‘Have you asked him, have you prayed to him? It’s the same thing, you know. And he always answers, did you know that? I was in such despair once I was going to kill myself, and at the last minute and as a last resort I prayed to God although I didn’t believe in him then, but he answered just the same. I found I could …’
Daniel let his voice trail off. He had thought or hoped that the importance to everybody of what he was saying was so great and obvious that it was bound to reach someone who at any rate was used to hearing God mentioned. But it seemed that the bright eyes had sunk back into their sockets and the liveliness of manner gone again. A moment ago, the one room had looked neat and even cheerful, the single bed made and spread with a light green counterpane, the sink and draining board clear, with the clean crockery on its rack, a pair of flourishing potted plants on the sill. Now, he saw it as static and lifeless, like a model cell in an enlightened gaol. Poor Miss Rawlings. Even if he had had the required energy and insensitivity, he would still have not dared to tell her any more of the story of his first prayer, not just that it had been answered because he had truly wanted help, but what he had suspected more and more strongly ever since that moment, that God had planted in him the impulse to pray. Faith was offered before it could be accepted. He brought out his pocket diary and turned over some of its pages while he briefly made petition that Miss Rawlings should receive the gift of faith.
‘Going, are you, doctor, I mean vicar?’
‘Not just yet. There’s still time for me to give you a hand with the forms for your new pension-book, that’s if you’d like me to.’
‘There’s just a couple of places I’m not sure about. My niece looked it over, but you know, Mr Davidson, she’s really a very ignorant woman, my niece. She’s good about clearing the place up, I’ll give her that …’
From the moment when Leo arrived at the Davidsons’ that evening, Daniel felt certain that some disaster impended. Leo was perhaps conscious of a similar discomfort, not showing the buoyant disposition of that morning, when he had seemed to be at worst perfectly resigned to each successive shock of revelation. Daniel was at once drawn to him as one who must be uniquely sympathetic, and repelled by dread of one who constituted a threat to indispensable convictions. Was that normal, reasonable, to be expected in a man confronted with another who was limitlessly the same? Or was the whole concern no more than most singular and interesting? Nothing on paper or anywhere else gave guidance.
Not quite understanding why he did so, Daniel had spent the afternoon getting everything squared away in good time. After seeing to it that the church was ready for early service in the morning, he came back home and made a couple of telephone calls to fix the time of a cremation and brought his diary up to date. Then, as he did every fortnight or so, he wrote to his bishop, a prelate with outmoded ideas about his special responsibilities to those he had ordained. By a self-established tradition, Daniel devoted his final paragraph to a report on how God had seemed to him over the last weeks and how he thought he might have seemed to God. With feelings of guilt that no inner reasoning would dispel, he confined himself here to what he more or less certainly knew, omitting formless and very likely superstitious presentiments. When the letter had been made ready for the post, he straightened his parishioners file and tidied his workroom. He left as they were the photographs along his mantelpiece except for one showing the woman at the orphanage who, as he supposed, had been like a mother to him. She had been dead for nearly twenty years and the likeness was imperfect, but it was good enough to recall her to him when, as now, he picked it up and studied it. Lastly he knelt and prayed to be forgiven for having done so little to help Miss Rawlings and himself to be helped to face – what? Whatever might be in store.
While Leo and he were settling themselves in the kitchen as before, Daniel started to explain that Ruth would come down in a few minutes when she was ready, but Leo finished his sentence for him. Daniel shifted uneasily in his chair.
‘Ah, come on, Daniel, there’s nothing in that,’ Leo went on. ‘Only cause for worry if I couldn’t see that coming. You and I could set up a great telepathy act, though. Do these identical twins have identical minds? Or maybe they have only one mind between them. We’d clean up. Too bad God wouldn’t like it.’
‘You don’t believe in any of that paranormal stuff, do you?’
‘Of course not, what do you think I am? That’s one of the places God comes in very conveniently, isn’t it? One word from him and there’s no need to bother with that type of dreck for the rest of your life.’
Leo had spoken lightly, in keeping with his words and with his generously cut light-blue suit, darker-blue shirt and rather flashy sea-green tie. He looked altogether unlike Daniel’s idea of a parson, even an American one. In fact he looked more like a successful insurance agent or travelling salesman than any member of the professional classes; Daniel recognized, or admitted to himself, that he must have something in his own general appearance that corresponded. Despite these things, however, Leo retained the air of uneasiness detectable as soon as he stepped in from the street. The smile accompanying his last remark seemed particularly forced. Before it had quite faded, he said,
‘There was just one thing I wanted to tell you out of your Ruth’s hearing, so here goes, why I didn’t bring my Ruth to England with me, I thought perhaps you wondered about that.’
‘Ruth did, my Ruth did.’
‘Yes, she would, I see she would. Maybe I should have told you then, before, but the reason my Ruth isn’t here is that she’s with another guy. Been with him just two years now. You don’t want to hear whose fault it was, even if I knew, it was like this other guy came along and sailed in and collected her. She liked me, but she liked him better. I didn’t enjoy the next year at all, but I got through it without falling by the wayside and I’m over it now.’
Nevertheless Daniel said, ‘I’m sorry, Leo.’
‘Sure you are. I wouldn’t have brought it up, but I felt you should know it. I didn’t want you wondering, and when I thought about it, well, you needed to hear about something where we aren’t the same, and right there is one sizeable thing. And don’t forget the guy came along and he collected her, I’ll swear she wasn’t on the lookout for him or anybody, she wasn’t driven out by her depression or anything else, so if you wanted to think my Ruth’s departure says something about the likelihood of your Ruth departing you’d have to believe in Santa Claus. Or telepathy. Okay, the name’s the same. Coincidence, my friend. Unless you have somebody called Janet in your life? No, I thought not. No more of this, then. I hope I didn’t waste your time, Daniel.’
Now Daniel embraced his twin without hesitation and held on. He wondered that he had ever found it more than unfamiliar to be looking at and talking to a man so like himself in appearance. Leo had indeed followed or read his thoughts with remarkable accuracy, perhaps less remarkable in one so like himself on the inside as well. Of course. At this point Daniel pulled himself up as he remembered that Leo had just been talking of an irreparable loss. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked without further thought.
‘Thank you, Daniel. If you mean a drink like coffee or lemonade, then not just now; if you mean like gin all the way through beer with any alcohol in it, then still no. But you have some of that kind of drink right here, do you?’
‘No, there’s nothing. I spoke without thinking. Neither Ruth nor I ever go near real drink.’
‘Oh,’ said Leo. He looked round the kitchen, seeming to notice the dresser with its rows of plates, the TV set and small low-built radio, the white-painted staircase leading up to the ground floor, the door to the dining-room, the open garden door past which came herbal scents and the distant cries of children. Louder and more sharply than before, he said, ‘Did you never touch alcohol? I mean you yourself?’
‘Oh, I touched it all right. Not to say bashed it. For years. Then I gave it up altogether.’
‘W
ould you have called yourself a drunk in those days?’
‘Yes. At least I agree that’s what I was then. I should imagine plenty of people called me it at the time.’
Leo nodded his head, looked at Daniel for a moment and dropped his gaze. ‘I don’t quite know how to say this, but back then, did you believe in God?’
‘No.’
‘And … did your belief, was your coming to believe connected with your ceasing to be a drunk?’
‘Yes,’ said Daniel, looking back at Leo. ‘It was all part of the same thing.’
‘Daniel!’ called Ruth’s voice from the floor above. ‘Darling, could you come up here a minute?’
Ruth was standing in the bedroom in an unfamiliar attitude, elbows crooked and right hand clasping left. She was smiling, with a look of settled anticipation, as if she had been watching him opening a parcel that contained a birthday present she knew he really wanted. She wore a freshly laundered white dress with a pattern of small blue flowers, one he had always liked her in but had not known her to wear for a long time.
‘I was going to get you to guess,’ she said, ‘but then I thought that would be a bit silly, so I’ll just tell you. You remember a couple of weeks ago I was boring you about some new stuff Eric had put me on, and I said it was early days yet but I thought there might be a slight improvement? – actually it was more than slight, but I was touching wood, and I’ve hung on all this time to try and be on the safe side, but anyway, still touching wood, I’m much better. Perhaps I’m still not quite what I was as a carefree schoolgirl, but I’m much better. I can see the point of things again. I thought I’d tell you before we—’
Daniel started kissing his wife. A few moments later she managed to say, ‘Darling – Leo’s downstairs. We can’t—’
‘So he’s downstairs, as he’d probably say.’
‘But … he’s a parson.’
‘So am I.’
‘But an American parson …’
In the end it was not so many minutes before Ruth was again ready to receive their guest. Leo put on a wonderful imitation of a man who understood completely the British custom whereby married couples always held a thorough private discussion of the weather before starting the evening. Nearly all the rest of that evening passed quickly and not over-memorably in the kind of semi-informative chatter to be expected of any new acquaintances with time to spare.
But not quite all of it. After Ruth had gone to bed, Leo gave some details of his acceptance of the Christian faith and of how this was connected with his renunciation of strong drink, and Daniel responded with some details of his own.
III
‘If you want to know what it’s called, you can read it off the label on the bottle,’ said Eric Margolis. ‘Remembering it afterwards, of course. Why they give these things such jawbreaking names beats me, unless for moral effect on the patient. If I put you on something called B-23 you may not be gripped enough, but if I say it’s called chromopolyamineoxidase you’re more likely to feel you’re being properly looked after. And why not? But to answer your question: yes, this stuff is indeed reasonably new, in this country at least. They’ve had good results with it in the States and especially Australia, according to a man I know in Sydney who actually understands these matters. It’s a narrow-spectrum deal; there are quite a few people it doesn’t help at all, but those it does help it helps a lot. Ruth sounds as though she’s one of the lucky ones.’
Eric’s consulting room looked less like the traditional sort of consulting room than the drawing room of a small but posh hotel, with nothing overtly medical to be seen, not even a notepad. Eric himself, a lanky person whose small mostly bald head was eked out with a dense beard, occupied an easy chair near a low table on which lay two or three novels in their jackets. Opposite him a similar chair held Daniel, sitting where he had sat on a couple of previous visits and assorted lunatics and neurotics on many times more. He said now, ‘How long will she have to go on taking this stuff?’
‘Some time. It’s no use putting even an approximate date on it.’
‘But there will be a date eventually, will there? Or will she be on it for the rest of her life?’
‘That’s most unlikely,’ said Eric in his gentle voice, rubbing his fingertips together in the way he had, ‘but at this stage I’m not ruling out anything.’
‘But isn’t there a danger she’ll get addicted?’
‘Addiction to a substance shows when somebody stops using that substance. Patients have come off this substance after a few weeks or a few years without serious trouble, as I told you. Some of them have felt funny or rotten for a while, which one can’t discount, but nothing on the scale of a real drug hangover, like coming off, well, some popular tranquillizers and antidepressives, which some have said is worse than what put them on it in the first place. Ruth stays on till it’s all right for her to come off.’
‘I see. How do we know when we’ve reached that stage?’
‘We get some idea when we try a controlled reduction of the dose.’
‘M’m. If you don’t mind my saying so, Eric, it all sounds rather hit-or-miss to me.’
‘That’s how it is. More miss than hit, too, though fortunately things are getting better every year. About point-one of one per cent a year. The gloomy view of the situation is that we’re no nearer understanding how these materials work than we were twenty years ago, so we’ve no way of telling which one will help which patient, and the consequence of that is we chop and change and keep our eyes and ears open for anything new that might be good.’
‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Daniel. ‘Would there be a cheerful view?’
‘No. But there is a slightly less gloomy one this time round. Let’s say we have scored a hit with Ruth. That means there’s something like an even chance she can be kept as she now is while in the meantime she gets better. A mental illness, if a prolonged bout of depression can be called that at all, is only like a physical illness in a couple of ways, but one of them is that its victims sometimes make a full recovery. Thank God.’
‘What sort of long-term chance do you give Ruth at this stage?’
‘More than evens, Daniel. Substantially more. With her intelligence and good temperament she’s beginning to shape up as one of my successes. The last, what, area to count your chickens in is the mind, but … I won’t say any more. Just, there’s a good deal of hope where before there was only average hope, average hope being better than no hope at all but not much. Well, unless you’ve got anything more …’
Eric stood up. Daniel did the same, but said, ‘Actually there is one other item, but could we talk about it somewhere else? What about that pub down on the corner?’
‘Not there if you don’t mind. They know me there because I take the occasional arachnophobe or homicidal maniac there. We’ll try another place.’
On their way to it, Daniel asked, ‘Don’t you ever take notes of what a patient says?’
‘No, I take a secret tape which I turn on and off with a secret switch. Better all round.’
‘Did you turn it on for me?’
‘I should say not. Tape costs money, you know. Sorry.’
‘That’s all right, only my nose does feel a little bit out of joint.’
Eric’s other place was another pub, an extensive pub where, at this early hour, there was room to sit apart. By way of a token of decorum, a concealed apparatus quietly played one of the more understandably neglected of Handel’s operas. Daniel brought Eric the gin and tonic he had asked for.
‘Aren’t you having anything at all?’
‘I’m not thirsty.’
Daniel spoke with enough emphasis to make Eric glance at him but not pursue the matter. Soon afterwards Eric said, ‘What was this item you were going to raise?’
‘Oh yes. Well, it’s a bit difficult to put neatly. More a feeling.’
‘Some quite important points are that.’
‘Yeah. Well … I’m afraid it rather brings in philosophical things. Things to do with belief. You know, church doctrine.’
‘To me, you can say anything you like about that. It’s one of the great advantages of me from your point of view. But try not to go too fast.’
‘Right.’ Daniel paused again, then nodded to himself. ‘Right. For all your professional pessimism, you’d agree that more and more drugs are being discovered every day and the field of their application is widening all the time.’
‘Yes. Exponentially.’
‘Is there any theoretical limit to their expansion?’
‘I don’t quite know what you mean by that, but if it’s, will there come a time when there are no more drugs to discover, then I haven’t thought about it but it’s certainly a long way off. If it’s, are there going to turn out to be parts of the mind and human behaviour that can never be reached by drugs, then I have thought about that but to little effect. Actually theory doesn’t help much there, because the question takes us outside pharmacology and biology and any other ology and into, what you said, philosophy, where I’m near enough at sea. But you want something more than that.’ Eric poked inconclusively at the slice of lemon in his glass. Then he said rather quickly, ‘Nothing I’ve learnt in the sense of being able to write it down, write it out, none of it tells me there are any areas of consciousness beyond the reach of human modification, and if the resulting prospect displeases you, don’t investigate recent findings on the results of physical interferences with the brain by surgery or accident or both at once. As for gene surgery, I’ve made a personal point of not investigating that.’
‘But,’ said Daniel. ‘At least I hope there’s a but.’
‘Oh, there is, beyond argument and beyond fact. Something tells me, and I mean tells me, not just suggests to me – something tells me that that is not so, that there is a part of each one of us no man could ever touch. I am I and you are you and will remain so. Unalterably. That something is very old, many times older than pharmacology. In my case it goes back at least as far as Abraham. In yours, Daniel,’ said Eric gently, ‘you’ll allow me to say it’s a little more recent than Abraham. But your personal … something … is stronger than mine. God has blessed you, my friend. I needn’t tell you to be grateful for that.’
Complete Stories Page 47