by Paul Hoffman
Outside in the street, the long-haired woman watched Winnicott pay and get up to leave. She moved back into the recess of the doorway from which she had been watching him throughout lunch. As he came into the street she felt her hatred of him move in her chest like a living thing. As he was about to turn the corner of the street, he stopped and looked down the alley, his face pale and haunted. She felt a kind of joy flowing through her: his fear seemed to connect with her, to shoot through every part of her like an injected drug connecting with the very nerve endings in her brain, filling her with an exultant rush. She waited for a minute, partly to let him get far enough ahead and partly to allow her racing heart to slow, then began to follow him.
As Jane Healey walked back from a business lunch to Laird, Colbourne and Cantrell, the heel of her shoe snapped, almost tipping her into the road. She hobbled into the nearest shoe shop, furious because she had bought them only a few weeks earlier. She tried on a pair of flat-heeled moccasins. The manageress, in passing, commented sympathetically on the poor standard of workmanship of the broken, though not inexpensive, shoe. Jane bought the first pair she tried on and left. Standing outside, she breathed in and out deeply, as if trying to control a sharp pain. The manageress was one of the women whose picture Geoff had cut out of a magazine and put in his photograph album.
She spent the rest of the afternoon trying, and failing, to concentrate on an audit into a foundry that had gone into receivership leaving complicated debts of over a million pounds. Eventually she stopped and went for a walk. She had recognised the woman because her picture had appeared four or five times, covering, she guessed, a ten-year period. She was older than her last picture, which must have been taken in her late forties, by about five years. Eventually Jane went back to the office. Although this was functionally pointless, it was necessary: the senior partner had been dropping hints about her returning full-time. It was hard to justify staying at Hat’s: it was interesting and she had undoubtedly learnt something, but the notion that there might be a satisfactory answer to the problem that had caused her to take the job had slowly dissipated. She realised, with amused shock, that as a result she had something in common with the men who came to Hat’s shop – a vague but still powerful sense that there was an ultimately satisfying discovery to be made there, along with an equally vague sense that they were wrong.
The next day Jane waited outside the shoe shop from a quarter to five. At a quarter past six, the manageress came out and started to lock the door. Jane stood behind her silently. The woman turned and started.
‘Oh! You gave me a fright. I’m afraid we’re closed.’
‘I don’t want to buy shoes,’ said Jane, pleasurably surprised by the steeliness in her voice.
‘You’re the woman with the broken high heel.’
‘That’s right. I want to talk to you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said the woman, alarmed by Jane’s tone. ‘What about?’
Jane reached into the pocket of her jacket and produced one of the pictures from the album. It had been taken in a wood on a warm summer day. The manageress, with a wide-mouthed cheerful smile, was sitting on a fallen tree stump with her skirt pulled around her waist and her legs apart. The woman’s face fell, her mouth opening slightly in alarm.
Jane noticed the reaction and also how much she enjoyed the woman’s fear.
‘Why don’t we go inside?’
Again Jane found it odd being inside an empty shop. The ranks of shoes had all been tidied for the next day. Empty and immaculately tidy, the place had a sombre, unlived-in air as if this was the mausoleum of a wealthy eccentric obsessed with ensuring an adequate supply of footwear in the next life.
The woman stared at her, sullen, frightened and unsure.
‘Why did you do this?’ asked Jane.
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Do you want me to send a copy to your employers?’ To her surprise the woman laughed, an uneasy barking sound. ‘If I was worried about what people think do you really imagine . . .?’ She breathed out dismissively. ‘Whoever you are, you’ve got a lot to learn about blackmail.’
Jane was shocked. For the first time in her life she realised that there was some vicious quality inside her, and that it had not been created by grief, betrayal or confusion; these things had merely uncovered it. There was a sudden change in her grasp of what kind of person she was, as if complicated tunnel-work for a long time improperly buttressed had collapsed with a crash of falling props and masonry and dust. But it was not only shame she felt, but also a kind of wonder that after all this time there should be something so staggeringly new to uncover about herself. There was also, buried further under her dismay and surprise, a pride in her ability to call on something ruthless, but as yet this was un-acknowledged and the easiest emotion to feel was remorse.
‘I’m sorry.’
The woman sat down and crossed her legs, as if to signal her relaxed control of the situation. She could see that whatever danger there was had passed. ‘What do you want?’
‘I wanted to know why you did it.’
‘Why?’
At first Jane thought of leaving. The woman was clearly not going to be frightened into telling her anything, and the last thing she wanted was to be in her debt. To have an explanation given out of pity would be unbearable, yet this was an opportunity she would not get again.
‘I found this . . .’ she gestured at the photograph, ‘. . . after my husband died.’ She felt shocked by the lie, almost superstitious.
The reaction from the woman was so quick it would have been easy to miss. Jane did not: a flash of pride so intense that not even her instant shuttering of it could prevent the momentary leak.
An intense loathing heated Jane’s stomach excusing any shame she had felt at having threatened her. She turned and started to leave, a move which caused the woman to panic. Her apparent indifference to being exposed seemed to collapse as she saw the furious decisiveness with which Jane walked to the door.
‘Wait!’ There was a desperate note in her voice. ‘It’s not what you think.’
It was this curious assertion, not the pleading note in her voice, that caused Jane to turn round.
‘Well?’
‘I swear I didn’t know your husband.’
The woman misread Jane’s uncomprehending look as scepticism. ‘It was nothing like that. I didn’t meet them. Really.’
Jane said nothing because she did not know what to say.
The silence obliged the woman to say more. ‘I didn’t know your husband,’ she finished lamely.
‘Do you still do it – pose for these pictures?’
‘No,’ she said softly.
‘Why not?’
‘Why do you think?’
Jane looked at her. In her mid-fifties, carefully made-up, she was plumper now than in her photographs, but her face was still thin and her hair still unusually short. She was still attractive. Neil would look at her. There were many women in the magazines, younger and older, who were less desirable.
Instinctively the woman reacted to Jane’s appraising eye, and she began to hold herself in, raise her chin, melt imperceptibly into a more attractive pose. It suddenly struck Jane that the woman was seducing her. But it was not sexual, at least not in any way that she could easily grasp. For a moment, like a breeze passing over her, she could feel what this woman wanted. Something in her came alive on being watched – something ghostly pulling at Jane from the crossed line of her legs, the curved division between her breasts and the dilating of her pupils. Jane felt the same alluring undertow as the searching men in Trevor Hat’s basement. The woman wanted Jane’s acknowledgement that she possessed this power. Then it was gone.
Jane was tempted to say nothing, to take revenge by denying her what she so clearly longed for, but her newly discovered ruthlessness applied even to her own vanity. She wanted to see just how far the woman would go.
‘You’re still very good-looking.’ Jane could
see that the coldness in her voice carried great weight, that the compliment rang truer for seeming to be forced out of her. She watched the woman’s flush of pleasure, and it was all she could do not to slap her face.
The woman sighed, a mixture of relief and a kind of self-regarding embarrassment. The reassurance from Jane began to soften her and she looked up almost sorrowfully as Jane turned back to the door.
‘I’d like to pose in a glass case, where people could see me, but no one would be able to touch me. I’d like the power. But I suppose that’s selfish.’
The lame appeal of her last words might have touched Jane at another time, but she’d had enough of the woman. She opened the door and left.
Jean Smith said patiently, ‘But I’ve told you before, I’m collecting information, that’s my job, it’s what I’m paid for. Winnicott is suffering these episodes because something has caused his interior world and mine to become mixed. Think of it as interference. I’m collecting evidence in the same way that an anthropologist would. I’m an economic anthropologist if you like, only instead of collecting stories about a man with one sandal and a missing sword, I collect ones about economics and fraud.’ She sighed, exasperated, as if considering how to describe the idea of yellow to a blind man or the ocean to someone who had never seen a lake. ‘Where I come from the great figures of economics are regarded in the way that you look on Shakespeare or Michelangelo. Economists are mobbed at airports, their private lives reported on in the papers, teenage girls weep into their pillows because their love is forever unrequited. No one on my planet would dream of reading an interview with an actor.’ She gasped with mock irritation. ‘I mean, what for?’
Hendrix and Haynes laughed, as they were meant to.
‘Now you’re teasing us,’ said Hendrix.
‘Am I? What happens in the Bank of England matters. Once your greatest works of art were about kings. Charley Varadi is your king. Alan Greenspan is your emperor. And yet you’re bored by them. And what do you read about? Rubbish. Actors and food and gardening. Rubbish! Where I come from people understand that what they do with their money is one of the central ways to grasp what they are. You don’t teach your children to recite the times table any more, but we do. Only what we get them to learn by heart is that the economy is the sum of all human desires expressed in goods and services; or that disappointment is the origin of every price increase. But you,’ she gasped with disgust, ‘even your farmers don’t understand there’s a law of supply and demand and that they have to obey it. We wouldn’t let a child out on his own who had the understanding of economics of the average graduate on this ignorant lump of rock.’ She looked at both men who were startled by her sudden vehemence. ‘You don’t know anything either, do you? Admit it, both of you, you couldn’t tell a monetary theory from an underconsumption theory if you had a gun to your head. And what really makes me mad is that you’re not ashamed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Haynes unapologetically. ‘I’m just not all that interested in economics.’
She stared at him coldly. ‘Get interested,’ she said menacingly. ‘Listen to me. People do not buy fridges just to keep their milk from going off; they do not buy cars just to get from A to B; they do not buy pensions just to ensure a provided-for old age. The fridge preserves the purity of milk in daily remembrance of your mother’s breast. The automobile is horse-power, your clutching for the potency of the stallion; the pension is a plan to ease the horror of your death by dreams of cruising to Miami or the Cyclades. You do not just buy fridges or cars or pension plans, but absolute love, a permanent erection, and defeat of death.’ She looked at them as if she were a patient parent reaching the end of her tether. ‘One of our ten-year-olds who didn’t know this off by rote would be given a bloody good thrashing.’
Haynes was clearly nettled at being baited in this way. ‘So – your civilisation is so much more advanced than ours that you still physically abuse children,’ he said, covering his annoyance, thought Hendrix, with an unconvincing smirk.
‘Spare the rod and spoil the child, Eddy. Over thousands of years we have accumulated overwhelming evidence that a clip on the ear never hurt anyone.’
‘I wonder if—’
‘Sorry for interrupting,’ said Hendrix, ‘but I think we’re being distracted. Why did you choose Mr Winnicott? He’s not an economist.’
‘You’re misinformed, Mr Hendrix. George Winnicott is studying for an economics degree at the Open University.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘He seems,’ said Smith, ‘to be a secretive fellow. But that wasn’t why I chose him, although it was a factor. His new job at the Fraud Secretariat seemed to me to offer a unique opportunity to research what it is I came here to do. Confusion is my speciality – distraction and bewilderment. Fraud is a measure of how uncertain people are. The more confused the easier it is to cheat them. Find out about lies and you have a measure of distraction and bewilderment. That’s why I chose Winnicott.’ She could see Hendrix and Haynes being tolerant of her fantasy and this infuriated her. ‘You don’t want to face the fact that all your pet theories about the world are wrong, do you?’ She sighed irritably. ‘And you think I’m deluded.’
‘So,’ said Hendrix, changing the subject before the session became too bad-tempered, ‘the post-hypnotic block implanted in you is preventing you from telling us this extraordinary secret, and whenever you try to do so it causes you serious physical pain?’
‘Is that your summing-up-the-patient’s-delusion voice? It’s very good,’ she said irritably. ‘So soothing.’ Hendrix had decided it would be best and would give him greater control in the therapeutic situation if he responded to the delusional persona as neutrally as he could. Despite the grumpiness of today’s session Winnicott’s alter ego was a seductive one and he was at a loss for the right way to deal with it other than to limit his reactions in every way possible. Unfortunately Smith seemed to have seen through his strategy almost immediately. She had responded, in general, by teasing him at every opportunity.
‘Thank you,’ he replied flatly. ‘Is my summary correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have any suggestions as to how we should proceed?’
Hendrix and Haynes had debated whether or not they should confront the question of The Big Secret. Hendrix had finally decided they should broach it directly. Knowing that the usual response among delusional patients to such confrontation was that they would clam up altogether, Haynes had pleaded with Hendrix to continue exploring what seemed for the patient to be the uncontroversial subject of her role as alien economist. Hendrix had testily reminded Haynes that his prime concern was the good of the patient and not the good of Haynes’s career. Despite a subsequent apology for his bluntness, their relationship was still in cool-politeness mode. The two men watched closely as Smith considered. For the first time during the session she looked hesitant.
‘You could try hypnotising me – get round it that way.’
‘But we’ve already hypnotised you. That’s why we’re talking now.’
Smith sighed irritably. ‘I mean hypnotise me – Jean Smith.’
There was a brief pause. Hendrix looked at Haynes. He could almost see his brain scanning the literature for a precedent. After thirty seconds it was clear he hadn’t found one.
‘Well?’ said Smith, impatient.
‘Um,’ began Haynes, ‘I . . . I don’t see why not.’
‘You’re sure about this?’ whispered Hendrix.
Haynes nodded, stood up and went to sit beside Smith. After a couple of minutes of soft talking he was ready. ‘Now, I’m going to count down from three and when I’ve finished you will be able to tell us anything you wish to without feeling pain.’ He paused.
Her breathing was shallow as if in the early stages of a night’s sleep.
‘Three, two, one.’
He walked back to the sofa and sat next to Hendrix. ‘Well, this is either going to be one of the high points of modern delusional an
alysis or a spectacular anticlimax . . . if you can have such a thing.’ He gestured that it was now Hendrix’s turn.
‘Are you comfortable?’ asked Hendrix.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think you’re ready to tell us what you discovered?’
‘I think so.’ She began to breathe more deeply, and they waited for nearly a minute before she spoke again. ‘The researchers on the home planet of the Vanguard discovered that they had been conducting an experiment, one that under normal circumstances they would have regarded as deeply unethical. They justified it to themselves on the basis of necessity. They had become convinced that their own decline would reach a critical point in less than five thousand years, at which point it would begin to accelerate rapidly. They had to find some answers so they began a series of experiments on a planet where life was at an extremely primitive stage . . . reptiles, small mammals. They were skilled geneticists and in effect they began to create a new life form. It took far longer than they had anticipated and the experiments failed many times. But after five hundred years they had a breakthrough, and within another two hundred the experiment seemed about to produce results when a virus wiped out nearly all of their specimens. Their results were poor, it was hugely expensive and the political will to continue was lost as their dying culture began to turn in on itself. The experiment was abandoned and the scientists went home. Within four hundred years the most advanced civilisation ever known had disintegrated completely. Within a thousand years, the last of them was dead. It was five hundred thousand years before the Illyrians discovered them again.’
She stopped for several minutes as if brooding over what she had said.
‘When we discovered records of the experiment and what it was meant to achieve we felt it was vital to find the planet and see if there were more details of what they’d been doing. It was clear that the scientists involved felt they were onto something. At any rate, we couldn’t afford to ignore it and fortunately we found out where they had been conducting the experiment. It was a long way, even for us and so horribly expensive that we had to do an enormous amount of lobbying to get the finance for an expedition. Finally, it was done and we arrived.’ She smiled. ‘You can imagine our surprise when we came to Earth and found that the mixture of mammal and reptile manufactured by the Vanguard half a million years before had risen to become the dominant species on the planet. We thought there might be evidence that could be of use. But what we found beggared imagination. Nothing could have prepared us for the astonishing variety of life we found here. There is nothing like this planet anywhere in the universe.’ She opened her eyes and looked at the two men. ‘The reason why, of all the intelligent creatures throughout the universe, mankind alone has maintained such a powerful belief in a divine creator is really quite simple. You were created.’ She closed her eyes again. ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’