by Ian Mcewan
By the time we had finished lunch, wine and sunshine were making the adults lazy. Bored with us, the children took pieces of apple to feed to the ponies. Jean began to explain how Rachael was missing her father but refused to talk about it. “I saw her talking to you in the river. She attaches herself to any man who comes into the house. She seems to feel there’s something she can get from them she can never have from me. She’s so trusting. I wish I knew what it is she’s looking for. Perhaps it’s just the sound of a man’s voice.”
We were watching the children as she spoke. They were wandering further upriver. At a certain distance from his mother, Leo glanced back, then slipped his hand into his sister’s. Jean was starting to tell us how well the children looked out for each other when she suddenly broke off and said, “Oh God! There she is. That must be her.”
We sat up and turned to look. I got to my feet.
“I know I asked you to do this,” Jean said quickly. “But I don’t think I can meet her. It’s too soon for me. And she’s brought someone with her. Her father. Or perhaps he’s her lawyer. I don’t want to talk to her. I thought I did …”
Clarissa put her hand on Jean’s arm. “It’s all right,” she said.
The couple had stopped a dozen yards away and stood side by side, waiting for me. The girl looked away as I approached. I knew she was a student. She looked about twenty, and she was very pretty, the incarnation of Jean Logan’s worst fears. The man was James Reid, Euler Professor of Logic at the girl’s college. We shook hands and said our names. The professor was hardly older than me, fifty perhaps, and rather plump. He introduced the student as Bonnie Deedes, and as I took her hand I could imagine how an older man might risk everything. It was the kind of prettiness I would have dismissed as a cliché if I’d heard it described—that blond, blue-eyed peachiness that drew a line of descent from Marilyn Monroe. She wore cutoff jeans and a ragged pink shirt. The professor, by contrast, was in a linen suit and tie.
“Well,” he said through a sigh, “shall we get this over with?” He was looking at his student, who looked down at her sandaled feet (the nails were painted red) and nodded miserably.
I led them across to the picnic and made the introductions. Jean would not look at Bonnie, and she in turn kept her eyes on her professor. I invited them to sit. Bonnie diplomatically arranged herself cross-legged on the grass, just at the edge of the groundsheet. Reid compromised between dignity and politeness by half kneeling. He looked at me and I nodded.
He placed his hands on his knee and stared at the ground a moment, focusing his thoughts, the habit of a lifetime’s lecturing. “We’ve come,” he said at last, “to explain and apologize.” He addressed his words to Jean, but she kept her gaze on the vivid remains of the pizza. “You’re living through this tragedy, this terrible loss, and heaven knows, the last thing you need is this extra pain. That scarf left behind in your husband’s car was Bonnie’s—there’s no doubt about that.”
Jean interrupted. Her ferocious gaze was suddenly on the girl. “Then perhaps I ought to hear it from her.”
But Bonnie simply wilted in the heat of that gaze. She could not speak, nor did she dare look up.
Reid continued. “She was there, all right. But I was too, you see. We were together.” He looked at Jean and let this sink in. Then he said, “I’ll put it at its simplest. Bonnie and I are in love. Thirty years between us, all very foolish, but there it is, we’re in love. We’ve kept it secret, and we know that soon we’re going to have to face all kinds of complication and upset. We never imagined that our clumsy attempts at concealment would cause such distress, and I hope that when I’ve explained what happened, you’ll find a way to forgive us.”
Far away along the riverbank we heard the children calling to each other. Jean sat quietly. Her left hand was across her mouth, as if to restrain herself from speech.
“My position at the college and with the university is about to become impossible. It’ll be a relief to resign. But that needn’t concern you.” He was looking at the girl, trying to catch her eye, but she wasn’t playing along.
“Until recently, Bonnie and I had a rule never to be seen together in Oxford. Now we’re throwing it all to the winds. On the day this happened, we’d planned a picnic in the Chilterns. I picked Bonnie up from a bus stop on the edge of town. We’d gone less than a mile together when my car broke down. We pushed it into a lay-by, and that’s when she persuaded me that we shouldn’t give up on the day. The car could be sorted out later. We should try and hitch a lift. So I cowered behind Bonnie, feeling terribly self-conscious and wondering if someone would recognize me. After a couple of minutes a car stopped, and it was your husband, on his way to London. He was very friendly and kind. If he guessed about us, he didn’t show any disapproval. Quite the contrary. He offered to make a detour from the motorway and drop us up by Christmas Common. We were almost at the place when we saw the man and boy having trouble with their balloon in the strong wind. I didn’t really take it in fully—I was sitting in the back, you see. Your husband pulled over sharply and without a word went running over to help. We got out to watch. I’m not a very physically active person, and there seemed to be quite a few people going in to sort it out, so at first, at least, it seemed sensible to stay put. I don’t think I would have been much use. Then the whole ghastly thing started to get out of hand, and we realized that we should try and get over and help them hold the balloon down, and we started to run. Then it was too late, the balloon was up in the air—and you know the rest.”
Reid hesitated over his choice of words. His voice dropped, and I had to lean forward to hear.
“After he fell, we were in a terrible state. It was panic, really. We went off down a footpath, trying to calm ourselves and think what to do. We left the car far behind and forgot that our picnic was in it, as well as Bonnie’s scarf. We walked for hours. I’m ashamed to say that one of my worries was that if we came forward as witnesses, I would have to explain what I was doing in the middle of the countryside with one of my students. We just didn’t know what to do.
“A few hours later we found ourselves walking into Watlington. We went into a pub to find out about buses or taxis. Standing at the bar was a man telling the barman and a group of regulars what had happened that afternoon. It was obvious he was one of the men who had been hanging on the ropes. We couldn’t help ourselves letting him know that we had been there too. These things bind you together, you know, and you have to talk. The people who hadn’t been there seemed like outsiders. We ended up going home with this fellow, Joseph Lacey, to talk more, and that was when I told him of my problem. Later on, he drove us back to Oxford, and on the way he gave us this advice. He thought there were enough witnesses to the accident. There was no need for us to add our accounts. But he also said that if it turned out there were disagreements, or conflicting stories, then he would get in touch with me, and I could think again. So. We never came forward. I know it’s caused you distress, and I’m deeply, deeply sorry.”
At these words I became aware once more of the meadow, the golden swaths of buttercups, a pack of horses and ponies galloping toward the village at the far end, the distant drone of the ring road, and close by, on the river, a sailing race proceeding with silent intensity. The children were walking slowly toward us, deep in conversation. Clarissa was unobtrusively packing the picnic away.
“Oh God,” Jean sighed.
“He was a terribly brave man,” the professor offered her, just as I had once. “It’s the kind of courage the rest of us can only dream about. But can you ever forgive us for being so selfish, so careless?”
“Of course I can,” she said angrily. There were tears in her eyes. “But who’s going to forgive me? The only person who can is dead.”
Reid was speaking over her, telling her she must not think that way. Jean raised her voice again to castigate herself. The professor’s reassurances tangled with her words. This breathless scrambling for forgiveness seemed to me almost mad, Ma
d Hatterish, here on the riverbank where Lewis Carroll, the dean of Christ Church, had once entertained the darling objects of his own obsessions. I caught Clarissa’s eye and we exchanged a half-smile, and it was as if we were pitching our own requests for mutual forgiveness, or at least tolerance, in there with Jean’s and Reid’s frantic counterpoint. I shrugged as though to say that, like her in her letter, I just did not know.
At last we were all standing. The picnic was stowed, the groundsheet folded up. Bonnie, who had still not spoken, had wandered a few steps away, and by her restless movements indicated she was impatient to go. She was either dim, a genuine dumb blonde, or contemptuous of us all. Reid was hovering helplessly, anxious to oblige her but constrained by politeness to make a proper farewell. I slung the backpack over my shoulder and was about to go and say goodbye and put him out of his misery when Rachael and Leo appeared on either side of me.
I’ve never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand. They drew me away with them toward the little muddy beach, where we stood and faced the slow brown expanse of water.
“So now,” Rachael said, “tell Leo as well. Say it again slowly, that thing about the river.”
Appendix I
Reprinted from The British Review of Psychiatry
Robert Wenn, MB Bch. MRCPsych, & Antonio Camia, MA, MB, DRCOG, MRCPsych
A homoerotic obsession, with religious overtones: a clinical variant of de Clerambault’s syndrome
The case of a pure (primary) form of de Clerambault’s syndrome is described in a man whose religious convictions are central to his delusions. Dangerousness and suicidal tendencies are also present. The case adds to recent literature supporting the view that the syndrome is a nosological entity.
Introduction
“Erotic delusions,” “erotomania,” and the associated pathologies of love have produced a rich and varied literature which describes, at one extreme, unusual behavior or acceptable occurrences without psychopathological implications, and at the other, strange variants encompassed by a schizophrenic psychosis. The earliest references are to be found in Plutarch, Galen, and Cicero, and as a review of the literature by Enoch & Trethowan (1979) makes clear, the term “erotomania” has suffered from the very beginning from a lack of clear definition.
In 1942 de Clerambault carefully delineated the paradigm that bears his name, a syndrome he termed les psychoses passionelles, or “pure erotomania,” to distinguish it from more generally accepted erotic paranoid states. The patient, or “subject,” usually a woman, has the intense delusional belief that a man, the “object,” often of higher social standing, is in love with her. The patient may have had little or no contact with the object of her delusion. The fact that the object is already married is likely to be regarded by the patient as irrelevant. His protestations of indifference or even hatred are seen as paradoxical or contradictory; her conviction that he “really” loves her remains fixed. Other derived themes include beliefs that the object will never find true happiness without her, and also that the relationship is universally acknowledged and approved. De Clerambault was emphatic that in the pure form of the condition onset was precise and sudden, even explosive, and that this was an important differentiating factor; paranoid erotic states, he believed, probably erroneously (Enoch & Trethowan 1979), developed gradually.
Central to de Clerambault’s paradigm was what he termed a “fundamental postulate” of the patient having “a conviction of being in amorous communication with a person of much higher rank, who has been the first to fall in love and was the first to make advances.” Such communication may take the form of secret signals, direct contact, and the deployment of “phenomenal resources” to meet the patient’s needs. She feels she is watching over and protecting the object of her delusion.
In one of his earliest and most celebrated cases, de Clerambault described a fifty-three-year-old Frenchwoman who believed King George V was in love with her. She persistently pursued him from 1918 onward, paying several visits to England:
She frequently waited for him outside Buckingham Palace. She once saw a curtain move in one of the palace windows and interpreted this as a signal from the king. She claimed that all Londoners knew of his love for her, but alleged that he had prevented her from finding lodgings in London, made her miss her hotel bookings, and was responsible for the loss of her baggage containing money and portraits of him … She vividly summarized her passion for him. “The king might hate me, but he can never forget. I could never be indifferent to him, nor he to me … It is in vain that he hurts me … I was attracted to him from the depths of my heart …”
Over the years, as more cases are described, there has been a tendency both to broaden and to clarify the defining criteria: not only women suffer, not only heterosexual attraction is involved. At least one of de Clerambault’s patients was male, and more male sufferers have been identified since. In their survey of mostly male patients, Mullen and Pathe (1994) conclude that in intrusiveness and dangerousness, men predominate. Homosexual cases have been reported by Mullen & Pathe, by Lovett Doust & Christie (1978), by Enoch and his coworkers, by Raskin & Sullivan (1974), and by Wenn & Camia (1990).
Thus the diagnostic criteria for the primary syndrome (i.e., de Clerambault’s syndrome) as suggested by Enoch & Trethowan would be likely to find general acceptance among those who accept the clinical entity: “a delusional conviction of being in amorous communication with another person, this person is of much higher rank, has been the first to fall in love, and the first to make advances, the onset is sudden, the object of the amorous delusion remains unchanged, the patient gives an explanation for the object’s paradoxical behavior, the course is chronic, hallucinations are absent, and there are no cognitive defects.”
Mullen and Pathe cite Peres (1993), who observes that an increasing awareness of the threat presented by de Clerambault sufferers is bringing about an “explosion” of legislation to protect their victims. Mullen and Pathe highlight the tragedy for patients and victims alike: for the patients, love becomes an “isolating and autistic mode of being, in which any possibility of unity with another is lost. The tragedy for those on whom they fix their unwanted attentions is that, at the very least, they suffer harassment and embarrassment, or the disintegration of their closest relationships, and at the worst they may fall victim to the violent expression of resentment, jealousy, or sexual desire.”
Case History
A twenty-eight-year-old unmarried man, P, was referred from the courts following charges arising out of an attempted murder.
P was the second child of an elderly father who died when p was eight and of an unsupportive mother who remarried when P was thirteen. By his own account, P was an intense and lonely child, prone to daydreaming, who did not easily make friends. When his mother remarried he was sent to boarding school, where he was above average academically, but not dramatically so. While he was there, his older sister moved abroad, and he never saw her again. He did not remember being teased or bullied, but he formed no close friendships and thought the other boys looked down on him because he had “no father to boast about, the way they did.” He gained entrance to university, where the pattern of isolation continued. P felt the students were frivolous. He joined the Student Christian Movement, and though he did not remain a member for long, he began to take comfort in his faith about this time. He left university with a poor degree in history and for the next four years drifted between low-skilled jobs. By now he had virtually no contact with his mother, who had divorced her second husband and had inherited a large house in North London and a sum of money from her sister.
P trained to become a teacher of English to foreigners and was one year into his first job when his mother died and he became the sole beneficiary of her estate, his sister being untraceable. He gave up his job and moved into the house, where both his isolation and his religious beliefs intensified. He meditated “on God’s glory” for long periods of time and went fo
r walks in the country. During this time he became convinced that God was preparing for him a challenge, which he must not fail.
It was while he was on one of his rambles that P assisted at the scene of an accident involving a helium balloon. He exchanged a glance with R, another passerby who was also helping, who appeared to P to fall in love with him at that moment. Late that night P made the first of many phone calls to R to let him know that the love was mutual. P realized that the task set him by God was to return R’s love and to “bring him to God.” This certainty grew when he discovered that R was a well-known science writer who wrote from an atheistic point of view. In P’s various apprehensions of God’s will, he experienced no hallucinations.
There now began the barrage of letters, doorstep confrontations, and street vigils so familiar in the sad literature of this condition. In an interesting echo of de Clerambault’s famous case, P perceived messages from R in the changing arrangement of the curtains in R’s apartment. P also received information by touching the leaves of a privet hedge and from published articles by R that had appeared in print long before their first meeting. R had been living contentedly with his common-law wife, M, and within days this relationship was under strain from P’s determined onslaught. Later they separated. P was mostly euphoric, certain that despite R’s outward hostility, he would come to accept his fate and live with P in his large house. He believed R was “playing with him” and testing his commitment.
Soon the euphoria turned to resentment. Early on, P had managed to steal M’s appointment diary from her place of work. Using the information he had that R was to be at a certain restaurant, P hired contract killers to shoot R. The attempt ended with a diner at a nearby table being shot in the shoulder. P was overcome with remorse and intended to stab himself to death in front of R. This plan failed too, and P was arrested and charged not only with the restaurant shooting but also for having held M at knifepoint. The court ordered a full psychiatric report.