by David Storey
‘How I loved her. Above all else,’ I am about to add, but remark, ‘And never looked back until, approaching my fiftieth year, but, more closely, my fifty-fifth, I was overwhelmed by forces which youth, energy, certainly passion had, until that moment, kept at bay, a species of terror, the intensity and extensiveness of which, even now, after all these years, I hesitate, indeed, am unable to describe.’
‘Experiences,’ Robeson says, referring to Raynor’s letter, ‘you’ve had since childhood.’
‘I believe you were in Junior King Edward’s?’ I enquire.
‘King Edward’s Juniors,’ he replies.
‘Fee-paying at the time.’
‘I was a fee-payer all the way through school,’ he says, and adds, ‘At least, my parents were.’
‘I was at Onasett Juniors.’
‘A good school, too, I hear,’ he says.
‘Only a few passed to the Grammar.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Equality restored by administering to the sick in your home town,’ I tell him.
‘It wasn’t my home town,’ he says. ‘My parents lived abroad and, when not, in a variety of places. However,’ he pauses, ‘I have made it my home town,’ and adds, ‘Would you say you were feeling depressed?’
‘Dispiritation,’ I tell him, ‘has been my way of life. I wake each morning as do the bereaved. Someone has gone. In my case, my mother’s eldest son who died six months before I was born.’
‘Your mind harks back to it continually,’ he suggests.
‘Not,’ I tell him, ‘any longer.’ (I have, I might have told him, outgrown it.)
‘We all have our portion of bad luck,’ he says. ‘Some infinitely more than others. The question we have to ask isn’t,’ he continues, ‘why or how, or even when and who, but what are we going to do about it?’
The words taken, or might have been, out of Maidstone’s mouth (a pragmatist!).
‘A life,’ he continues, ‘of initial hardship, followed by one of considerable success.’
‘A classic pattern,’ I tell him, ‘of decline.’
Etty is subdued. ‘Perhaps you’d feel easier,’ I suggest, ‘if my daughter wasn’t here.’
‘On the contrary,’ he says, ‘I’m interested in what she has to say.’
‘Over the last few days,’ she says, ‘he has rambled in his speech, has been unable to focus his thoughts, is totally self-absorbed, and appears oblivious of any help anyone may give him.’
God help Cotman! is what I am about to say, but, if shocked, swiftly reply, ‘That’s not entirely true. I am more aware than ever of my faults and do my best, despite dispiritation and attacks of terror, to set them right.’
Robeson writes – left-handed, I note, recalling this mannerism in the Sixth Form Library, his pen held in such a way that, as he wrote, the nib was pointing at his chest: something narcissistic, careerist, even, in this gesture – less so, I reflect now, as if, self-possessed, he is privately lost.
‘In addition to which there are,’ I tell him, ‘moments of self-preoccupation that induce a feeling of my being lifted from the ground. I float. A curious sensation I can’t,’ I conclude, ‘otherwise describe.’
‘Would you describe it as ecstatic?’
‘On the contrary,’ I tell him, ‘I invariably feel reflective, as if this form of elevation is, or should be, my normal state of mind.’
A sense of normality, he might have written, he ascribes to an abnormal state of mind.
‘Who, in this situation, is to define normality?’ I enquire. ‘Or do we take a hippocratic view that that which is not experienced by the observing mind is not to be considered normal – is, if not corroborated, to be considered pathogenic, etymologically deriving from, in short, a grief-stricken source?’
Such abstruseness (a view of Linfield’s inner suburb – rows of semi-detached houses – visible through the window and, closer to the building, a mildewed, stone-flagged yard) is not to Robeson’s liking: his pen, its cap towards me, is arrested in its track: the self-directed scribbler, the other-directed scribe, the silver clip enquires, have you come here to decide?
‘Were you,’ I enquire, ‘at the Allgrave party that summer when “the best generation KEGS has ever had”, as the Head described it, met for, as it turned out, the very last time?’
‘I was one of the few,’ Robeson said, ‘who didn’t go.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ he says, ‘I wasn’t invited.’
‘I wonder why that was?’ I ask.
‘Because,’ he says, ‘I was in the bug-house,’ smiling at Etty to add, ‘The boarding-house where us poor boarders slept, socially unacceptable,’ he goes on, ‘to the town boys,’ and, still smiling, ‘You’re the third person from that party I’ve seen in the past few months,’ continuing, ‘not socially,’ the pen still in his hand, ‘but in this room.’
‘Depression of the kind I have described is the equivalent,’ I tell him, ‘of having your skin peeled back, or your skull removed. All those things that normally protect you have been displaced. The whole metabolism quivers and shakes, is ceaselessly tormented.’
I tell him this to have the satisfaction, the cap of the pen once more towards me, of watching him make a note on his pad.
‘You’re the seventh psychiatrist I’ve spoken to, at length, over the past ten years – one, roughly, every eighteen months – and though our encounters have never led to much – as much a fulfilment of their expectations, I might add, as mine – it has nourished in me a scepticism of my own reactions. Am I, for instance, I ask myself each morning when I wake – gripped by alarm, anxiety, dread – as mad as I make out? Is this a reasonable expectation? i.e., a sensitive and intelligent man, imbued with understanding, sensibility, taste, even with the gift of self-expression. Will it, unless I am brutalised like everyone else, ever be any different? Am I condemned to be an aberration, a sensitised monstrosity, thrown up by nature which only evolutionary indiscretion will bring to an end? It’s not, for instance, by chance, that when I look up the antecedents of a case like mine – unique, I would have thought, in many respects – I am not directed to psychology, or even analysis, let alone philosophy or God, but to teratology, the science of vegetable and animal monstrosities, and the famous Harrison and Schaadt experiments, at Berkeley, on pregnant mice.’
I am scarcely, at this stage, in a state to go on (his pen feverishly active on the paper before him – how like those lectures in Natural Science, he, as always, sitting at the front).
‘I haven’t heard of teratology,’ he says, smiling at Etty, ‘applied to this particular subject. Nor,’ he goes on, ‘of Harrison’s – and did you say Shat’s experiments on pregnant mice?’
‘I want! I want!’ comes a voice outside the door, followed by a banging at the one adjacent.
Robeson’s pen is still. The adjoining door is opened: ‘What is it, Hilary?’ a male voice enquires.
‘Can I smoke?’ a woman’s voice replies.
‘Only if you have to.’
‘You said only one a day.’
‘Only one.’
‘I’ve had one, Doctor Freeman, already.’
The door of the room is closed.
‘What relevance,’ Robeson says, ‘do these experiments have for you?’
‘My mother suffered,’ I tell him, ‘in a similar way When,’ I add, ‘she was pregnant with me.’
‘You’re not equating yourself,’ he smiles once more at Etty, ‘with a mouse?’
‘With several.’
‘Or even,’ a further smile at Etty, ‘with several.’ Leaning to the file, he adds, ‘Your psychiatrist at the North London Royal was inclined,’ he consults an appropriate sheet of paper, ‘in fact, was anxious to discount it.’
‘We are talking about a physiological entity,’ I tell him. ‘Like having, for instance, red hair, or being born with only one foot.’
‘At least; not three,’ Old Robey laughs.
I la
ugh as well: so does Etty, who, until now, has watched Robeson’s expression with a frown.
‘If,’ he goes on, ‘it happens to be – shall we say, not “true”, but relevant – it doesn’t change in any way what you intend to do about it now. A mouse, I suspect, has no powers of reflection. Consciousness it might have, in a passive but not an active sense, of things mulled over and acted on. And we,’ he smiles again at Etty, ‘are mullers, and you, if I’m not mistaken – according to the The Edwardian, which I still receive, at the end of every term,’ he gestures in the direction (I take it) of the school, ‘are a muller-in-extremis, your books, whereas unread by me, have been commented upon almost, it seems, on an annual basis – until, that is, the last few years. I take that to be congruent with your illness.’
‘It was more my illness was congruent with something else,’ I tell him. ‘My wife leaving me, for instance, first for the sake of science, then for the sake of the parliamentary private secretary to the Minister of Health and subsequently, in a reshuffle, to a junior minister in the same department.’
‘Your wife’s departure was congruent with your illness?’ he enquires.
‘Coincidental,’ the patient declares. ‘I was already in extremis,’ (the foetal prodigy of those early months, locked in with its placenta, had, after sixty-odd years, finally shown its hand).
‘What brought you to me?’ he suddenly enquires and, as I turn my head from the window, perceive that this enquiry is directed not at me but to the, until now, relatively silent figure beside me who, pre-empting my desire to say, ‘Brought is the operative word: I didn’t choose to come,’ says, ‘He appears, despite you being with him, to be speaking to someone else. That, and his irresponsible and at times nonsensical actions, his inclination to sit, his arms folded across his stomach, and rock himself in a chair, his tendency – which, at this stage, I wouldn’t wish to put any higher than that – to weep, involuntarily, without provocation, sometimes, with only one or two intermissions, for several hours on end.’
‘What do you weep about?’ he asks, and adds, ‘It’s unusual for a man to weep so long,’ as if, in reporting this behaviour, Etty is being, if not deceptive, misleading.
‘I don’t know why I weep,’ I tell him. ‘It happens, as it were, without my knowing. First of all,’ I go on, ‘there’s fear, a feeling of desolation, of loss, so complete that, even after all these years, I couldn’t begin to describe it.’
‘Why not,’ he tells me, ‘make a start?’
‘First of all,’ I tell him, ‘there’s the fear that is on me the moment I wake. There is no morning, for instance, when it isn’t there, and no day when it doesn’t persist until the evening. At times it is so intense, so comprehensive, so all-embracing that, involuntarily, I weep.’
‘What sort of fear?’ the pen pointing once more towards his chest.
‘A passive fear, synonymous with waking to the realisation that during the night a death sentence has been passed, and an active fear synonymous with the realisation I will never see another dawn, another night, my children, my wife, or anyone I love, again. Underlying this sensation is a feeling of guilt which not merely absorbs but consumes the mind entirely, so monstrous and complete, so all-pervading and all-enclosing, that there is no hope – no conception, even – of forgiveness or atonement: gripped by this dementia, the mind can think of nothing else. Yesterday, for instance, I persuaded myself I was on the threshold of going mad. This was prompted by the severity of a bolt depression which struck me, unaccountably, when I glimpsed my daughter’s doctor, Raynor, in the village, doing nothing more significant than carrying a bag of shopping to his car. Immediately I thought, “My last hope has gone!” though what that hope was, and why it should be abandoned at such an irrelevant moment, I have no idea. This attack, appeared to be related to the shallowness of everything around me: the people in the street, the face of Raynor with his bag of shopping – the fact that he had something meaningful to do in life and I, transparently, had not – and with the face of Etty and the cleaning-woman as I came back inside the house. I immediately thought of Bea and the shallowness of our marriage, of a relationship diverted from its course by something as inconsequential as a laboratory experiment and a relationship with a one-armed opportunist whose name at school, I understand, was “Bandit”. The fatuity, as I say, not only of all these people but of such reflections reducing me to a state not indistinguishable from that of a condemned man who steps out to the yard and, after one or two faltering steps, onto the scaffold. A certain complicity in what is about to take place absorbs him, alongside the feelings of terror and despair, a dispiritation so profound he can’t even speak, as if, in desperation, he is about to slip the noose from around his neck. Yet the noose, in this allegory, is reality itself, and the irreality he would have to endure in taking it off is worse than the reality he faces at present, a realisation which pitches him into a despair greater than anything he has previously imagined.’
The room is quiet: a door opens in the corridor outside. ‘One more,’ says a woman’s voice, followed, from inside the adjacent room, by, ‘Perhaps you’ll miss one tomorrow.’
A door is closed: feet fade towards the sound of distant voices.
All this, I reflect, is induced by what? Not hunger, not electric shock, not a lack of shelter, nor a lack of love but, despite the absence of such things, an organic, physiological condition endemic to my system.
‘I think,’ Robeson says, writing again, ‘you give me a very clear picture.’
When I enquire, ‘Of what?’ he replies, ‘A tired mind.’
‘My God!’ I cry. ‘I only need a rest!’
‘A rest,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t do any harm.’
‘What do you think, Etty?’ I ask. ‘Does that complete the clinical picture?’
‘I think it’s gone further,’ she says, ‘than that. We need,’ she continues, ‘a practical solution.’
Robeson raises his head: he is not sure what a remark like that is intending to suggest.
‘You think your father,’ he pauses, ‘ought to come in.’
‘I’m not sure I can handle him,’ she says, ‘in the mood he’s in at present. He can’t, quite clearly, be left in London or up here to live alone.’
‘Do you want to come in?’ Robeson says, addressing me.
‘I’m quite all right on my own,’ I tell him.
‘You’re currently living with your daughter,’ he says as if, having identified a coffin, he is tapping in a nail.
‘It was her, and her mother’s suggestion I should come up here,’ I tell him. ‘My wife, as you know, has now re-married. “A run-away romance”, it was described in the papers. Though where they ran to I’ve no idea. They were both back at work inside two weeks.’
‘That is an indication of the difficulties my husband and I are under,’ Etty says, obscurely, interrupting this remark.
‘The only point,’ I tell Robeson, ‘I wish to make is that I was living contentedly in London, and though one or two neighbours had made complaints, they were nothing that, on reflection, I couldn’t contend with.’
‘What complaints?’ Robeson says, closing the file on the desk and re-adjusting the pad on his knee.
‘I solicited, in a wholly innocuous way, the wife of my next-door-neighbour and the wives of two other neighbours across the street. With women particularly I have difficulty in distinguishing between what I wish them to be – loving, warm, all-embracing, providing the affection I never had – and what they are: attached to, and strongly imbued with the values of their husbands. Now I’ve recognised this as a characteristic of my illness – which, like most disabilities, requires a little while to get used to – I can and, indeed, shall refrain from doing the same again.’
‘What would be the same?’ he says, this a turn-up, his look suggests, for a former hero of King Edward’s whose name, for several decades, has figured prominently in the termly published Edwardian.
‘I commented on their make
-up as well as their appearance, in terms which were approving but which were regarded by them as, if true, intrusive. Yet how can truth be intrusive? I’d enquire, their husbands, of course, taking a more forceful line, disinclined to have their wives approved of in any way at all.’
‘How approve?’ He re-crosses his legs, preventing the pad, as he does so, from falling on the floor.
‘I embraced each one of them and, in one specific instance – that of my immediate neighbour – solicited a kiss.’
‘Were you aware of this?’ He directs his enquiry to Etty.
‘It was my mother who visited him,’ she says, ‘and found him unable to work or even properly feed himself. Both his general practitioner and the psychiatrist, Maidstone, suggested it would be a good idea to bring him away, as an alternative,’ she adds, ‘to returning either to the North London Royal or Boady Hall.’
‘I went prepared,’ I tell him, ‘to a group therapy session, with an account of my past history at my fingertips, to find only four other people there, in addition to the psychotherapist, as a consequence of which, on the therapist’s instructions, we spent the entire hour playing Twenty Questions. How, with an intellect like mine, with a wealth of social, cultural, moral and spiritual, not to mention domestic experience behind it, am I supposed to recover? I’m afraid confinement, apart from keeping me off the streets, never did me the slightest good.’
‘I had no alternative,’ Etty says, ‘but to bring him home. But I’m not sure his eccentricities fit into a home with two young children, and I’m loath to have him returned – since he so dislikes it – to Boady Hall.’
‘Eastley Hall,’ I enquire, ‘is a suitable alternative?’
‘Doctor Raynor,’ she goes on, ‘suggested we got in touch with you, not merely,’ she adds to me, ‘as a matter of form but because he believes we need advice.’
‘There are halfway houses,’ Robeson says – with, I notice, a return of his smile. ‘But none that I know of would be suitable for a man of Richard’s background.’