by William Boyd
14. The Fabulating Function
‘I read your little book,’ Lysander said, stretching himself out on the divan. ‘Most interesting. I think I understand it. Well, sort of.’
‘It’s basically about using your imagination,’ Dr Bensimon said. ‘I’m going to pull the curtains today, if you don’t mind.’
Lysander heard him drawing the curtains on the three windows and the room grew dim and tenebrous, lit only by the lamp on Bensimon’s desk. As he crossed back to his seat his giant shadow flicked across the wall by the fireplace.
As far as Lysander was able to comprehend, Bensimon’s theory of ‘Parallelism’ worked approximately along the following lines. Reality was neutral, as he had explained – ‘gaunt’ was a word he used several times to describe it. This world, unperceived by our senses, lay out there like a skeleton, impoverished and passionless. When we opened our eyes, when we smelled, heard, touched and tasted we added the flesh to these bones according to our natures and how well our imagination functioned. Thus the individual transforms ‘the world’ – a person’s mind weaves its own bright covering over neutral reality. This world is created by us as a ‘fiction’, it is ours alone and is unique and unshareable.
‘I think I find the idea of the world being “fictive” a bit tricky,’ Lysander said, with some hesitation.
‘Pure common sense,’ Bensimon said. ‘You know how you feel when you wake up in a good mood. The first cup of coffee tastes extra delicious. You go out for a stroll – you notice colours, sounds, the effect of sunlight on an old brick wall. On the other hand, if you wake up gloomy and depressed, you have no appetite. Your cigarette tastes sour and burns your throat. In the streets the clanging of the trams irritates you, the passers-by are ugly and selfish. And so on. This happens unreflectingly – what I’m trying to do is make this power, that we all have in us, a conscious one, to bring it to the front of your mind.’
‘I see what you mean.’ This made a sort of sense, Lysander acknowledged. Bensimon continued.
‘So – we human beings bring to the world what the French philosopher Bergson calls “La Fonction Fabulatrice”. The fabulating function. Do you know Bergson’s work?’
‘Ah. No.’
‘I’ve rather appropriated this idea of his and reworked it. The world, our world, is for each one of us a unique blend – a union, a fusing – of this individual imagination and reality.’
Lysander said nothing, concentrating on the bas-relief over the fireplace, wondering how Parallelism was going to cure his anorgasmia.
Bensimon was speaking again. ‘You know that old saying: “The gods of Africa are always African.” That is the fiction the African mind has created – its fusing of imagination and reality.’
Perhaps that explains the bas-relief, Lysander thought.
‘I can understand that,’ he said, cautiously. ‘I can see how that works. An African god will hardly be Chinese. But how does that apply to my particular problem?’
Lysander heard Bensimon move his chair from behind his desk and set it down close to the end of the divan. Heard the creak of leather as he sat down.
‘In precisely this way,’ he said. ‘If the everyday world, everyday reality, is a fiction we create then the same can be said of our past – the past is an aggregate of fictive realities we have already experienced – our memories. What I’m going to try and make you do is change those old fictions you’ve been living with.’
This was all becoming a bit complex, Lysander thought.
‘I’m going to use a bit of very mild hypnosis on you. A very gentle and shallow hypnotic state. That’s why the room is dark. Close your eyes, please.’
Lysander did so.
Bensimon’s voice changed register, going deeper and strangely monotone. He spoke very slowly and deliberately.
‘Relax. Try to relax totally. You’re inert, lying immobile. You feel that total relaxation begin in your feet. Slowly it begins to travel up your legs. Now you feel it in your calves. Now it’s reached your knees . . . Your thighs . . . Breathe as slowly as possible. In – out. In – out. It’s climbing your body, now it’s in your chest, filling your body, total relaxation.’
Lysander felt a kind of swoon flow through him. He was completely conscious but he felt in a form of semi-paralysis, as if he couldn’t lift a finger, floating an inch above the blanket. Bensimon began to count down in his deep, monotone voice.
‘Twenty, nineteen, eighteen . . . You are completely relaxed . . . Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen . . .’
Now Lysander felt fatigue envelop him, his eyes locked shut, Bensimon’s voice oddly distant and muffled as he counted down to zero.
‘Think back to that day,’ Bensimon went on. ‘You’re a young boy, fourteen years old. You have your book in your hand, “The Rape of the Lock”. You walk through the walled garden. You greet the gardeners. You climb the stile into the wood. It’s a glorious sunny day, warm and balmy, the birds are singing. You walk into the wood and you sit down at the foot of an ancient oak. You start to read. The sun warms you. You begin to nod. You fall asleep. Fast asleep. You sleep for two hours, you’re late for tea. You wake up. You pick up your book and you go back to the house where your mother is waiting for you. You apologize for being late and the two of you go into the drawing room to have your tea . . .’
‘Open your eyes.’ A dry slap. Slap-slap.
Lysander did so at once, suddenly tense, forgetting where he was for an instant. He’d fallen asleep. Had he missed something crucial? Bensimon opened the curtains and daylight filled the room again.
‘Did I fall asleep. I’m terribly sorry if I –’
‘For a matter of seconds. Quite natural. You’ll remember everything I said.’
‘I remember apologizing for being late for tea.’
‘Exactly.’ Bensimon crossed the room. ‘You weren’t in a trance. You were simply imagining being in a parallel world. A world where you went to sleep in a wood on a sunny afternoon, woke up and returned home for tea. Concentrate on that day in your parallel world. Fill it with detail and concentrate on the emotions that day generated. Use your fonction fabulatrice. In this parallel world nothing happened. Reality and imagination fuse to form the fiction that we live by. Now you have an alternative.’
Lysander ordered a brandy in the Café Central. He thought about what had happened in that session, obeying Bensimon’s instructions to concentrate on the details of the parallel world he had created – that sunny day where nothing happened except that he nodded off over his book as he lay under an oak tree in Claverleigh Wood. Yes, he could see himself waking, rubbing his eyes, rising to his feet a little stiffly and unsteadily, picking up his book and walking home. Over the stile, through the walled garden – all the gardeners gone – and into the Hall through a side door, clattering up the stairs to the green drawing room where his mother was waiting and tea had been laid out on the circular table. Thinking – yes, she has rung the bell for more hot water to freshen the pot because I was late and the tea had cooled. There would be triangles of buttered toast and strawberry jam and a slice of seed cake, my favourite. I sit down and brush a blade of grass off my trousers. My mother picks up the silver teapot – no, it’s the pale-green china one with the pattern of coiling ivy leaves and the chip in its lid – and as she pours my cup of tea she asks me, ‘How’s the reading going, darling?’
Lysander paused, brandy glass held halfway to his lips. It was so real. Completely real and, to him, entirely true. He had chosen to go into a parallel world and had brought his imagination to bear. Extraordinary. His mother was wearing . . . What? A tangerine rest-gown with wide Magyar sleeves. A jade bracelet that clinked against her teacup. Stevens, the footman, cleared away the tray. It was so easy. What was it called? His fonction fabulatrice. He had made a familiar world and created a day in it where nothing untoward had happened. He felt only happiness . . . Maybe he should read some more of this Bergson person. He sipped his brandy, felt its warmth slide down his thro
at, its sweet smoky mellowness, and smiled to himself.
15. The Studio at Ottakring
There was a letter from Blanche in Lysander’s post that morning. He ripped it open with his thumb and for a brief second he caught a residual odour of rose water, the scent she used. She had covered four leaves of lilac writing paper, dense with her big, jagged scrawl.
Darling One and Only,
Flaming June is going to be an enormous success – I can feel in my bones that it’s going to run and run for months. When are you coming home? Are you feeling better in yourself? Your little kitten wants to curl up in your lap again. I have a part in a ‘film’ – can you believe it? Loads of lovely money. You must have a test when you come back. It’s so easy – no lines to learn! I think your handsome face will be perfect and the whole experience is simply fun, as easy as pie compared to what we do night after night in the theatre –
He put the letter down, deciding to finish it later, and noticing with some irritation that Blanche hadn’t bothered to answer any of his questions. Writing letters to each other was meant to be a form of dialogue, a conversation – but Blanche wrote as if the traffic was one way, a declamation about her feelings and what she was up to that paid not the slightest notice to his replies. When he wrote to her he always had her latest letter by his side. A correspondence should feed off its two parts; monologues – however lively and intimate – were not necessarily interesting.
His mood of mild irritation persisted as he walked to the Stadtbahn station and bought his return ticket to Ottakring. He looked out of the window at the western suburbs of Vienna as the little train chuffed around its branch line to its destination. Suddenly he didn’t feel like posing for Miss Bull and being drawn by her – why had he agreed? But Miss Bull was persistent, it was hard to say no to her – this much he’d already learned.
At Ottakring he showed the driver of a two-horse Fiaker the address of the studio and climbed up into the cab. They rattled further westward, past rows of allotments and orchards of apple trees and a large graveyard with a wooden paling fence before turning up a muddy farm lane. The cab stopped at a gate painted a vibrant scarlet and Lysander stepped down and paid the modest fare. Already he was thinking of his journey home: it was all very well taking a cab from the station but how did one return to the station? He would stay an hour – no more.
From the gate, a clinker path led to what looked like an old stone barn at the edge of a tree-lined field in which two shire horses grazed. Flower pots were clustered round the front door to the barn, bright with marguerites and zinnias. He pushed the gate open and set a brass bell, mounted on a whippy length of curved metal, clanging loudly. Miss Bull appeared at the doorway almost immediately. They shook hands. She was wearing a knee-length canvas smock covered in splashes of clay and plaster.
‘Mr Lysander Rief, you’re actually here. I can’t believe it!’ she cried and led him into her studio.
The old barn had been converted into a capacious, windowless, ceilingless sculpture-room. A wide section of the tiled roof had been removed and replaced with glass panes. In the corner was a large squat cast-iron stove with a tall thin chimney pipe climbing up in a series of angled lengths to the roof. Along one wall ran a line of trestle tables covered with trays and pots and variously sized blocks of wood. Twisted wire armatures were stacked at one end. In another corner was a seating area – four cane chairs round a low table with a bright throw on it and a jug of anemones. In the very middle of the room on a high turning table was a crude clay sculpture, three feet tall, of a crouching minotaur – a blunt bovine head with stubby horns set on a massy, muscled body beneath. Beside it stood a small dais, with a square of carpet cut to fit the surface. Lysander looked around.
‘Marvellous light,’ he said, thinking this was the sort of remark to make on entering an artist’s studio.
Miss Bull removed her smock to reveal that she was wearing a cream muslin blouse over a mid-calf black serge skirt. She had wooden clogs on her feet. Her dark hair was tousled, pinned and piled up on her head with long strands falling from it carelessly. There were no paintings on view.
‘Does Hoff work here?’ Lysander asked.
‘No, no. We live across the field, about half a mile away. Udo’s family home. We both tried working in his studio but it was a disaster – we did nothing but fight. So I rented this old place and renovated it after a fashion.’ She pointed up. ‘Got some proper light in.’ She indicated a door at the far end. ‘There’s a bedroom in there, if I feel like a snooze, and a sink and scullery. Thunderbox outside round the back.’
‘Very nice.’ He corrected himself. ‘Ideal.’
‘Have a glass of Madeira,’ she said, going to the trestle table and pouring the wine into two small tumblers. Lysander wandered over and they clinked glasses and drank. He didn’t really like fortified wines – sherries and ports and the like – and immediately felt a small dry headache form over one eye.
‘This is impressive,’ he said, gesturing at the crouching minotaur.
‘I’m going to cast it in bronze,’ Miss Bull said. ‘If I can afford it. Udo posed – never again. Moaning, complaining. I pose nude for him all the time. Most unfair.’ She put her glass down and picked up a large drawing pad and a stick of charcoal. ‘Talking of which – shall we get to work?’
‘Should I stand on the dais?’
‘Yes. But once you’ve got your clothes off.’
Lysander smiled reflexively, assuming this was a typical Miss Bull-style risqué joke.
‘Clothes off?’ he said. ‘Most amusing.’
‘I don’t sculpt the clothed figure. So there’s no point in me drawing you with your clothes on.’ She smiled and pointed to the door at the end of the big room. ‘You can change in there.’
‘Fine. Right.’
It was a small basic bedroom with whitewashed walls and rough planked floor covered with a rag-rug. There was a single iron-framed bed with a brown blanket and a dresser with a plain jug and ewer. On the ledge of a small window that looked over a vegetable garden lost amongst its rank weeds was a small glass jar filled with dried grasses, the only sign of individuality.
Lysander stood in the middle of the room thinking what to do. What was going on here? For a second he considered the option of opening the door again, striding out and telling her that it was impossible and that he had to leave. But he knew Miss Bull would think the less of him if he did that. He didn’t want her to see him as a prig or an insecure stuffed-shirt. He emptied his mind as best he could and began to undress.
When he was down to his socks and his drawers he began to feel a stirring of excitement at the audacity of what he was about to do. He looked at his clothes laid neatly on the bed. Last chance. He slipped off his socks and tugged at the bow of the waistcord. As his drawers fell he felt his genitals cool. There was a towel on a towel-rail by the dresser and he tied it around him and stepped back into the studio. Miss Bull was sitting in a wicker chair that she’d drawn closer to the dais. She held out something that looked like a small leather sling.
‘It just struck me. Would you prefer a cache-sexe? I don’t mind.’
‘No, no. Au naturel – all the same to me.’
He stepped up on to the dais, feeling the coarse carpet under the soles of his feet and hearing his suddenly thumping heart in his ears.
‘Ready when you are,’ Miss Bull said, calmly.
He let the towel fall and concentrated his gaze on the sooty chimney rising from the stove opposite, hearing only the hurried scratch of the charcoal on Miss Bull’s sketch pad. He squared his shoulders and told himself to relax, once more. He was not the tallest of men but he knew he had a good slim-waisted, broad-shouldered figure – certainly his tailor was always complimenting him on his build. ‘Classic, Mr Rief. The “manly ideal” – you should see my other customers. Gor blimey.’
‘Could you turn to your left slightly? Perfect.’
Lysander turned, trying to think of himself as some k
ind of Greek Olympian, a discus-thrower or javelin-hurler, stripped off for the games. What was all the fuss about the naked body, anyway? Especially in the context of art – think of all the nudes ever painted, the unclothed statues in public gardens, Michelangelo’s David, the innumerable Venuses and bare-buttocked gods and gladiators. He took a deep breath, allowing his fingers to graze his thighs. Relax, relax, relax.
‘Could you put your hands on your hips?’
He did so, clenching his buttocks involuntarily, suddenly chastened by the thought of Udo Hoff, crossing the meadow from his own studio to see how his mistress was getting on . . . No, don’t let your thoughts go there. Think of a parallel world, your parallel world . . . He shut down his mind.
He heard the legs of the wicker chair scrape back and the wooden clattering sound of Miss Bull’s footsteps – walking away and then returning.
‘Shall we have a break?’ she said. ‘You’ve earned another glass of Madeira.’
Now he could look at her. She stood there smiling, holding out the glass for him. He stooped and picked up the towel, holding it casually in front of him, and stepped down to the floor, taking the glass from her. But now he couldn’t tie the towel around him, he had no hands free – but what the hell, he thought. He was enjoying the sensation – they might as well be standing at the bar of a café, chatting. Miss Bull seemed totally unperturbed. It was just another life-class to her, of course.
‘You stood admirably still.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anyone would have thought you’d done this before.’
‘It’s a definite first.’ He took a huge gulp of Madeira and then another – too sweet for his taste but he needed the rush of alcohol.
‘D’you want to see what I’ve done?’ Miss Bull was holding out the sketch pad, a strange smiling expression on her face. It seemed both absurd and yet entirely natural that he was standing here naked in this room with only a hanging towel ‘to protect his modesty’, as the saying went, three feet away from a young woman, fully clothed in a muslin blouse, a serge skirt and wooden clogs. She took the glass from his hand and replaced it with her sketch pad.