by Neil M. Gunn
There followed a still, appalling moment, wherein Aunt Phemie dwelt with the utmost cause, the last dark root, of Nan’s illness: she wanted to save Ranald from becoming Kronos.
Mad—mad as the Oedipus legend—mad as all the legends; but, like them, absolutely haunting. Once a thing like that got a grip of you, Aunt Phemie saw, not as a theoretic or psychoanalytic formulation, but as an actuality, as an emotion, a picture, as something that rose undeniably out of your depths, out of what seemed the very essence of your being, you could only protect yourself by going neurotic, psychotic, and ultimately mad, lunatic.
Fear was the basis, but in Nan’s case not only fear for herself, for her life instincts, but also fear for Ranald, for her love. She had had to break Fanwicke and the others—or get broken.
At this point Nan moved in her bed and instantly Aunt Phemie, as though still in the pulse of Nan’s mind, experienced a sudden shift of anxiety, gripped now by an actual fear. She knew quite certainly that Nan would get up and go into Ranald’s room. She would go looking for him, in a strange dream sense. From that moment, natural sleep had become impossible for Aunt Phemie.
Yet exhausted, she must have dozed, for some time during the night she came fully to herself to find Nan already standing by the small mahogany chest of drawers just inside the door. There was the creak of a top drawer. Aunt Phemie watched, knowing Nan kept her writing materials there. Outside, the moonlight must have been fairly strong, for Nan’s bowed head was solid against the pale-daffodil wall. An elbow lifted; a hand moved in the drawer—paused and slowly withdrew. Slowly she shut the drawer, stood quite still for a little while, then moved to the door. As the knob was turning, Aunt Phemie called her in a low voice, at the same time getting out of bed and going towards her, but not touching her. Nan stood but never spoke. Aunt Phemie had an impulse to get over the moment, to make it easy for Nan, by asking her if she wanted to go to the bathroom. But something deeper restrained her and, instead, she suggested, “Won’t you go to your bed, Nan?” And, as if acting on the suggestion in quite an automatic way, Nan went back to her bed, covered herself with the clothes, and lay quite still.
The whole night’s experience was now in Aunt Phemie as she stood listening, after hearing what she thought was a cry from upstairs. But the cry was not repeated. Yet she could not go on with her kitchen work; she had to make sure.
Before Nan’s room she took a deep breath, noiselessly turned the knob and put her head round the door. Nan was sitting up in bed and stared at her with a steady fixity as if watching what her visitor was going to do next.
“I was wondering if you were asleep,” said Aunt Phemie, smiling, closing the door behind her. After her first look at Nan she cast her eyes about the room as though to make sure the place was tidy, then in a natural companionable way went to the south window and said cheerfully, “The sun is shining.” She glanced about the fields and farther away, but Nan did not answer, did not move. Fear had touched Aunt Phemie with its sickly feather. The look on Nan’s face had gone completely alien.
Turning from the window and still interested, remarking the room could do with a proper tidy-up, she now sat, as though only for a few minutes, on the foot of Nan’s bed, and looked at her patient again to confirm what appeared her obvious impression that everything was going well. “And how are you, Nan?” she asked gently but cheerfully, smiling, with a frank look.
Nan held her look then removed her eyes, though it was indeed as if the eyes themselves had removed, like the eyes of a child who has grown unaccountably serious, who lives in another place and has found there what is outside time.
Aunt Phemie experienced the clutch at the mother’s heart. Nan did not answer.
Aunt Phemie regarded Nan’s face with an unconscious concentration. With its bright chestnut hair, in a wave-broken disorder which enriched its colour and depth, the face took on an arrested beauty that drew Aunt Phemie out of herself so that she was held in a moment of pure wonder. The eyes had grown larger, with the blue a shade lighter than Aunt Phemie’s own blue, but miraculously clear, translucent, the light that no flower ever quite has, nor any sky. The face had a fragile firmness, not pale but cool. The quiet lines ran flawlessly down until they met on her chest for a moment then gathered to a deepening flow between her breasts, to disappear beneath her blue pyjama jacket which was plucked away on one side where the top button had come unfastened.
She was like a plucked flower, like a single daffodil in a vase, whose trumpet hears the quietness of the snow outside, the mysterious quietness that is known to it.
Aunt Phemie’s eyes followed the arms to the hands which lay together on the light-blue satin quilt. The hands were relaxed, but then she noticed that every now and then they tremored slightly of their own accord. As she glanced up, she met Nan’s full regard, which remained on her for quite a time, in a distant silence that yet had in it something of incommunicable speech.
“Tell me, Nan,” said Aunt Phemie, but speaking also through her eyes from the pressure of her emotion, “is there anything worrying you?”
Nan’s eyes went away to the wall behind Aunt Phemie where there hung a framed water colour of a woman sitting with bowed head, as if asleep, before the sea. But the eyes found nothing in the picture and shifted to the blank pale-daffodil distemper of the wall. Then, without movement of the head, they were on Aunt Phemie again, but only for a moment.
“Won’t you tell me?” begged Aunt Phemie.
“I saw him,” she said, quite suddenly and clearly.
Aunt Phemie was so completely taken aback, so instantly confused by the notion that she might have seen Ranald, that she had an impulse to bluster, to say it was quite impossible. Nan’s eyes were on her like the eyes of the child who knows what it has done and is coolly curious, and yet incurious, about the effect.
“But,” said Aunt Phemie, “but—how could you? You were in your bed.”
Nan’s eyes went back to the wall. “I wasn’t,” she said.
Aunt Phemie had now got control of herself. “Where were you?”
Nan did not answer.
“Won’t you tell me?” asked Aunt Phemie gently. “Do tell me.”
The subdued roar of a lorry as it took the brae to the steading came into the room; a lowing of moving cattle; a commotion and stamping movement; the shrill barking of Sandy’s young dog; all was in that outside world, which seemed in a moment even more remote and strange than the world which Aunt Phemie was now in. The noises died away, leaving only the rumble of the engine as it idled over.
“They are moving some cattle to-day,” explained Aunt Phemie, under a sudden heavy weight of reluctance to find out any more.
Nan did not speak, but she stirred slightly, lifted her hand to her breast; but the hand trembled and she laid it down again.
The hand clutched at Aunt Phemie’s heart, weakening her; but more gently and sensibly than ever she asked, “Won’t you tell me, Nan? You know you can tell me anything.”
Nan shook her head slowly once.
Encouraged, Aunt Phemie asked, “Where did you go? Surely you can tell me that?”
“The sun,” she said, staring at the wall.
“Is the sun troubling you?”
“The sun came into the room.”
“Yes?”
“I went to see it.”
“Did you? Where?”
“At the window.”
“But you know you shouldn’t be moving about. You had a high fever and that weakens you and makes you imagine all sorts of things. Besides you might get a dreadful relapse.” Aunt Phemie was preparing for what might come next.
But Nan did not go on.
“And what did you see?” asked Aunt Phemie inexorably driven.
“I saw him.”
“Who?”
“Ranald.” Nan regarded Aunt Phemie with waiting eyes, watching.
“Did you?” replied Aunt Phemie, with the veiled air of knowing quite well that Nan could not have seen Ranald. “Wher
e was he?” She was not looking at Nan, asked the question lightly but quite solemnly.
“He came in sight from the gate. Then he stood by the trees and looked at me. He stood quite still. Then he turned and went away.”
All along Aunt Phemie was afraid that it might have been Ranald. Now she realised he could have been coming back to the house … or perhaps been taking a look at it from an angle that would show Nan’s window, not from any romantic feeling but out of the strange curiosity which at such a moment haunts the very core of human nature. Anyone in the glen, knowing what was going on behind that window, would experience an urge to steal in and have a long look. In Ranald’s case, the matter was profoundly involved. Aunt Phemie could see him, standing there by the trees, and going away.
Overpoweringly she perceived the dreadfulness of her dilemma—and of Nan’s. For Nan, from her whole behaviour, did not expect to be believed. Yet she knew she had seen Ranald. If now Aunt Phemie were to persist that it was impossible for Ranald to have been there in the flesh, then Nan’s hallucination or illusion had at last crossed the border and become for her the reality. Nan would know this.
The idling motor suddenly stopped and the world became extraordinarily still. A cock crew in the distance, an echoing and forlorn cry that arched and fell away over the edge of the world. Then, with incredible nearness, there were footsteps on the stairs. They were steadily mounting, muffled to a choking stealth by the carpet, yet deliberate and confident, a man’s footsteps. Aunt Phemie’s heart turned over in her and the skin of her face ran cold. The footsteps came to the door and paused. A hand knocked quietly. Aunt Phemie could not move. The knob turned, the door opened slowly and a face came round it. It was the doctor’s face, red and smiling in a sort of peep-bo expression, smiling at Aunt Phemie with an amused greeting ready, when the eyes suddenly switched to the bed and the smile vanished. Aunt Phemie turned. Nan was slipping away against the back of the bed, her face deathly pale. She had fainted.
7
With a poker, Aunt Phemie tried to hurry the heat under the kettle.
“If she really did see him, if he was there,” the doctor said.
“You didn’t see him at all as you were coming in?”
“No.”
“Where on earth can he have gone?” Aunt Phemie’s anxiety and impatience were unconcealed. “I feel something should be done at once.”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor doubtfully. “You think that if Ranald could be actually produced, then Nan would be reassured, would be helped, by knowing that she was not absolutely obsessed?”
“Don’t you?”
“Supposing she hasn’t seen him?”
“That will make all the difference. That’s why I wish he would come. You would have thought his anxiety would have kept him at the door,” said Aunt Phemie in an angry rush.
“Wait a bit. We’ll have to go easy. Why do you think it will make all the difference? Does an illusion, more or less, really matter now?”
“In this case, yes. It will make all the difference in the world.”
“How?”
“Oh, it’s difficult to explain, but I know. I don’t care what any authority may say about what happens inside the mind at such a time. If Nan did not see Ranald, then however real and solid he may have seemed to her, yet somewhere deep in her she will know that it may not actually have been him. But if she did see the real Ranald, then the effect on her mind will be quite different, especially if you were to prove to her that it was an illusion.”
The doctor regarded her unconsciously with his professional look. “I get your point,” he said. “It’s a subtle one. I can see I don’t need to tell you that I don’t know a great deal about this. It’s psychiatric. But I couldn’t help seeing a lot of it in the Middle East. I’m not so very long demobbed, as you know. It’s not just always an easy business. Above all it needs patience and time.”
“Time can run short,” said Aunt Phemie.
“You mean there is a critical phase? No doubt. But then more than ever all depends on how you are going to deal with it. A wrong treatment—a wrong step—can tip the balance the wrong way. You saw what happened when I blundered into the bedroom. By the way, I did go first to the kitchen door—quietly, because I thought we might have a few words.”
“I understand,” said Aunt Phemie without relaxing her expression.
The doctor glanced at her. “I think—perhaps—you are overemphasising the difficulty at the moment. We have got to be careful, I mean, that we don’t shove our burden onto that young man’s shoulders.”
“You’re telling me,” said Aunt Phemie, with an impatient look at the fire.
The doctor smiled. “I suppose so,” he said. After a moment he went on. “All the same, when you mentioned how he came into sight and stood by the trees and then went away, I got the feeling of something happening in a dream.”
“You really think he wasn’t there?” Aunt Phemie glanced at him quickly.
“Anyway, he isn’t here yet! But I wasn’t thinking of that. Supposing you had been up there, ill like Nan, and you saw a dream-like happening of that kind, would you be terribly distressed to find it hadn’t been real?”
It was like a blow to Aunt Phemie. She momentarily lost grip and said in a distressed way, “Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“I don’t think you need worry about that. In any case, I shouldn’t like to see you begin to worry.” He smiled quickly, giving her a flashing complimentary glance. “You have been pretty good.”
The compliment did not help her. She was suddenly terrified at the amount of emotion that wanted to burst through. She felt on the verge of crying out everything to the doctor, of letting her choked anxiety have its wild way.
“It’s a very difficult thing to deal with,” the doctor was saying, as he shifted his stance and pulled down his waistcoat. His darkbrown suit was a perfect fit. He looked at once professional and elegant. “And the world is full of it. We just can’t have wars and not expect this kind of reaction.”
“I know,” said Aunt Phemie automatically. She looked frozen.
“It’s getting a bit too common for my taste. Even amongst children, neurotic school children. You would hardly believe it.” He glanced away through the kitchen window. Aunt Phemie turned her fixed gaze on the kettle. It was singing.
“You keep on as you’re doing and Nan will come round all right. It’s been unfortunate that this murder affair on the hill got under her skin, but she is fundamentally sound.” His voice, the movement of his feet, intimated that he was about to go. “I’ll look in again to-morrow.”
Before Aunt Phemie could speak the door opened. She started violently and the blood drained from her face. It was Ranald.
“Hallo,” said the doctor, “we have been wondering where you were.” His manner was courteous.
Ranald glanced at Aunt Phemie and then, in his casual way, said, “I have been out about the farm—talking to some of the men. I saw your car.”
“There’s been some trouble here over you,” said the doctor. “Miss Gordon rather imagines she saw you from the window.”
Ranald’s face steadied. “Where?”
“Did you come into the drive, stand for a moment against the trees and look up at her window?”
“Yes,” said Ranald, watching the doctor.
“You did? Oh.” The doctor’s brows gathered thoughtfully.
“Why? What happened?” asked Ranald.
“She fainted,” said Aunt Phemie in a flat laconic voice. It sounded at once tragic and indifferent. As she lifted the kettle off the fire, both men looked at her back. She began making a pot of tea.
“The problem is this,” said the doctor to Ranald in his professional manner. “Because of her condition—and too much excitement will be very bad for her—should we let her believe that she was deluded, which I fancy would do her no harm, or should you go up?”
“I have said all along,” remarked Ranald calmly, “that I
should go up.”
The doctor suddenly looked nettled. “I hope you realise it’s not just quite so simple as all that?”
“Well, I hope I’m not just a simpleton.” There was no sarcasm in his voice; there was even a certain dry humour in his eyes.
The doctor smiled. “I hope not.” But his voice did not sound as if he had been reassured. However, he had to go. “I’ll have to leave it to yourself, Mrs. Robertson.” He glanced at his gold wrist-watch. “I have a hospital appointment and need my time.”
Aunt Phemie turned from the fire. “Very good, Doctor. And thank you for coming. I’ll take up a cup of tea—and prepare her for Ranald’s visit.” Her voice was clear but without warmth, almost without life.
The doctor’s eyes searched her face for a moment. “You think so?”
“Yes. I agree with Ronald.”
“Very good,” said the doctor. “But you needn’t hurry the process.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“Right. Good morning.”
Aunt Phemie turned back from the door and began preparing a small tray. She did not look at Ranald, did not speak.
“How could she see me?” asked Ranald. “I thought she was in bed.”
“She got up to welcome the sun,” replied Aunt Phemie, “and saw you. Didn’t you see her?”
“No. The light was on the window, blinding it.”
At last she had two cups of tea and the biscuit box on the tray. “I’ll take this up and try to get her to take something. I’ll tell her I wrote you and you arrived suddenly to-day. You were coming in by the front drive—when suddenly you changed your mind and came in by the back.”
“That’s what happened,” said Ranald.
“That’s fine.” She hesitated. But she didn’t or couldn’t say any more; she lifted the tray and went out. On the top landing she paused, out of breath. A twist of pain passed over her features. Then she went forward, opened the door quietly and entered the room. Nan was lying with her face to the wall. After the doctor had got her round, she had been bewildered and jumpy in a scrambling way, but soon, exhausted, had grown wearily composed and turned her face away from them. Her body had now turned away as well.