The Mind of Mr Soames

by Maine, Charles Eric

  ‘By sheer coincidence,’ he said when she answered the phone, ‘I happen to have a few cans of beer in the cupboard, and as it’s a warm, dry evening I was wondering if you would care to accept my hospitality.’

  ‘I’d rather you accepted mine. I’m fresh out of a bath and too deshabille to go wandering round the corridors.’

  ‘In that case I’ll be right down,’ he said with mock alacrity, and replaced the receiver.

  However, he did not hurry but spent a few minutes sitting on the edge of his bed idly scanning an evening newspaper. It was two days old, but still unread, which illustrated an insular lack of interest in the outside world rather than a shortage of leisure time, he decided. Not that much was happening, anyway. Somebody had robbed a jeweller, a famous film actress had been injured in a car crash, and the City was apparently in a state of anxiety neurosis about the Bank Rate—it was either about to go up or come down, he wasn’t sure which. There was a minor earthquake in the Middle East, Lord somebody-or-other was alarmed at the export situation, the Americans had shot a man into space, and a teenage rock ’n roll singer was stuck in a lift for two and a half hours in a building near St Giles Circus. The contemporary scene was just about ripe for psychoanalysis, he thought, putting the paper down and collecting four small cans of beer from the wall cupboard which acted as wardrobe.

  Ann was wearing a dark green housecoat which made her look decidedly remote and regal, but her smile was warm enough.

  ‘So far as I’m concerned it’s nearly bedtime,’ she said admonishingiy. ‘Or don’t you ever sleep?’

  ‘Occasionally,’ Conway replied, ‘but it’s an over-rated pleasure. In a hundred years from now we shall all regret the many years of our lives we spent unconscious.’

  ‘But not nearly so much as poor Mr Soames. How is he?’

  ‘Fit, smug and incontinent.’

  ‘One of the daily newspapers is trying to trace his mother.’ He put down the cans of beer on the table and stared at her in some astonishment. ‘His what?’

  ‘His mother.’

  ‘D’you know,’ he said with an air of amazement, ‘I never really thought of Mr Soames as having parents at all.’

  ‘Did you imagine he was born spontaneously in the cold tank?’

  He shrugged.‘What’s the angle? A cheap publicity stunt, I suppose.’

  ‘More or less. The angle is human interest and the aim is circulation. Father Soames was killed during the war, it seems, and Mother Soames married again and went off to Canada. Apparently she lost any further interest in her comatose son—it could be she preferred to keep quiet about it in case anyone thought it was fundamentally her fault, that she was the kind of woman who produces freaks and mutants.’

  ‘Well, then, why not let sleeping dogs lie?’ he asked.

  ‘What popular newspaper ever did? They plan to trace Mrs Soames if she’s still alive and fly her back to England to meet her long lost son.’

  ‘Having secured exclusive rights to the story complete with pictures,’ he said sourly. ‘Why the hell can’t they mind their own business? It’s not going to do Soames any good at all to have an old woman foisted on him who’s a complete stranger and be told it’s his mother. He wouldn’t even know the meaning of the word, and never will.’

  She regarded him thoughtfully, with a hint of shrewdness in her eyes. ‘You might say the same about any baby, Dave, but it doesn’t take long for the child to acquire what you might call a mother fixation. With all this clever talk and planning about how to train Mr Soames through his mental childhood, as it were, hasn’t anybody ever suggested that he might need a mother more than anything else?’

  Conway groaned gently. ‘He’s a man, darling—a tall, well-built man. There’s nothing wrong with his mind except that it lacks information. He’s old enough not to need a mother. All he needs is knowledge, self assurance and independence.’

  ‘You may be right,’ she conceded. ‘All the same, you can be sure that if Mother Soames should turn up the newspaper will do everything possible to exploit the situation.’

  ‘Hazarding a guess,’ he said darkly, ‘I doubt very much if Mother Soames will be allowed to set foot in the Institute at all—not if I know Dr Breuer.’

  He pick up one of the beer cans and attacked it with an opener. ‘Let’s change the subject,’ he suggested. ‘There are times when I begin to wish Mr Soames had stayed in the cold tank.’

  She brought glasses and they drank.

  ‘This week-end,’ he said, ‘I propose to look up Penelope. I’ve made several attempts to telephone her during the past few days, but there’s never been any reply. It could be she’s ill, or gone away, or just out having fun—probably the latter. I think it would be better if I knew what the situation was.’

  ‘Of course, Dave.’

  ‘In any case, it’s no use leaving things static—to stagnate, as it were. Four months have gone by since she walked out, and I think we’ve reached the point where the future needs to be decided.’

  ‘You mean—reconciliation or divorce?’

  ‘I don’t think a reconciliation would work—not after the things that have happened. It wasn’t only Morry, you see.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  He put the glass down on a small bedside table and began to pace about the room.

  ‘It’s not that I blame Penny completely,’ he explained. ‘When we married I was twenty-four and she was hardly out of her teens—at least, she was just twenty. I had a rather stubborn streak of independence, and I wanted to do everything myself, the hard way. Her father was willing to help financially, to provide a flat or even a house, but I wouldn’t have any of it.’ He looked at her solemnly. ‘He knew best, of course. He knew just how much his daughter had been spoilt and indulged from childhood, and how unlikely she was to settle down to a workaday domestic life on a restricted income. I took the job at the Institute partly because I was specialising in psychiatry, but mainly because a limited number of staff married quarters were available on the premises and I was lucky enough to be offered one. It seemed an ideal arrangement at the time—cheap accommodation, cheap meals, no travelling expenses—and I was even able to fix Penelope up with a staff job, too, as a receptionist.’

  ‘It didn’t suit her, of course,’ Ann said.

  He smiled grimly. ‘Nothing ever suited dear Penny. She had to find an antidote for boredom. That was where Morry came into the picture, and a man called Ibbotson who’s left now.’

  ‘How did you find out about... all this?’

  ‘I didn’t—not at first hand. But people began to talk and eventually the rumours reached the ears of Dr Breuer. He didn’t interfere personally, but he passed on the information just to put me in the picture, as he said. It was a pretty ugly picture, Penelope and I had a showdown.’

  ‘That must have been fun.’

  ‘Great fun. She pleaded guilty and said so what, she was tired of living like a council tenant on Institute charity and if she chose to break the monotony with the help of Morry and Ibbotson it was her own business.’

  ‘Quite an emancipated outlook.’

  ‘More than that, I’m afraid. The odd thing was I’d never suspected it before. Anyway, she packed and left, which pleased Breuer. She lived with her parents for a while until that became a bore, too, and now she’s taken a smart flat in Chelsea where presumably she can whoop it up with beatnik friends as and when she feels like it.’

  He hesitated, sipping his drink. ‘I’ve spoken to her on a few occasions, by telephone, mainly, I suppose, because I still feel responsible for her in an obscure way.’

  ‘How was the atmosphere—over the telephone, I mean?’

  ‘Cool and independent.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Obviously,’ he went on, ‘the problem has to be resolved one way or the other, and it can’t be done on the phone.’

  ‘That’s reasonable, Dave,’ she agreed. ‘There’s just one thing you ought to know before you sort things
out once and for all. It concerns me.’

  He smiled wryly. ‘It’s not your problem, Ann. It’s between Penny and me.’

  She came closer to him. ‘But I enter into it, don’t I? I must be influencing you to some extent—that is, if we love each other?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘in that sense you do come into it.’

  ‘Dave,’ she said in a level tone of voice, ‘before you commit yourself, I think you ought to know that a few years ago I lived with a man for nearly eighteen months. He was a married man, with a wife and three children somewhere in Surrey. He left them to live with me. His wife refused to divorce him, and in the end he went back to her.’

  For a while he seemed to be lost in thought. ‘I suppose,’ he said presently, ‘that you were in love with him.’

  ‘At the time. One always is at the time.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. One always is.’

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment, as if separated by an invisible eternal barrier, then he took her hands in his.

  ‘Well thanks for telling me, anyway. Cards on the table and all that.’

  ‘Better on the table than up one’s sleeve.’

  ‘At least you’ve got the past behind you, Ann,’ he pointed out. ‘My past is still with me.’

  ‘Why worry about the past when we’ve got the future in front of us?’

  He retrieved his glass and emptied it. ‘That’s true enough,’ he said. ‘Let’s have another beer to celebrate.’

  Feeling in a brighter mood, he attacked the second can.

  PART TWO

  THE CREATION

  6

  With something of the precision of a military operation the education of Mr Soames began. The unpredictable factor, as in all military operations, was the resistance of the enemy, but during the first few weeks of his training Mr Soames revealed himself as a very accommodating enemy, capable of learning very quickly despite an inherent laziness. He seemed disinclined to concentrate on any one aspect of his training for more than a few minutes, and always he was easily distracted by visual stimuli such as bright colours or sudden movement or mere novelty of shape. Dr Bird’s small, gingery moustache evoked sustained curiosity for several days, until the interest evaporated quite suddenly, never to return. A fly buzzing around the room induced in him a state of hypnotic fascination which was only dispelled when the male orderly despatched the insect with a toxic spray.

  He accepted normal sanitation procedure with some reluctance, but once the habit was established it was possible to relax supervision. Shaving proved to be a major obstacle, even with a relatively silent electric shaver, and it was not until he had overcome his initial suspicion and fear and was able to perform the operation for himself, even though in a clumsy fashion, that any real progress was achieved. He had no interest in walking whatever, so that manhandling was necessary in order to get him to his feet, but many weeks Went by before he developed sufficient self-assurance to stand erect without holding on to furniture or propping himself against the wall. Time and time again he fell heavily while attempting his first uncertain steps, and with each fall his confidence was undermined a little more. But success came suddenly and unexpectedly as it so frequently does with the physical skills involving balance. One morning, in the presence of Dr Wilson, he walked steadily across the room, from one wall to the other, and from that moment on there was no further trouble.

  His brain absorbed speech effortlessly, as a dry sponge absorbs water. The principal difficulty he seemed to encounter was not in remembering words but in co ordinating the movements of his lips, tongue and breath to articulate them intelligibly. Lack: of muscular co-ordination was, in fact, Mr Soames’s greatest handicap during the early months of his training, which in a way was to be expected, for his brain had to achieve coordination by a deliberate effort of will whereas in the normal individual it is largely an unconscious or reflex process resulting from habits ingrained during childhood.

  Nevertheless, in certain directions he made positive progress at a very satisfactory rate, so much so that Conway was prompted to record in the log book:

  Mr Soames displays a considerable aptitude for acquiring certain skills, in particular those which might be defined as egocentric, i.e., calculated to improve his own status in relation to other people. The adult accomplishments of free movement and speech he pursues with stubborn single-mindedness now that he has overcome the initial difficulties of muscular coordination. It is as if he instinctively recognises the importance of these things. On the other hand, creative activities of an educational nature such as modelling in clay and drawing with crayons bore him immensely, and he frequently refuses to cooperate at all. However, he is still fascinated by brightly coloured or shining objects, and is sensitive to form and shape.

  These were the positive things which gave rise to general satisfaction in the Psychiatric Division, but there was also the negative side. Mr Soames occasionally showed flashes of sullen temper when forced to do something contrary to his own wishes. Undressing was a case in point. Clothes to him were a symbol of equality with other people. He liked to dress and remain dressed. Each evening at nine o’clock when he was required to undress before retiring he would sulk and struggle with the male nurse. Sometimes he would surrender and allow his clothes to be removed, but frequently he would resist to the point of violence, so that the orderly was obliged to call for assistance.

  There were difficulties, too, during the regular periods of exercise when Mr Soames was conducted on a tour of a secluded part of the Institute grounds. Although at first the very spaciousness of the open air seemed to fill him with a vague sense of disquiet, he soon grew to welcome these excursions from the virtual imprisonment of his room and made it very plain that he had no wish to return. Once he escaped from the orderly who was escorting him round the lake and ran towards the trees, but his lack of skill in running finally brought him crashing headlong to the ground, where he bruised the side of his face. After this incident he was always accompanied by two male nurses.

  There was another occasion when, without warning, he grabbed at Dr Wilson’s hair and held on inflexibly, grinning to himself as if in secret amusement. All attempts to unlock his clenched fist failed, and Dr Wilson was held firmly and uncompromisingly in a painful half stooping position until the male nurse, abandoning therapeutic principle, struck Mr Soames forcibly in the ribs. Mr Soames forthwith released the doctor and lunged at the orderly, who defended himself in the classic manner while Wilson went for help. In the end it took three men to hold the patient down long enough for a sedative to be injected.

  ‘He’s developing a “Mr Soames” complex,’ Dr Bird remarked one lunch time. He was sharing a table in the canteen with Conway.

  ‘I think I know what you mean,’ Conway said. ‘He’s reached the stage where he feels on terms of physical equality with all comers, and he’s beginning to assert his independence.’

  ‘If it were simply that it wouldn’t be so bad,’ Wilson observed. ‘The trouble is that he’s steadily acquiring a behaviour pattern of “what Mr Soames likes, Mr Soames does”. Within the limits of his small vocabulary of words he even expresses himself in those terms. I want this. I want that. Or I don’t want this—or that.’

  Conway shrugged. ‘It’s a typical infantile phase. Every child goes through the “I want” stage, and grows out of it in due course.’

  ‘Grows out of it under the pressure of nagging and punishment. You can’t treat Mr Soames that way. You can’t smack his bottom and send him to bed early.’

  Conway pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. ‘It’s difficult,’ he agreed. ‘Right now Mr Soames’s world consists of what he likes and what he doesn’t like, and they are about the only behaviour motives he recognises. It may be that as his education improves, so will his outlook broaden until he is able to respond to subtler and more abstract motives.’

  ‘If you want my opinion,’ Wilson said, shaking his head, ‘he’ll make
no further progress at all without strict discipline. It’s no use telling him what’s right and what’s wrong. He has to learn that wrong behaviour results in pain and discomfort. That’s how we all learned as children.’

  ‘He’s a grown man. Short of beating him up from time to time, how do you propose to inflict pain and discomfort?’

  ‘That is precisely the problem,’ Wilson said.

  It was a problem, moreover, which grew more pressing as each week passed by. The educational instruction had begun to branch out into simple arithmetic, geography and history, not so much because it was thought that Mr Soames was ready for these more erudite subjects, but because it was considered desirable to widen the horizons of his mind beyond the four walls of his room and the secluded grounds of the Institute. But the patient wasn’t having any. ‘I don’t want history,’ he told the tutor one day, and forthwith plugged his ears with his fingertips and refused to listen. This manoeuvre proved successful. Mr Soames discovered that he did not have to learn what he didn’t wish to learn. The lessons reverted back to speech instruction, which presumably he was willing to accept because from his naïve point of view the ability to talk increased his feeling of power.

  Inevitably the situation had to be considered at executive level. One morning Dr Breuer called a conference in his office, attended by Mortimer, Hoff, Wilson, Bird and Conway. Breuer was sitting at his desk referring to a thick file of written reports.

  ‘We seem to have entered a period of difficulty with Mr Soames,’ he said pensively. ‘Naturally one can overlook isolated instances of recalcitrant behaviour, but recently it has become only too apparent that the patient is deliberately and consistently refusing to conform. In other words, he is pursuing a personal behaviour pattern of defiance of imposed external authority, and while that condition persists he is unlikely to make any further progress. What we have to consider is how we can deal with this situation, bearing in mind that Mr Soames is fundamentally a normal adult male with no mental aberration.’