The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  Chopping parsley … slicing carrots lengthways … whipping cream to go on top of the apples baked in syrup and ginger … and all the time the hands of the electric clock pressed silently forward, and still she hadn’t got her red wool dress on, or changed her tights; and supposing one of the links of her gold chain belt broke again as she put it on, and supposing that after all Martin turned out not to be late at all, but early, as not infrequently happened when he’d warned her he would be late. “Surprise, darling, surprise! I managed to get away before the end….” and then the ecstatic hugging in the hallway, half of her soul clasped in his embrace, and the other half ranging the kitchen, antennae out for something burning, something boiling over, something Beatrice-like and awful…. It had never happened so far … it mustn’t ever happen.

  With a quick, expert glance round her kitchen, Helen assured herself that her pots and pans, like a class of well-disciplined children, were all doing exactly what they should be doing at this precise point in the timetable, and then she dashed into the bedroom to effect a lightning change. Until she tore it off, she had not noticed how damp her pleated school skirt had become during the journey home. It would need pressing before she wore it again. Oh hell! Oh never mind, never mind, her hair was the really urgent problem, just look at it, bashed lank and stringy by the February sleet, no time now to set it with rollers, she’d just have to push it into shape as best she could with fingers and comb….

  *

  It was a photo-finish, just about: with Martin’s key in the door exactly as Helen raced past the winning-post—emerged, that is, from the bedroom, smiling, relaxed and with every hair in place to welcome him.

  CHAPTER VII

  IT HAD BEEN a lovely dinner, one of Helen’s best. The washing up had been done—Martin always helped with this, no one could call him a chauvinist pig, he could see that it was only fair when she worked all day—and now here he was, his domestic duties honourably fulfilled, and with a long, peaceful evening ahead in which to get on with his work. Evenings had always been his best time for working. He remembered vividly from his student days that surge of energy that would come over him at nightfall, as it comes to a cat, or a panther; and how the words would pour forth almost faster than he could get them down, far into the night. “Best first-year essay I’ve ever read, Martin.” “A remarkable piece of work, Mr Lockwood. I’d like to show it to the Professor….”

  That sort of thing. It seemed like yesterday. He waited, now, for it all to happen again. The circumstances were ideal; a good dinner inside him and a long, peaceful stretch of time ahead, safe from interruption.

  Helen saw to this. For her, Martin’s work sessions were sacrosanct, and evening after evening she would fend off neighbours, phone calls, relatives, canvassers, like a blonde and beautiful guard-dog, creating for him an atmosphere of peace and privacy such as he had longed for in vain ever since leaving university. Now at last, after all these frustrating years, he had a chance of really achieving something.

  *

  Martin stirred in his chair, restlessly: then bent to open the bottom drawer of the desk and extracted from it the file containing the provisional synopsis for his thesis. His supervisor, Dr Frost, a pale, painstaking academic, humiliatingly much younger than himself, hadn’t been too pleased with the synopsis at first reading, and Martin had had to go to great lengths to impress on him the provisional nature of the document, and had endeavoured to mask its intrinsic dullness and lack of originality by dropping vague hints of some startling new angle shortly to be adumbrated, and to be expounded in detail in the revised version.

  So far, so good; but for several weeks now Dr Frost had been politely indicating that it was high time that this startling new angle should be taking some kind of definite shape; that something, at least, should by now have been set down on paper indicating the direction of these new and original thoughts that were to be the raison d’être of the thesis.

  “There’s a lot of supplementary data that hasn’t been fully analysed yet,” Martin would temporise; or, “I’ve got to get a further control sample before I can make any positive assertions,” but his supervisor was becoming understandably impatient.

  “I’ll get out the full revised synopsis by the end of the month,” Martin had wildly promised only a fortnight ago; had, indeed, wildly pictured this actually happening, in the first flush of his triumphant move to Helen’s, where everything was going to be perfect for ever. But now it almost was the end of the month, and the synopsis had not been revised by so much as a syllable. Unless you counted the changing of the spelling of “vigour” to “vigor”, which he fancied looked a bit more—well—vigorous.

  “Vigour”. “Vigor”. Better change it in the carbon as well. There! At least he’d done something.

  He flipped through the typed pages. They looked good. Wide margins, clear headings and sub-headings, good spacing. A synopsis to be proud of. The only thing missing was a clear statement of what it was all about. The new, exciting idea that was to be the focal point of the whole thing, and was to put the name of Martin Lockwood well and thoroughly on the map, was still missing.

  *

  Why could he not think of any such idea? He’d always been able to in the past, without the smallest difficulty. No matter how hackneyed the subject—from “Death and Bereavement in the Extended Family Circle” to “Incest and Pre-Pubertal Sex in Three Mining Villages”—Martin Lockwood could always be counted on to come up with something fresh and provocative, such as that sex is on the decline north of Birmingham, or that extended families are only tolerable when frequent bereavements are the norm. Something like that. It didn’t have to be true, or even likely; it just had to be startling, and backed up by one or two case-histories so remarkable and so atypical as to stick in the mind long after the unremarkable facts had faded into oblivion. It is the remarkable, not the unremarkable, that tends to get quoted, and anything once quoted begins automatically to take on a dim veneer of authenticity that is almost impossible to dispel.

  All that was needed, then, was a remarkable idea. Even the germ of a remarkable idea. What had happened to him that nothing came into his mind at all? Absolutely nothing?

  It had been so easy, once. How had he done it, in those days? Was it a trick, a sort of intellectual sleight-of-hand whose secret he had forgotten? A game of skill at which he had grown rusty? Or what?

  Martin closed his eyes, and tried to recapture the exact sensations of being that brilliant student twenty years ago: to re-live, inside his head, those magical intimations of approaching breakthrough, that sense of his brain beginning to stir and heave, with bubbles of thought beginning to rise in it, like marsh-gas, slowly at first, and then faster: thicker and thicker, faster and faster, until his whole skull was boiling and churning with novel and astonishing ideas, his heart thudding in his ears, his blood racing, his pen flying over the foolscap in a sort of madness of creation.

  Why wasn’t it happening now? Why? Why? What was wrong with him that all this peace, all this perfection, all these long, quiet uninterrupted hours, resulted in such a deadlock of the soul?

  *

  Getting started. That was always the worst part. Even in the good old days this had sometimes presented problems, he recalled. The important thing was to take a piece of paper and write something, and then, with any luck, your pen would carry you on from there. Pulling a little pile of clean, new typing paper towards him, he wrote, almost at random, one of the headings from his synopsis:

  “VARIETIES OF ENDOGENOUS DEPRESSION: A NEW SYNTHESIS” He underlined it neatly and carefully, using a ruler, and then sat clutching his biro, waiting for it to write something.

  *

  Through the wall, he could just hear Helen’s typewriter, patiently tap-tapping away at the Timberley interview. He was glad to hear her working on it, not because it was going to be much use to him—the whole thing was a dead loss, really, a complete waste of an afternoon—but because it meant that she must have quite
got over that funny mood she’d been in before dinner.

  He still couldn’t understand it, not really. It had all blown up so suddenly, and quite without warning. There they’d been, drinking together, companionably, as they usually did before dinner. Helen had been looking particularly beautiful, he recalled, and he for his part had been feeling even more than usually in need of a sympathetic ear after his nerve-racking afternoon, and so it wasn’t long before he found himself launching into the story of the frightful Timberley interview and how frustrating it had been. In the telling it became, somehow, quite a funny story, what with the budgerigar and everything; and looking to Helen to share his amusement, he was taken aback to notice that she was not, after all, laughing with him, but on the contrary was very nearly crying.

  “Oh, that poor old man!” she exclaimed. “How he must love her! Oh, Martin, how tragic! Whatever’s going to happen to them? What are you going to do?”

  Do? Martin was thunderstruck. What was there to do, apart from resolving not to waste any more valuable time on such a pair of senile crackpots? Patiently, he tried to explain to Helen that an interview in which the actual subject simply doesn’t answer at all is really rather useless: it doesn’t fit into the series anywhere. Though of course, he allowed, seeing her still looking stricken, it was intriguing in a way, of course it was, and no doubt a slot could be made for it somewhere, maybe in the section on Negative Family Attitudes. And so yes, he did want it typed. Oh yes, certainly he did: that would be awfully sweet of her.

  And so the incident had passed off, and soon Helen had been all smiles again, flushing up with pleasure when he praised her cooking, which he was at pains to do.

  So that was all right. It hadn’t been a quarrel at all, really: just a misunderstanding, quickly resolved. And so it couldn’t be that which was disturbing his concentration.

  The soft, regular sound of the typewriter had ceased. She must have finished the Timberley interview. She would be putting the pages together now, separating out the carbons, and in a minute she would come tiptoeing in, laying the document wordlessly on his desk and tiptoeing out again, her whole being set on not interrupting his flow of thought or distracting him in the least degree.

  *

  Suddenly, and completely without warning, his nerves were aquiver with irritation, and he longed for an interruption, a proper interruption such as Beatrice would have inflicted on him.

  “Martin! Did you remember to ring up the heating people this afternoon?” or, “Martin! You never fetched the stuff from the launderette! Do you realise it closes at nine?”

  “Oh, to hell with the heating people!” he could yell back. “Ring them yourself if you’re so bloody steamed-up about it!” Or he could go storming off to the launderette, fetch the stuff, hurl it on the kitchen floor, and return to his work refreshed, newly-injured, his adrenalin flowing.

  Nothing like this ever happened with Helen, or could ever be imagined to happen. This, of course, was one of the wonderful things about her, one of the major reasons why he had uprooted himself and actually come to live with her.

  Peace, he’d thought. Peace at last, in a congenial supportive environment in which his long-repressed creative faculties would have a chance to flower once more.

  *

  The pin-men were back. Martin stared down at them, in anger and dismay. He’d thought that once he was settled at Helen’s, secure and happy, they’d trouble him no more.

  But he’d thought wrong. Beneath that impressive sub-title about Endogenous Depression, they were already mustering, dozens and dozens of them, dancing and doodling across the clean, expensive paper just as they’d always done, arms stuck out straight as hyphens and legs splayed out like upside-down “Ys”. No feet, usually. A lot of them didn’t even have heads, so idle must his right hand have been feeling, so disinclined for the slightest bother or effort.

  Hastily, Martin shuffled the defaced page out of sight beneath the pile. Any minute now, Helen would be in with that damned Timberley interview, and even though she wouldn’t say a word to interrupt him, it would be impossible for her not to notice the little brutes if they were still uppermost. Having safely hidden them, he now set to work on a fresh piece of paper to inscribe once more that Endogenous Depression heading, once again underlining it with painstaking precision. It would merely look as if he’d finished one section and was just about to embark on the next. No one could guess that he hadn’t written a single sentence all evening.

  It did cross his mind that this sort of thing had been a lot simpler in Beatrice’s day. No need, with her, to hide the fact that he was stuck, because she hadn’t cared a damn whether he was stuck or not: hadn’t even understood the meaning of that unhappy state. Miserable though it had been to be married to a woman who shared no single one of his interests, and couldn’t care less about his career, her indifference had nevertheless given him a certain freedom of which, at the time, he’d been totally unaware.

  Freedom to be idle, bored, unsuccessful, in a rotten mood. Freedom to spend whole evenings doodling and daydreaming at his desk without the smallest risk of anyone looking in to enquire how he was getting on. Beatrice didn’t care a damn how he was getting on. She would never even have noticed that he hadn’t written a word all day, or given a second thought to the fact that sheet after sheet of expensive typing paper were covered with vacuous little intruders from his subconscious.

  If it was indeed his subconscious that was responsible. Weren’t subconsciouses supposed to be full of dark guilts and traumas, too terrible for the conscious mind to contemplate? And yet when you gave it its head, just look what it came up with! Matchstick manikins, without face or character, symbolising nothing. Trying to arouse in himself some twinge of Freudian guilt, he tried adding a penis to two or three of them; but it was no good. It didn’t stir up any traumas. It just made them look like camera tripods.

  *

  The sounds through the wall were different now. Helen was pushing her chair back, putting the lid on her typewriter. Her light step crossed the passage, and now he could hear her in the kitchen, clitter-clattering softly with kettle and crockery.

  Tea, perhaps? Or a nice frothy mug of cocoa, sugared exactly right? Whatever it was, he loved the sound of her preparing it, it made him feel cossetted and cared-for. With a warm feeling of anticipation, he began to clear a space on the desk for the mug, jug, glass, beaker, cup of whatever it might turn out to be.

  Damn! More pin-men, on this second sheet! Angrily, he crumpled it up and flung it in the waste-paper basket. What a mercy he’d noticed, and in the nick of time, too! Any moment now, the drink would be ready and she’d be at his elbow.

  “How’s it going, darling?” she would murmur, lightly stroking his not-yet-thinning hair; and, “Fine,” he’d answer. “Just fine.”

  Supposing, though, he were to answer “Bloody awful!”, which was the truth? Why, at once she would be all sympathy, her whole soul would spring into helpfulness as at the touch of a switch.

  “Shall I check your conversion tables?” she would offer eagerly, all the tiredness wiped from her face at the mere thought of it; or, “Shall I re-draw the 1968 graphs in accordance with the new base line? That might throw fresh light on …”

  And so it might. She really did understand the problems he was wrestling with. Over the past months, ever since they had become lovers, she had read up the subject assiduously, and was able to make really useful suggestions. And further, in her determination to be as unlike Beatrice as it was possible for a human being to be, she had even worked her way through a manual on Teach Yourself Statistics, and was now in a position to take over some of the minor mathematical chores which are so tedious to a really creative mind such as Martin’s. It was for his sake, too, that she’d been learning to touch-type, and had bought herself this portable typewriter.

  To have the woman in his life taking this sort of trouble about him was something absolutely new to Martin. It was wonderful, it was heart-warming. T
here were times, too, when it made him feel like a rat in a trap.

  CHAPTER VIII

  “DARLING, ARE YOU asleep?”

  “Mmmmm. Ye-es. I mean no. What’s happened?”

  “Because if you’re not,” Martin continued, his voice pitched low as becomes one who is resolved not to disturb his partner’s rest, no matter how great his own need, “then a pot of tea might be nice, don’t you think?”

  This last remark was impossible for Helen to answer. Struggling up towards consciousness through layer after layer of utter peace and darkness, she had not yet reached the stage of being able to think. It had been well after midnight when they’d got to bed, and she’d sunk instantly into a sleep of absolute exhaustion. Waking up now was like recovering from being dead.

  “Wha—What time is it?” she managed to mumble, her vocal chords scarcely obeying her, for all her faculties were still fighting every inch of the way in their yearning to sink back into oblivion.

  “Three o’clock,” Martin answered, in the martyred tones of one who has brought the time to three o’clock single-handed—as indeed he felt he had. “I’ve been awake the whole time,” he added, trying to convey the experience of it. “I haven’t slept a wink.”