by Brian Aldiss
On the beach were pebbles as smooth as the far-shining moon. As I chucked one of them into the foam dashing up to meet our feet, as I had the feel of it between my fingers, it occurred to me naturally that a recurring dream I had was about the moon, and that the moon was a female entity with which I was in communication. About the night was a unity that made this leap of thought entirely natural, as if something from a much more primitive way of life, long forgotten, had slipped through a panel in the universe and presented me with its visiting card.
This thought – it was something much more basic than thought – this illumination filled my mind like sunshine (it’s generally very dark in the brain, you know). We shook the sand from our shoes and went inside, up the wooden stairs to bed.
That nut Jung said that the crux of today’s spiritual problems lay in the fascination which psychic life holds for modern man. Or, alternatively, he might have said does not hold for modern man … But suddenly I was filled with a radiant psychic hope – I can’t tell you – quite unlike me. You’re religious and you’ll interpret it your way, but I felt it as a great pagan force, almost geometrically plain and pure, like cliffs, sea, moon, beyond our window sill.
Lucy was marvellous. She must have thought I was mad. We sleep naked. There she was in the nude, in the dim white light of the room, before creeping into bed. I didn’t touch her. She was a catalyst that night, a numinosity rather than the flesh. I was in a trance. There has never been a night like it in my life.
I recalled Muslims in Sumatra, prostrating themselves during Ramadan. The urge came on me to do the same. I flung myself to the floor. The light of the moon poured in on me like a white syrup. Without words, I addressed the anima, my female tutelary spirit – wayward priestess – beseeching her to speak to me, to emerge from behind the veil. I was complete, on the spiral, beyond myself, a creature, a flung pebble.
How I slept. Like a dropped pebble. Ellie, something wonderful happened to me. My anima did indeed visit me. Perhaps her face had always been turned elsewhere. Okay, it wasn’t like that, but it felt like that. I tell you some inarguable persona of female gender came unto me during that night while I slept and said –
Can you think of the most momentous thing she might have said? The most unlikely, the most tiny, the most illogical, the most inescapable? You can? Okay, well that’s what she said. I awoke with these words in my head: ‘Your mother did love you.’
You see, she was putting me right, putting everything right.
Your mother did love you. So I was worth something, after all.
It’s possible to be full of faith and joy and yet almost fainting. I told Lucy about it when she woke. And again she was great. She seemed extremely moved. At least, she didn’t laugh, and was strong enough to stand back and give me air. Somehow I managed to eat an enormous breakfast downstairs in a little back parlour, and then we went out into the morning air. There I tried to explain everything.
She listened and kissed me and did not run from me screaming.
Ever since that clear November day, I have been trying to rearrange my life according to the truth as delivered by that wondrous voice. Well – rebuilding rather than rearranging. It’s like arriving from Mars to try and live on Earth. Long, long ago, before geology happened, while you were still running about with a rusk in your mouth barking like a little dog, I came to the conclusion that the parents, sweet folk that they were, did not love their only little son. I had to come to that conclusion. It protected me from the uncertainty that was destroying me.
You won’t remember how you were kidnapped into persuading me how hateful I was. But mother grabbed you and strapped you into your pushchair and rammed on your bonnet and rammed on her bonnet and rushed off in the direction of eternity up Ipswich Street – simply in order to persuade me that I was such a little shit she had run away from me for good. Maybe that was the actual moment you got religion. You know – Teach Love Through Fear and all that. It was the moment when I got mad. I could not bear the nervous strain and found it as a matter of survival necessary to remain forever sullen, unmoved by kisses or threats, sheltered behind the doleful fortification of her assumed unlovingness. I mean, part of me knew even then that she did in a way love me, but was too much up the pole to admit it.
And ever since I have had to live my life behind that barricade. It has twisted everything out of true. All those whores in the East, all my attempts to cut my life short, all those fears of the permanent bond of marriage, all those delusions, all those broken hopes … all have sprung from that fragile defence erected at the age of four or five. Of course she was off her rocker, and she threw me off mine. I think she buggered up your life just as much, but I know you won’t have that.
Anyhow, somehow, I have survived sixty years of torture to be – it’s your word – Redeemed. I am a different chap. Lucy sees it. She knows there’s a touch of magic about me. Understanding follows forgiveness, blossoms follow drought.
As to what it has cost. The universe itself
There the letter broke off.
Clement closed the recipe book and laid it down on the desk, scarcely able to look at Lucy, who had sat by on the sofa, covertly studying his face as he read and crossing and re-crossing her jean-clad legs.
To break a silence that threatened to extend itself, she said, ‘Joe had some funny ideas – comparing the moon with a sparrow’s egg. He read too much poetry, Joe did.’
‘Did this letter get written out?’
She shrugged. ‘Are you annoyed? I know he’s not very complimentary about you … I think he wrote it only a week or so before he died.’
‘I’ll have it copied out and sent to Ellen, since it was intended for her. If you don’t mind.’
‘Why should I mind?’ she said, in a tone of voice that implied that she was never going to fathom the Winter family.
He said, speaking to himself, ‘Perhaps he felt in the end that everything did work out all right.’
Another long pause came, in which both of them sighed heavily.
As if putting many complex thoughts behind him, Clement brushed his hollow temples and looked directly at her with an intense gaze, smiling. ‘I’m so glad that you were with him, Lucy, at such a taxing time.’
‘Ever since I first knew Joe, times were taxing for him. But that bit about living on Mars is just an exaggeration. Being with Joe helped me quite a lot. He sort of gave utterance for both of us, really …’ She paused, but Clement’s grave yet friendly glance encouraged her to go on. ‘I felt a bit out of my depth – this talk of the anima and everything. But he relied on me. I quite liked that. He said that I would have to help him, but I didn’t see how I could, except by being with him …’
Clement nodded. ‘What more could anyone hope for? Why didn’t he come to me?’
Lucy said, without intending cruelty, ‘You asked me that before. You would have been the last person Joe turned to.’
Clement propped his elbow on his desk and covered his eyes, recognizing the truth of what she said. Always there had been a barrier between him and Joseph, a barrier not of their own making, compounded of the age difference and the effect of the ‘steel-engraving angel’ and the secretiveness of their parents. But his attempts to demolish the barrier had been singularly ineffective. It occurred to him now, as he shaded out the room with his hand, that an early awareness of and sensitivity to that barrier, to his brother’s predicament, had influenced him to follow his career in analytical psychology. All that he was owed mainly to Joe’s suffering.
The chief’s witness to his brother’s latter days had moved round the desk and stood beside him. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
Touched by this unexpected display of affection, he put an arm round her lower waist, causing her to move closer against him. Feeling her warmth, he rose and put both arms about her. For a moment, he set his lips against her shapely mouth, and then withdrew.
‘You’re not entirely unemoti
onal, then,’ she said, looking up at him.
‘Lucy – I’m being silly. You’re very kind. Let’s sit on the sofa together. I don’t know why I put the desk between us – force of habit, maybe.’
Without moving, she said, ‘You reckon I’m an easy lay, I suppose?’
‘I thought nothing of the sort.’
‘All right. No funny business.’ She sat down as he had indicated, contemplating him, not without a certain look of amusement in her eyes. ‘Perhaps the desk was between us for safety’s sake …’
‘My safety, then, not yours.’ They smiled at each other, as if something had been agreed with a delicacy beyond words.
‘Look at me, I’m carrying on with you,’ she said, with a mischievous smile. ‘The truth is, I’m glad to talk to you like this. How can I put it? I’m always snarled up in the minute – in everyday things. I’ve always got to be at the hospital or looking after Pat, or arranging for someone else to look after her, or shopping … Well, a thousand and one little things. Most people I know are like that. It’s a rubbish life. A cop-out, isn’t it? Sometimes it all seems unreal, as if my real life was going to waste. Does that make sense to you at all?’
‘Oh, it’s “everydayness” – that’s what H. G. Wells called it. We’re all victims of everydayness. Routine. It’s easier than thinking.’
She pulled a face in her endeavour to get an idea across to Clement. ‘That’s one thing I liked about Joe. He didn’t suffer from that sort of thing. He may have been a slave to his miseries, but he was free otherwise from – well, what you said, I guess, “everydayness”. I never met anyone else like that. But perhaps you’re like it too. Your parents can’t have been all that bad …’ She laughed.
‘We’re all given the means of refuge. Through dreams, for instance, which link us with our world of inner feelings, at least some of the time. Joe paid attention to his dreams, and they directed him to stability.’ He felt he was beginning to lecture, and added, more conversationally, ‘We’re so proud, as a species, of our big brains, yet they aren’t really all that good for thinking with, at least to judge by global results. What they really are good at is fantasizing. Most people do large amounts of fantasizing every day – by watching TV or videos if nothing else.’
‘Joe wouldn’t watch TV. He said he preferred the Far East.’
They both laughed. ‘Not everyone is as individual as Joe. Now, after this seminal dream, he set about rethinking his life, yes?’
She took a sip of her coffee and pulled a face. ‘I feel a bit guilty about this. You see, I did stay with him for a bit, then I didn’t. You’re used to all this mental stuff, and so was he. I wasn’t. I’m a physiotherapist, I’m physical. It’s everydayness, I suppose. Anything else I find – well, a bit freaky, to be honest.’
‘People do. That’s why analysts are treated as a joke.’
‘Also, I had my own troubles. Joe and Pat didn’t get on. He always said he couldn’t work with her around. He hated kids. He just wanted me. I couldn’t have that. I mean, she’s my child. He said to me once, “Shove her in an orphanage.” Fancy! “Shove her in an orphanage …” After all he’d suffered in that respect. He could be very hurtful. It wasn’t just me …
‘Also we had quarrels over CND. Oh, trivial things, really. So they seem now, now he’s dead. I got a room nearer my job, but Pat didn’t exactly take to the day centre. Cash was tight. Then I moved in with Ron, over in Brentford. Ron’s very easy-going.’
‘What does Ron do?’
‘He’s a sort of builder. I did go over to Joe at Christmas time, just for a couple of days. We were supposed to go on a march, but he wouldn’t come. Like a fool, I cleared off again. I know it was bad for him. It was bad for both of us. He wrote me a long letter in the New Year, and that persuaded me I loved him and should stay with him for good.’
‘I think I have a copy of the very letter.’
‘All the political stuff about what the Americans had done didn’t cut much ice with me, but I liked the trouble he’d taken. He was really quite a lot different when I moved back in – gentler with me and more patient with Pat. A sunny, gentler side was coming out. He allowed himself to be less guarded. You see, he meant what he said. He’d started to rethink his whole life. What a task – at sixty! There was nothing for it but to believe the message from his anima – the visitation had been too serious to ignore. He felt compelled to act on it. After all, the anima wasn’t the moon – wasn’t outside him. It came from within him, from something he had previously suppressed. You see what I mean?
‘He’d lived by the assumption that your mother did not love him. She’d wanted a girl to make up for the dead one and had only been happy when Ellen came along. Hence her treatment of him – all those threats that she didn’t love him, and her running away from him. Did you know she even threatened that she was going to die at any day? She was a right one, your mother! How come she didn’t behave like that to you?’
Despite his training, it was a question still capable of inducing guilt feelings. Clement clasped his hands together as he replied.
‘Joe bore the brunt of her mental disturbance. Illness, if you like. I came along twelve years after him, don’t forget, when mother had largely recovered. She’d had Ellen to console her, and so on.’
‘Mental disturbance. I should think it was. I see red when I think of a mother behaving in that way. To be honest, I don’t think she did love Joe, or she wouldn’t have done what she did. What do you say? I mean you’re the expert.’
Clement stared at the ceiling. ‘She had a neurosis. She was primarily preoccupied with her own life, rather than with anyone else’s. A diagnostic label isn’t very useful. She was unable to establish emotional boundaries, and was sexually unsettled; hence, in part, her rejection of Joe and over-possessiveness towards Ellen.’
‘But did she love Joe?’
‘Of course. If he said so.’
Lucy regarded him searchingly, as if she felt he had raised a barrier to further questions. Then she glanced at her watch and spoke in a deliberately casual tone.
‘Well, love is a whole bundle of things … Anyhow, after last November, Joe began to count up all the signs of love and affection she had shown him, totting up the positive side of the bill, as against the negative. How she had written to him twice a week when he was at that barbarous little school – St Paul’s. Even how she wept for joy – Joe said it was either joy or remorse – when he returned from that fatal stay with his gran at Lavenham. Lots of plus items like that.
‘But even the minus things. You see, what this rethinking process came down to was this – I guess it was the crucial bit – that he had to forgive. Forgive his mother and his father. Then he could forgive himself. He laughed and said he was getting as bad as Christ.’
‘I can imagine him saying it. The question of forgiveness would have been a crucial element, as you say.’
‘He was reluctant to do it. He fought himself. He had a fit of smoking and drinking hard, although he had been off the booze. I suppose you’d say he was mad?’
Clement shook his head. He saw that she wanted approval of Joe for reasons of her own, and spoke firmly. ‘Joe was never mad, Lucy. Far from it. Those infantile traumatic experiences, which destroyed the security he should have enjoyed, compelled him to recognize the insecurity of the human condition. So he grew up wise and unhappy, but not ill. Wartime suited him, for instance, because everyone shared the sense of insecurity which had become his lot. But, no, Joe was one of the sane.’
She smiled. ‘I think often it’s hard to tell. Often I wonder about myself. Thanks. What a good father you’d make, Clem. Anyhow, it was hard for Joe to accept that his mother had loved him after all the terrors she’d put him through, but he trusted in the communication of his anima, and pushed on. I could see the strain … Oh, I left him again, sod me. Just for a month. I couldn’t really grasp … It was wrong of me – I knew it at the time. Yet there I was, doing what his mother had done, deser
ting him. But I realized that if he couldn’t rely on me there was no one else … So I went back …’
‘Good for you. And for him. How did he receive you?’
She shook the curls at the memory. ‘He cried. He was very sweet. But next day he was angry and said he couldn’t stand me coming and going like that – he’d really rather I stayed away for good. Then – well, it was as if he stood back from what he was saying. He started to laugh, and said that was simply an old pattern. Now discarded. He kept saying it. “That was the old pattern.”’
‘Meaning?’
She sighed and put a hand on Clement’s knee. ‘He’d worked through the crisis on his own, while I was gone. He understood that the infant Joe had been unable to tolerate all the terrifying uncertainties of life with his mother. Did she love him? Didn’t she? He had to decide that she didn’t, and leave it at that. That was the old pattern. Signs of love, indications of love, had become unbearable – they just stepped up his anxiety. So much so that when she threatened to run away, he began to wish she really would. And me ditto.’
Clement nodded. ‘And when she said she would die, he wished she really would. All guilt-inducing.’
‘So by the age of six, he’d decided that neither of his parents loved him. A terrible thing for a kid. It also meant that he was unlovable. I know he was under terrible pressure, but I can’t see how he could have been so wrong – about such an important thing, I mean.’
Clement was silent, wondering how best to explain a case he had yet to understand fully himself. The question of phenomenology came into it. This attractive woman and the room they sat in undoubtedly had objective existence; yet his cognizance of her and the room was a subjective one, contained within his head. It was our perceptions, rather than reality, which determined what we perceived. The perceptions of the infant Joseph had been directed towards all that was threatening in the behaviour of his dominating parent. But there was also a transcendental reality, and towards that Joseph had been able, finally, to fight his way. His escapes from England were unconscious elements in that fight.