Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  And of course he was also . . . physically very strong. He had heavy shoulders and this big chest. I mean . . . He could have been a fantastic rower. He was a bit short I suppose, but er you know, he was, he gave the impression that, of being a very powerful young man, though as I say I don’t know if he actually took any exercise.

  God, what else can you say? I kept in touch with him because I felt that . . . I . . . I saw something in him that I quite liked – but also I suppose out of a sense of kindness. He . . . er, I felt this was a guy who perhaps needed the odd friend. He certainly didn’t have any other friends, so far as I knew.

  As far as Jennifer Arkland is concerned, er I think I knew that Mike had met her because he sort of er . . . gatecrashed one summer when they were making a film in Ireland, I remember him telling me about it at the beginning of it must have been our last year I think. Mike just sort of invited himself along and then . . . um, made himself useful. So I knew that he would have met her then and he did mention her to me I think once. He said something about that she was a friend of his. He didn’t say that it was anything more than that and I certainly never saw them together.

  I knew almost nothing about his family. I knew that his father had died when he was young and that he’d . . . and that his mother went out to work but I couldn’t tell you, I haven’t the faintest idea what she did. Was there a sister? Did he have a sister or a younger brother? Er . . . I knew also that Mike came from a er . . . pretty er . . . simple background. He, you know, made no bones about that. He had quite a marked accent from wherever it was he came from . . . Reading, I think. Er . . . He didn’t make any attempt to sort of make himself sound more posh or anything like that as I think quite a lot of boys and girls did when they first went to university.

  I don’t think he ever mentioned where he’d been to school. I assumed he’d been to the local grammar school. I mean that’s what, that’s where most people had been. There’s a sort of misconception that all the undergraduates are terribly posh and drink champagne, but it wasn’t like that at all. Most of them were from grammar schools. A lot of them were teetotal scientists who just scurried from their rooms to the lecture hall and back again.

  What else? The other thing is that he was very clever. But again, so what? So were most of the young men and women there, and I’ve really no idea whether Mike had a higher IQ, more firepower intellectually than anyone else. But he certainly had a phenomenal memory. I mean, if you, if he, if you wanted to, you could test him on dates and lists and you know which record had been in the top ten when, but you know to his credit [laughs] he didn’t show off that too much but he certainly had a superior memory.

  When I hear this you know, this . . . development, the trouble that Mike’s now in I’m . . . I’m surprised. Because I knew that Mike was a bit of an oddball, as I say – but I am surprised that anything . . . On the other hand, er, you have to say there was kind of concealed violence in a lot of his conversation, in the extreme positions he took on even little things, like music . . . And er politics and all sorts of things . . . He was extremely critical, I mean brutally critical of a lot of political thought and political belief. So there was a kind of maybe undischarged anger in the way that he saw the world.

  The truth is I guess now I think about it, that you know that maybe I didn’t really know him at all. People are always mysterious, aren’t they? You know you find out that one of your best friends has been having an affair for years and you never knew anything about it. And I suppose in that way nothing should ever really surprise us because people are like icebergs, you only see the little bit on top.

  On the particular questions that you . . . you mentioned in your letter, the particular points. Did Mike appear remote, unengaged, distant from others? Yes, I think I would say that. Next, did he have a ‘loner’ view of life? Yes, I’d definitely say yes to that, in fact it was the first word I used about him. Did he avoid social situations? Yes, I suppose probably he did. Perhaps because he was shy, but also perhaps because he thought he’d be bored, I think. Did he have low sexual desire? I know absolutely nothing about his sexual life at all. What’s the next one? ‘Interpersonal skills’, whatever that means. Yeah, they were poor, I mean really [laughs] . . . poor old Mike, I think of him at that dinner party, I mean, it was, it was very funny in a way, in a cruel way, watching him floundering and trying to talk to these people, but yeah he wasn’t able to handle that.

  Next. His response to praise and criticism. Was he unresponsive? Yes. Indeed. I would say he was unresponsive to praise. For instance he did very well in the first-year exams and I said, ‘Well done, Mike, that’s fantastic,’ and he then had a very good reason for why anyone could do it, and it wasn’t any sort of achievement at all on his part. And that’s when he acquired the nickname of Groucho as in Groucho Marx who said I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

  Now, ‘difficulty in expressing anger’ . . . That’s also tricky. Yes and no. Um. I suppose it was bottled up, as I said earlier on, I certainly never saw him express anger. So . . . Of those six points I suppose I am answering in the affirmative to pretty well all of them. Sexual desire – except that one. I can’t really say.

  What else can I say about Mike? Well of course, he was a terrible pedant. He was always correcting you if you said ‘between you and I’. And what was the other one that used to drive him up the wall? I forget. ‘Internecine’ maybe. Yes, I think I heard him go off on quite a rant about that. You know when people think it’s just a posh word for ‘internal’? I forget what it really does mean now. Better ask Mike.

  But of course none of these things made him very popular. People don’t like being ticked off for their grammar especially when they’re just trying to be friendly and thinking maybe Mike could have used a friend.

  I did like him, though. Why am I talking in the past, as though he’s dead? I’d like to end by saying that I did like him, though I may have sounded a bit lukewarm in this tape. And I will stick by him even if it turns out for the worst.

  So what do I like about him? Mike . . . God. [laughs] Not his clothes, that’s for sure. I liked his manner. I think. Although it was awkward, direct, embarrassing . . . It was embarrassing, it was painful to be around sometimes. But there was something deeply er . . . uncompromising about him. He told it exactly how he saw it. It made me laugh. Mike made me laugh a lot, though I often thought he didn’t really get the joke himself. Yes, that’s weird now I come to think of it. He could be very funny, but he hardly ever laughed. He very seldom laughed or showed any emotion at all.

  I’ll definitely keep in touch. I’ve certainly never met anyone else quite like him. I’ll send him cards or go and see him. I think that’s all. I’m going to stop this thing now.

  I confirm that this is a true and accurate transcript of the tape I made. Signed: James Stellings, 24 July, 1988

  Who would have thought old Stellings to have quite such pedestrian thought processes? And to be quite so radically inarticulate? I’d always thought of him with his Montrachet and his Rodgers and Hammerstein as rather debonair. But then as he himself remarked – with such shining originality – perhaps you never really know people.

  Oh well.

  Yesterday, Dr Exley – deliberately, I think – left some more papers on the table in the room where we do our interviews while he went out to talk to one of the officers. I wasn’t sure whether the scrawly notes were intended to go to the lawyers or to his fellow defence shrink. Or perhaps they were just a memo to himself. Anyway, he was gone for ten minutes, so I read them.

  Dr Julian Exley MD, FRCPsych

  Preparatory notes for report on patient M. Engleby in case of

  R v Engleby.

  (Philippa: please leave or fill gaps where indicated. I shall have to redraft in more formal way later. More typing . . . Sorry! J) I recommend a plea of guilty to manslaughter but not guilty to murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility. I expect that expert opinion for the p
rosecution will agree with the diagnosis and accept the plea. However, in view of the notoriety of the case, it’s possible that the judge will want to put it before a jury, so I have roughed out a report in more detail on the grounds that I may have to give evidence in person.

  1.

  Michael Engleby is a 35-year-old male of Anglo-Saxon/Caucasiandescent.

  He was brought up in a normal working-class family, he is unusually well educated (grammar school, public school, Cambridge University) and has a high IQ (see test results, to be appended). He has managed to retain a well paid and respectable job in journalism. He is financially solvent, has some savings and owns the leasehold (less outstanding mortgage) of a small flat in London.

  He has a mild cardiac arrhythmia, and lung function test results (using Youlten peak-flow meter) are slightly below average for his age. This may be caused by excessive smoking. He has a borderline alcohol dependency problem and has been a heavy drug user in the past. Neither condition appears to be acute, however. In prison, he has been prescribed ten mg diazepam twice daily and this seems to be all that is necessary.

  Throughout his life, however, he has had difficulty in forming even rudimentary attachments to others. He disliked his father, who, he says, abused him as a child by beating him regularly. His mother appears to have been the dominant figure at home, yet emotionally distant. He had little respect for her and minimal attachment. He claims to have been ‘close’ to a younger sister, but has hardly seen her in the last ten years. He had no close friends at school, university or work. He says that the resulting solitude has not bothered him, that in fact he prefers it.

  His preference has been for solitary activities, such as reading or listening to music. In journalism, he made it a condition of his joining the staff of a newspaper that he need not go to the office more than once or twice a week, thus maintaining his solitude. As he put it to me, ‘I’d rather be abandoned than engulfed.’

  He exhibits a degree of anhedonia – viz., he takes little pleasure in life, even in the activities that he chooses. He evinces little emotion of a positive or negative kind. He exhibits a consistent flatness of response. He responds little to the facial expressions of others.

  He declines to discuss his libido, but appears to have had only one sexual relationship of any kind. According to him, it was coming to an end at the time of his arrest. His partner/ex-partner has declined to be interviewed.

  He admits to having been indifferent to the praise or criticism of colleagues, teachers or friends at any stage in his life. He has admitted that this was because he did not value their opinions.

  Some of the defining symptoms of this disorder (e.g. anhedonia, flatness of affect) are associated with the so-called ‘negative’ symptoms of schizophrenia. However, the subject exhibits no positive symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis in any form and I do not find that he is suffering from mental illness.

  The subject has had a firm grasp of reality at most stages of his life. The exceptions are twofold. First, in the occurrence of occasional acute panic attacks, which are considered below. Second, there appears to have been occasional partial memory loss. These lapses in my view can be explained in simple psychological terms of defence mechanisms, stress and so on. It is ironic that they occur in someone whose memory is generally of an almost ‘savant’ or autistic order – but no more than ironic, and not in my view suggestive of psychotic illness or indeed of any neurological problem, such as local brain damage.

  In my view, he suffers from a personality disorder, which amounts to abnormality of mind for the purposes of Section 2 of the 1957 Homicide Act. If pressed to answer, I would say that this disorder substantially impaired his responsibility for his offence, although I am mindful that this is properly a question for the jury.

  Personality disorder diagnoses can cause problems because in many cases the crime is the first evidence we have of serious abnormality. However, in the case of Engleby we have the extraordinary advantage of his own written account of the formative years of his life.

  2.

  The following is a list of some notes I made while reading the journal.

  Chapter One. His vanity while being interviewed for a university place. Contempt for his superiors. Fetishistic attitude to brands of drink and cigarettes. Persistent alcohol abuse. Drug abuse. (It is interesting that the ‘blue ten-milligram pill’ he takes is almost certainly diazepam, or Valium, whose tranquillising effect may have been helpful in the long term, but may also have distorted the diagnostic picture by removing a degree of anxiety that might otherwise have been present.)

  He ‘does not like to think’ about his younger sister. I believe this is not because he dislikes her, but because he has a fear of emotional closeness. Significantly, she is the only person he can feel sorry for (when she comes to visit him in London later) or empathise with at all.

  Chapter Two. Explicit preferences for solitude, particularly in his student travelling. Note also his reluctance to name either his university or his college. Also, the pub he calls the Kestrel is clearly the Eagle. Etc. This may not be significant, but is consonant with a fear of being ‘engulfed’ by a social context which he found intimidating.

  Chapter Three. Schooldays. One notes that he is abused and becomes an abuser. Systematic thieving. Disregard of social norms. Fantasises about killing his tormentor.

  Chapter Four. Memory loss could be attributed to marijuana abuse, but more likely to the selective repression necessary in his building of a pathological defence system.

  There is almost no sexual content in his descriptions of the girl Jennifer, very unusual in a man of 20/21 years old. He appears more concerned about whether she has sex with her boyfriend than whether she has sex with him.

  Chapter Five. His only friend or acquaintance, James Stellings (see witness statement), does not look him up in the vacation. ‘Mercifully’ is how M.E. describes this omission.

  Chapter Six. His only friend in London appears to be the shopkeeper, a refugee from Amin’s Uganda. His account of buying pornographic magazines shows little libido. He is more interested in the imagined lives of the models and the homeland of the shopkeeper. His attempt to meet women in a wine bar is halfhearted and inept; his account of it is misogynistic. Note: his account of his father’s abuse. Lacks detail. Detail suppressed? Or gravity of episode(s) exaggerated?

  Chapter Seven. He recoils from Jeffrey Archer’s mistress, or perhaps from the thought of sex when confronted with physical presence of two lovers. Although he doubtless interviewed people for his newspaper, the stories of his meetings with famous people are not always convincing. Creative fantasy?

  His admission here to periodic rages, on the other hand, is extremely compelling. I think it is significant that it comes at a time when he feels his life is generally ‘improving’. He feels more confident and is able to look at himself with detachment and recall these episodes.

  Elsewhere he typically sees no problem with himself, only with others – the teachers, colleagues, would-be friends, acquaintances and even shopkeepers. This is characteristic of personality disorders.

  Chapter Eight. His vagueness about how to proceed with Margaret suggests sexual inexperience, perhaps even virginity. His description of sex with her – ‘We took a room and had it off’ – is, even allowing for natural modesty, rather unconvincing.

  Chapter Nine. He is unable to deal with the intimacy of living with Margaret and is moving back to his preferred state of solitude.

  Narcissism is continually present in the Engleby journal. It is evident in all his accounts of the intellectual processes of others, which he views with contempt. Any failings of his own, on the other hand, are attributed to the poor judgement or misinterpretation of others. He is dismissive of all politicians, of all scientists, of playwrights, of almost all cinema and most music, with only bizarre and partial exceptions.

  His own intellectual processes, by contrast, pass unchallenged. His social inadequacies and embarrassments are b
lamed on others. It never occurs to him that he is unattractive in any way or that his behaviour could be adjusted. His problems do not appear to him as problems because they are so deeply entrenched that they are ego-syntonic – i.e. they seem normal to him.

  My belief is that he suffers from schizoid personality disorder (following criteria of DSM III-R) with elements of narcissism and antisocial personality disorder. This is a complicated picture for the court, however, and I note that in the latest figures we have from one Special Hospital (Broadmoor) only two per cent of personality disorder patients have schizoid PD as their primary diagnosis.

  However, more than 80 per cent of these non-psychotics have psychopathic or unspecified PD as their main diagnosis. The worse the crime, the vaguer the diagnosis, on the latest figures; and I can therefore see no problem with Engleby being put in this looser category.

  Although he has suggested otherwise, I am not convinced that the patient is responsible either for an assault on a schoolmate that may have led, indirectly, to his premature death many years later, or the murder of a German woman in London, in which case no forensic evidence survives, the victim’s body having been flown home and cremated.

  I suspect that the patient believes that a diminished responsibility plea stands a better chance of succeeding if there is more than one crime.

  (Philippa: this next bit is technical. You can leave it till later if you on’t have time now, as I may need to revise it anyway.)

  Winnicott (1965) characterises extreme aggression as arising at the moment at which a ‘deprived’ character tries catastrophically to revert to the instant before deprivation led him to erect morbid defence systems. It is a moment of hope: of asserting that, despite entrenched patterns, he can still take something from his environment.