles around the authors and dragging them into murky depths. It was worth acknowledging these dimensions in order to discount them with more clarity.

  PART THREE

  17

  Olivia was lying in bed, her hands pressed to her bulging belly, feeling the baby kick and turn and enjoying a moment of communion she chose not to share with Francis, although he was lying beside her.

  ‘It is amazing here,’ she said instead, as the electric blinds purred up, unveiling the view from their bedroom. On one side, far below, a redwood forest ran down to the edge of the Pacific; on the other, an undulation of autumnal hills flowed south from Hunter’s house. In the distance, she could see the sharper creases of the Santa Lucia Mountains, a compressed accordion of chaparral ridgelines. At least a dozen butterflies were resting on the plate-glass window, some with pulsing wings, as if catching their breath before their next flight.

  ‘Those Monarch butterflies have flown down from northern Canada to spend the winter here,’ said Francis. ‘It takes four generations to make the three-thousand-mile round trip.’

  ‘Each generation must be born knowing the way,’ said Olivia.

  ‘Yes, when it comes to navigation, they have bigger minds than any one of us – just more distributed through the generations and the kaleidoscope.’

  ‘Kaleidoscope?’ said Olivia.

  ‘It’s a collective noun for a group of butterflies.’

  ‘I thought it was swarm.’

  ‘I went with kaleidoscope.’

  ‘Such an aesthete,’ said Olivia.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Francis, staring out of the window, smiling.

  The redwoods down in the coastal canyons belonged to a state park that protected Apocalypse Now from below. Its flanks were protected by two other large private properties. Altogether the three ranches formed a block of roughly five thousand acres, slightly larger than Howorth but more complicated to integrate. The further thousand acres of the state park had its own policy and its own management, and a bureaucracy that Hunter was better off not provoking, but yesterday he had invited his two other neighbours over to lunch, hoping to persuade them to participate in the wilding project that Francis was devising for him.

  Jim Burroughs, the owner of Titan Ranch, was a self-mocking Republican with a white moustache, who joked that the only gun-control he could imagine supporting would be a law that made it mandatory for anyone over the age of five to carry a concealed weapon.

  ‘How else are they going to protect themselves in t
he modern school environment?’ he chuckled.

  Jim’s great-grandfather had bought Titan Ranch in 1924 to raise the finest grass-fed cattle in California. Jim claimed that he was planning to celebrate a century of Burroughs ownership by releasing a thousand doves from a patch of woodland on his property, while a hundred friends of his stood nearby, heavily armed. The guests would be protected from each other by flak jackets and pellet-proof visors, since you couldn’t rule out a ‘Dick Cheney moment’ at a circular shoot in the middle of a cocktail party.

  ‘The dove that gets away from that wood alive is certainly going to justify its reputation as the poster bird for universal peace,’ said Jim.

  ‘Are the doves going to be armed?’ asked Lucy. ‘Otherwise, I don’t see what they have to justify.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Olivia, ‘what about their Second Amendment rights?’

  ‘We’re flying them in from Colombia,’ said Jim. ‘They don’t have any Second Amendment rights.’

  ‘They’re just bad palomas,’ said Hunter, ‘rapists and drug doves.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jim, the glass in his hand recoiling several times from his laughing mouth. ‘Kidding aside, tree-huggers and hunters need to work together on this one: with no trees to hug, there won’t be any animals to hunt. If you and Francis are going to come up with a way to make the land more fertile and the wildlife more abundant, count me in. Science is mostly common sense with a lot of uncommon words snapping at its heels, but as long as you can explain it to me in plain English, I’ll sign on the dotted line.’

  ‘Great,’ said Francis, ‘plain English and common sense coming right up.’

  ‘He’s my guy,’ said Jim, nodding approvingly at Hunter.

  ‘Golly, Jim, you must have the most awesome mind on the planet if you think that quantum mechanics or genome sequencing or event horizons are “common sense”,’ said Hope Schwartz, the owner of the other big property bordering on Apocalypse Now.

  ‘The fact is, Hope, I do have the most awesome mind on the planet,’ said Jim, his glass still bouncing against the force field of his irrepressible jocularity.

  Jim and Hope were old antagonists in the uncivil war between liberal and conservative values that unfolded even at this high altitude of American society, but the basic solidarity of being rich meant that they could still have lunch together; their antipathy was more like an unattended jousting tournament than a primetime wrestling match, beloved by millions.

  With her high cheekbones, her tangled blonde hair and her sun-faded denim jacket, Hope looked to Olivia as if she had surfed to lunch on a Beach Boys album. She was bewildered to discover that Hope was already forty. Her wide-open face could easily have been ten or twelve years younger and her body was sinisterly flexible. She sat through lunch as if she were in a yoga class, arching her back like a stretched bow and folding her legs like shoelaces. For Hope, it was just so much simpler to sit in a double lotus than keep her feet on the ground. She refused most of the food that Raoul brought around, but sometimes took tiny helpings of the healthiest dishes, her slim brown wrists decorated with an alluring turquoise and silver bracelet, as well as an accumulation of red and yellow cotton threads she had promised not to remove until they fell apart of their own accord: tokens of commitment to a surprising number of fragile vows and friendships. When she bought the property next to Hunter’s, it had been called, with crushing literalism, Hilltop Ranch, but Hope had renamed it Yab-Yum, in honour of the Tantric symbol for the union between male compassion and female insight, portraying the highest spiritual state in the most primordial sexual act; an image of copulative fusion that represented the transcendence of duality.

  ‘Oh, Francis has a Yab-Yum image in his study, don’t you, darling?’ said Olivia.

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘It’s a nineteenth-century Tibetan thangka,’ he explained to Hope.

  ‘Beautiful,’ said Hope, like a woman glancing approvingly at some new earrings in a mirror. ‘Do you have a meditation practice?’

  ‘I practise ineptly,’ said Francis, ‘when I remember.’

  ‘I’ve got a dojo at my place,’ said Hope, ‘that was blessed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Francis. ‘Did he just happen to be in the area?’

  ‘He just happened to get a donation from the Schwartz Foundation. My family made a fortune in pretzels and I’m laundering the money with philanthropy. It’s a beautiful space; you’re welcome to come over and sit there.’

  Why don’t you just say, ‘fuck’? thought Olivia.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Francis. ‘I do less formal meditation than I used to; I just try to integrate my practice with whatever is going on.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound inept to me,’ said Hope, flashing him a smile, ‘more like the highest path.’

  ‘That’s exactly why it’s inept,’ said Francis. ‘I should really go back to counting breaths and realising that I can’t even do that.’

  To Olivia it seemed like they were communicating in some kind of Buddhist whale song, lost on the uninitiated. Why didn’t they just move in together? She felt the weight of her pregnancy with renewed force. Her hormones were all over the place. She wasn’t an insanely jealous person by nature, or perhaps she hadn’t yet loved anyone enough to awaken her inner Othello.

  Today, by contrast, after a good night’s sleep, on this immaculate morning, gazing at the butterflies on the thick, silent window, lying next to Francis, feeling the rapture and the intimacy of being pregnant with his child, Olivia was quite shocked by the violence of her emotions at yesterday’s lunch.

  ‘I have to go over to see the other ranches later,’ said Francis, ‘do you want to come along?’

  ‘I think I’ll stay here,’ said Olivia, defying her possessiveness.

  She not only wanted to wash away the guilt of her jealous spasm, but she also felt, as she embarked on her third trimester, that she and Francis were no longer a couple with a pregnancy on their hands, but already a family of three. She had often seen her friends’ relationships buckle from the pressure of what was in some ways an archetypal drama, in which the mother and child were bound to be the stars, while the father, like Joseph in The Most Puzzling Story Ever Told, could only play a supporting role. At least she wasn’t putting their relationship under the unnecessary strain of claiming to have been impregnated by God without losing her virginity, but whether a mother was about to give birth to Christ or to Oedipus, or to any other child, the father was forced to stand to the side for a while, being a spear-carrier, a confidant and a dutiful provider to the new couple formed by the extinction of the old one. Poor Francis, he should be allowed to go wild in the country.

  ‘Okay,’ said Francis, leaning over to kiss her belly while Olivia ran her fingers nostalgically through his hair.

  * * *

  ‘Hope likes to make fun of me for being a conservative,’ said Jim, resting his hand on the roof of Francis’s car, ‘but the word “conservative” isn’t as far from the word “conservation” as she seems to think. I may not know what an “event horizon” is – it sounds to me like a catering company out of Carmel – but I take the stewardship of this land as seriously as anyone and I don’t have to quote Chief Seattle to prove it, although he seems to have been a sensible guy and something of a conservative himself.’

  ‘It’s been a revelation seeing what you’ve done here,’ said Francis. ‘Thanks for showing me around.’

  ‘You remember how to get to Hilltop?’ asked Jim. ‘I can’t bring myself to call it Yab-Yum, it’s what my granddaughter says when I buy her an ice cream. I don’t know when arrested development became a virtue; around the same time as greed and grievance and self-pity, I guess. Resentment used to be something folks wanted to get rid of, now they water it and put it on a windowsill, like a favourite pot plant.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Francis, ‘but we have to get rid of the causes of resentment at the same time.’

  ‘Good luck with that!’ said Jim. �
��If you breed a resentment hound, it’s going to sniff out resentment, even if you put it in a forest full of truffle and deer.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Francis with a smile. ‘Anyway, your directions to Hilltop were very clear, and I saw the totem pole on the way up.’

  ‘Now that’s what I call environmental damage,’ said Jim. ‘If it had been there in the first place, I would have conserved the hell out of it, but having it erected by a woman whose family came over here from Germany to make a fortune in the snack industry doesn’t seem to me like a compliment to the folks who used to live here, more like another slap in the face.’

  ‘I can’t really judge,’ said Francis, in modest defence of Hope’s pole. ‘I suppose intention plays a key part in it.’

  ‘Her intention was to put the biggest goddam pole she could get her hands on at the entrance to her property,’ said Jim with a mischievous chuckle. He tapped the roof of the car twice and called out, ‘Send me that proposal,’ as he turned to walk back to his house.