Blood and Water and Other Tales

by McGrath, Patrick

  You will detect the maudlin cast of the man’s reflections; but what, I wonder, will you make of this?

  I stopped dead and peered into the gloom. After a moment I saw what it was that had alarmed the dog: some small animal was upon the bridge. I could see its eyes shining, but I was not yet close enough to identify the species. I advanced, not without caution, but with another step it seemed that we had come upon, not a wild animal, but a child—for the creature was sitting on the edge of the bridge and swinging its legs over the water. Khrushchev held back, growling softly. I drew close, and with a flick of my cigarette lighter briefly illuminated the scene.

  To my immense surprise the creature on the bridge was not a child. It was a tiny man, with a well-trimmed, graying beard and an old-fashioned suit of some heavy tweed. He was smoking a cigar, but what was most remarkable was that he was not more than fifteen inches high!

  Again I flashed the cigarette lighter. His face was very familiar indeed, but I could not at that moment place it. “Good evening,” I said. “I believe we may have met. My name is Neville Pilkington.”

  “Guten Abend,” said the tiny stranger in a high, piping voice. “Ich bin Doktor Sigmund Freud.”

  Allow me to break into the narrative here and briefly summarize a few comments Max Nordau made at the inquest. Neville Pilkington, he said, had been referred to him after complaining to his physician of sleeplessness, depression, and “queer spells.” During these so-called queer spells my uncle would apparently enter a hypnagogic state in which hideous sharp-edged instruments loomed out of a black mist and attempted to amputate parts of his body. These experiences were of course extremely disturbing to the old man, for they seemed at the time utterly real and authentic. He would “come to” after a few minutes, his heart dangerously excited and his whole body twitching and shivering with fright. Max Nordau described these events as “retributive delusions.” He suggested that my uncle felt guilt with regard to his own body, and that the sharp instruments were symbolic of self-punitive impulses long repressed. He had begun, he said, to conduct intensive psychotherapy sessions with my uncle, but it seems Neville’s psyche was well defended, and staunchly resisted the attempted penetrations of Nordau’s insights. The Freud hallucination, said Nordau, was a product of that defensiveness. It was one of the most vividly externalized manifestations of psychic resistance in the morbid personality that he’d encountered in his long clinical career.

  Now, the image of Max Nordau blandly articulating this nonsense to a gullible courtroom is one I shall not quickly forget. Nordau is a plump, sleek man with one of those plummy, Old School voices that always intimidate the lower middle classes. He has greasy silver hair which is not cut frequently enough and resolves to oily curls on his fat, pink neck and pink, gleaming temples. He favors tweedy suits and meaningful ties, and when he reads from his notes dons silver-rimmed spectacles which make him seem academic, and further awes the shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and other respectables that normally make up a coroner’s jury. My uncle’s behavior subsequent to encountering the Freud seems eminently sane to me; but you can perhaps imagine the implications Nordau laid upon it.

  I stepped back, brandishing my walking stick. “Stay where you are,” I said, and pointed the stick straight at him. The Freud seemed not at all dismayed; indeed, he began to skip along the path, waving his cigar in the air, twirling about and griming wildly in the gloom, and I felt sure he intended to leap on me like a monkey.

  This I most emphatically did not wish, so when the little fellow ceased his gambols and ran straight at me with arms outspread I took action. “Hold?” I cried; then I lunged forward with my walking stick. But to my unspeakable horror, I felt the stick pass right through him—as though nothing were there but thin air!

  I need not continue with this entry. Such is man’s terror of the preternatural that Neville, and Khrushchev, made for home with great alacrity; and when they had attained the security of the domestic hearth, the door was rapidly bolted and the curtains drawn against the night. And then—and this is a point that was not explored thoroughly enough at the inquest—my uncle did not attempt to contact Nordau. Instead, he did what any normal person would have done in the circumstances: he drank a number of large Scotch-and-sodas.

  September 23. It’s hard to credit the events of last evening. I can hear Mrs. Digweed downstairs, andthe bustling of that good woman seems to restore me to my senses. A trick of the failing light; a nervous system fragile and overtired... clearly I need to get away. What if I’d been seen? An elderly gentleman standing en garde on a lonely footpath at dusk, lunging at some unseen mannikin with his walking stick—people have been committed for less! Not a word to Nordau, of course!

  At one point during the inquest Nordau was asked why, in his opinion, Neville Pilkington had not told him of the appearance of the Freud. I shall attempt to reproduce verbatim the psychiatrist’s response:

  Neville Pilkington suffered from a severe guilt complex which stemmed from unresolved conflicts in the psychosexual domain. These conflicts were so deeply buried that an extended psychotherapy was indicated. After only a few sessions, however, Mr. Pilkington realized, at a quite unconscious level I believe, that if he thoroughly excavated the areas we had begun merely to probe at, he would have to face certain memories, or certain truths about himself, that he had successfully avoided for several decades. The Freud of course obliquely symbolized myself and my profession, precisely what Pilkington was threatened by. His fear translated into a hallucinatory conflict with the very therapy that could free him of his guilt— but to acknowledge this meant to accept the progress of his treatment, and Pilkington could not yet afford to make that concession.

  “Do you mean to say,” said the coroner, a dehydrated stick of a man with gray skin, “that the deceased terminated his treatment because he did not wish to reveal his guilty secrets to you?”

  “I go further than that,” Nordau replied.

  I suggest, sir, that the deceased did not wish to reveal his guilty secrets to himself. His psyche was castellated, as it were, almost to the point of impregnability. But hairline cracks had begun to appear, and fearing the worst he fled. I was no longer able to help him.

  This is how Max Nordau spoke. With one hand in his pocket and the other making fat, flowing, persuasive gestures in the air, his rhetoric mellifluated with rich sonority in that dreary place, and none challenged him. The court was not surprised to learn that my uncle left for Belgium later that day. That would be the evening of September 23.

  It is at this point that I must talk about Africa. My uncle was not in fact born in England; shortly after the Great War his parents, my grandparents, emigrated to Kenya, where, in Neville’s words, “they joined a clique of blue-blooded colonials who made of the White Highlands a sort of voluptuary’s paradise.” Life was not easy for a child growing up in that climate of privilege and hedonism, and I fear that Neville and his twin sister, Evelyn, though pampered in a material sense, were emotionally undernourished; and it did not surprise me that after the war—which Neville spent in London in the Auxiliary Fire Service—he did not return to Africa. He remained obsessed with the continent until his death, however, as will be evident from several of the later journal entries.

  One curious and tragic incident from those early years must be mentioned before I continue, and that is the death of the twin sister, Evelyn. This occurred during the last summer she and Neville spent in Africa— the summer of 1938, just before they were to go up to Oxford together. Now, their mother had been dead for many years, and in the spring of 1938, after a long struggle with cirrhosis, their father died. With no other relatives in Africa, Neville and Evelyn decided on the advice of the family lawyers to sell the plantation and, after completing their studies, to settle permanently in England. Neville promptly used part of his patrimony to buy a little two-seater airplane, and in the little time that remained to them in Africa he would take Evelyn up almost daily for long flights over the magnificent Ken
yan uplands.

  One evening, as he was about to land at the Nairobi airfield, Neville realized he was bringing the plane in too fast; so he lifted the nose, to lose speed. He spoke of this to me only once, and it caused him great pain to do so; I did not press him for details, and report here only what he told me. The engine stalled, and the little plane went cartwheeling over the grass and burst into flames. Neville crawled out, very badly burned, and was rushed to hospital. Evelyn was not so lucky; her charred body was recovered from the wreck some hours later. After almost a year in hospital, and a long series of skin grafts, Neville left Africa and sailed, alone, for England.

  I never heard him speak of his sister again, I presumed because he felt responsible for her death. It was only a chance encounter a year ago with an old lady who’d known the Pilkingtons in Kenya that led me to doubt his account of the accident; it was then that I realized what he had done on the crossing from Mombasa to Southampton, and why he lived as he did.

  September 24. I have always had a vivid affection for Brussels, but my sense of pleasurable anticipation has been rather deflated by the disappearance of Khrushchev. Mrs. Digweed was out looking for him all morning, but to no avail. Even as the cab was carrying me off to Victoria I found myself peering down sidestreets with almost maternal anxiety. Oh, dear! I do hope the little fellow is safe. Now I am settled in first class with a volume gf Ruskin at my elbow. I have pulled down the window blinds and removed my tinted spectacles, and the compartment is comfortably gloomy; and tomorrow I shall once more be in Brussels. Why do I love the city so? My entire critical life has of course been associated with the Brussels of the Nineties, its most expressive and brilliant moment; but decadence, in the Paterian sense, is now more to my taste than brilliance, and I’m attracted by the aura of lost imperial grandeur—who can forget King Leopold, with his compulsive appetite for the great festering swamps of the Congo?! There’s an air of decay that clings to his capital now, and this is what delights me.

  I suppose I must have dozed off. I come to slowly and am aware of voices. Waking is sometimes difficult at my age. But as my mind clears, my eye falls upon two tiny men perched on the edge of the opposite seat. One is Freud; the other I do not at first recognize. He has a long, damp, sensual, clever mouth. He wears round, thick-rimmed spectacles, and his black hair is plastered straight back from his forehead. It is, I realize after a moment, Otto Rank. The two stop speaking and gaze at me with clinical detachment. I start up, shaking off the last fetters of sleep, and stumble to the door of the compartment. Rank addresses a question to me in German, but I do not understand him. I flee down the corridor and return a moment later with the conductor, a thin man from Kent. The compartment is empty.

  This we may call the second sighting. It demonstrates how profoundly disturbed my uncle had been by Nordau’s “therapy sessions”—disturbed to the point of being terrorized by phantom analysts, and forced to flee for his sanity! Nordau did not, of course, accept responsibility. He bemoaned the fact that with the “acceleration of the psychotic process,” as he called it, my uncle should have removed himself from “the domestic milieu.” He implied that had Neville remained in London, he would be alive today. Ha! The reptile!

  Having embarked for Ostend, my uncle did not spend the night in his cabin. Instead, he stayed in the bar, happy for once, he wrote, of the proximity of his fellows. On his arrival in Brussels he took a cab to a modest hotel near the Bourse. He had often stayed there in the past. The patron, a portly Fleming, welcomed him with warmth and gave him a large room with a view of the street. Neville closed the curtains, unpacked, and made a hurried toilet; then he left the hotel and walked to the Cafe LeFanu, for he did not wish to be alone a moment longer than was necessary. Cruel irony for a man who had spent his life in comfortable and shadowy isolation!

  September 25. The LeFanu is an unremarkable instance of high Belgian Art Nouveau, a hysterical curvilinear impulse whipping across leaded glass, tiled floors, globe lamps, and large whiskered waiters in white aprons who move among the tables with trays of red beer and white wine. I have determined to while away the hours of the night in this busy place, lest I should be once again visited. The dilemma I face is, I think you will agree, an exquisite one: I cannot speak of it without appearing deluded; and yet not to speak condemns me to shoulder alone the hideous burden of my haunting.

  It seems, however, I am to be denied even such solace as the LeFanu can offer. At a few minutes after midnight I saw them again, and I rose from my seat with a cry of despair. It was Freud and Rank, standing on a bar at the far side of the crowded cafe, and they had been joined by Ernest Jones. They were talking about me, that was clear, for their faces were turned constantly in my direction, and Freud once gestured at me in a rather patronizing manner with his cigar.

  The LeFanu is a large cafe, and by this time it was hot, packed, and smoky. A hubbub of animated conversation issued from every table and alcove, punctuated by sudden brays of laughter and the clink of bottles, and to one such as I, drinking alone and not partaking of the general mood, there seemed a desperate and frenzied tone to the conviviality, a sense that if the lights should fail, if silence should descend, some larger emptiness might have to be faced, some yawning, possibly even twisting, void—the effluvium of mortality was there.

  My cry produced silence. Every face in the room turned towards me as I rose from my seat. I shook my fist at the three figments on the bar. I pushed my way across the room, my lidless old eyes prick-ling with tears of anger and my hands trembling as with a fever. The three diminutive psychoanalysts stopped talking and observed my approach from shrewd and hooded eyes. Ernest Jones twitched his nose at me like a rat.

  “Steady on, old girl,” he murmured as I reached the bar. I went for him; but of course there was nothing there for me to clutch at, no neck to wring and no head to punch. A pair of waiters gently led me off, and the cafe was within moments as frenzied as before.

  This was the third sighting. It was soon followed by the fourth, one of the most critical in the entire sequence. The drama was beginning now to move inexorably to its grim and grisly conclusion, and Neville, I think, realized this. His journal entries start to sound a note of fatalistic resignation; at one point he remarks that “contrary to common belief, one of the few blessings of age is one’s ripening ability to adjust to new and distressing circumstances. Thus,” he writes, “have I seen my friends begin to die off, and thus have I prepared myself for the loss of Khrushchev.”

  He returned to his hotel and settled himself at the table, where he wrote up his account of the LeFanu sighting. A great silence had settled upon the city, and he had the feeling that his was the only active mind in the whole of Brussels. He was not startled when he heard from behind him a discreet cough. He turned in his seat, pen poised. Freud and Rank were reclining on his bed in the manner of odalisques, their languid eyes upon him. “Jones,” he wrote,

  dapper in a black suit with a white collar on a blue-striped shirt and a navy bow tie with tiny white dots, was leaned nonchalantly against a leg of the bed. As I sat, half-turned in my chair, he advanced smartly across the darkened room, his little cane tapping on the floorboards. In a moment he was beside me, and then with simian agility had clambered up my chair and sprung onto the table, where he planted himself squarely on my open journal, one black bespatted oxford upon each leaf He had eyes like a hawk, Ernest Jones, and they drilled into my brain like a corkscrew or a sharp-tipped spiral bore. He began immediately to speak, in a low, hypnotic voice, a honeyed voice to which I listened with an increasingly numbed passivity, such that it began to seem that the voice was issuing not from the tiny apparition before me but from somewhere inside my own brain. How long this discourse lasted I cannot say, save that his words, spiked though they were with familiar analytic terms, yet flowed with such a potent and seamless logic that the arguments seemed not framed or constructed by any interested cognitive agent but instead snipped whole and intact from the very fabric of language it
self; and thus was I led, by degrees, without apparent block or hindrance, to accept his conclusion, radical as it may appear.

  What happened next is rather shocking. Apparently, Jones took up the pen and employed it as a lance to put out one of my uncle’s eyes. The final journal entry, written some days later in London, describes how, in the moments immediately preceding this operation,

  there was the slowing down of time such that every tiny detail became magnified, momentous and horrible. Now it was the spectacle of Jones removing his cuff links and rolling up his shirtsleeves. Freud and Rank had joined him on the table, but stood beyond the pool of light shed by the table lamp, the only lamp that burned in that unholy room. There was the flare of a tiny flame as Freud relit his cigar. Rank was peering at me intently, and even from behind those great thick lenses his eyes glittered perceptibly in the gloom.

  When it was done, Neville stumbled, weeping and laughing, to the bathroom, where he cleaned his face as best he could and flushed the tissues down the toilet. As he stood “swaying and trembling over the bloody swirling waters,” he experienced an access of sublime sensation such that, he writes, “I glowed like a molten pillar, and knew peace for the first time in many months.”

  The heartbreaking pathos of this sentence was not apparent to Max Nordau. Even now I can hear him pontificating in that tawdry little courtroom:

  Neville Pilkington was of course profoundly and floridly psychotic when he put out his eye in a shabby hotel in Brussels. His earlier delusions had involved the amputation of body parts, and I think we can safely assume that the identical pathological mechanism was involved here. I would briefly mention in this regard one simple Freudian concept, that of the bodily ego, the somatic frontier upon which the deepest-spawned of our great atavistic impulses finally and indelibly work themselves out. On this frontier Neville Pilkington disfigured himself, destroyed a vital organ. Figuratively, and with the only means at his disposal, he hacked down some great standing thing. I leave it to you to name that thing.