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The Ocean Liner

Page 29

by Marius Gabriel


  ‘I can’t wait to hear it. Do you know, he gave the original manuscript of the second movement to a young Jewish refugee we met on the boat.’

  ‘An attractive woman?’ Vera guessed.

  ‘Not even especially attractive. A nobody whom we will never hear from again.’

  ‘He is prone to these impulsive acts of generosity. Let us hope she looks after it . . .’ They walked in silence for a while, the gulls wheeling over their heads. The laughter of the others drifted to them on the breeze. Robert and Georgette Sachs were the centre of a cultured, elegant circle which adored Stravinsky. ‘This place has been a godsend to us,’ Vera went on. ‘Los Angeles is hellish in the summer. But up here we can breathe. Igor wants to buy a house here.’

  ‘If you need any help or advice, let me know.’

  ‘Thank you, Katharine.’

  ‘And what of the Disney film, Fantasia?’

  ‘They’re still working on it. It’s taking longer than they expected. They say it’s the most ambitious animated film ever attempted. They’re hoping to release it by the end of the year.’

  ‘Is he still upset about the Rite?’

  ‘I think he’s dreading what they will do with it. You know how the music was mocked when it was first performed. He doesn’t want to go through anything like that again.’

  ‘I hope they show it the respect it deserves.’

  ‘Hollywood is unpredictable. There’s no telling how it will be. He has no control whatsoever.’

  Ahead of them, Stravinsky paused and turned. ‘What are you two gossiping about?’ he called.

  ‘Not about you,’ Vera replied, ‘you can be sure of that.’

  ‘Then come along,’ he commanded, ‘and don’t dawdle.’

  ‘You see what I mean?’ Vera said in an undertone. ‘Quite masterful.’

  The two women caught up with the rest of the group, and they continued across the beach, over the rocks.

  Washington, D.C.

  Rosemary hadn’t been frightened at all because they’d told her how easy it would be, and because Daddy was going to be with her. So even when they arrived at the hospital, and a whole bunch of doctors came out to look at her, and smile in that way doctors smiled, which wasn’t really smiling at all, she kept her nerve. That was what Mother always told her: keep your nerve, Rosemary. You’re a Kennedy.

  Being with Daddy was a treat, though.

  There was only Daddy who cared about her any more.

  Rosemary pressed close to him, holding on to his arm with both hands, loving the smell of him and the strength of him, which always made her feel soothed and loved. She loved the rumble of his voice and it didn’t really matter what he said, she could just lose herself in the sound of it.

  He was saying, ‘I’ve been having a lot of second thoughts about this lately. I’m not sure I’m ready to go through with it.’

  ‘Has something happened to change your mind?’ Dr Freeman asked.

  ‘Well, yes. Somebody told me that the American Medical Association is warning against this operation.’

  ‘The AMA is a very conservative organisation, Senator Kennedy. It generally takes them twenty years to catch up with leading practices in the field. I wouldn’t be too concerned.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. Rosemary’s not your daughter.’

  Dr Freeman kept smiling. ‘What is it exactly that concerns you?’

  ‘Well, I guess it’s the uncertainty of it all. This is a very new procedure.’

  ‘Very new, yes. But the results we’ve been getting have been astounding. There’s no other word for it. As medical people, we don’t like to use terms like “miracle cure”. But if there’s any such thing, then psychosurgery comes close to it.’

  ‘Are you saying she’ll be’ – Daddy glanced at Rosemary – ‘restored?’

  ‘We prefer to think of it as clearing the way for a better life. We believe that once we remove all the obstacles that are holding Rosemary back, she’ll immediately start to grow.’

  ‘Can you give me a guarantee that will happen?’

  Dr Freeman laughed, as though Daddy had made a good joke. He had a neatly trimmed little beard and glasses, and he looked like a happy version of the devil. ‘There are no guarantees in medicine, Senator. What we can promise you is that we’ll do the very best we can. I’ll be directing. The operation itself will be performed by my partner, Dr Watts, who is currently the leading practitioner in the United States – if I may say so, in the world.’

  Dr Watts edged forward. He didn’t smile as much as Dr Freeman. He was also shorter, and clean-shaven, and he didn’t have any laughter in his voice, as Dr Freeman did. ‘As we discussed in our previous conversation, the most egregious problems will be solved almost instantly. I’m speaking of the convulsions, the violence, the nymphomania—’

  ‘She’s not a nymphomaniac,’ Daddy said sharply.

  ‘You’ve told us yourself about the sexual liaisons,’ Dr Watts said, frowning. ‘I don’t need to tell you how dangerous these drives can be, Senator, especially in such—’ He looked at Rosemary with his small, hard eyes. ‘—such a buxom young woman. The risks of an unwanted pregnancy, of contracting a venereal disease—’

  ‘I know all that,’ Daddy growled.

  ‘Then you’ll know that Rosemary can’t continue like this. Female psychosexual aberrations are among the conditions which respond most favourably to this procedure, in our experience. The abnormal drives disappear, along with the indecent speech, the absence of modesty, the readiness to copulate with every male.’

  Rosemary didn’t understand all these words, but she knew what they were talking about, and she felt her face flush hotly. Only the fact that she could tell that Daddy really didn’t like Dr Watts allowed her to keep her nerve.

  Dr Freeman butted in, perhaps because he could also tell that Daddy was getting annoyed. ‘The Freeman-Watts technique is the procedure of the future, Senator Kennedy. We call it the “precision method”. It’s quick and it’s painless. Above all, it’s been proven to be highly effective.’

  Not to be outdone, Dr Watts tried again. ‘The technique, put very simply, transects the white fibrous matter connecting the cortical tissue of the prefrontal cortex to the thalamus. There is almost no bleeding.’

  ‘And only a local anaesthetic is necessary,’ Dr Freeman added. He smiled at Rosemary. ‘In fact, we need Rosemary to be wide awake, so she can tell us how it’s going. The operation is performed through small incisions, which will soon heal, leaving almost no scarring. It’s no worse than going to the dentist. She’ll be a much happier young woman, less frustrated, calmer. Have no fears, Senator. This is going to change her life – and yours.’

  Everybody fell silent when he said that, and they all stood around without saying anything, looking at Daddy, waiting. Daddy was looking at the ground. Rosemary felt so proud of him at that moment. He was so tall, and handsome, and important. Everybody treated him like the President. To her, he was far more important than the President, and she’d got into trouble with the nuns for saying he was more important than God, but that was how she felt. The nuns had told her to trust in God, but God had let her down too many times. She only trusted Daddy.

  At last Daddy turned to look at her. He looked into her eyes and smiled in that way that always made her heart sing with joy. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ she replied happily.

  And then she realised that he was going away, and was going to leave her there, and she didn’t think it was going to be all right after all.

  They came for her early the next morning. She was still sleepy, and she hadn’t had her breakfast yet, but they said there was no breakfast today. She was hungry and thirsty and starting to lose her nerve. She wanted badly to see Daddy but they said Daddy would come along later in the day.

  She had to lie on a trolley and be pushed along the corridor, so she couldn’t see where they were taking her. All she could see was the rows of lights i
n the ceiling above her. The way they swept slowly overhead was queer, and made her feel sleepy again.

  She was woken up when they reached a bright, white room where they told her to get off the trolley and sit in a chair. The nurse there had a real smile, not a doctor smile. She was kind. She said, ‘I’ll just cut your hair now.’

  Rosemary said she’d already had her hair cut short, which was true. They’d taken her to have it bobbed the week before, because they said bobbed hair was in, and now it curled just below her ears.

  ‘Didn’t they explain?’ the nurse asked. ‘We’ll need to shave the front of your head completely for the operation.’

  ‘You mean, bald?’ Rosemary asked in astonishment.

  ‘They can’t very well work through all that hair, can they?’ the nurse said reasonably, draping a sheet around Rosemary, like at the hairdresser’s. ‘But it’ll grow back in no time. You’re very lucky. You have such lovely thick hair.’

  Rosemary didn’t feel very lucky. She started crying as the nurse switched on the electric clipping machine. The hard steel teeth buzzed over her head. Dark locks fell into her lap. She tried to get her hand out of the sheet to pick up the silky strands that were falling, falling into her lap, but the nurse said she had to sit still.

  Dr Freeman and Dr Watts came in to see her. They were wearing very strange clothes, like gardeners’ overalls, except that their arms were bare right to the shoulder. Dr Freeman had bruises on his arms, as though he’d been wrestling, and someone had grabbed him really hard. You could see the finger marks.

  ‘Don’t cry, Rosemary,’ Dr Freeman said. ‘This is all worth it. You’re never going to be angry or sad again. You’re going to be a much calmer, happier person.’

  They gave her a pill to swallow. They said it would make her feel more relaxed. She took it, hoping it would work fast.

  Dr Watts didn’t say anything, but he put his hand on Rosemary’s forehead and tilted her head this way and that, as though she wasn’t even a person, just maybe a melon he was thinking of buying. He had a grease pencil and he wrote something on either side of her head, but she didn’t know what it was.

  Someone held her head tight. She felt the sharp sting of needles going into her temples, first on one side, then on the other. It hurt so much that she started crying again. But then her face went numb. It felt like they were still holding her head, except they had let go now. She just couldn’t feel anything. She asked them if that was it. They laughed and said, just a little bit longer, Rosemary. Just a little bit longer.

  She got on the table as they asked her and lay back. She hadn’t noticed, but there were leather straps fastened on the table, and now they started to buckle them over her wrists and ankles, pulling them tight so she couldn’t move.

  Before they started to operate, the nurse tilted her head right back, so she was almost looking at the people standing behind her. She could smell disinfectant and alcohol and the man-smell of Dr Watts’s skin as he bent over her. She could feel them cutting into her temples with the knife. It didn’t hurt, though she could feel the blade scraping on bone, and the tug of the skin being pulled back. There was sizzling and flashing and the smell of barbecue. They told her they were cauterising the incision to stop the bleeding, and that she was being very brave. That helped her not to lose her nerve. She had never been a fraidy-cat. Her brothers had taken care of that.

  And then the worst started. The drilling into her skull with the machine that was so terribly loud and pressed so terribly hard. The grinding of the steel against the bone that rattled her teeth and made her cry out in terror, ‘Daddy. Daddy!’

  First the left side. Then the right.

  It stopped at last. She lay trembling in her bonds, listening to the murmur of strangers’ voices and the rattle of instruments, feeling like doors had been cut into where her soul lived, and that it was in danger of flying out, never to return, like the nuns said happened when you died.

  Then Dr Freeman’s happy-devil face hovered over her, smiling.

  ‘We’re ready to start the operation now, Rosemary. We’ll need you to help us with this part, okay? And then it will all be over. Can you help us?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘Good girl.’ He looked away from her at the other people standing around the table. ‘Dr Watts is going into the brain now. You can see the dura exposed through the access holes. We’ll need to penetrate that to get to the frontal lobes. The patient herself will guide us as to how much we need to cut.’

  There was a sudden pain, much worse than any of the other pains, worse than the worst headaches she’d ever had. She felt dizzy and weak, and she started to pant like a dog in the sun.

  ‘Rosemary,’ Dr Freeman said, ‘can you say your Hail Mary for us?’

  ‘Hail Mary,’ she panted, ‘the Lord is with thee. Blessed – blessed art thou among women and blessed – blessed – blessed is the fruit of thy womb—’

  ‘Go on Rosemary. Don’t stop.’

  She could feel Dr Watts twisting something into her head, something that scraped and sliced. ‘—the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now – now and at the hour of our death. Amen.’

  ‘Very good,’ Dr Freeman said, as though she’d done something really clever. ‘What’s your favourite book?’

  ‘Winnie-the-Pooh,’ she whispered.

  ‘Can you tell us what it’s about?’

  The twisting and scraping was going deeper and deeper. She could hear Dr Watts breathing through his nose, close to her ear, in that way men did when they were concentrating on something, or when they lay on top of her in the grass. ‘It’s about a teddy bear.’

  ‘And what happens to him?’

  ‘He doesn’t have a brain.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘He likes honey.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He lives in the Hundred Acre Wood. It rained a lot, and he had to float in an umbrella to rescue Piglet. And he wanted to give Eeyore a pot of honey, but he ate it all, and so he – he just gave him the empty pot instead—’

  ‘That’s very good, Rosemary.’ His voice lost its purring tone as he spoke to the others. ‘We’re separating the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain now. As you can see, the patient is conscious and lucid through the procedure. She feels no pain, and only minimal discomfort. She will emerge from this free of depression or other negative moods, her emotions under her own control, and able to resume a normal life within a few weeks.’ The instrument was twisting and slicing deep inside her head now. ‘Rosemary, can you count backwards from twenty for us?’

  ‘Twenty,’ she said. ‘Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen. Fifteen.’

  ‘You left out sixteen,’ Dr Freeman chuckled.

  ‘Sixteen. Fifteen.’

  But she couldn’t remember what came after fifteen. There was flashing in her eyes, and she couldn’t see anything past the flashing. Sounds were coming out of her mouth, but they weren’t numbers, or even words. They were just sounds. Nor could she understand what Dr Freeman was saying to her now. She tried to push herself to say the numbers out loud, but it was like there wasn’t a Rosemary there to say anything any more. Rosemary was being switched off, like a radio going into silence, like a light going into darkness. She knew that something terrible was happening, but she didn’t know what.

  Los Angeles

  Stravinsky sat transfixed in the darkness of the movie theatre. The music was his, but there was no virgin dancing herself to death. The images were new and extraordinary.

  As the familiar movements of The Rite of Spring rolled from the speakers, he watched volcanoes erupting, the molten lava pouring and swirling, rolling into the sea with fantastic eruptions of steam and foam. In the depths of the oceans, tiny protozoa and amoebas coalesced, growing eyes and legs, becoming fish, crawling on to the land.

  The fish became lizards that nibbled on the lush vegetation, then evolved into mighty dinosaurs that roared and lumbered through
the swamps. Tyrannosaurus rex and Stegosaurus battled to the death in primeval rain. Spikes and claws and teeth tore at one another. Pterodactyls soared into a lurid sky.

  The rain ceased. The climate changed. Now he was seeing herds of dying dinosaurs trudging across a desert landscape, searching hopelessly for water, their pools and rivers drying up, their mighty limbs becoming trapped in mud. Despairing, skeletal, dying, they raised their monstrous heads to an orange sky, where a fatal sun bloomed.

  And then, whirling from the depths of outer space, a meteorite collided with the earth. The movie theatre shook with the rumble of the impact. Eyes were dazzled by the blinding flash which destroyed all life, levelling mountains and emptying seas.

  Stravinsky’s mouth was open. His fingers gripped the arms of his seat. It had taken a great deal to get him to come here to see Fantasia today, but he was experiencing a revelation.

  This music – his music – had worked on the minds of others to produce images that were very different from the ones he himself had had half a century ago, when he’d written the Rite; but they were extraordinary images, images shot through with fire and brilliance and – yes, with genius.

  It was a new kind of genius, flickering and evanescent. But was not all art flickering and evanescent? Did not music itself appear from the depths of darkness, flash like a comet across the brain, and then vanish into silence? Was that not the fate of every human soul?

  Sitting beside him, Vera put her lips close to his ear.

  ‘Do you forgive them, Igor?’

  ‘It is extraordinary,’ he replied, so loudly that people in the audience turned to hush him. ‘It is extraordinary,’ he repeated in a lowered voice. ‘They have reinvented the Rite.’

  ‘So you approve?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I approve or not,’ he replied, his round spectacles reflecting the restless shimmering of the screen. ‘They have reinvented me, too.’

  He heard her soft laughter.

 

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