Mantissa

by John Fowles

  Some new horror seems to strike him. He looks in agony towards the empty chair.

  “I can’t even remember what you look like.”

  “Which will perhaps teach you not to meddle in fields about which you know nothing. Such as amnesia.”

  He feels his way, almost as if he is suffering from a general blindness, to the end of the bed, and sits heavily there.

  “Is it irreversible?”

  “I am sure the entire literary community will join me in praying that it proves to be so.”

  “You can’t do this to me.” The voice is silent. He puts a hand under the mulberry-colored bathrobe, over his heart. “I feel faint.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I need a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor.”

  “A real doctor.”

  “If you must know, Miles, the absurdly romantic role you and the neurotic rest of your kind have always attributed to me bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.”

  “Mental illness!”

  “Yes, Miles. Mental illness.”

  “But what about –”

  “To me you are simply someone obliged to act out a primal scene trauma. As usual it has left you with a marked feeling of destructive revenge. As usual you’ve tried to sublimate that by an equally marked tendency to voyeurism and exhibitionism. I’ve seen it ten thousand times. You also obey the usual pathology in attempting to master the unresolved trauma by repetitive indulgence in the quasi-regressive activities of writing and being published. I can tell you you’d be a much healthier person if you regressed fully and openly to the two underlying activities concerned.”

  “Became a peeping Tom and a flasher?”

  “There is a profession that permits and even rewards those activities. In a slightly sublimated form.”

  “What?”

  “The theatrical, Miles. You should have been an actor or director. But I’m afraid it’s too late for that now.”

  “You wouldn’t dare talk like this to my face.”

  “That is because I am inevitably cast as a surrogate for your mother – in other words, as a chief target for your repressed feelings of Oedipal rejection, transmuted into Rachsucht, or need for revenge. I think it’s time you reread Freud. Or another of my more gifted students, Fenichel. Try The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York. W. W. Norton and Company, nineteen forty-five.”

  “If Freud had ever met you, he’d have jumped into the Danube.”

  “Don’t be childish, Miles. You’re merely confirming my diagnosis again.”

  “What do you mean, again?”

  “I don’t think I have to gloss the true anaclitic purport behind your need to humiliate a woman doctor symbolically.” There is silence. Then suddenly her voice is much closer, beside the bed, just behind him. “It was never really thunderbolts and tridents, you know. We’ve always believed, in my family, in letting nature cure nature.”

  He sits with bowed head; but then without warning he twists and dives across the corner of the bed, in a kind of improvised football tackle, at where the voice seems to come from. Alas, his right knee catches the rather high corner of the hospital bed and despite a frantic clutch to save himself, he falls off it to the floor. He picks himself angrily up. Now the maddening voice comes from the top of the domed ceiling, above his head.

  “I shouldn’t worry. It won’t prevent you leading a perfectly normal life. Very probably a far more useful one. As a road-digger, perhaps. Or a garbage-collector.”

  He stares up. “You’d better not appear again, by God.”

  “I have no intention of appearing again. In fact in a very short while the aneurysm will spread to the related aural ganglia. You won’t even hear my voice.”

  He almost shouts at the ceiling.

  “The sooner you piss off back to your bloody boring mountain, the happier I shall be!”

  The vehemence of this declaration is somewhat spoiled by the direction of her answer: once more from the table in the corner.

  “I haven’t quite finished with you. First of all I’d like you to consider how lucky you are I didn’t ask my father to make it a major brain hemorrhage. I’ll pass over the whole matter of your sneering skepticism and your attempts to mock all I stand for. Given your very superficial level of intelligence, and the general clinical picture, I suppose I can hardly blame you for having been indoctrinated by the cheaply iconoclastic spirit of a talentless and self-destructive culture.”

  “You enjoyed every minute of it.”

  “No, Miles. If I gave that illusion, it was simply to test you. To see what depths you would descend to. In the vain hope that at some point you would cry, Enough, I tamper with sacred mysteries.”

  “Christ, if I could just get my hands on you.”

  “What I cannot forgive is your ingratitude. It is some time since I took such an interest in any of my patients, as I have in you. And as for the artistic side – I’ve done my best, against all natural inclination, to adapt myself to your ploddingly literal imagination. Now the whole episode is over I can tell you there was place after place where I was silently screaming for even the smallest sign of a veiling metaphor.”

  “I shall murder you.”

  “And what I want you to remember, when I’m finally gone forever, which will be any moment now, is how you’ve lost the chance of a lifetime. Instead of this, Miles, I might have been sitting on your lap. As a matter of fact I might very well have been having a little cry and making you feel all male and strong and the rest of it. Properly approached and wooed, I’m not in the least like that ridiculous caricature of a hag-ridden old puritan you quite unnecessarily dragged in. Your comforting caresses would have grown into erotic ones, I shouldn’t have minded your taking advantage of my emotion, in circumstances like that it would have been perfectly plausible, and we might quite naturally have ended up in a mutually satisfying position. But making love, Miles, not that disgusting, mechanical term you employed. We should have been sweetly, forgivingly, passionately one. The whole episode would have closed on that, it would have redeemed all the stupidity of the rest. But here we are. When we could have been there – your proud manhood in deep possession of my abandoned femininity, masterfully provoking new tears, but this time of carnal bliss.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Our fused bodies in final togetherness, eternally awaiting climax.” The voice stops, as if belatedly aware that it has risen a shade too lyrically to its proposition; then goes on in a flatter tone. “That’s what you’ve destroyed. Made impossible forever now.”

  He looks grimly at where the voice came from. “As I can’t visualize you anymore, I can’t even imagine what I’m missing.” He adds, “And as for eternally awaiting climax, it sounds more like constipation than anything else.”

  “You’re so unimaginably insensitive.”

  Now he folds his arms, and once again eyes the empty chair, with a calculated cunning.

  “I can still remember that black girl, you know.”

  “I don’t wish to talk about her. She was an extremely superfluous idea from the beginning.”

  “And how she left you absolutely standing for looks. And sexiness.”

  “How can you possibly tell? You’ve forgotten what I look like.”

  “By a process of deduction. If she was this, you must have been that.”

  “That does not follow at all.”

  He leans back on an elbow. “I can still feel her lovely rich brown skin, how warm and compact and voluptuously curved her body was. She was sensational.” He smiles at the empty chair in the corner. “From which I’m afraid I have to conclude that you must have been rather fat and pasty-faced. Not your fault, of course. I’m sure psychiatry’s an unhealthy profession.”

  “I will not listen a moment more to –”

  �
�And that mouth of hers. It was like jacaranda blossom. Yours must have tasted of Greek onions or something. It’s all coming back, she gave off that wonderful feeling of really wanting it, no holds barred, anything goes. She was like great jazz. Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday… I think the impression I must have got from you, whoever you are, was of a rather priggish fear of your own body, never being able to release, just one more intellectual cold fish, a standard female Wasp, far too frigid and generally screwed-up ever to –”

  There is no visible hand, but the slap is real enough. He raises his own hand, and nurses the cheek.

  “You did say clinical psychology?”

  “I am also a woman. You pig!”

  “I thought you’d gone.”

  The voice comes from the door.

  “I am just about to. But not before I tell you that you are the most absurdly conceited man I’ve ever had dealings with. God, how you have the nerve to – the one thing you would-be strutting cocks of the universe have never registered about a liberated woman is that she can’t be conned over sex. I wouldn’t even put you in the top fifty thousand, just in this country, which everyone knows is the masculine bottom in bed – and quite literally. I could tell from the moment we first met. You’d have been far happier if I’d been a sailor or a choirboy.” There is a moment’s silence. “Black girl, that’s a joke. Who do you seriously think you’re talking to? Who do you think was the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, for a start? You name them, I’ve known them. And not just Shakespeare. Milton. Rochester. Shelley. The man who wrote The Boudoir. Keats. H. G. Wells.” The voice is silent again for a moment or two, then speaks with rather less passion. “I even spent a wet afternoon once with T. S. Eliot.”

  “Where was that?”

  There is a brief hesitation. “In London. It didn’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is totally irrelevant.” He says nothing. “If you must know, for some absurd reason he got himself up as a house agent’s clerk. With some ridiculous hat he’d borrowed from a Bradford millionaire. I was rather bored and tired, he frankly… never mind. In the end, flushed and undecided, he assaulted me once. Gave me one final patronizing kiss. As I’m sure you would if I gave you half a chance, which I’m not going to.”

  “I do wish you’d think of writing your memoirs.”

  “I can tell you one thing. If I ever did, it would be to tell the truth about people like you. If you really want to know why you’re a sexual zero, and about as attractive as a basket of stale laundry, it’s because, like all your type, you don’t begin to understand the female mind. You think all we’re good for is to swoon at your feet and open our –”

  “Hang on.” He sits up. “Only a few minutes ago you were –”

  “Typical. That’s exactly the sort of police-dossier argument my prude of an eldest sister always brings up. If she felt this yesterday, she must still feel it today. What do you think liberation is about?”

  “Not logic. That’s for sure.”

  “I knew you’d say that. Has it never occurred to your poor little male brain that logic, as you call it, is the mental equivalent of the chastity belt? Where do you think the world would have been if we’d all worn nothing but logic since the beginning? We’d still be creeping around that sickeningly dull garden. I bet he’s your idea of a hero, that all-time wet drip. Driving his wife mad with domestic boredom. Not even allowing her to buy a few clothes now and then. Any woman could tell you what that serpent really stood for. He just wasn’t up to the job.”

  “If we could return to the particular case. A few minutes ago you –”

  “I was trying to get it through your thick skull that I have not just become invisible to you, I have always been invisible to you. All you’ve ever seen in me is what you choose to see. And that’s metaphorically no more than this.”

  Most bizarrely, suspended in the air, some three feet from the door and five feet above the old rose carpet, appears a cocked little finger; but almost as soon as he sees it, it disappears again.

  “I can think of another portion of your anatomy that would have summed you up a damned sight better. They called it delta in Ancient Greek.”

  “That’s disgustingly cheap.”

  “And accurate.”

  “I forbid you to say another word. You’re just a degenerate tenth-rate hack. God, no wonder the Times Literary Supplement calls you an affront to serious English fiction.”

  “I happen to regard that as one of the finest feathers in my cap.”

  “You would. Since it’s the only claim to distinction you have.”

  There is a silence. He leans back and looks down at the bed.

  “At least you’ve done one thing for me. I now realize that evolution was out of its already highly confused mind when it dragged women into it.”

  “And you out of one of them.”

  “For which you’ve played us every kind of mean, vindictive trick ever since.”

  “Something you innocent, lily-white, notoriously non-violent men would know nothing about.”

  “Until you taught us.”

  “Don’t stop. Feel free. The massed ranks of certified male paranoia are standing right behind you.”

  He stretches a finger at the door. “I’ll tell you something else. If you were Cleopatra, your Cypriot aunt, and Helen of Troy all rolled into one, and standing there now, I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole.”

  “You needn’t worry. I’d rather be raped by a band of orangutans.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

  “I’ve met some contemptible –”

  “And poor bloody orangutans.”

  There is a silence.

  “If you imagine for a moment that you’re going to get away with this…”

  “And if you think I wouldn’t rather be analphabetic than ever stuck in the same room with you again…”

  “If you crawled from here to eternity I’d never forgive you.”

  “And if you crawled all the way back, nor would I.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Not half as much as I hate you.”

  “Oh no you can’t. I can hate as a woman.”

  “Who can’t hold the same idea in her head five minutes running.”

  “Oh yes she can. With shits like you.”

  Suddenly he smiles, puts his hands in the pockets of the bathrobe, and sits up again on the bed.

  “I know your game, my dear woman.”

  “Don’t you dare call me your dear woman!”

  “I know perfectly well why you’ve really gone invisible.” There is a silence. He makes a mocking little beckoning sign. “Come on. You know you can’t resist an apple. Even though you’re only an archetype.” The silence continues, but at last the voice speaks curtly from the door.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you weren’t invisible, I’d have you around” – he raises it – “my little finger again in less than five minutes.”

  There is a moment’s pregnant silence; and then there comes from the door a sound beyond the capacities of mere alphabet (Greek or English) to transcribe; an urrgh or arrgh, but at the same time both deeper and more high-pitched, of a throat being slowly cut, of a soul being scorched, of an endurance stretched beyond endurance, an agony beyond agony. It is close, and yet seems also to come from the furthest depths of the universe, from some ultimate and innermost core of animate being, and suffering, within it. To any third listener, especially to one familiar with the less happy theory of the nature of the cosmos – that is, that it must one day fall in on itself out of sheer horror at its own asininely repetitive futility – it must have seemed a deeply fitting, and indeed moving, noise. But the man on the bed in the grey-quilted room is clearly no more than rather cynically amused by this cross between a moan and a death-rattle that he has evoked.

  What might then have followed… but what does come is a much more banal sound, though completely unexpected. There is suddenly a whirring, a clic
king of ratchets and escapements from the hitherto supposedly silenced cuckoo clock on the wall in the corner. It is clearly premonitory, despite its distinctly absurd and busy length, of some major announcement. It comes at last, the little Swiss oracle from the wooden machine, and cries its miraculous message.

  At the very first cuckoo, Dr. Delfie is visible again. She stands in her white tunic by the door, her hands only an inch or two from where they have evidently been clasping her head in a frenzy of despair. But now already she is glancing at the clock in the corner with an expression of amazed delight, as a child might on hearing the end-of-lesson bell; by the second cuckoo she has turned to look at Miles Green, who has risen from the bed, and is impulsively reaching his hands towards her; by the third, the pair are respectively running and striding across the old rose carpet; and by a fourth cuckoo, had there been one, they are impacted in each other’s arms.

  “Oh darling.”

  “My darling.”

  “Darling.”

  “Darling.”

  “Darling.”

  “Oh my darling.”

  These somewhat cuckoolike words and phrases lack the pleasing rhythm and swiftness of the true and experienced voice in the clock; and take far longer to be said than to be read, since they come more like gasps for air than words, and from among a series of fevered, straining, seemingly insatiable kisses. At last she turns her head away, though the two bodies remain as tightly clinging, and speaks more coherently.

  “I thought it had stopped.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh Miles, it seemed forever.”

  “I know… I honestly didn’t mean a single –”

  “Darling, I know. It was all my fault.”

  “I was just as bad.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “Darling.”

  “Oh darling.”

  “I love you.”

  “So do I.”

  “For God’s sake make the door vanish.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  She turns her head and looks back at it. The door vanishes; and once again they are kissing; then collapsing to the carpet.

  “Oh you poor angel, look how big – no stop, let me, you’ll tear the buttons.”