Hidden Symptoms

by Deirdre Madden

  Even they don’t know it all, she thought defiantly. The body still kept its secrets and always would. They had not yet fully unravelled the mysteries of the long, dark ribbons of chromosomes coiled and replicating at the heart of every cell. They had put men on the moon, but Theresa’s body remained an undiscovered country.

  Robert came into the library at that moment, and saw Theresa before she saw him. He thought that she looked even worse than usual. Glancing up, she saw him and thought, “Please don’t come over.” He walked straight across to her desk.

  “Hello,” he said. “I have a message for you from Kathy. She wants you to go over to her house this evening, she wants to talk to you about something.”

  “You don’t know what it is?”

  “No. She said go any time after five and she’ll give you tea.”

  Theresa was silent. She was very tired, and had foreseen an evening of coffee, toast, cigarettes, vacuous television and then sleep, sleep and more sleep. She didn’t want to trudge over to Harberton Park and risk being insulted by that horrible woman again.

  “She said that if you can’t go you’re to phone her and she’ll arrange to see you tomorrow.”

  “Sounds important.”

  “Quite.”

  Theresa sighed deeply. “Very well then. I’ll go. You’ve no idea…?”

  “No, none.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks for the message, anyway.”

  Theresa knocked timidly at the door, afraid that she would be again surrounded by a trio of yapping, snapping dogs, but there was silence until she heard Kathy’s heels clatter across the parquet floor of the hall.

  “Come in.”

  Her eyes were red, and when Theresa stepped into the house the two girls saw themselves reflected, side by side, in a vast oval mirror. They both looked pale and ill.

  “You’re safe this time,” said Kathy, in a very stilted voice. “I have the three dogs locked in the garage, and the bitch is out, and I know that’s a terrible thing to say about your own mother, but wait till you hear what I have to tell you. Food first.”

  She led the way to the kitchen, where she put the finishing touches to two plates of chicken salad, put coffee in the filter for later and cut two large slices of gateau. They carried the food through to the dining-room on a tray, and ate sitting on fat, red velvet chairs with cabriole legs. Neither of them ate much, pushing pieces of chicken and lettuce aimlessly around their plates with large silver forks. Theresa noted that, although Kathy was obviously deeply distressed, in her own home she still fell into the role of good hostess, and had not neglected napkin rings or a posy of flowers in the centre of the table, the colours of which matched the designs on the china and the table linen. It seemed such a ridiculous facade when she was obviously so upset, and eventually Theresa said, “Look, give me that. Make the coffee, forget about the cake and tell me everything.”

  “It’s about my father,” said Kathy. “You know I told you that he’s dead.”

  “Yes,” said Theresa.

  “Well, he’s not.” She was struggling to keep her voice steady. “He’s alive. He lives in London.” From her pocket she drew a crumpled envelope. “This letter arrived this morning. He wrote to say that he didn’t know how much I knew about him, but that he was sorry for all the time lost. He wants to see me. He sent me a cheque so that I can go over to London to see him. Can you imagine it, Theresa? Can you imagine it? I thought that he was dead!”

  “Some people might be very happy to receive such a letter.”

  “Happy? My father deserts my mother and myself when I’m a baby; she divorces him and tells me lies, tells me he’s dead, and then he waits over twenty years before he cares enough to ask if I’m living or dead. That’s supposed to make me happy?” said Kathy angrily.

  Theresa sat quiet, trying to imagine how she would feel if the dead father of the street photograph, with his smile and cigarette, were to suddenly write to her and suggest that they meet. That the neverness of death could be so suddenly reversed … It was little wonder that Kathy was distressed.

  “He’s married again now,” said Kathy slowly. “And he has two little girls. Their names are Cissie and Lizzie. Isn’t that nice? Cissie is ten and Lizzie is twelve. I’m sure they’re sweet, Theresa, just think, two little girls. I have two little sisters … I … Theresa … I … I can’t …”

  She broke down and cried and cried and cried. Theresa fetched a box of paper handkerchiefs and let her cry her fill. When she was calmer and wiping her eyes with her fists, Theresa said cautiously, “May I ask you something, Kathy?”

  “What?”

  “Does Robert know about this?”

  Kathy gave a huge sigh. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She took a deep breath and replied very slowly.

  “I wanted to tell him. That was one of my first reactions. Tell someone. Tell Robert. So I phoned him and said that I wanted to meet him for lunch and he agreed. So we met. Theresa, I could not tell him. I wanted to, I tried to, but it would not come. I sat there waiting and waiting and said to myself, now, now, tell him now, but I couldn’t do it. I opened my mouth and either I said something else or closed my mouth again without having said anything. Eventually he said that he was going back to the library, so I asked him to give you a message if he saw you: to ask you to come here this evening.”

  “I see.”

  “My mother’s away for a couple of days: that’ll be a nice showdown when she comes back. I’ll never forgive her for this. I’ll never forgive either of them.” She paused for a moment, then said, “But Robert … It worries me so much that I couldn’t tell Robert, for I felt at first that it put a big gap between us, and then I saw that this gap had always been there, and that this just made me admit to it. Lately I haven’t known what to make of things. Sometimes I feel in my heart — this sounds terrible, but it’s the truth — sometimes I felt that he really despised me because I loved him so much. I felt that he was using me. And sometimes I even wondered if I loved him because he was there — because there was no one else, so perhaps I was using him too … God, Theresa, it’s such a muddle. I hardly know who I am anymore, nor where to go nor what to do.”

  “Sleep on it,” said Theresa. “Wait for a few days before you decide anything. Things like this need time to settle.”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose so. Thank you for listening to all this, Theresa. You have no idea what this means. You’re the only one, you know,” said Kathy, and for the first time that evening her voice was firm and steady. “You’re the only real friend I have: you’re the only person that I really and truly love.”

  Robert and Kathy sat in the Bonne Bouche Café, taking Earl Grey tea and little buns. Kathy looked prettier than Robert had ever before seen her, with her long, dark, silky hair piled artlessly on top of her head, little coils and tresses escaping from their fetters at the back of the neck. He could not help but wonder what went on in the mind beneath all that hair. For over a week now she had been acting oddly. She wouldn’t sleep with him and when he was in any way affectionate towards her, it seemed to make her either sad or annoyed. There was something rather cold in her recent conduct, and when he had asked one night what was wrong she had replied, “Nothing,” so vehemently that he had been afraid to ask again. And now here she was, saying that she was leaving Belfast within two days.

  “To go where?” he asked.

  “London.”

  “Oh.” He paused for a moment, then she saw panic and horror in his face as he jumped to the wrong conclusion. She went very red and looked away.

  “Don’t be so horrible and suspicious, Robert, it’s only for a holiday,” she muttered crossly.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” she snapped.

  “Oh. This is all very sudden, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so, but what does that matter? I’m bored with Belfast and college’ll be starting up again soon enough. I just felt that I needed a break before that.”
/>   “Are you going alone?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. With whom did you imagine I might be going?”

  “How would I know who you might go off with?” he said harshly. He realized that he was staring angrily across the room and intimidating a rather elderly waitress, so he lowered his eyes and tried to speak calmly.

  “What will you do over there?”

  She poured out more tea. “Go to the theatre, go to the art galleries, go out to Kew to see the pagoda, watch the changing of the guard: the usual things one does when in London, I suppose. It’s only for a week, you know.”

  “I hope you enjoy it,” he said, with all the sarcasm he could muster.

  “Yes, so do I,” she said lightly, then she abruptly put down her teacup. “Do you want to talk to me about something, Robert?” she asked angrily. “Do you want to have one of those heavy what’s-gone-wrong-with-our-relationship discussions?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.” He glanced at her little hand, which was resting on the table-cloth: she noticed this and immediately withdrew it.

  “You will wait for me, won’t you, Robert?” she taunted him. “You will be good while I’m away?”

  Robert stood up, hurt and confused. “That,” he said, “I cannot promise. Enjoy yourself without me.”

  “I will,” she replied, and she had to call it across the café, for he was already at the door.

  Robert had found Belfast dull and tedious even with the palliative of Kathy’s company. Without it, he found his loneliness and boredom verging on the unbearable. He had many other friends and he now made an effort to see and entertain them, but he missed Kathy inordinately. He wondered and worried about her going off like that so suddenly, and he regretted deeply the row in the café. With anyone else, the bed would not have been cold before he was at least attempting to charm a replacement into it, and he was surprised to find that he now could not bring himself to do this. He missed her in every possible way, and every so often he hated himself for missing her, and told himself that she wasn’t worth it.

  In his flat he found a silk scarf which bore her smell, and a copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which bore her bookplate. He tied the former around the bar at the foot of the bed and attempted to read the latter, remembering Kathy’s enthusiasm for it, but found it impenetrable. He forced himself to plough through the novel, but retained little, save perhaps the image of the girl with the handkerchief and orange perfume, and the passage concerning X-rays as a means of seeing into the diseased, mortal, dying body of a woman, which he found both disturbing and oddly titillating. On the fourth evening after Kathy’s departure, he had just wearily cast the book aside, wondering if Kathy had been lying when she said that she enjoyed it, and uncorked a bottle of cheap wine to blur his misery when the doorbell rang. His astonishment when he opened the door and found Theresa standing there was total.

  “Good evening.”

  “Hello.” He stared at her blankly.

  “May I come in, please? It’s rather cold out on the step.”

  “Of course.” He opened the door wider and she passed through into his room, a strong smell of cigarettes trailing in her wake.

  “I see you’re reading The Magic Mountain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful, isn’t it?”

  Robert made a non-committal noise as reply. “Why have you come?” he asked bluntly.

  “Social call,” she said with a sweet smile, as she removed her jacket. “Alright?”

  “Yes. Fine.” He went into the kitchen and brought out another wine glass.

  “May I put on some music?”

  “Yes.”

  Soft clicks from the stereo were succeeded by strains of Wagner. Her strange behaviour in his own home made Robert feel uneasy. He offered her a glass of wine, which she accepted but left sitting untasted in front of her for a long time, and she did not speak. Slowly the truth dawned on him: she was carefully, lucidly and extremely drunk, and just as he realized this she downed the glass of wine in a single gulp and began to speak.

  “Come the revolution, Robert, what do you think will happen? Will the weak merely overthrow the powerful? The poor overthrow the rich? Or is it possible that at last the ugly will overthrow the beautiful? The uncultured overthrow the cultured? More wine. Do you ever think about that, Robert?”

  “No,” he said, reluctantly refilling her glass.

  “Well, you ought to, because we need to know whose side we’ll be on when it happens, oppressors or oppressed. Whose side are we on now? We need to know that first.”

  “I see,” he said, seeing nothing.

  She was quiet for a few moments, then said, “Wonderful music.” They listened to it for a few moments, then she added, “He was Hitler’s favourite composer; you know. The Israeli Philharmonic still refuses to perform his works.” Wagner soared on. “Today, Robert, all art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It is the noise against which real life happens.” She spoke very slowly and carefully. “This is the century which has seen art become more debased than at any other time. Because there was a war, Robert, with concentration camps where a string quartet played Mozart while a man who liked good music had a line of people pass before him and he decided which of those people should live and which should die. Things happened in those camps, Robert, and in that war, which were so terrible that art could not cope with them, and just as all the paintings and music and books in the world were unable to prevent those things happening, afterwards the artists found that they could not produce books or paintings or music which could express that horror. But no one admitted this. The artists would not openly admit defeat. They were like priests who stop believing in God but who keep on going through the motions of religion rather than trying to face or find an alternative. And so more books and paintings and music have been produced since that time than ever before. Because people need something pretty to hang on the walls of their living-rooms. They need agreeable noises to flood their ears. They need stories to distract them from the passage of time. They need art, Robert, to clutter their minds, because if they did not have art they would be forced to look into the silence and emptiness of their own hearts. And the artists conspire with them in this. This is the art we need now, Robert.”

  She got up, lifted the needle from the record and the room was at once filled with silence.

  Robert put his head in his hands, unable to believe what he was hearing. He cursed his luck at being invaded by a drunken female philosopher.

  “Doesn’t this bother you, Robert? You’re supposed to be a writer.”

  The “supposed” found its target. “No, it doesn’t bother me,” he replied grumpily. “You’re trying to say that art is, or should be, dependent upon politics, and I don’t believe that. You’re trying to give art a moral function.”

  “That’s what it had long ago.”

  “Well, not any more.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” she cried. She drank her wine and filled her glass again. “Truth is beauty, beauty truth.’ You still believe that, Robert?” He did not reply. “What does art do?”

  He would not reply.

  “What does art do?” she yelled.

  He shrugged, not wanting to get embroiled in this pointless row. “It makes you more alive,” he said eventually.

  “You try telling that, Robert,” she said, “to all the people in this world who are suffering and dying.”

  As she spoke, he remembered the moment of his mother’s burial, when he had suddenly felt that he was the person in the coffin who was being lowered out of life. He was conscious of familiar faces growing smaller around a rectangle of light: then silence and darkness. An overwhelming sense of the absolute futility of his life and labours swept over him, and he heard Rosie say in a small, sad voice, “It makes ye wonder what it’s all about.”

  “Christ Almighty, Theresa!” he exploded. “Leave me be!” He gazed at her with revulsion as she cowered in a huge, whit
e, wicker chair: sullen, skinny, pale, cross-eyed, drunk, grotesque. It was a very long time before she spoke again.

  “Why don’t you write about the troubles here, Robert?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t interest me. I don’t understand them.”

  “God curse your indifference. What does understanding matter? Nobody understands. Some people say that they can see both sides, but they can’t. You can only ever see one side, the side you happen to be on. But you haven’t the guts for that, Robert: you haven’t the guts to be partial, ye spineless liberal.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you were going?” he said coldly, picking up her jacket.

  “No.”

  “It’s very late.”

  “I haven’t said all I came to say.”

  He tossed her jacket onto a chair. “Say it, then, and go.”

  “Kathy has gone to London to see her father and sisters.” She saw his face change. “I thought that might interest you.”

  “Her father’s dead.”

  “So you think. And so she thought. But he’s not. He’s alive and well and living in London. And he’s married, with two little daughters. Sisters for Kathy. So you see, Robert, you’ve lost her.”

  “What do you mean? She’s coming back.”

  “But not the same as she was when she went away. She’s found her family, Robert. You know she won’t be the same again.”

  And Robert understood perfectly.