The Eye in the Door

by Pat Barker

  Rivers said something he knew he’d regret, but he had to say it. ‘This was my father’s vicarage.’

  ‘I was raped in a vicarage once.’

  It was on the tip of Rivers’s tongue to say that no doubt Prior had been ‘raped’ in any number of places, but he managed to restrain himself. ‘When I said terrible I meant to a child of that age. I was five remember. Things happen to children which are an enormous shock to the child, but which wouldn’t seem terrible or or or even particularly important to an adult.’

  ‘And equally things happen to children which are genuinely terrible. And would be recognized as terrible by anybody at any age.’

  ‘Yes, of course. How old were you?’

  ‘Eleven. I wasn’t meaning myself.’

  ‘You don’t classify that as “terrible”?’

  ‘No. I was receiving extra tuition.’ He gave a yelping laugh. ‘God, was I receiving extra tuition. From the parish priest, Father Mackenzie. My mother offered him a shilling a week – more than she could afford – but he said, “Don’t worry, my good woman, I have seldom seen a more promising boy.”’ He added irritably, ‘Don’t look so shocked, Rivers.’

  ‘I am shocked.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t be. He got paid in kind, that’s all.’ Suddenly Prior leant forward and grasped Rivers’s knee, digging his fingers in round the kneecap. ‘Everything has to be paid for, doesn’t it?’ He grasped the knee harder. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  Prior let go. ‘This terrible-in-big-black-inverted commas thing that happened to you, what do you think it was?’

  ‘I don’t know. Dressing-gown on the back of a door?’

  ‘As bad as that? Oh, my God.’

  Rivers pressed on in defiance of Prior’s smile. ‘I had a patient once who became claustrophobic as the result of being accidentally locked in a corridor with a fierce dog. Or it seemed fierce to him. In that –’

  ‘Oh, I see. Even the bloody dog wasn’t really fierce.’

  ‘In that case his parents didn’t even know it had happened.’

  ‘You say you were five when this… non-event didn’t happen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How old were you when you started to stammer?’

  ‘Fi-ive.’

  Prior leant back in Rivers’s chair and smiled. ‘Big dog.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply there was –’

  ‘For God’s sake. Whatever it was, you blinded yourself so you wouldn’t have to go on seeing it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it as dramatically as that.’

  ‘You destroyed your visual memory. You put your mind’s eye out. Is that what happened, or isn’t it?’

  Rivers struggled with himself. Then said simply; ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you ever think you’re on the verge of remembering?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And what do you feel?’

  ‘Fear.’ He smiled. ‘Because the child’s emotions are still attached to the memory.’

  ‘We’re back to the dressing-gown.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’m afraid we are, because I do sincerely believe it may be as simple as that.’

  ‘Then one can only applaud,’ Prior said, and did. Three loud claps.

  ‘You know…’ Rivers hesitated and started again. ‘You must be wary of filling the gaps in your memory with… with monsters. I think we all tend to do it. As soon as we’re left with a blank, we start projecting our worst fears on to it. It’s a bit like the guide for medieval map-makers, isn’t it? Where unknown, there place monsters. But I do think you should try not to do it, because what you’re really doing is subjecting yourself to a constant stream of suggestion of of a very negative kind.’

  ‘All right. I’ll try not to. I’ll substitute the Rivers guide to map-making: Where unknown, there place dressing-gowns. Or just possibly, dogs. Here, have your chair back.’ Prior settled himself back into the patient’s chair, murmuring, ‘Do you know, Rivers, you’re as neurotic as I am? And that’s saying quite a lot.’

  Rivers rested his chin on his hands. ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘Oh, my God, we are back to normal. You mean, “Do I feel a nasty, mean-spirited sense of triumph?” No. I’m mean-spirited enough, I’m just not stupid enough.’ Prior brooded a moment. ‘There’s one thing wrong with the Rivers guide to map-making. Suppose there really are monsters?’

  ‘I think if there are, we’ll meet them soon enough.’

  Prior looked straight at Rivers. ‘I’m frightened.’

  ‘I know.’

  When Prior finally left – it had been a long, exhausting session – Rivers switched off the desk lamp, went to sit in his armchair by the fire, and indulged in some concentrated, unobserved eye-rubbing. Did he do it ‘when something touched a nerve’? It was possible, he supposed. If there was a pattern, Prior would certainly have spotted it. On the other hand, Prior was equally capable of making the whole thing up.

  He didn’t regret the decision to give Prior what he’d always claimed he wanted – to change places – because in the process he’d discovered an aspect of Prior that mightn’t have been uncovered in any other way. Not so much the ‘extra tuition’ – though that was interesting, particularly in view of Prior’s habit of aggressive flirtation – as the assumption that Rivers’s loss of visual memory must have some totally traumatic explanation. That had revealed more about Prior than he was aware of.

  Though Prior had been a formidable interrogator. Whatever it was, you blinded yourself so you wouldn’t have to go on seeing it… You put your mind’s eye out. Simply by being rougher than any professional colleague would ever have been, Prior had brought him face to face with the full extent of his loss. People tended to assume he didn’t know what he’d lost, but that wasn’t true. He did know, or glimpsed at least. Once, in the Torres Straits, he’d attended a court held by the British official in collaboration with the native chiefs, and an old woman had given evidence about a dispute in which she was involved. As she spoke, she’d glanced from side to side, clearly reliving every detail of the events she was describing, and very obviously seeing people who were not present in court. And he had looked at her, this scrawny, half-naked, elderly, illiterate woman, and he had envied her. No doubt he’d encountered Europeans who had visual memories of equal power, but his own deficiency had never before been brought home to him with such force.

  It was a loss, and he had long been aware of it, though he had been slow to connect it with the Brighton house experience. Slower still to recognize that the impact of the experience had gone beyond the loss of visual memory and had occasioned a deep split between the rational, analytical cast of his mind and his emotions. It was easy to overstate this: he had, after all, been subject to a form of education which is designed to inculcate precisely such a split, but he thought the division went deeper in him than it did in most men. It was almost as if the experience – whatever it was – had triggered an attempt at dissociation of personality, though, mercifully, not a successful one. Still, he had been, throughout most of his life, a deeply divided man, and though he would once have said that this division exercised little, if any, influence on his thinking, he had come to believe it had determined the direction of his research.

  Many years after that initial unremembered experience, he and Henry Head had conducted an experiment together. The nerve supplying Head’s left forearm had been severed and sutured, and then over a period of five years they had traced the progress of regeneration. This had taken place in two phases. The first was characterized by a high threshold of sensation, though when the sensation was finally evoked it was, to use Head’s own word, ‘extreme’. In addition to this all-or-nothing quality, the sensation was difficult to localize. Sitting blindfold at the table, Head had been unable to locate the stimulus that was causing him such severe pain. This primitive form of innervation they called the protopathic. The second phase of regeneration-which they called the epicritic-followed some months
later, and was characterized by the ability to make graduated responses and to locate the source of a stimulus precisely. As the epicritic level of innervation was restored, the lower, or protopathic, level was partially integrated with it and partially suppressed, so that the epicritic system carried out two functions: one, to help the organism adapt to its environment by supplying it with accurate information; the other, to suppress the protopathic, to keep the animal within leashed. Inevitably, as time went on, both words had acquired broader meanings, so that ‘epicritic’ came to stand for everything rational, ordered, cerebral, objective, while ‘protopathic’ referred to the emotional, the sensual, the chaotic, the primitive. In this way the experiment both reflected Rivers’s internal divisions and supplied him with a vocabulary in which to express them. He might almost have said with Henry Jekyll, It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both…

  It was odd how the term ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ had passed into the language, so that even people who had never read Stevenson’s story used the names as a shorthand for internal divisions. Prior spoke of looking at his hands to make sure they had not been transformed into the hairy hands of Hyde, and he was not alone in that. Every patient Rivers had ever had who suffered from a fugue state sooner or later referred to that state as ‘Hyde’, and generally this was a plea for reassurance. In a hospital setting, where the fugue state could be observed, such reassurance was easily given, but it was less easy to reassure Prior. Partly because the fugue state couldn’t be observed, but also because Prior’s sense of the darker side of his personality was unusually strong. He might talk about being incapable of sexual guilt, but, Rivers thought, he was deeply ashamed of his sadistic impulses, even frightened of them. He believed there were monsters on his map, and who was to say he was wrong?

  There was one genuinely disturbing feature of the case: that odd business of making an appointment in the fugue state and keeping it in the normal state. It suggested the fugue state was capable of influencing Prior’s behaviour even when it was not present, in other words, that it was functioning as a co-consciousness. Not that a dual personality need develop even from that. He intended to make sure it didn’t. There would be no hypnosis, no artificial creation of dissociated states for experimental purposes, no encouraging Prior to think of the fugue state as an alternative self. Even so. It had to be remembered Prior was no mere bundle of symptoms, but an extremely complex personality with his own views on his condition. And his imagination was already at work, doing everything it could to transform the fugue state into a malignant double. He believed in the monsters – and whatever Rivers might decide to do, or refrain from doing – Prior’s belief in them would inevitably give them power.

  TWELVE

  ‘Now I want you to draw me an elephant,’ Head said.

  His voice distorted, as if he were blowing bubbles in soapy water, Lucas replied, ‘Yeth ah seen dom. Up. Uvver end.’

  He took the notepad and pencil, and began to draw. Rivers was sitting beside Head, but neither of them spoke since Lucas’s concentration must not be disturbed. They had been doing the tests for half an hour and Lucas was already tired. His tongue protruded between his teeth, giving him the look of a small boy learning to read, except that, in Lucas’s case, the protrusion was permanent.

  Rivers noticed Head looking at the shrapnel wound on Lucas’s shaved scalp, and knew he was thinking about the technical problems of duplicating this on the skull of the cadaver he’d been working on that morning. It was an interesting technique, Rivers thought. Head measured the dimensions of the wound on the living patient, then traced the outline on to the skull of a cadaver, drilled holes at regular intervals around the outline, and introduced a blue dye into the holes. The entire skull cap could then be lifted off and the brain structures underlying the dyed area dissected and identified. In this way the area of brain death could be correlated precisely with the nature of the patient’s language defects.

  A laborious business, made more so by the need to duplicate the wounds of two patients on every cadaver. One of the more surprising consequences of the war was a shortage of suitable male corpses.

  Rivers lifted his hands to his chin, smelling the medical school smell of human fat and formaldehyde, only partially masked by carbolic soap. He watched Head’s expression as he looked at Lucas’s shaved scalp, and realized it differed hardly at all from his expression that morning as he’d bent over the cadaver. For the moment, Lucas had become simply a technical problem. Then Lucas looked up from his task, and instantly Head’s face flashed open in his transforming smile. A murmur of encouragement, and Lucas returned to his drawing. Head’s face, looking at the ridged purple scar on the shaved head, again became remote, withdrawn. His empathy, his strong sense of the humanity he shared with his patients, was again suspended. A necessary suspension, without which the practice of medical research, and indeed of medicine itself, would hardly be possible, but none the less identifiably the same suspension the soldier must achieve in order to kill. The end was different, but the psychological mechanism employed to achieve it was essentially the same. What Head was doing, Rivers thought, was in some ways a benign, epicritic form of the morbid dissociation that had begun to afflict Prior. Head’s dissociation was healthy because the researcher and the physician each had instant access to the experience of the other, and both had access to Head’s experience in all other areas of his life. Prior’s was pathological because areas of his conscious experience had become inaccessible to memory. What was interesting was why Head’s dissociation didn’t lead to the kind of split that had taken place in Prior. Rivers shifted his position, and sighed. One began by finding mental illness mystifying, and ended by being still more mystified by health.

  Lucas had finished. Head leant across the desk and took the drawing from him. ‘Hmm,’ he said, looking at the remarkably cow-like creature in front of him. A long pause. ‘What’s an elephant got in front?’

  Again the blurting voice, always on the verge of becoming a wail. ‘He got a big’ – Lucas’s good hand waved up and down – ‘straight about a yard long.’

  ‘Do you know what it’s called?’

  ‘Same what you. Drive. Water with.’

  ‘Has he got a trunk?’

  Lucas wriggled in his wheelchair and laughed. ‘He lost it.’

  He reached for his drawing, wanting to correct it, but Head slipped it quickly into the file. ‘Sums now.’

  They went quickly through a range of simple sums. Lucas, whose ability to understand numbers was unimpaired, got them predictably right. It was Head’s custom to alternate tasks the patient found difficult or impossible with others that he could perform successfully. The next task – designed to discover whether Lucas’s understanding of ‘right’ and ‘left’ was impaired – involved his attempting to imitate movements of Head’s arms, first in a mirror and then facing him across the desk.

  Rivers watched Head raise his left hand – ‘professional in shape and size;… large, firm, white and comely’ – and thought he probably knew that hand better than any part of his own body. He’d experimented on it for five years, after all, and even now could have traced on to the skin the outline of the remaining area of protopathic innervation – for the process of regeneration is never complete. A triangle of skin between the thumb and forefinger retained the primitive, all-or-nothing responses and remained abnormally sensitive to changes in temperature. Sometimes, on a cold day, he would notice Head shielding this triangle of skin beneath his other hand.

  For a while, after the tests were complete, Head chatted to Lucas about the results. It was Head’s particular gift to be able to involve his patients in the study of their own condition. Lucas’s face, as Head outlined the extent of his impairments, was alight with what one could only call cl
inical interest. When, finally, an orderly appeared and wheeled him out of the room, he was smiling.

  ‘He has… improved,’ Head said. ‘Slightly.’ He brushed his thinning hair back from his forehead and for a moment looked utterly bleak. ‘Tea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk.’

  ‘Milk?’

  Rivers patted his midriff. ‘Keeps the ulcers quiet.’

  ‘Why, are they protesting?’

  ‘God, how I hate psychologists.’

  Head laughed. ‘I’ll get you the milk.’

  Rivers glanced at The Times while he waited. In the Pemberton Billing trial they’d reached the medical evidence – such as it was. As Head came back into the room, Rivers read aloud: ‘“Asked what should be done with such people. Dr Serrel Cooke replied, ‘They are monsters. They should be locked up.’” The voice of psychological medicine.’

  Head handed him a cup. ‘Put it down, Rivers.’

  Rivers folded the paper. ‘I keep trying to tell myself it’s funny.’

  ‘Well, it is, a lot of it. It was hilarious when that woman told the Judge his name was in the Black Book.’ He waited for a reply. ‘Anyway, when do you want to see Lucas? Tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, I think we give the poor little blighter a rest, don’t we? Monday?’

  They talked for a while about Lucas, then drifted into a rambling conversation about the use of pacifist orderlies. The hospital contained a great many paralysed patients in a building not designed to accommodate them. There were only two lifts. The nurses and the existing orderlies – men who were either disabled or above military age – did their best, but the lives of patients were inevitably more restricted than they need have been. What was desperately required was young male muscle, and this the pacifist orderlies – recruited under the Home Office scheme – supplied. But they also aroused hostility in the staff obliged to work with them. It had now reached a point where it was doubtful whether the hospital could go on using them. The irrationality of getting rid of much needed labour exasperated Rivers, and he had spoken out against it at the last meeting of the hospital management committee, rather too forcefully, perhaps, or at least Head seemed to think ‘so. ‘I’m not g-going b-back on it,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent m-most of my l-life t-t-toning down what I w-wanted to s-say. I’m not d-doing it any more.’