Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  He could see her now, this instant, as the Winston Churchill Centre burgeoned into the Garden of Eden, an unchaotic sunny spot where Mary cavorted naked with her Adam. He cast himself as Adam, adding several inches to both his height and shoulder-width, and transforming his six chest-hairs to a dark and tangled pelt. Mary did resemble Eve, in fact, or at least the picture of her in his Children’s Illustrated Bible – ‘Eve Banished from the Garden’. Her breasts had been enormous in the picture – or had seemed so in his boyhood – full and soft and rounded, yet trussed up very high, as if supported by some supernatural pulley. But a snake had been coiled round them, a terrifying serpent with a long forked tongue and scales. His Anne was nothing like that. Anne was just a friend, and a very old and loyal one, not dangerous, not a symbol. But if John-Paul didn’t understand, then it was probably his fault again. He just wasn’t bright enough, didn’t have symbols, only cuddly toys; didn’t read creation myths, just the Daily Mail.

  ‘What are you thinking, Bryan?’

  He jumped. ‘Er … nothing.’

  ‘So you’re still fixated on your sense of unreality?’

  ‘No, I’m …’ Bryan fished desperately in the shallows of his mind, came up with a mermaid in a blue flower-patterned blouse. ‘I was … thinking about Mary.’

  ‘The Mother of God?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I assumed you meant the Virgin Mary, since we were just talking about Eden. Eve’s been called the precursor of the Virgin, and of course her name in Hebrew means …’

  Bryan swallowed. Precursor. Hebrew names. This was worse than Skerwin. ‘No, Mary’s just a friend of mine.’

  ‘You have a friend called Mary? You’ve never mentioned her before.’

  He nodded, shook his head, drooped back on the couch. ‘I don’t know her, actually.’

  ‘Yet you just called her your friend.’

  ‘Well, she might have been a friend. We were getting on so well, you see. I think she really liked me. But then I saw my Father and …’ Again, the words dried up. He could hardly bear to think that his Father hadn’t recognised him. They were so physically alike – even Mary had remarked on it – but it wasn’t only that. There was obviously a strong instinctual bond between all fathers and all sons. He’d experienced it himself on some deep and almost sacred level the instant he’d glimpsed Skerwin; hoped, assumed the tutor would reciprocate. It could have been so different – Skerwin pulling up his chair in the warm womb of the canteen, while he introduced his Father to his girlfriend – no, fiancée – Mary; drinks all round, to celebrate. Or perhaps knickerbocker glories. He’d never had one, ever, but they had figured very frequently in his boyhood fantasies: he and his (vague) Father sharing one long spoon, one foot-high fancy glass; all shyness, strangeness, melting as fast as the ice cream.

  ‘What d’you mean, you saw your father? You saw him in a dream?’

  Bryan shook his head. He nearly always dreamed about his Mother – the Parcel Dream – where the postman’s thunderous knocking on the door woke him with a start as he raced down the stairs to consciousness and found his squawking, crumpled, revenge-declaring Mother struggling from her wrappings on the doormat.

  In the last few weeks, he hadn’t dreamed at all, though he’d been trying really hard, jotting it on all his lists, the night ones and the day ones: ‘Mow lawn, mend drawer, have dream.’ John-Paul thrived on dreams, reacted like a dog might to a bone (especially sexual dreams, which seemed the equivalent of marrowbones). He also made them highly complicated, even brief and flimsy ones, which could fill the next day’s session as they worked on them together, poking under the ‘manifest content’ to drag out the so-called ‘latent content’ (which he always pictured like a slug beneath a lettuce leaf). It seemed strange to call it ‘work’, but John-Paul always did, and indeed he often felt more tired and drained after fifty minutes on the couch than by nine hours at his desk.

  ‘You imagined that you saw him, then?’

  Bryan jumped back to his Father, exchanged his tortured dream-life for the Winston Churchill Centre. ‘No, I saw him really.’

  ‘Bryan, you’re projecting your fantasies into the external world. That’s understandable, but all the same …

  ‘It wasn’t a fantasy.’ Bryan’s voice was slowly rising, with the smoke. ‘He was as real as you and me. I even saw him in the gents. I went in there to hide and …’

  ‘You seem confused this morning, about the nature of reality.

  Nothing in your world today seems real, except your father, who died thirty years ago.’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘So you do agree he’s dead?’

  ‘Oh, no. I only meant they’d said he’d died thirty-one years ago. But he wasn’t dead, in fact.’

  ‘You appear to be hinting now at some idea of Resurrection. Are you confusing your father with God?’

  ‘There isn’t any God.’ Bryan heard his own voice falter. He’d never been religious, despite that childhood Bible, but it still hurt to lose his God. None of the authors of those science books seemed to feel the need for Him – well, not the God he knew: the Managing Director who kept things organised, made the rules, hired and fired, could draw straight lines without a ruler, and did everything methodically – created night and day on Monday, sky and water Tuesday – even had a Mother and yet found time to rest on Sundays, which was impossible with his Mother.

  ‘You’re denying God because you’ve never had a father. It’s the same principle again, you see – a very shaky sense of masculinity, whether in yourself, or in your father, or the idea of God Himself.’

  ‘But I have got a Father. I keep telling you I found him just last Friday. I know I should have mentioned it before, informed you on the Monday or the Wednesday, but we talked about my Mother the whole time.’

  ‘The two may well be linked. Your fixation on your mother has created an overwhelming need to find your absent father, so as to reassert the idea of masculinity, and help you take a stand against your mother. This could well be a hopeful sign, the beginning of a change.’

  Bryan sighed. John-Paul’s skill was listening, but he sometimes felt he was listening to someone else – not B.V. Payne, but some other brighter patient, someone more important. That had probably been the trouble with his Father. Skerwin might have acknowledged him if he’d been brainier, more cultivated. He could always try again, though, approach him in a week or two when he’d completed the whole reading list and could reel off phrases like ‘naked singularities’ or ‘extragalactic nebulae’.

  He was aware again of silence, a hopeless dragging silence. If he didn’t fill it quickly, John-Paul would ask ‘What are you not saying?’, which never failed to throw him. ‘I’ll be seeing him again tonight,’ he murmured swiftly, wildly. ‘Except how can I face Mary after last time? No, I think I’ll have to miss the class …’ He was talking to himself now, though John-Paul still swooped down.

  ‘I know your mother’s very hostile to your going, but didn’t we come to the conclusion that you’d keep that one night free from her, not let her dominate?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with Mother – not this time. It’s Mary.’

  ‘But you just agreed you didn’t know a Mary.’

  Bryan closed his eyes. He was feeling very tired. Maybe John-Paul was right (again) and Mary wasn’t real. Perhaps the class was unreal, too, so that it wouldn’t really matter if he missed it. He could go home and have an early night, go home now – immediately – take his snake and curl up tight in bed with it, tell his Mother he was sickening for a cold. If Friday wasn’t real, nobody could caution him for missing a day’s work.

  He forced his eyes to open. It was rude to doze, as well as being wasteful. Every minute cost. He glanced up at the pictures, which he’d always found intimidating. Only clever people had pictures with no people in, and these were really deep ones. He gazed with new intensity, a new sense of startled shock. There was Chaos on the walls – black and swirling Chaos, seething
searing Void. Not one straight line in any of the paintings, not one familiar object, or single patch of colour. How could John-Paul dismiss chaos as just a disorder of a patient’s inner world, when his very choice of paintings proved him wrong? That artist knew the facts – like the authors of those physics books – had expressed the inexpressible, depicted the grim truth that there was no truth, no certainty.

  He gripped his snake, heart racing. Was John-Paul even real himself? If he turned his head to check, would he see an empty chair, or worse, no chair at all? Had he been talking to himself for four whole years? He touched his forehead, felt it burning hot, despite the chilly room. He wasn’t sickening for a cold, but for something much more serious.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ he faltered, voice half-lost as the clock outside the tower began its strident chiming.

  ‘It’s time, Bryan. We must finish now.’

  ‘But I’m feeling really rough.’ He raised his voice to contradict the chimes. He welcomed them most mornings as his release from grim detention, but today he dared not face a crumbling world. ‘I can’t just leave like this. Everything’s dissolving, breaking down.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it on Wednesday.’ The clock spun out its seven, cadenced on a final braying eight.

  ‘There won’t be any Wednesday. Friday’s gone already and …’

  ‘It’s time. In fact, half a minute over now.’

  Bryan leapt up from the couch, snatched his shoes, his briefcase, the new and heavy physics book he took with him everywhere, so he could read it in the train, the lift, the gents. His place was marked with a strip of aluminium foil, stolen from his sandwich wrappings (which his Mother always washed and used again). He’d reached page four hundred and twenty-two – ‘The Myth of Time’.

  ‘You’re wrong, John-Paul,’ he shouted, as he staggered through the door, snake clutched to his chest. ‘There isn’t any time.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Beautiful chrysanthemums! Are they from the garden, dear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I love those bronzy ones, don’t you?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Mary? You don’t seem quite yourself today. I noticed when you first came in. You looked a little flushed and …’

  ‘No, I’m … fine. Absolutely fine.’ Mary turned away, so Phyllis couldn’t see her face. She was flushed. ‘You don’t seem quite yourself.’ The words alarmed her, underlined her feeling of not knowing who she was. Would Phyllis believe she suffered murderous rages, fought secret battles with violent sexual urges, had even wished to kill her mother? Oh, they were all unconscious feelings, John-Paul had assured her, but even so, she couldn’t come to terms with them, couldn’t understand why outwardly she was still the placid, plodding Mary who never blew her fuse (either out of bed, or in it), when inwardly she was a seething mass of aggression and hot lust. She still felt the same, reacted much the same – rarely lost her temper or felt even mildly cross (except with Jonathan’s headmaster who really was unreasonable, hadn’t let her visit when she was passing just three miles away and only intended dropping in some underpants). And as for … bed, well, James was still complaining about useless shrinks who grabbed his money without delivering the goods.

  It was as if John-Paul had eavesdropped on their night-time conversation and decided to change tack, since the last two sessions they’d actually discussed the subject, and full-frontally, so to speak. (Though she was still lying on that dreadful couch, with him out of sight behind her.) She’d blushed so much, perspired so profusely, she’d feared she might be suffering an early menopause and was experiencing her first hot flush. John-Paul’s room was always hot, but those last two Fridays it had seemed like an inferno, especially when he’d talked about her powerful sexuality, which was apparently quite clear to him because of the equal strength and potency of something called her super-ego which opposed that sexual drive.

  Sexual! Mary Hampton – who’d never really seen much point in all that grunting and grimacing which James preferred to a nice quiet read in bed, with a mugful of hot chocolate, and just a friendly cuddle before they put the lights off. Of course, she knew it was her duty to try to go along with him (and she meant that in all senses), but she sometimes wished he’d have a few more headaches, or a crisis in the office, or even a business trip (or two) abroad which didn’t extend to wives. But that was not the real her, according to John-Paul. That was just her spoilsport super-ego, which was determined to suppress her naturally strong libido, deny her any pleasure or release. She still hadn’t fully grasped the new (confusing) Blessed Trinity of Ego, Id and Super-ego, except that the latter seemed extremely sour and strict, rather like her first ayah in Calcutta combined with Reverend Mother. John-Paul said she had, in fact, internalised those figures of authority, who had now become a part of her, a punishing restrictive part which frowned on ‘letting go’. Something like that, anyway. He’d used a lot of terms which had left her, frankly, baffled – terms like ‘the pre-Oedipal phase’ and ‘parental introjects’. It all sounded most alarming and she had to confess she preferred the Catholic theory, which seemed simpler altogether: man composed of body and soul – body gross and sinful, soul vital and superior, rather like the cream in a profiterole or the battery in a torch.

  ‘Mary! What are you doing, dear? You’re meant to slit the stalks, not cut the heads off.’

  Mary stared down at her flowers. She had decapitated six of the chrysanthemums, and without even noticing. Perhaps John-Paul was right in calling her aggressive – aggressive even as an infant, which had helped, apparently, to build that savage super-ego, which then turned on her, attacked. Violent as an infant seemed even more unlikely than sexual as a wife. The photos showed her plump – a docile, almost vacuous baby, staring into space or munching on her teddy. But Lesson One in therapy she had learned: nothing was what it seemed, least of all small babies, whom she’d always loved as innocent and sweet, but who were actually downright dissolute and vicious.

  She scooped up an amputated flower-head. Could she salvage it perhaps, make a Chinese-style arrangement comprising one perfect stemless bloom floating on a saucer? No. She’d never find saucers in a church. They were restricted to brass vases which needed hours of polishing to make them worthy of the altar. She threw the heads away, hoping Father Fox wouldn’t see them and accuse her of extravagance. She really ought to concentrate. It was a privilege to do the altar flowers, arrange them beautifully – for God – bring a part of her own garden to God’s House. She and Phyllis had been doing them for years together. Phyllis was unmarried – well, married to the Church, perhaps, and very close to Father Fox, who shared her interest in … what was it, that name they gave to people who loved birds? Not loved them in the vague sense of saving crusts and bacon rinds, or buying robin Christmas cards, but studied all their Latin names and rushed around to breeding spots with binoculars and notebooks. Omi-something, wasn’t it? She wasn’t good at words today, could only remember shameful ones like clitoris, libido.

  ‘Clitoris,’ she whispered. She’d never said the word before, never even heard it said, before John-Paul had brazened it. James wasn’t one for words.

  ‘What, dear?’

  Mary wrenched her mind back, tried to fix her whole attention on Phyllis’s brass vase. ‘It’s late for roses, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Those were just the last few in the garden. I think we’ll have to buy our flowers next week.’

  ‘Orgasm,’ she mouthed. The word felt strange – and shocking – especially that last syllable which rhymed with ‘spasm’, seemed to stretch her lips and jar her tongue. John-Paul had actually asked her if she had them – yes, just as casually, as chattily, as if he were asking whether she had oil-fired central heating, or cats, or fitted carpets. ‘O-o-r-gasm.’ She made the word much longer, spun it out; suddenly caught the eye of Ignatius of Loyola, who was frowning from his picture on the wall. She mustn’t think of orgasms in church – well, they weren’t quite in
church, but in the sacristy, which was maybe even worse since it housed all the sacred vessels, the vestments and the altar linens, and had framed pictures of a dozen saints watching from three sides.

  She stripped the lower leaves from a chrysanthemum, forced her mind to stay on flowers or birds. The leaves smelt strange – damp and slightly putrid; the dizzy scent of roses almost overwhelming the small and sober room which smelt usually of piety and mothballs. Smells were so important. John-Paul’s room smelt dangerous – our – the clash of men’s cologne with cigarette smoke, the faint tang of Mint Imperials cutting through the odour of old stone; the reek of sex, of rage. Then all those threatening noises – panting traffic, pouncing clocks, police cars squalling past. So different from this tranquil church where the silence was so thick you could bottle it and take it home – no confessions being heard, no organ practice, children’s choir, no fussy Father Fox, just her and Phyllis alone with God. She ought to feel serene; always had before, the days they did the flowers – until John-Paul had started joining them, unasked.

  ‘Quick! Mary, turn that tap off. You’re miles away today. Is it Jonathan again? I thought you said his ear infection cleared.’

  ‘Yes, it did, thank God. He’s still not really right, though.’ Mary mopped her sodden skirt, swabbed water from the floor. ‘I’m sorry, Phyllis, really. I think I’m simply tired. I’m not sleeping all that well.’

  ‘You’re not drinking coffee, are you? Late at night, I mean?’

  ‘No, it’s usually hot chocolate.’ Too often, James would say. It seemed to be either sex or chocolate for some reason, never both.

  ‘That’s every bit as bad dear. People just don’t realise, but there’s caffeine in hot chocolate, and in cocoa. I can’t look at them myself. One sip and I’m jumping.’

  Mary glanced across at Phyllis, tried to see her jumping, see her murderous. Could she be violent, too, exterminating mothers, fighting sexual urges? It didn’t seem that likely. Her face looked pale and passionless behind the rimless glasses, the grey eyes weak but kindly, the prim mouth tightly closed, as if to prevent anything unpleasant either going in or out of it. Perhaps caffeine hyped her up, but without it she was dormant, like a small boat always tethered to its moorings, not risking the high seas, not risking any movement beyond a gentle lap and plash. She was dressed solidly and sensibly in lumpy tweeds with olive knitted knee-socks and men’s brown leather sandals. Mary towelled a final damp spot from her own Berkertex two-piece, admired her new blue slingbacks which she’d bought in John-Paul’s honour. She and frumpy Phyllis didn’t really have that much in common, except the Church and lovely gardens. Strange how all her friends seemed wrong now, strangely superficial. She’d never noticed it before – before John-Paul, that is. She longed to have a real best friend (the sort you had at boarding school and swore to giggly secrecy about periods or boys), so they could discuss vital things like super-egos or erotogenic zones, instead of the new Marks and Spencer range of frozen yogurts, or the price of football boots.