Double Blind

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Francis, who was not concentrating properly. He really ought to tell Hope to go back to the Park and not visit him again.

  ‘Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d love that,’ said Hope.

  He was reminded again of a zombie ant. Hope had clearly taken control of his language centres and made him say the opposite of what he intended. He must fight back.

  ‘Are those what I think they are?’ said Hope, stepping out of her shoes and discarding her jacket on the sofa.

  ‘Yes, if you think they’re magic mushrooms,’ said Francis.

  ‘Let’s take some now.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ said Francis, tilting the guard to throw more logs on the fire, ‘but I have some for you to take back to George and Emma. I’ll go and get them and make some tea.’

  ‘It’s so cosy here,’ said Hope, sitting sideways across the armchair and stretching her feet towards the rekindled flames.

  Francis went into the kitchen and filled the battered, cream-coloured kettle that had amused Olivia on her first visit, a relic with a thick nozzle and a whistle. He put it on the hob and lit the gas, feeling that his polite but cool replies to Hope showed that he was getting on top of the Cordyceps Californica that was attempting to commandeer his mind and body. He dropped a teabag into the pot and put it on the tray with two mugs. There was still time to make this into an affectionate but decisive de-escalation of their charged and potentially destructive relationship. They had kissed, it was true, but not to have kissed would have been frankly hostile. He could still police the riot she had started by touching him. It was difficult for him to be on the side of the truncheons, the shields and the tear gas, but it would be vandalism to be on any other side. He loved Olivia and her family, and he was preparing to love their child. On this occasion, being a man meant stepping firmly away from his virility.

  While he was in the larder collecting the mushrooms for Hope to take back to the house, the kettle started to whistle faintly, and Francis hurried to take it off the stove before it reached its shrillest note. He poured the water into the teapot, put the Ziploc bag next to the milk jug, picked up the tray and walked resolutely into the living room.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he said, standing in the doorway, ‘put your clothes back on.’

  ‘What?’ said Hope. ‘It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.’

  ‘I’ve almost only seen you naked,’ said Francis, ‘that’s why it would be refreshing to talk to you when you were wearing something – other than that bracelet.’

  ‘I never take this off,’ said Hope.

  ‘How restrained of you,’ said Francis. ‘I wish you took the same approach to your underwear.’

  ‘It was given to me by the only man I ever loved,’ said Hope, sitting up and hugging her knees.

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Francis, trying not to look at her and taking inordinately long to put the tray down on the table. ‘Did he catch a chill snowboarding in the nude?’

  ‘He drowned,’ said Hope.

  ‘Oh, okay, well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Francis, feeling unjustly caught out.

  ‘That’s why I’m making a fool of myself chasing after you,’ said Hope. ‘I’ve been feeling numb for the last four years – until we met.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Francis, ‘you can’t do that.’

  ‘Do what? Tell the truth?’

  ‘No, put that on me.’

  ‘Don’t you find me attractive?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. You know I do. That’s why you’ve got to go. I can’t believe you’re sitting there naked, fishing for compliments!’

  Francis dropped the bag of mushrooms on the sofa in front of Hope.

  ‘I’m going to go upstairs and wait to hear the door close behind you.’

  He leant over and kissed her on the forehead.

  ‘I’ll see you at Hunter’s party,’ said Hope.

  ‘Oh, Christ, are you going to that as well?’ said Francis.

  ‘I promise to behave,’ said Hope.

  Francis gave her a final, despairing look and turned to leave the room.

  20

  Looking out from the window of his apartment in St James’s Place, Hunter was filled with a hazy sense of depression, remembering how many times he had walked to school from his parents’ flat in Mount Street, across Constitution Hill, which he could see through the leafless plane trees, its rain-soaked paths hurried along today by office workers, tramps, civil servants, tourists and, for all he knew, Westminster School children on their way to the morning service ‘Up Abbey’, or to double Chemistry, or to an expulsion interview with the Headmaster – he had managed to clock up three of those during his chequered adolescence. He hadn’t thought of Westminster Abbey for a long time, although for five years he had gone there six times a week. He could still remember the chandeliers that hung by cords nearly invisible in the dimness of the morning service. They looked like glass bombs pointing down on the congregation, promising an explosion of light if they could only complete their descent to the stone floor a few feet below the tips of their scintillating bodies. Hunter would hide his most pressing homework inside his hymnal and pretend to sing while he tried to get on top of a Latin translation or a physics equation.

  Sometimes, he used to take Queen’s Walk, along the eastern boundary of Green Park, and look up at the buildings whose gardens ran to the edge of the path, thinking that they would constitute an ultimate London address. Now he was on the other side of the wall, on the top floors and, later that day, he would be giving a launch party fifty yards away in Spencer House, which also overlooked the park. And yet, despite this over-attainment of his teenage grandiosity, he still didn’t feel as if he had arrived at his destination. On the contrary, a new destination that he couldn’t yet make out clearly seemed to lie in the opposite direction, and the journey there seemed to begin with this strange feeling of unspecific sadness. It certainly included sadness for the hunger that had driven him to vault over the garden wall and turn himself from a voyeuristic pedestrian into a disappointed resident. He wasn’t trudging his way to double Chemistry, but he did seem to be having some kind of history lesson: the history of how he had seen things at the time when he habitually walked back and forth across this park and the resulting mixture of revulsion and tenderness towards that former version of himself. At that time, he had been boiling with teenage conflicts which, although he would be fifty next year, didn’t seem to have simmered down until quite recently. The temperature had started to rise when he was fourteen, and by the time he was fifteen he had demanded that his parents let him become a weekly boarder at Westminster, so as to get away from their moronic company and their intrusive enquiries. He still often went back home between four and seven to raid the fridge, steal alcohol and money and take his mother’s Valium from the medicine cabinet. His school bedroom in Busby’s gave on to a flat roof that overlooked Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament; a view he still had, in a more remote form, from his roof terrace upstairs. In the summer term, on hot days, when he was in a ‘private study’, supposedly working on his A levels, he would spread blankets out on that terrace, and smoke joints, watching the hands of the world’s most famous clock take a staccato measure of his wasted time. The appearance of idleness was of great importance at Westminster (although an ‘essay crisis’ was allowed, since it issued from a collision between personal laziness and a universally resented authority). In reality, the cult of idleness had to be accompanied by secret bouts of hard work in order to stay in a school determined to keep its place at the top of the league table, delivering more students to the world’s best universities than any other in the country. Sometimes, Matron would stick her head out of his study window and ask, as swirls of hash and tobacco smoke dispersed over the division-bell area, if Hunter had been smoking.

  ‘Absolutely not, Matron,’ Hunter would say, barely able to disguise his anno
yance at being interrupted while he admired the clouds that he was Rorschach testing through his wrap-around Ray-Bans.

  His roof terrace also provided a fire escape for Busby’s, leading on to the high, sloping roof of Church House. There was a flat area at the top of a set of metal steps, girded on three sides by some simple rusting railings. Hunter found that it was just possible to hook his feet under the lowest bar of the railings and lean backwards along the slope of the roof, lying at a sixty-degree angle, held only by the pointed tips of his black leather boots. The challenge was to smoke an entire joint of Afghani Black in this position, against the steep, smooth slate tiles, with nothing, if he lost his foothold, to interrupt his headlong rush into Great College Street, more than a hundred feet below. Excited by this discovery, he invited his gang of reckless and clever friends to join him on the roof. After demonstrating the dare, he hoisted himself up, clasped the dirty and corroded iron bar and clambered back on to the flat area.

  ‘Who’s next?’ he asked, holding up a pre-rolled joint.

  To his surprise, there were no takers. He had crossed the line from bravado to something unacceptably sinister that lay beyond the presumption of invulnerability among these self-professed daredevils, who never tired of driving cars over the speed limit without a licence, or jumping from high rocks into seas of uncertain depth, or swallowing random pills sold to them by strangers at festivals.

  Where had his internal inhibition been? Hunter wondered, taking another mouthful of coffee from a broad thin cup and looking out on the dreary winter scene. Lucy was still in bed. There was no doubt that the strange flood of sadness he was feeling came not only from being in his rarely used London flat and experiencing it as a kind of umpire’s chair between his old home and his old school, between his past self and his present self, but also from living with Lucy’s illness, which had made him temper his megalomania and look seriously into the idea of moderation for the first time since his raging adolescence. At first, it had just seemed too tactless to wolf down cocaine in the presence of a woman who was abstaining from carbohydrates. Lucy was already lying upside down on a steep roof of undeserved misfortune and, far from wanting to hand her a joint, he wanted to lift her back to safety. He still wasn’t sure where his old appetite for high risk had come from. For a long time, he had imagined that his misguided audacity on that rooftop was an early sign, not yet fixed on its proper target, of the daring investment policies that had made him a billionaire with the Midas fund. When clients told him that the name of his fund was ‘kind of weird’, or even ‘inappropriate’, because King Midas had not been a happy bunny when he watched his food and his daughter turn to metal, Hunter would restrain himself from pointing out that he had absorbed all the Greek myths by the age of eight, and simply replied that he was the one taking ‘the Midas hit’ for them and that it was only their investments that would turn to gold. And in a sense, he had taken the Midas hit. Love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself, until Lucy had suggested a more direct path.

  Although his phone was on silent, Hunter saw the screen light up and the word ‘Jade’ appear.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, Hunter!’ said Jade, as surprised and delighted as ever to speak to him. ‘I’m sorry to call you so early, but Cardinal Lagerfeld’s office is pushing for him to come to the party tonight. I wrote to you about it last week, but you didn’t get back to me.’

  ‘Did his parents call him Cardinal, like Ellington’s parents called him Duke, or did he call himself Cardinal, like Prince called himself Prince?’ asked Hunter.

  ‘No,’ said Jade, laughing a little more than necessary, ‘he’s a real Cardinal. He was involved with the Capo Santo deal.’

  ‘I thought that was the little Abbot who came to Soleil.’

  ‘Father Guido. It was, but the Cardinal was the guy with the legal team.’

  ‘They were a pain in the ass,’ said Hunter. ‘They almost wrecked the deal. Is Guido coming?’

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ said Jade, ‘he’s way excited. He’s coming by train, or donkey, or on foot, or on his knees, I’m not sure, but he left Assisi about a week ago.’

  ‘Okay, we’d better let Cardinal Ellington come along,’ said Hunter, ‘or it might be awkward for Guido. I love that guy and so does Lucy.’

  ‘Did she enjoy the immunotherapy meeting with Dr Seaford?’

  ‘It was great,’ said Hunter, ‘and it ties in with what she is doing at Epi, working with the natural defences of plants.’

  ‘Right!’ said Jade, who appeared to be even more passionate about Lucy’s longevity than Hunter, or Lucy herself. ‘It just makes so much sense, working with the body instead of against it.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Hunter, ‘bar the odd amputation, antibiotic, transplant, anti-viral medication…’

  ‘Okay, so maybe I was rushing ahead,’ said Jade.

  ‘I think I’m going to try one of the Capo Santo programs before Lucy wakes up,’ said Hunter. ‘I never got around to testing it out. I was too busy with Focus and Concentrate. I could really use a mystical experience this morning and I’d like to see whether Cardinal Ellington has ripped us off or not.’

  ‘Enjoy!’ said Jade, in her go-to-bed voice, just in case Hunter had forgotten that she was always there for him.

  * * *

  ‘I suppose we must support Lucy,’ said Martin, ‘but this Brainwaves thing…’

  ‘I know, darling,’ said Lizzie. ‘Look on the bright side, there might be a placebo effect.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll certainly be lots of effects. We’ve been shooting electric currents through the brain for some time. I used to have to watch. And we’ve been surrendering parts of ourselves to technology ever since we hit someone with a rock rather than a fist. It’s the credulity and the voluptuousness of the surrender…’

  ‘What if it works?’ said Lizzie. ‘Maybe there are brain-wave patterns that induce desirable emotional states.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Martin. ‘There are already so many ways to confuse pleasure with well-being.’

  ‘You’re such a puritan,’ said Lizzie, resting her hand on Martin’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze.

  He got up and they both cleared away their coffee cups and the rest of the breakfast things, carrying them over to the sink.

  ‘I thought there was something odd about Francis last night,’ said Martin.

  ‘Maybe he’s just staring into the crevasse of parenthood,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Martin, ‘it was definitely a crevasse of some sort.’

  Lizzie gave Martin a sympathetic but firm look, managing to show that she understood, but was opposed to further speculation. ‘I enjoyed meeting Hunter. It turns out he’s been in analysis for quite a while.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martin, ‘he mentioned that to me as well.’

  Martin had spoken to Hunter and Francis at some length over dinner about what Lizzie called ‘the bee in Martin’s bonnet’: the way in which psychotherapy as a treatment for the most serious mental illness was denigrated by those who thought that it belonged to some fanciful realm beyond the proper objects of scientific enquiry: brain mapping and biochemistry.

  ‘The fanciful realm of emotion,’ Martin had said to Hunter, ‘of symbolic language, psychological conditioning and cultural context…’

  ‘Hang on a moment,’ Hunter pretended to object, ‘culture is invited to the party, once it’s been atomised into “memes”, to give it the boost of making its particles rhyme with “genes”.’

  ‘Yes, the “meme” is probably the luckiest break for civilisation since the invention of gunpowder,’ said Martin. ‘The idea that emotion and psychological conditioning should be rigorously excluded from science or included only as far-flung provinces of a Celestial Empire whose capital is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN belongs in a satire by Swift but, sadly, he’s not around to write it.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Hunter, the agreeable guest. ‘Scienc
e is a subset of human nature and not the other way around. It has its own oppressive sociology of funding and peer review and publication and profit, and it shares all the emotions of rivalry, intuition, conformity, anxiety and generosity that inform every other field of activity.’

  ‘At the beginning of my career,’ said Martin, ‘I spent a good deal of time in hospitals run by psychiatrists who were more or less unsympathetic to my approach. One of the patients whose incarceration was renewed year after year under the Mental Health Act of 1959 complained that he had Christ-like nails driven through his feet, not through his hands but through his feet. The psychiatrist doing the rounds explained as patiently as he could – he was not a cruel man, but it was rather exasperatingly obvious – that this claim was proof that the patient was hallucinating and therefore that it was the correct decision to keep him in the hospital. The patient turned to me, knowing that I had an interest in the workings of the human mind, and said, “Some of these doctors don’t seem to have ever heard of a metaphor.”’

  ‘That’s hilarious and tragic,’ said Hunter.

  ‘Mainly tragic,’ said Martin.

  ‘Are you a fan of Ronald Laing’s?’

  ‘It was hard to be an unreserved fan of Laing’s,’ said Martin, ‘he was so incredibly drunk; but he did show moments of genius in analysing the dynamics running through schizophrenic families, and his wild and sometimes misguided experiments have to be understood in the context of the world I was just describing, where incarceration and sedation and at times barbaric treatment were seen as the only possibilities.’

  Martin would have expected Francis to contribute more to the discussion, and it was during this exchange, when Francis was leaning in and nodding and appearing to listen, that Martin had noticed something uncharacteristically distant and inauthentic about his presence.