Hidden Symptoms

by Deirdre Madden

  As he thumbed through the faded newspapers the following day, he felt sad. He doubted that the reviews would be significant, or even relevant, but he felt that he had to find them as a final and token gesture to Kathy. At last he came to the issue for the given date, and began to scan the columns carefully. The first two pages revealed nothing, and when he turned over the third frail page he saw a large grainy photograph of Theresa. Startled, he read the caption. “Miss Theresa Cassidy at the funeral yesterday of her twin brother, Francis.” He quickly read the accompanying report, which dealt mainly with the funeral, but revealed to Robert that Francis had been murdered. He then rapidly turned back to the issues for the days immediately preceding. The report of three days before said that the badly mutilated body of a young man had been found on a patch of waste ground near the city centre. By the following day he had been identified and his name released: Francis Cassidy, 21, a Roman Catholic who had no connections with the security forces or with any paramilitary organization. He had been abducted on his way to work in a supermarket near the city centre. The murder was described as “particularly brutal” and the motive appeared to be purely sectarian. There was a small photograph of the dead man, who looked so like Theresa that Robert shivered.

  The discovery stunned and confused him, and he did not know what to think. Foolishly, he tried to remember what he had been doing around that date two years ago, as if that knowledge could help him to understand or control in some way this dreadful new reality. He could not recall the murder from papers or news reports which he might have heard or read at that time. It had been a particularly brutal and cruel killing, but it was still only one out of so many hundreds of brutal and cruel killings. He looked up at the people around him in the library, reading and writing and browsing and whispering. It shocked him to think of the evils and sorrows which might be in their minds and hearts: no one could see or guess the things which they might have done or endured. He looked down again at the photograph of Francis, and was suddenly conscious of someone standing close behind him. He quickly raised his head, and saw to his horror that it was Theresa, who at that very moment glanced down casually over his shoulder at the book laid open before him. She saw Francis’s photograph and her face changed immediately, becoming pale and impassive as a mask. Without saying a word, she turned and walked away. Robert watched her go, and could have wept with embarrassment. He did not know what to do. He could not bring himself to go after her, and in any case he was not sure if that was what the situation required.

  Attempting to avert his eyes from the photograph, he closed the heavy volume and returned it to the issue desk, but waited for a long time before leaving the library.

  Three times that afternoon, Robert tried to phone Theresa, but each time there was no reply. By late evening he had decided that meeting her again would be so awkward and embarrassing that he wanted to do it as soon as possible and get it over. He therefore drove over to West Belfast and parked outside the house which he had seen her enter on the day of the christening. A light glowed in the bay window. Timidly, he knocked upon the door, and as soon as Theresa opened it he felt that he had compounded his error by coming to her home. He wished that he could garble out upon the doorstep all he had to say and then run, but he had the wit to know that to attempt this would be the final and greatest insult.

  “Oh,” said Theresa when she saw him. She had a few pound notes in her left hand. “I thought you were the paper boy.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course,” she said, but seemed annoyed, and he did not know if this was because she did not really want him to enter; or because she had intended to usher him in anyway, and the request to be admitted was thus an insult to her hospitality. Feeling wretched, he followed her into a dim hallway, and on through into a small parlour.

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” he mumbled.

  “Not at all,” said Theresa, indicating a chair by the fireside. “You owe me a visit.” He sat down and felt slightly more at ease than he had done on the doorstep. Theresa remained standing. On the wall behind her was a round mirror surrounded by a garland of leaves wrought from black metal. Robert gazed thankfully past Theresa’s head into the glass, where he could see the whole room reflected, circular and small, distorted at the circumference because of the mirror’s convexity. It reminded him of a painting — what was it called? — “The Arnolfini Marriage,” was that it? Robert could see himself in the mirror as if he were the artist who had created all before him, both the room and the room reflected. He remembered from the painting trivial domestic details — a little dog; some oranges; a pair of slippers carelessly tossed aside — and as he thought this he noticed that Theresa was wearing the most absurd bedroom slippers he had ever seen: a pair of mules which engulfed her feet in two clouds of candy-pink imitation fur. Had he not seen them for himself, he would never have believed her guilty of possessing such things.

  “When you’ve finished gazing into the middle distance,” she suddenly drawled, “you might speak to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he blurted out, and wished that he could escape into the circular reflected room, or that he really were a figure in a painting, with the crabbed inscription “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic” upon the flock wallpaper, to prove the artifice. “I’m sorry about what happened this morning.”

  “Next time you’re checking someone out like that, Robert, remember to sit facing the door.”

  “But I wasn’t checking you out. Honestly, Theresa, I came upon that report when I was looking for something else. It was pure coincidence …”

  She raised an eyebrow cynically, knelt down by the fire and lit a cigarette from a small ember which she plucked from the grate with the tongs. “Funny coincidence,” she said, sitting back on her heels.

  “I tell you, it’s the truth. I was looking for a play review — look, I can even tell you the name of it.” He took from his pocket the crumpled page which Kathy had given to him, and passed it to Theresa. She glanced at it indifferently, then looked again more closely.

  “But this is Kathy’s handwriting.”

  “Yes,” he said, “Kathy gave me the reference to check. She said that it was important.”

  Theresa looked back at the page, then suddenly to Robert’s amazement her eyes filled up with tears and she said bitterly, “She may have found her father, but she’s still her mother’s daughter.”

  “Theresa,” said Robert wearily, “I give up. I know that I probably ought to understand all this, but it’s beyond me.”

  “For someone who’s supposed to be educated, Robert, you can be very dense. But tell me this: did someone as au fait with the theatre in Belfast as yourself not find it strange that a significant play was produced here less than two years ago and yet you had never heard of either author or play? And when you couldn’t find the reviews, did you not think it odder still?”

  “How do you know that I didn’t find them?”

  “You tell me, Robert. Yes, Robert, yes,” she said, seeing sudden understanding in his face. “That’s the way it is. Sweet girl, Kathy, isn’t she?”

  “But why did she do it?”

  “To hurt me. To get her revenge because I went to see you when she was in London, and because I told you about her father. She doesn’t need or want us now that she has her precious Daddy and sisters.”

  “Does it matter so much that I know about your brother?”

  “Yes,” she said shortly. There had been a time when she had wanted everyone to know, when she had craved pity: look at me, look at how much I have to suffer. She wanted her suffering to frighten others as much as it frightened herself. That time had passed, leaving inexplicable feelings of shame, as if she were somehow tainted by his murder. She felt guilty for continuing to live while he was dead, and the pity of others now sickened her, for under it she saw contempt. “It matters a lot. It matters to me.”

  Robert tried to visualize the dead boy at home in this cosy room: curled up in a fat armchair; kn
eeling at the tiled hearth or looking at his reflection in the circular mirror, but his imagination failed him. Francis remained one of those grey people (and his own father was another) whose existence, Robert knew, could be proven, but whose reality he could never quite grasp. “You have to get over these things,” he said with a hint of impatience. “Surely your religion must give you some comfort?” She turned on him, more angry than he had ever before seen her.

  “Comfort? Why do you miserable atheists always say that about religion? You don’t know what it’s like to suffer and believe. Where’s the comfort in knowing that God Himself had to die because of my sins? Where’s the comfort in knowing that I’ll never be good enough? Where’s the comfort in trying to escape suffering when I know that I ought to cherish it? You’re the one who has it easy, because you don’t believe in sin or in judgment. You think that when you die there’ll be blackness and silence and nothing. You don’t believe that you’ll ever need forgiveness for all the evil things you’ve done, and that makes you dangerous. It was people who thought that they were above forgiveness that killed my brother.”

  “But you believe that your brother’s in Heaven now, don’t you? You believe that he’s at peace?”

  “Yes, but what about me?” she cried. “What about me? I loved Francis as dearly as I loved my own life, but he was taken from me and tortured and killed. I have to go on living without him, and I have to go on believing in God, a good God, a God who loves and cares for me. Do you think that’s easy? I have to believe that my brother’s death was a victory. I have to forgive the people who killed my brother; I have to try to love them as I loved him. I have to try to think of them as brothers while in my heart I want to hate them: and then you dare to speak to me of comfort? You tell me what’s easy about belief. You tell me where the comfort is.”

  She was crying long before she ceased to speak, and continued to cry in the following silence. Robert listened to her, remembering how he had once heard her weeping far into the night on the other side of his closed bedroom door. He was awed not by the depth of her faith, but by the intransigence of her will, seeing in her a refusal to be comforted as staunch as his own refusal to believe. He remembered his mother making much of God’s mercy and grace, but he did not dare mention it. He wished that he could take her in his arms and weep, too, but his usual revulsion for her body was now compounded with fear, for he felt that if he were to touch her, all that immense anger and grief would thrill through him like electricity and he would be brought down to suffer there with her. Her professedly comfortless faith did do something: it made her grief finite; but he felt that if he were to fall he would fall forever and forever.

  “Leave me,” she sobbed. “Please go away and leave me.”

  Robert wanted to speak but could find nothing to say. Feeling wretched, he quietly left the room and her home. As soon as he had gone, Theresa slid to the rug and lay there crying with a total lack of restraint until she was spent and could cry no more. She wondered how long she had been lying there in tears: perhaps for half an hour, perhaps for even longer. Sniffing pathetically, she curled up on the rug until she could touch her feet, then removed a slipper, smelt it and stroked its soft, synthetic fur against her damp face while gazing at the dusty grey cinders of the fire. She thought of nothing.

  After a long time, she heard a single knock upon the front door. She waited, listened and heard a second knock. Raising herself to her knees, she listened again, and when the third knock came she arose and went into the hall. As soon as she saw Theresa’s face in the ghastly yellow light of the street lamp, Kathy knew that she had come too late.

  “Robert’s been here, hasn’t he?” she said. “Oh, Theresa …” She stepped into the house, but would go no further than the tiny porch formed between the main house door and a light inner door inset with a square pane of glass into which was frosted the image of a bowl of roses. Only a very little light filtered through from the hall and the street by way of the frosted glass and the fanlight: the porch remained dim. “I told him in such a roundabout way that afterwards I thought: he won’t find out or if he does he won’t mention it; it doesn’t matter. But all day today I couldn’t get Francis out of my mind and I thought, of course it matters, of course it’s important. I could hardly believe that I had done such a thing, and I couldn’t forgive myself. Can you forgive me?”

  “Yes,” said Theresa’s voice in the darkness. “Of course I forgive you.”

  “I feel so bad about this,” said Kathy. “It’s dreadful to do something wrong, and then know that absolutely nothing can undo it.”

  “Kathy, I’ve forgiven you,” said Theresa wearily. “I can do nothing more.”

  “I’m sorry, Theresa. I’m really, really sorry. Look, I’ll leave you now because you’re tired, but I promise I’ll phone tomorrow. Goodnight. And thanks.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Kathy left and Theresa returned to the parlour. She reached for the cigarette packet but found it empty; swore and folded her arms in frustration. Then she caught sight of her reflection in the round mirror, and was startled. Who was that person? Could that pale, hunched, ugly little person be herself? She could scarcely believe how intimately she must know the sad hinterland of the red-eyed girl’s life, and she approached the mirror timidly, watching with fascination the way in which the image grew. Stopping before it, she was filled with a desire to touch the glass. She remembered when she was a child at school a priest had once come to show slides of the Missions, and halfway through the showing she and Francis had risen, with a shared, single impulse, and run across the dark room together to stroke the wall, believing that the bright pictures being cast upon it would magically change its texture. (Francis said afterwards to the angry teacher, “I wanted to feel what Africa was like.”) Of course they were disappointed when their touch encountered only the ordinary wall; but they did distort the image: they did have the satisfaction of seeing the African veldt at dusk ripple across their tiny hands, even if they could not feel it.

  Stretching up, she touched the mirror with the tips of her fingers. It was, of course, cold and smooth. What else, even now, did she expect? She withdrew her hand and gazed again at her reflection. Me. The metal leaves framed her as she stood, still and dead as a painting. Could there be anything more wearisome, she wondered, than to stand alone, alone, alone before a mirror? How long would it be, she wondered, until she could go beyond reflections? For how long would she have to continue claiming the face in the mirror as her own? When would there be an end to shadows cast upon glass?

  Theresa turned her back upon the mirror, with its cold, circular, distorted room, and looked around the real parlour in which she was standing. She realized that she was very cold. Shivering, she crossed to the hearth, knelt down and tried to rekindle the dying fire.

  About the Author

  Deirdre Madden is from Toomebridge, Co. Antrim. Her novels include The Birds of Innocent Wood, Nothing is Black, One by One in the Darkness, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and Authenticity. Her novel Molly Fox’s Birthday also was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She teaches at Trinity College, Dublin and is a member of the Irish Arts Academy Aosdana.

  Copyright

  First published in the USA in 1986 by The Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston/New York

  Hidden Symptoms was first published in Great Britain in 1987 in First Fictions: Introduction 9 (Faber and Faber)

  Published in paperback in 1988 by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Deirdre Madden, 1986

  The right of Deirdre Madden to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, lice
nsed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29807–5