Kitty was restless, stuck in her bedroom, feeling once more like a neurasthenic patient. Mary came to talk to her and massage her back and legs in the morning, not because Kitty really needed it, but because she enjoyed the company.
‘Tell me the news from the other girls,’ said Kitty.
‘Well,’ said Mary. ‘I shouldn’t tell you, Miss, but I know as you are very dependable.’
‘You can count on me, Mary,’ said Kitty, who was leaning over the bed while Mary worked the lower spine with her strong thumbs. ‘That’s lovely.’
‘I think that Hans is a little sweet on Daisy,’ said Mary.
‘Hans? Josef’s little helper? But isn’t he too young?’
‘A little bit, Miss. But Daisy, she’s coming on thirty-seven – though she doesn’t know exactly, and . . . You know. If she wants to have children and that.’
‘My goodness. I do see, Mary. And how old are you?’
‘I’m a year younger than Daisy, Miss. But no one’s going to marry me.’
‘But you’re a lovely—’
‘No, Miss. I don’t want to get married. Honest. I’m very happy as I am. Just so long as you and Dr Thomas is happy with me. I’m already happier than I ever thought I might be.’
‘Of course we are happy. You are an important part of the schloss. We need you. I am going to lie on my back so you can do my legs. But tell me, is Hans a good prospect for Daisy?’
‘I know she’s thinking about it. Josef will retire one day, then Hans can be in charge of all the buildings. And he already does a lot of work in the labs, looking after things for Dr Bernthaler.’
‘He looks like a naughty boy, Mary, that’s the thing. He has a face like a little monkey.’
‘Daisy says he’s clever, Miss. Maybe he doesn’t look it. But he can write and read and he’s good with figures.’
‘Perhaps we should give him something to do with the new buildings on the Wilhelmskogel, see what he can manage. I shall speak to my sister-in-law about it.’
‘Thank you, Miss. Shall I stop now?’
‘Yes, Mary. Thank you. But will you come tomorrow?’
Kitty’s bedroom looked on to the lawn of the South Court, beneath whose chestnut tree she had often sat to read her book when she was a patient. Her old seat was these days frequently occupied by one of those referred from the asylum, a powerful-looking red-haired man who talked earnestly to himself, or to someone unseen.
‘“Under the spreading chestnut tree”,’ remarked Thomas one afternoon, standing at the window and looking down, ‘“The village madman stands. /The voices in his fevered head/Are loud as marching bands. /We don’t know if he’s made that way/Or has infected glands.” Longfellow.’
‘Thank you, my darling. That was enlightening.’
‘I have been working on it. Now listen, Kitty. I have a little thought that you might want to turn around in your head as you have your rest this afternoon.’
‘Very well, Thomas.’
‘You have read Mr Darwin’s book, have you not?’
‘Which one?’
‘The Origin of Species.’
‘Yes. I hurried through some of it, but I did finish it.’
‘Good. Well, let us suppose that humans have developed with modification in the same way as other species.’
‘Very well. This is what Mr Darwin calls “transmutation”.’
‘It is indeed. It was another English writer, called Herbert Spencer, who was I think the first to use the word “evolution” in this context. He also gave us the phrase “survival of the fittest”.’
‘It sounds unpleasant. Do I need to read Mr Spencer too?’
‘He is influential, but for the moment you merely need to understand those words.’
‘Not very difficult.’
‘Not at all. But suppose that the gentleman beneath the chestnut tree, who has Olivier’s disease, or what we are now obliged to call “dementia praecox” – suppose that people like him have been around for millions of years. And suppose that the incidence of this illness was roughly the same in all populations, despite differences in climate, conditions of life, diet and so on.’
‘The very things that influence the outcome of Mr Darwin’s “natural selection”.’
‘Precisely. Suppose this illness had remained at a stable level in all populations, even though it appears to have no natural advantages. Quite the opposite in fact. What does that suggest to you, Kitty?’
‘How do you know that it has stayed stable?’
‘We can come back to that. But just suppose we could demonstrate it. What would that suggest to you?’
‘Well,’ said Kitty slowly. ‘It suggests that this characteristic has not been lost, but has somehow been passed on . . . Despite its disadvantages.’
‘Indeed. Now consider the extent of those disadvantages. People with dementia praecox are irrational. They die young. They frequently kill themselves. Sexual selection works against them because they are an unattractive mating proposition. They have fewer children than ordinary people. Yet, relatively speaking, they have flourished.’
‘But that seems to contradict the theory. I thought only characteristics useful in the battle for life are naturally “selected”.’
Thomas smiled. ‘Exactly. So just take the reasoning one step further.’
‘I suppose that, if Mr Darwin is right, then there must be advantages in this condition. But we cannot see them.’
‘You are a remarkable woman, Katharina. That is exactly what it tells us. But we can go further. We can refine the basic logic a little and still be strictly and simply Darwinian.’
‘Which we want to be?’
‘I think we do. He may be out of fashion, but I feel sure the theory of natural selection is correct in its fundamentals.’
‘So?’
‘Well, I think we must say that dementia praecox itself confers no advantage, but its survival against all its apparent disadvantages suggests to me that a hereditary predisposition to the disease must be closely allied – in whatever microscopic way these things are transmitted from one generation to the next – to something that is advantageous, connected in fact to something which by definition must be overwhelmingly advantageous to the development of the human. The more terrible the drawback, the more important must be the related advantage for the disease to have survived at that consistent level.’
‘That is certainly logical.’
‘What I am saying is that it is like a misprint. It is a mistake which serves no purpose. But the capacity to misprint is the minor price you pay for literature.’
‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘It doesn’t mean that there is something fundamentally wrong with the process of thinking, writing, printing or reading – the sequence that comprises literature. It is a sequence so magnificent that misprints have been perpetuated – tolerated. Because they are an organic and inseparable part of the greater good. Because you simply cannot have literature without misprints. And it is still a price worth paying. If misprints were somehow taken out of the mixture, you would risk losing literature too. You might throw out the baby, humanity, with the bathwater, dementia.’
‘A very unfortunate choice of words in the circumstances,’ said Kitty with her hand on her belly.
‘I am sorry.’
‘So what you are saying is that the capacity to be mad in this way is somehow close to the very thing that made us human in the first place.’
‘Exactly. It is something my old employer Dr Faverill first mentioned to me. But of course I should have to be able to prove that the incidence of the illness really is stable throughout the world and has survived the selective pressure of all different environments. And that I cannot do – though oddly enough it would not present any great scientific difficulty. It is just that the task of organising and collecting the data would take so long. And people would have to agree a precise diagnosis of the illness – which, knowing doctors, would be difficult.’
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br /> ‘But how would that prove that it is as fundamental as you say? If there are as many people with it in Japan as in Brazil?’
‘Because if it was both universally spread and indifferent to the pressures of natural selection then it must have been endemic in the first humans who came out of Africa. It would suggest that it was related to whatever transmutation took place in Africa that first turned pre-humans into Homo sapiens.’
‘But you cannot prove it, Thomas.’
Thomas laughed. ‘No. I cannot. At heart, I am only a scholar of Shakespeare, though I am perfectly sure, as a matter of fact, that Shakespeare recognised and described this illness in several characters. You see it also in the Bible. Think of John the Baptist – naked, raving, hearing voices, eating insects. I have treated a hundred such men. You could argue that in the times referred to by Homer it was in fact more widespread, because almost everyone seemed to hear voices. But we don’t know when that time was, and the voice-hearing could be a literary invention rather than a literal fact.’
‘But what does this mean for your work now?’
Thomas sighed. ‘You are very practical, Kitty. It means that Franz and I will go on looking at pieces of brain tissue beneath our microscope in the hope of finding something. We shall try to find out more about the mechanics of heredity, the nature of which eluded even Mr Darwin.’
‘I thought we believed in him,’ said Kitty.
‘We think he was right about natural selection as the engine of evolution. But he thought that the characteristics of the offspring were transmitted by a “blending” of the characteristics of the parents, and he was wrong about that.’
‘How do we know?’
‘Because if you fully transfuse the blood of a white rabbit into that of a brown rabbit, it still has brown offspring. A man called Galton did it. So the nature of the brown rabbit’s offspring is not altered by anything that happens to it. If you cut off its tail, its offspring will still be born with tails – unless it mated with a naturally tailless species, of course. And then you would not get half-tails. You would get either one or the other.’
‘And what then does determine exactly what the offspring inherits?’
‘Nobody knows. Though gardeners and livestock breeders have always had their theories.’
‘So Mr Darwin was right about one thing and wrong about another.’
‘Yes. That is the nature of science. Mr Galton is right about this, but he was wrong in thinking that all murderers have square jaws or that adulterers have high foreheads. Though that theory was quite popular when I worked in the asylum.’
‘And does that apply to you as well, my love? That you will not get everything right?’
‘Yes. The two-steps-forward-one-step-back law of scientific discovery will take care of that. And the limits of the human mind.’
‘And are you right about your theory of the man beneath the chestnut tree?’
‘I am probably right about some parts and wrong about others. But I will persist in thinking in this way, because even if Franz and I don’t find the lesion or the particle beneath the stain, even if we don’t find a medicine that soothes these patients, it may be helpful to think about them in this way, to see their illness in the longest human perspective. It might help us, at the very least, in our efforts to be kind to them.’
Kitty’s twins were born on February 24th. A girl arrived at nine in the morning – purple, slight, with dark hair and swollen genitals; then half an hour later, distressed by the umbilicus tight round the neck, quickly freed by Frau Holzer, a second girl. Thomas had given Kitty a powder to dull the pain at the onset, but she waved him away as the labour progressed and he left her with the midwife while he went for a walk by the lake. He knelt down by the small landing stage, concealing himself from any inquisitive eyes that might be turned on him from the schloss, and offered an awkward prayer to whatever deity might be allowed to exist in the interstices of Mr Darwin’s theory, Mr Wallace’s more theistical variations and in his own child-memory of the Bible and its literary grandeur. He began with many scientific qualifications and apologies to the divinity whose existence he could not logically concede, but ended with a tearful plea to the God of his fathers: please spare my wife and our children and I will always believe in You.
He was anxious that, if Kitty’s heart had been weakened by rheumatic fever, the birth of twins might strain it, but when he returned in mid-morning, he found her sitting up in bed, washed, tidy and smiling, with a twin at each breast. He sat with her until noon, when Sonia and Daniel came to visit. Thomas felt as though he had been singled out among all men for some enormous, inexplicable and undeserved good fortune; as though after almost forty years of unrequited prayers, each of his desires, including many of which he was unaware, had been granted all at once. Why me? he thought as wandered in a daze through the main hall of the schloss. The fountain sang to him in the courtyard. The snow on the distant peaks flashed messages in the winter sun. The madmen in the gardens muttered and gambolled to a tune whose unheard melody was surely part of a benign universal harmony. Daisy came running up from the North Hall, her wooden shoes sounding on the cobbles, and threw herself onto him. The wind whipped the snowdrops on the bank into a flurry of white felicitation. He heard Mary’s stick tap-tapping at an urgent pace over the terracotta floors of the open section of the first-floor gallery; and in a minute she too was hugging him. He walked on towards the stables, Daisy on one arm and Mary on the other, to tell Josef and Hans of his astonishing fortune, readying his modesty for the onslaught of their congratulations.
In the afternoon, Pierre Valade arrived for one of his twice-yearly but still unannounced visits.
‘It could not be better timing,’ said Thomas. ‘I shall put you in the green room.’
‘Tonight,’ said Valade, ‘we shall celebrate. I suppose you would have preferred boys, but never mind. Nature cannot be helped. We can still have champagne.’
‘I can,’ said Thomas. ‘But you can only have some if you concede that my daughters are not only far better than any boys but also the most beautiful children ever born.’
‘I shall go at once to your wife’s room to see for myself.’
Thomas spent the afternoon with Kitty, in the course of which they discussed names. They began with the idea of something Carinthian, and tried out Andrea, Ilse, Fanny, Ulrike and Claudia, but could not agree on any of them; in the end they settled on Martha, which was almost the local Marta, and – since the girls were in any case three quarters English – Charlotte. Martha was the first born and Charlotte the younger; they appeared to be identical, but Thomas pointed out that all babies look much the same. Kitty, though tired and with a spot of fever in her cheeks, had suffered no ill effects.
That evening, Thomas ate in the main dining room with Sonia, Jacques and Pierre Valade. He distributed champagne to all the patients so they could drink to the health of his daughters, and after dinner Valade insisted on bringing brandy and more champagne to his rooms in the South Court, where they closed all the intervening doors for fear of waking the girls.
Thomas went to bed at last in a spare room not far from where Kitty was sleeping with the twins.
In the middle of the night he was awoken by a terrible screaming. ‘Thomas!’ It was Kitty’s voice. ‘Thomas! Thomas!’
He threw himself out of bed and ran down the corridor. She had rolled over and suffocated one of the twins . . . He had never heard panic like this before. They had been savaged by a wolf . . . Both were dead . . .
The bedroom door rebounded against the wall as he burst into her room.
‘What is it? What is it?’
Kitty stirred sleepily in the depths of their large bed. ‘What?’
‘What is it? Why were you screaming?’
‘I didn’t scream, I was asleep.’
‘What?’
‘I was asleep until you came in.’
‘And the girls? Are they all right?’
‘Look.’
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They were both asleep, wrapped tight and peaceful, lying in wicker baskets by the side of the bed.
‘But . . . But you called.’
‘No, I didn’t. Everything is fine, my love. Now go back to bed.’
‘All right.’ He leaned over the bed to kiss her. ‘But I did hear you.’
Valade was thrilled by the proposed railway, for which he took the credit, since it was he who had first seen the magazine article about Mount Lowe, and he appointed himself draughtsman to the project. He and Thomas went by mule to the summit of the Wilhelmskogel and inspected the widow’s buildings. They had clearly once comprised a tiny village, from which a church with double bell tower and onion-dome spire survived. On its west wall were faded outdoor frescoes, punished by the wind and altitude, but still with recognisable Biblical figures in sandy orange and blue.
The main house was in the local style, dilapidated despite its extra wooden weatherboarding; there were two farms and a dozen smaller dwellings, some of which had collapsed beyond repair.
Valade sat down and took out his sketch pad. Within an hour he had produced an impression of what the new schloss might look like: half a dozen satellite buildings ranged about the main house, which he had extended to include a walled courtyard and a shallow stream. He had notionally laid down a large area to grass among the existing trees, with walkways, pergolas and secret gardens.
‘You should have roses here, though of course I don’t know what will survive this high up,’ he said. ‘And your kitchen gardens will need sun, so they had better be on the south side, down a little and out of the wind. You should keep the structure of the main house if you can. It is rather fine – if you like Carinthian vernacular.’
‘A complete world,’ said Thomas. ‘And the wonderful thing is that when the cable-car is built and the railway spur is running, you could be in the middle of town in little more than half an hour. So we would be apart and above, but not isolated. I shall show your sketch to the architect.’
Human Traces Page 48