by Fay Weldon
A friend of mine whose husband had just left her had joined us for comfort and consolation, and had set up a tent next to ours, beneath the pine trees. Around the 16th of August every year the wind turns on the wild Atlantic coast and the hot sands are whipped with cold rain. The summer announces it is over. But this year the turn in the weather was late and Ron's version of consolation took a practical form, and he did not arrive home for another ten days, or phone me, or write, by which time Jane was dead and the funeral over, and Julia - I will call her that - presumably well bedded.
But like so many men of his generation Ron found death embarrassing. He sometimes did not know where to put himself in a crisis except somewhere else. As for Julia, she was a nice, baffled, terrified girl with a difficult husband and I forgive her. She had three small children whom she would drive round in the car between six o'clock and eight o'clock every morning so as not to disturb her husband with their playing and crying. He was a copywriter and needed sleep to fuel his creativity and made a terrible fuss if disturbed. Now he had left. I daresay I would have done the same in her circumstances. Nevertheless it was painful.
Had Miss Rowlands been trained by the Jungians, not the Freudians, had she belonged to some newer, younger, post-feminist school of therapy, I would have been out of the marriage like a shot, divorce papers flying - but the law was not so kind to women in those days, and the current wisdom was that men would be men and women should put up with it. And my children loved their step-father and father, and my niece and two nephews their step-uncle, and, like it or not so did I. And I have had to break the news of enough deaths to enough children in my time not to want to go round rocking any more boats than necessary. I stayed, and had another baby.
Doralee and Peter don't have this kind of problem: the new young are trained to look after their own best interests. They have support groups and are there for one another, and tragedies are only allowed to hang around for so long before acceptance is reached and closure obtained. Though for Doralee and Peter it does seem unlikely that there will be many others in a similar predicament to their own, and 'sharing' they can see may be a difficulty in this particular case.
I do not think Miss Rowlands helped me come to terms with my masochistic tendencies or my low self-esteem, or any of the other neurotic ills that plagued my young life, but it was here in her consulting rooms that I learned to finish my sentences when speaking aloud. I learned to distinguish between what is a feeling and what is a thought, which is trickier than you might think, but useful for novelists. Before Miss Rowlands, feelings and thoughts lay in a viscous muddle inside my head. After Miss Rowlands I could sort them out, put them into the heads of fictional characters, and consider them.
When I started psychoanalysis I lived in a short-term world. This lover, this baby, this profound but passing emotion, this TV commercial - and I could just about manage a thirty-second script but fifteen would be better. After that I would lie back exhausted. Eight years later I could undertake a television drama, a full-length novel, a radio or stage play. I did not need the gratification of instant results: I could cover more than a single page without pausing to be admired. I preferred to sell ideas rather than products. Was that an achievement? I had the feeling Miss Rowlands thought it was, but she did not say so.
How I hated going to see her, how hard the sofa was, the time went so slowly, it was as bad as being five years old and made to lie down for a nap after lunch. I hated the suspension of real life that occurred in those lunchtime sessions, I hated the sound of my own voice as I searched my past for patterns. I could have been off lunching with one of the colleagues at the Strand Palace Hotel, flirting with my boss, or drinking in the American Bar at the Savoy. Yet I knew well enough the better path was to lie there on the couch, undeserving yet one of the privileged who had found a watering-place in a desert, a tiny oasis of wisdom, and that it was my path and purpose in life to pass it on.
My conversion to anti-therapism came as a bolt from the blue: a flurry of enantiodromia to the head, in fairly dreadful circumstances. Enantiodromia is a Jungian and very useful term for the process of conversion, when someone goes as far down the road of obsession as possible, comes to the end of the tracks, and has no option but to go back the other way. It is the moment when Saul the persecutor of the Christians turns into Paul, the great saint and protector, the flash of light on the road to Damascus.
It was 1991. I had been asked by a group of psychotherapists to talk to them about the role of the archetype in my novels. I demurred. Not my scene: mine to write, theirs to analyse. They persisted, I went. A large house in North London, headquarters of some kind of association for the dissemination of emotional literacy. Here were courses for policemen, social workers, magistrates, priests, politicians - my, they were busy! Laypersons streamed in, converts flowed out, with the jargon of knowledge, kindness and understanding at their fingertips. Couldn't be bad, I thought. But my audience of therapists seemed to want only to know how to get their novels published. And they were cross with me because without training, without their insights, I managed to do it. And I realised with some alarm that what they did professionally was write their novels in other people's heads, turn their lives into narratives, and give it the end their particular training suggested. The beginning was theirs to define (cold mother, abusive father), the middle (be more assertive, find your self-esteem), theirs to develop, the end (mostly to split with the heretofore loved one) theirs to conclude. Members all of a living creative-writing course.
After the talk we went to a Chinese restaurant. This was 1991. I was living apart from Ron on the suggestion of his therapist. We 'needed time apart', she said, and had done my horoscope and his, to prove how unsuited we were. I could hardly take her seriously, and was surprised he could, but held the general view that therapy was good, therapists were wise, knew what they were doing and it was all going to be okay. But that evening scales fell from my eyes, the cataract was swept away, I was indeed Paul on the road to Damascus. Not only was I wrong, self-deceived, complacent, unthinking, uncritical, I was stupid. These people were dangerous.
Over sweet and sour pork the group discussed patients and cases, using real names, while pondering what should happen next to them. Over apple and banana toffee and bad white wine they decided Jill must leave Jack - he bullied her. That Jack was in the same line of work as his therapist - both were parsons - and both up for promotion in the Church and there was a conflict of interests here bothered no one. Jack didn't want Jill to leave, and she said she didn't want to go, but they reckoned she could be persuaded. I asked how old Jack and Jill were and was told, 'Oh, in their sixties:' They'd been married thirty-five years. 'Mightn't they be lonely apart?' I asked. They turned to me as one. 'We don't talk about loneliness, we talk about aloneness.' And I saw the tall house in North London as the haunted house on the hill out of which streamed the bats of Satan, leaving a blight of sorrow and loneliness wherever they alighted. I went home and rang Ron and said, 'For God's sake be careful.' But it was too late, he trusted her, not me. If his therapist said I was the source of her troubles, why then he believed her. Besides, he was in love with someone else by then, not that I knew that at the time.
His therapist was a new-age devotee, a lover of nature cures and crystals, and saw the family as the source of many evils, and had Cutting the Ties That Bind upon her coffee table, and it was her belief that heart by-passes and angiograms were unnatural, and that blocked arteries and all physical ills could be cured by attitude of mind and the right diet. Think healthy and you will be healthy. And within a couple of years of 'treatment' he was dead, from the unblocked artery, on the day of our divorce.
I still get letters from those who have run up against the cruel side of the therapy industry (an industry is what it is, and a powerful one, with influence in high places) and have suffered greatly. My own family has certainly not yet recovered from their father's visits to the therapist. I wrote another novel, Worst Fears, vaguely co
nnected to the events of the death, and then felt enough, enough, and left the subject. In this the new widow discovers the truth about the thorny patch she has so blithely and blindly been living in, while deluding herself it was the Garden of Eden. There's a telephone therapist in this one. She's not wicked, not like the ones in Affliction, just not very bright.
That was in the early Nineties when the arcane world of psychoanalysis for the few, for those who could afford it, had turned for good or bad into free counselling for those on benefit. But out of the years in psychoanalysis in the Sixties and Seventies, I wrote a series of short stories twenty and thirty years on, tales told to an analyst to whom I gave the name Miss Jacobs, but of course she was Miss Rowlands in disguise. Miss Jacobs sits and nods and knits while lives ravel and unravel around her, and those in denial come to their senses. A Gentle Tonic Affect, the PR girl at the nuclear power plant; the good wife with the hysterical paralysis in Delights of France or Horrors of the Road; Moon Over Minneapolis, title story of a collection, in which twin sisters, one pretty, one plain, visit the twin cities and realise where duty lies; and other stories too, and just thinking about them makes me want to write another one, and resuscitate Miss Rowlands, sitting there, calm and kind. I suspect I had a very positive transference, no matter how I denied it at the time, and since. She wept for my sister, when there were precious few to do it. I think perhaps she saved me from self-pity. She had standards in suffering, after all. She had worked with the victims of the camps.
Trisha, Doralee and Peter visit the parson
Ruby was disturbed when making jam doughnuts for the village fete by a ring on the doorbell, and was surprised to find her daughter, her partner Peter and a strange young woman on her doorstep.
'Let me guess,' Ruby said. 'You've decided to have a baby after all and this young woman is to be the surrogate mother.' 'Give me a break, Mum,' said Doralee. 'Not at a time like this. I need you to be there for me,' and she sat her mother down and told her the story.
'How does it work sexually?' asked Ruby, taking the plain woman's view, unimpressed by philosophical or medical detail. 'The him-her, the her-him, and you?' 'You mean you believe me?' asked Doralee, surprised. Peter and Trisha were wiping out the mixing bowl with their index fingers. The doughnuts had been deep fried and put aside to cool a little before being filled with jam and rolled in sugar. Doralee hated to think of the wasted calories each one represented. If they were hungry why didn't they eat something good for them? She was not surprised her mother was a size 22.
'Nothing surprises me?' said Ruby. 'The Lords of Misrule are abroad, that's for sure and everything is topsy-turvy in the world. Gay weddings and cloned babies! If these two have had a sex change then that's their doing. Perhaps it's just as well you never married the him-her, though heaven knows who else you're going to find.'
Doralee tried to explain that she was not talking about a sex change, rather a personality change, but her mother failed to grasp the difference. Doralee could see why her father had left. Ruby walked them down to the village church to keep their appointment with Father Bryant, who was rumoured to have successfully exorcised a ghost from the Edwardian ladies' loo in the Market Square and a DVD-throwing poltergeist from a house in Bell Street on the council estate, neither having any potential in the local tourist trade. They walked past the old shambles and the estate agents and the new trendy kitchen shop and the cross in the cobbles where a Catholic had been burned by Protestants four hundred years ago. The Peter body kicked a stone along the road while they walked, attracting looks from passers-by.
'I don't think Father Bryant will be blessing any gay weddings,' said Ruby, 'if your friend is a man in drag, as you say. Little hands for a man and no Adam's apple but you're the one with the education, Dora, and the up-to-date life style, so I suppose you know. I dare say they have hand transplants now, and Adam's apple removal on the NHS.' 'Doralee. Not Dora,' said Doralee, automatically. 'I've changed my mind about that. From now on you girls are going to be Dora, Claudia, Gloria and Mary like anyone else,' said her mother. 'I don't know what I was trying to prove. To upset my mother-in-law, I daresay, and give the fox-hunting set something to talk about. But now she's passed on it hardly seems worth it.'
'Well thank you very much,' said Doralee, bitterly. 'After all that!'
'I can see you're in a mood,' said her mother. 'Your London life does nothing for your nerves. Don't say anything to upset Father Bryant. I warn you he's gone very High Church, incense everywhere, refuses to do signs of peace, keeps using the 1662 Prayer Book in defiance of the Bishop, who is trying to excommunicate him. It was bad enough years back getting you girls christened, he certainly wouldn't put up with it now.'
'Names are so important,' said the Peter body. 'My little boy's called Spencer. I think it's a lovely name.'
'You have a child then?' asked Ruby. 'So at least something works, or did. Or perhaps you mean to have it cut off?
Some people do, I believe.'
'A dear little boy,' said the Peter body, 'but I don't see too much of him.'
'You didn't tell me he already had a child,' said Ruby to Doralee. 'He never mentioned it before. You are a dark horse,
Dora. I suppose you know what you're doing with your life.'
They arrived at a little stone Saxon church, set amongst yew trees, the other side of a lychgate. A notice said the place was protected by CCTV cameras, and another that it was Grade 1 listed, and pinned up over the board which gave the times of services was a poster headed Returning the Nation to its Heritage and obscuring that poster were warnings to countryside roamers to close gates and not to eat yew berries, and not to put up notices which might be seen as offensive to people of other faiths. But the interior of the church was beautifully restored with mock-Victorian stencilling and evening light struck a rosy glow through arched windows. Doralee began to feel quite hopeful.
Father Bryant came forward from the back of the church to meet them, like some amiable, if manic, Friar Tuck. He had a huge double chin beneath a wide face, and astute eyes, and a fine head of light brown hair which looked as if it had been set on rollers before being brushed out. He carried a bag of boiled sweets in his hand but offered the others none. He thanked Ruby for the doughnuts which he said he would give to the fete-organisers in the morning. He wore voluminous white robes draped with a purple sash, and big walking boots.
'Talk about cross-dressing!' whispered the Peter body, too loudly, and the Trisha body kicked his ankle and he squealed. Ruby went home to deep fry another batch of doughnuts.
They sat in the vestry. The Trisha body wriggled in the orange feather stole so it slipped from her pale, sloping shoulders, and she did not bother to pick it up. The Peter body directed flirtatious glances at the priest, looking out from under long lashes. Doralee had not realised before how long they were. Doralee got them settled as best she could. Thus in her childhood she had settled her little brothers and sisters. She told her tale as if she were talking to her editor, in measured and civil terms, and the priest listened attentively.
'It is my opinion,' Doralee concluded, 'that the two of them won't revert of their own accord, but need some kind of cosmic help, and as soon as possible. They're regressing. I don't know how these things work but I would imagine the longer they are out of their bodies the more somehow diffuse they become: they won't fit back properly and that could be disastrous for my relationship. I don't want to share my life with someone who's got a strange woman inside him. I'm the one with the oestrogen. I want a full return to normality. But if you do bring this about I would be happy for Peter and I to go through a marriage ceremony. It would be the least I could do.'
'Thank you,' said Father Bryant, 'but bribes are not necessary, pleased though I would be to welcome you back into the Church. I was there at your christening - the power of the Church reaches out and draws its children back. I am not sure however that the regular exorcism ceremony is appropriate. The unfortunate couple you bring to me, Trisha and
Peter, hardly seem to me to be instruments of the devil's malice. They may rather be implements of God's blessing, a miracle, though it would take a convocation or so to get to the bottom of it. They are not lost souls waiting to go to heaven or afraid of going to hell, for whom the ritual has been devised. They are not loitering in public lavatories the better to frighten the living. They are not wandering energies with disturbed spirits, throwing the crockery about. The man is in the woman's body and the woman in the man's. What can this be but God's visual fix? Time and time again my parishioners come to me and tell me their boys are behaving like girls. It is the boys who are modest and sensitive and easily hurt; it is the girls who are forceful, energetic, predatory, notching up sexual conquests while the boys do what they can to preserve their virtue. The transmigration of souls, which seems to me what we have here, was bound to happen sooner or later, and I am most obliged to you, Doralee, for bringing it to my attention. God sends his messengers in the most surprising way. He speaks not from out a burning bush but on the back stairs of a dry-cleaning shop and domestic employment agency!' He was quite excited. 'I will raise the issue with the General Synod at their next meeting in two months' time. That should stir them up a bit. One in the eye for the Bishop, in fact, who, as you may have heard, is not on the traditionalists' side.' 'You mean you're not going to do anything?' Doralee was horrified. 'Not even pray? Surely this counts as possession. Surely you invoke the Archangel Michael? What about bell, book and candle? It worked for the ladies' loo, it worked in Bell Lane for the poltergeist. You have to help!'
Father Bryant said he worried about the validity of trying to perform an exorcism when a miracle might be involved, rather than a curse from hell, and when there were two parties involved, neither of whom were demonstrating any particular distress or showing any signs of diabolic possession. It was without precedent. Doralee said there had to be a first time for everything, and that she would write the exorcism up in her columns. That persuaded him, though he first asked for picture approval, which Doralee promised. She would argue about that when the time came.