Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  In the corridors of her school, Mathilde fell in love with the part she was playing. No longer the grand Princesse, she was by turns the compassionate or stern headmistress. Her staff adored her and bowed to the trenchancy of her quick decisions, her infallible instinct for what would be best for individual children. Visitors from the Ministry of Education or the courts were quick to jeer behind her back at the progressive ideas of this eccentric aristocrat. But faced by Mathilde they quailed in their boots and gave in to all her demands.

  The second thing Mathilde did was quite different and it involved a greater obliteration of her identity. In the quiet of her own apartment, she began regularly and systematically to write. Several men in her circle had commented that Mathilde had a particular genius for listening. She now put this to some benefit. Everyday from ten to twelve, she sat at her desk and wove the things that she had heard and seen and felt into stories. They were trenchant little tales told with a mordant wit which exposed the vagaries of high life. When she had written twelve of these stories, Mathilde sent them off pseudonymously to a publisher. With an excitement she had not experienced since her wedding night, she waited for the response. It came. M. Roland Duby, for this was the name she had chosen, was congratulated on his brilliant stories which the Editions de Blais would be delighted to publish. Mathilde clapped her hands in glee. She revelled in this newly-found secret existence; and even when Paris was agog at the identity of a writer who seemed to know its corrupt core, yet whom no one had met, she revealed herself only to a single person.

  It was during the time that she was writing her first stories that Mathilde’s father’s health began seriously to fail. Albert de Polignesco had suffered a stroke just before Mathilde had determined to move to Paris. He had recovered. Now complications of various kinds had set in and he was quickly losing his grip on reality. During the daytime, he would lie on a chaise longue in the vast Neuilly conservatory where he was attended by two nurses. At night, once the children were in bed, Mathilde cared for him. Sometimes she read to him and her voice seemed to soothe his pain. At other times, they would talk in a desultory way. It was clear that he wanted her near him and she took to sleeping in a small bed at the far corner of his room.

  This unaccustomed proximity had a strange effect on Mathilde. In all her years, she had never been so close to her father. During her lonely childhood, she had sought his love and approval, even simply his attention and rarely received it. Now his dependence on her gave her an uncomfortable power which she both relished and despised. It was deeply troubling to get to know the person who for years had been an unreachable superior only in the guise of this pathetic old man.

  One night she was woken from light sleep by the sound of a shrill curse. Instantly she was by her father’s bedside. Though his eyes were wide open, he seemed not to see her. Nor did he respond to her words. The voice that emerged from him was one she had never heard her father use: it was rampant with hostility.

  ‘Filthy slut. So you’ve been at it again. I told you what I would do to you, if I found you out.’ He flailed a thin fist. ‘Come here, Claire, come here you impudent hussy.’ The voice had changed now. It was wheedling, cajoling. ‘There what do you think of that. It’s bigger than his, isn’t it? It belongs to a prince of the realm. Yes, stroke it, suck it.’

  A thin stream of spittle emerged from her father’s mouth. Mathilde trembled. She felt nausea rising in her stomach. Claire, that had been the name of the English governess she had had at the age of eight. She had stayed longer than some of the others. Her father’s eyes were closed now. He was quiet. Mathilde watched him for a long time, her mind in turmoil.

  The next night, it happened again. But the scene his delirious words evoked was different. This time the woman’s name was unknown to Mathilde, but he was evidently in bed with her. ‘It’s beautiful. With you, it’s beautiful. Your pussy is beautiful. Everything moves.’ His expression changed, grew sour, ‘Not like that cold tight little cunt I’m married to.’ He stared straight at Mathilde, his luminous eyes unseeing.

  Mathilde lurched away from him. She didn’t want to hear anymore, know any more. She drew her blanket over her ears. The next day, like the previous one, her father seemed to remember nothing. He was as always, passive, slightly absent, grateful when things were done for him. As for Mathilde, she was racked by his revelations. The shock of hearing her mother referred to in that way; the horror of what must have been their marriage. Inevitably, she thought of her own. Was she like her mother. Did Frederick think of her like that? And what were these wonders of women that her father referred to. Mathilde’s thoughts could focus on nothing else. She was terrified of facing anymore of his delirious memories, yet simultaneously she wanted to hear them. She steeled herself to returning to his room, rationalising her fascination with the excuse that she did not want her father to feel she was withdrawing from him. Nor did she want any strange nurse to hear his delirious wanderings.

  For one long week, Mathilde listened to the old man and learned and cried, as much over herself as over her mother and him. At the end of that time, her emotions in turmoil, she spoke shamefacedly to her father’s physician.

  ‘At night, he’s delirious. He talks. He doesn’t recognize me,’ Mathilde gazed at the elderly doctor beseechingly.

  Dr. Picard patted her hand. ‘It is not unusual at this stage,’ he comforted her.

  ‘But the content of his delirium…’ Mathilde couldn’t bring herself to go on. She had known Dr Picard since her earliest childhood.

  ‘The mind is a strange apparatus and not always a noble one.’ He accepted the cup of tea the maid brought in and looked at it reflectively. ‘You’re overwrought, tired. We shall bring a night nurse in.’

  Mathilde shook her head emphatically.

  ‘He is nearing his end, you know,’ Dr. Picard said gently.

  ‘But I need to understand.’ Again Mathilde couldn’t go on. What was it exactly that she wanted to know? Was it to do with the content of her father’s deliria or the fact that they occurred? She looked into herself and realised that it was both. She took her courage in her hands. ‘I want to know why it is that he talks only about his sexual life.’ There, she had brought it out at last, and she rushed on, ‘And why, how, this delirium takes hold of him?’

  The old man shrugged. ‘I am neither a philosopher, nor one of these new fangled psychoanalysts. But if you must take advice, here.’ He wrote two names on a slip of paper. Mathilde took the piece of paper. In her heart of hearts, she sensed that it was neither doctors nor philosophers that would help her understand what she sought. But she read the names in any case. One of them would, in a circuitous way, eventually change the course of her life.

  Chapter

  Five

  __________

  ∞

  ‘My father said some very strange things before he died.’

  ‘Strange things?’ Prince Frederick savoured the full flavour of his Pouilly-Fumé, before swallowing and looking at his wife.

  It was early summer and the golden glow of the setting sun warmed the terrace of their Neuilly residence. Roses, clambering profusely round ornate railings gave off a heady perfume.

  ‘Yes,’ Mathilde paused. She stroked the sleek head of her father’s prize Borzoi, who now trailed her everywhere. ‘Yes,’ she murmured again, ‘very strange things.’ Ever since her father’s death a month ago, she had wanted to talk to Frederick about her fears, question him. The desire had become an obsession. But amidst the endless funeral arrangements, the pomp and circumstance of the event itself, amidst the array of family and visiting dignitaries, the moment had never presented itself. Now they would be leaving the Neuilly house in two days’ time to return to Denmark and Mathilde felt that if she didn’t seize the occasion, another would not easily present itself.

  ‘He talked about my mother in his delirium, talked about intimate matters.’ Mathilde couldn’t find the appropriate expression. She met Frederick’s eyes. He was looking a
t her expectantly. ‘Yes, he seemed to suggest there was something wrong with her in… well, in her female parts.’ She blurted it out clumsily. Frederick stiffened. His face closed, he looked away from her. Mathilde hurtled on, ‘Frederick, are you happy with me in that way? Am I properly formed?’

  He stood up, almost dropping his glass. ‘I cannot talk about these things, Mathilde.’ His normally ruddy complexion had grown white. He looked at once angry and helpless. ‘I am not French, you know.’ It was his parting shot. He bowed to her briefly and turned away.

  Mathilde, looking after his lumbering form, felt contrite, sorry for him. Yet the feeling did nothing to ease her own sense of frustration. She knew that he would now go off with his preferred secretary, a rotund young man given to leather coats and boots, and sit for hours discussing the intricacies of the next week’s fishing expedition.

  Had Princesse Mathilde been born fifty years later the why’s, how’s and wherefore’s of what she was feeling would have been paraded for her daily in the pages of the women’s magazines. Indeed, she might even have had prescribed for her a little dialogue with which to confront her husband. As it was, the limited circle of her experience, her class, the lack of a common language in which to talk about sexuality, all conspired to make her feel that she was somehow, like her mother, at fault. Throughout the long succeeding months, no matter how much she buried herself in activity, this subterranean fear oppressed her. Was she sexually misshapen? Was something wrong with her? The fear was accompanied by a vague longing. Despite her new enterprises, despite the strong young limbs of her growing children, the Princesse again felt dissatisfied with herself and the world. Without telling her husband, she arranged to attend lectures at the Paris special infirmary, lectures which she hoped would rid her of her ignorance and her fear.

  Princesse Mathilde sped lightly from Gaitan de Clérambault’s lecture hall just before the professor terminated his opening gambit of the season. Then, in the dim gloom of the corridor, she hesitated. Yes, why not wait. True, Jacob Jardine had not taken up her invitation to attend one of her Wednesday evenings, but he had nodded to her from across the room and it would be rude to vanish without exchanging some form of greeting. She made herself small as the young doctors emerged from the room and by the time Jacob appeared, she had made up her mind.

  ‘Would you do me the honour of accompanying me home? I should very much like to discuss some of the points M. de Clérambault raised today.’

  Jacob detached himself from his group. His friends’ curious eyes were on his back. He hesitated. He had thought about Princesse Mathilde after having met her some four weeks back at the Brenners’. But he had deliberately not taken up her earlier invitation. Indeed he and Jacques had argued over it. ‘I will not be paraded in front of society people to titillate them with stories about madness. I will not be party to their gawping and tut-tutting over others’ suffering.’ he had said then.

  His suspicion about Princesse Mathilde was unabated. Yet he had no other immediate engagement, no excuse to offer and the woman with the straightforward gaze and charming smile who stood before him now in a tailored grey suit, seemed a distant cousin of the gilded and bejewelled creature he had met on the eve of the new year.

  Jacob nodded his assent. He had another momentary misgiving as they approached the Princesse’s silver Daimler and a stern liveried chauffeur bowed a greeting. But when he had been ushered into the book-lined comfort of her study, where afternoon light poured through large windows, he began to relax. He liked the unostentatious elegance of the room; he liked, too, the way the Princesse sank into a deep chair, crossed long, slender legs, and looked at him intently, without a trace of coyness, as they talked.

  She questioned him about his work, about his interest in psychiatry and Jacob found himself answering her with a fluency normally reserved for Jacques and his other male friends. It was to do with the quality of her listening, the wide arch of her eyes, the spirited irony which lit up her features. He knew from her lively responses that she followed him in everything he said and understood the intent beneath the words.

  When they had moved from their second cup of coffee to wine, the Princesse asked, ‘And M. de Clérambault. What do you think of him?’

  Jacob grinned, ‘He’s madder than the patients he pretends to diagnose. Completely and rigorously systematic. He’s a pigeon-hole man. He doesn’t listen to a jot of what patients say. He simply peers at them with his eagle-eye, classifies them into one of his categories and happily locks them away in perpetuity. Because, of course, if their illness is organic, as he insists it is, there is nothing to be done.’ He shook his head in disgust, earnest now.

  ‘So you have found masters more to your taste, Henri Claude, perhaps,’ Princesse Mathilde pressed him.

  Jacob shrugged. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Clérambault is a genius. With all his faults, at least he understands the propulsion of the erotic.’

  The Princesse’s dark eyes grew darker. She looked away for a moment, straightened her skirt.

  Jacob noticed her discomfort. ‘But you, how did you come to be interested in all this?’ he asked, suddenly burning to know more about her.

  The Princesse laughed. ‘If you want the truth, it’s all to do with my father.’ She had never said this to anyone but old Dr. Picard before and she was surprised at the facility with which the statement had tripped off her tongue.

  Jacob pushed her, ‘Your father?’

  The Princesse reached for one of the cigarettes she had taken to smoking and waited for Jacob to light it. She inhaled deeply. With Jacob the words seemed to flow out of her with relative ease. ‘Yes, in his delirium, just before he died, he talked only of sex.’ She flushed slightly. ‘It was something, as you can imagine, which he normally didn’t mention. I wanted to know why…’

  He seemed not in the least surprised. ‘When the censors of the conscious mind are at bay, all kinds of repressed thoughts, hidden wishes make themselves known. It is only natural.’ Jacob examined her face acutely and read the anxiety there. ‘But, of course, it is not usually something we would choose to reveal to our children. You must have been deeply distressed.’

  It was all so simple the way Jacob put it, so clean, almost scientific. The Princesse felt one layer of shame lifted from her. There was more, but that was not something she wanted to broach now. After all, they hardly knew each other. Instead she asked, ‘But the things that are revealed in this kind of state, are they true?’

  A twinkle lit up Jacob’s dark eyes. ‘What is truth?’ he intoned with mock solemnity. ‘For the unconscious, for human beings, for us, can there ever be a single truth?’

  The Princesse took it and remained silent for an extended moment.

  Jacob continued, ‘Have you ever read Freud?’

  Mathilde shook her head, ‘I have heard his name, though not always mentioned with great respect.’

  ‘I shall bring you one or two of his books. You must judge for yourself. He makes it clear how we are propelled by forces within us which are beyond our knowledge; and that these forces are to a large extent sexual.’ With that he rose. ‘I ought to get back to the hospital now. Thank you for a most enjoyable few hours.’

  ‘The pleasure has been all mine,’ Mathilde responded, meaning it. Then she restrained him for a moment. ‘The problem is I want to know; I want desperately to know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jacob considered. ‘In that I fear we may be alike.

  From her window, she watched his back receding along the street. She had a mounting sense of exhilaration.

  Over the next weeks, Jacob and Princesse Mathilde met with growing regularity after M. de Clérambault’s lectures. In the quiet of her large airy study, they talked, hungrily exchanging ideas and impressions. Since she spoke German, he had brought her Freud’s Studies on Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams. She read them avidly and he was impressed by the quick-wittedness of her response. They often argued, sometimes agreed. Occasionally, too, they offered up li
ttle fragments of their own lives, small gem-like distillations of their experience, a revealing anecdote, a pointed aside. But rarely did they mention the matter-of-fact make-up of their day-to-day existences. Jacob knew little more than when he had begun seeing the Princesse about how she spent her days and all she knew of him was his passion for his work.

  Nonetheless Mathilde felt that for the first time in her life, she was truly awake. A film of what she now thought of as boredom seemed to have lifted from her eyes. She was alive to everything: to the pace of the March clouds across the sky, to the shoots pushing through the ground of the garden at Neuilly, to her boys’ scamperings and tears. She found herself hugging them a great deal and when she held their taut little resisting bodies, tears would suddenly come to her eyes. But no matter how busy she was, no matter how numerous the run of her activities and duties, her inner clock was set by her meetings with Jacob. Without thinking about it, she anticipated and drew her energies from those brief weekly hours in the confines of her study when the whole workings of the human world seemed to inform the agility of their two-handed conversation.

  One afternoon, late in March, Jacob grew particularly heated in his description of a scene he had witnessed earlier that day between a head psychiatrist and a young female patient. He was pacing the room, his face stormy. Mathilde rose to ring for the maid. It was time for a drink. Unwittingly, Jacob brushed against her. They both stopped in their tracks. A palpable current of electricity had passed between them. Their eyes met and suddenly Jacob’s arms were round her. He kissed her fiercely on the lips and then as quickly let her go. ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve been wanting to do that for some time.’

  Before Mathilde could gather her thoughts, he was abruptly gone.

  The next evening Jacob was due to dine with the Brenners. As usual the sitting room of their sumptuous home was aglow with soft lights, discretely positioned flowers. The old master portraits, the solid Empire furniture, everything was in its customary place. Yet as soon as Jacob entered, he sensed something ominous in the air.