The Joyce Girl

by Annabel Abbs

  Doctor Jung nods. “I expected it to be more like your father’s work.”

  I stop playing with my buttons and draw myself up, making myself as tall as possible. “That must be a compliment because we all know what you think of Babbo’s work.” My voice is icy as I remember how hurt Babbo had been when Doctor Jung publicly described Ulysses as cold and unfeeling and boring – and like a tapeworm. Yes, that was the word he’d used. “So, it’s no tapeworm, Doctor?”

  He flicks through the pages, nodding his head and sniffing noisily. “Where were you born, Miss Joyce?”

  “I’ve already told you. In a pauper’s hospital in Italy. Babbo was there too. Don’t you want to ask about my story?”

  “Your father watched the birth?” Doctor Jung’s eyebrows rise up his forehead.

  “Of course not! He was very sick in a different part of the hospital. My mother said he nearly died there.”

  The doctor pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs ineffectually at his nose. “Did you know that you weren’t nursed for very long, if at all, by your mother?”

  I shrug. “So what?”

  “But your brother was. Almost until you were born. Your father wrote that in the account he gave me. Does that make you feel anything, Miss Joyce?”

  “Giorgio always had everything – that’s just the way it was. My mother worships him. Babbo worships me.” I shrug again. Why is Doctor Jung talking about my life as a baby? “My story,” I persist. “Don’t you have any questions?”

  “I’m fascinated by the prophetic powers you touch on here.” He taps his fat fingers on my manuscript. “Can you tell me more? Were there other occasions when you were able to see the future? Do you still see it?”

  I pause and wonder whether to answer his questions. But then it strikes me that I have nothing left now. Nothing but my secrets. And he is being too eager, too greedy. “You must wait for the next instalment. But don’t expect your spy to tell you. I shall be extra careful not to let my secrets slip out.” I don’t tell him that nothing makes sense until I’ve shaped it in my memoir, until I’ve wrapped it in a skein of words. Instead I stand up and walk to the window, careful to keep my shoulders braced and my head very upright. Doctor Jung’s manicured garden leads to the lake where wild ducks and swans swim freely, sending out rippling cones of water. Overhead, the gulls jostle and swoop and dive.

  “I don’t want to be incarcerated anymore,” I say, turning back into the room. “Babbo needs me. The future of literature depends on me.” I think again of the caged bears at the zoo, how they’d prowled round their enclosure, their bodies limp and hopeless.

  “You’re making excellent progress, Miss Joyce, but this is only the beginning. Madame Baynes thinks you’re less confused than we had thought. She finds you often lucid. And to have written this …” He pauses, picks up my manuscript and flourishes it in the air. “You must have had many moments of clarity and recollection.”

  “When I start writing I remember everything. The darkness dissolves and it’s as though it all happened yesterday.” I begin to pace the room. I am so tired of sitting … sitting in consulting rooms and surgeries, sitting in cars and on benches, sitting in beds and at tables. Oh, how I want to move and dance again! Why can no one understand this?

  “Please sit down.” Doctor Jung’s voice is strained and clipped.

  “Did my father tell you how I loathe doctors?” I continue to pace the room, circling the doctor, looking at him from every angle. If the great Doctor Jung can walk round the room and examine me as though I’m a dead butterfly on a microscope slide, why can’t I do the same to him?

  “Yes, he did. How are you getting on with Doctor Naegeli?”

  “He has taken so much blood from me, that I must be empty now. He says I have constant leukocytes – a superabundance of white blood corpuscles. He is checking me for …” I don’t want to say the word. Not to Doctor Jung. Not to anyone.

  “For what, Miss Joyce?” The doctor’s voice softens and he leans back in his chair so that his large stomach balloons in front of him. “You forget that I can ask Doctor Naegeli myself. Quite easily.” He sniffs and wipes at his nostrils again.

  “I’m not telling you!” I slump back into the armchair, pulling my coat into my ribs, hunching my shoulders. No doubt he will start on his old line of questioning again, about me and Babbo and all the bedrooms we shared. But he doesn’t. Instead he asks me if I’m comfortable in Doctor Brunner’s private sanatorium.

  “It’s like here.” I gesture round the room, at the mahogany panelling and the oriental paintings on the clean white walls and the mandala prints propped up on the mantelpiece. “Bourgeois,” I add contemptuously.

  “You don’t feel comfortable here?”

  “No. Only when I look out of the window.” I can’t explain how the moneyed ease and comfort of the furnishings alienate me, how the thick velvet of the curtains and the polished parquet floor make me feel anxious and unwelcome, how they remind me of a certain Parisian apartment I’d rather forget.

  “Miss Joyce …” Doctor Jung pauses and blows his nose so loudly I hear the snot bubbling from him. “You’re twenty-seven and you have never lived away from your family. Even now, when you are with Madame Baynes in the sanatorium, I cannot prise you and your father apart. Contrary to all my instructions, he refuses to leave Switzerland.” He pauses and inspects the contents of his handkerchief, as though Babbo may be lurking there. “Why did you never leave home?”

  My eyes shift back to the window. “I used to imagine being Stella Steyn. I imagined her waking up every morning, putting on her green velvet coat and her hat with the orange feathers. No one telling her what to wear or what time to come home.”

  “Go on,” urges the doctor, his gaping eyes trapping me in their bright beam.

  “My friends went to night clubs and had lovers. I went out to dinner with my parents. So, one day I asked Babbo if I could move out. I told him Mama hated me.” I pause and close my eyes, willing the memory back. I can hear the doctor sniffling and clearing his throat, but after a few seconds I have the scene before me – Babbo’s study, books everywhere, newspapers, magazines, comics, picture books, encyclopaedias, maps, dictionaries, fanned across the floor and stacked against the walls and tipping from the shelves. Babbo, head bowed over his desk. Silence but for the scraping of his pen. And me, stretching out my neck and arching my back as I prepared to dance.

  “Babbo?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to move out. I want my own place. Like my friends.” I rolled each shoulder back, first the right and then the left. “I’m nearly twenty-one!”

  “I know, Lucia. You’ve asked us many times and our answer has always been no.” He put down his pen and, from the corner of my eye, I saw him watching me.

  “But why not? I’m the only dancer who still lives at home, except for Kitten.” I rolled my spine down until my head hung loosely by my knees.

  “They leap so looply as they link to light … linking and blinking to light and to flight. How does that sound?”

  “Mama hates me and Giorgio’s always singing with his choir and you’re always writing.” I felt the muscles behind my knees tauten as I placed my palms on the floor. I turned my head a fraction and looked through my legs at my father. He was watching me, his head cocked to one side, his face imperturbable and expressionless.

  “Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing … will they like that, Lucia? Those philistines who mock me, who maim and mutilate my work.” He sighed and turned back to his desk.

  “I want my own life. I want to be more independent.” I unrolled my spine, bringing myself up to a standing position. Then I pushed my head back until I saw nothing but the once-white ceiling, stained a dull beige from Babbo’s cigarettes.

  He fixed me with a single pink-veined eye. “How feline you are in that position … pussypussy plunderpussy …”

  “It’s nothing to do with you, Babbo. I’ll come and visit,
you know I will.” I kept my eyes on the ceiling.

  “In Ireland nice girls don’t live on their own. You stay with your mammy until you’re married.” The rasp of pen on paper started again.

  “What’s Ireland got to do with anything? This is Paris. And if Ireland was so wonderful why did you and Mama elope and marry in Italy instead of Dublin?”

  “Enough of your sauce. I need to get on with my work now. Run and post these letters for me … Pick, prick, pack, crack.”

  I slowly brought my neck and head back, enjoying the feeling of looseness in my muscles, but irritated by his words. I should have asked Mama. She wanted me out of the way. She found my dancing intrusive and unseemly. And when she saw Babbo watching me her eyes shrank and her face snapped shut. Yes, Mama would have agreed.

  Babbo put down his pen again and looked at me thoughtfully. “Perhaps someone could live with you.” He spoke very slowly, as if an idea was gradually forming in his mind.

  “Who could live with me? You mean I could live with Stella Steyn or Kitten?” I tried to keep my voice calm.

  “No, I do not mean that. I mean someone who could be like a mother to you.”

  “A mother? I don’t need a mother. I’m old enough to be a mother!”

  “I’m thinking of someone like ….” He paused and looked at me, as if deciding whether to continue or not. Then he shook his head quickly. “Run and post these letters will you, Lucia?”

  “Only if you tell me who you’re thinking of.”

  “I’m thinking perhaps we could prevail on your Aunt Eileen.” He watched me carefully as he said this.

  “I would love to live with Aunt Eileen again, but what about her children?”

  “I’d pay her to live with you here. No doubt she needs the money.” Babbo rubbed his goatee beard for a bit then turned back to his desk.

  “Her children could come to Paris too,” I said. “They’re my cousins, after all.”

  “Oh no,” He said quickly. “I couldn’t afford that. But I could afford to put them in an Irish boarding school. I’ll ask her when she comes, next week.” And then his claw-like hand with its large ring had reached out for the letters on his desk. “Now go and post these, Lucia. And hurry back – I need you to dance for me again.”

  I open my eyes, blinking, bewildered. The faint odour of pond weed reminds me that I’m not in Paris about to dance to Babbo, but in Doctor Jung’s study being watched and interrogated before he returns me to my spying nurse and the sanatorium with its barred windows.

  “So what happened?” The doctor nods and smiles as if I’m a small child that has pleased him in some way.

  “She agreed, but Babbo’s family in Ireland got very angry and made her go back and look after her own children. You see, her children were still young and her husband had just shot himself.” My voice tails off.

  Doctor Jung frowns, his chin resting in his palm. “Your father asked his sister to look after you, a twenty-one year old woman, and leave her own newly orphaned children in a boarding school? Do I understand you correctly, Miss Joyce?”

  I nod, and then the words tumble out of me, unbidden and uncontrollable. “My uncle shot himself while Aunt Eileen was staying with us. Babbo got the telegram but didn’t tell her … he took her sight-seeing instead. When she got home, to Trieste, my uncle had already been buried. She didn’t believe he’d shot himself so she made them dig up his body.” I can feel the plates of my skull grinding and the air wheezing in my throat. Why am I dragging up this memory?

  “Was that the only time you tried to leave home?”

  I sit, motionless and wordless, pulling thin strands of fox hair from my coat. How easily they come away … soon my coat will be bald and hairless like an old man.

  “Did your parents treat you like a child because you behaved like one?”

  “Babbo needed me at home. He depended on me. You don’t understand!”

  “Because he was almost blind? He needed you to run errands, is that it, Miss Joyce? To take down his letters and collect his library books?” Doctor Jung stands up, pushes back his chair, moves towards me.

  I shake my head vigorously. “I was his muse! He needed me for inspiration. You don’t understand!”

  “How did you know that?” He looms over me, swaying and sniffling.

  “Everyone knew! People talked of it in the Montparnasse bars. He watched me all the time. Wait until his book comes out. You’ll find me there – on every page!”

  My head is throbbing and inside my coat stray fox hairs are clinging to my damp skin. What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not in his book? What if he watched me dancing not for literary inspiration but for something lewd and disgusting? I struggle to stand up. I need air, oxygen. The doctor seems to have swelled and expanded until he’s too big for the room and I feel pushed to the edges, crushed by his presence, unable to breathe.

  “I’ll call the nurse to take you back to the sanatorium.” He steers me gently towards the door, before adding, “Doctor Naegeli is dining here tonight. I won’t forget to ask after your blood tests, Miss Joyce.”

  Doctor Naegeli. Dining here. Blood tests. His words roll round inside my head and suddenly I feel a surge of anger and my lungs fill with the ice-blue air of the mountains and the blood fizzes behind my eyes.

  I spin round on the heel of my foot, the unexpected rush of fury making my voice rise. “In which case I’ll tell you myself! I won’t have you gossiping about me over your Swiss cheese!”

  Doctor Jung reaches his arm round me, pushes open the door and propels me out. A dog barks incessantly somewhere and the sound ricochets round the inside of my skull.

  “Can I have no secrets? No privacy? Nothing that is mine – just mine!” I turn my back on the doctor, ashamed of my sudden fury. My memory of being in a straitjacket is still as sharp and bright as a knife. I will not go back into a straitjacket! I will not …

  “Of course, it is always possible that doctor Naegeli will not tell me.” Doctor Jung’s voice is calm and soothing but I know he’s placating me, lying to me.

  “I will tell you myself!”

  “An excellent idea.” He runs his fat hand down my arm, as if he’s stroking the haunch of a dog.

  “Syphilis!” I spit out the hated word and take a deep breath. In the large airy hall with its view of the hills, the doctor seems diminished and I’m able to breathe again. “He is testing me for syphilis! They all think I have syphilis!”

  “In which case, you must carry on with your memoir.” He pats my shoulder. “And don’t lose your new coat, Miss Joyce. Winter is coming and it gets very cold in the mountains.”

  5

  December 1928

  Paris

  On Mr Beckett’s first day working for Babbo, I slipped out of my dance class early, hurried home and positioned myself casually in the hall. I knew he would arrive punctually. Not only because he’d made plain his admiration for my father, but because there was something very precise about him. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but I had a sense that Mr Beckett appreciated order and exactitude. And no sooner had the clock chimed, than the doorbell rang – and there he was looking earnest and bright-eyed, a fat book clamped beneath his arm.

  “Hello, Sam,” I said, trying to sound calm.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Joyce – Lucia.” He stepped into the hall and stood there, staring at me.

  “Have you bought that for Babbo?” I tilted my head in the direction of the book tucked under his elbow.

  “Great Expectations. It’s got a passage about the River Thames I want to read to your father.” He stopped and looked over my shoulder at Babbo’s study door as if he was willing it to open, like Aladdin’s cave.

  “Oh yes, he’ll like that. Mama says if he mentions another river she’ll go mad. He knows them all now, every river in the world. And when you’re least expecting it, he starts reciting them, one after another.”

  “Is that so?” Mr Beckett’s eyes slid back to me and then back to Babbo
’s door.

  I lowered my voice to a dramatic whisper. “The Nile … The Po … The Amazon … The Yangtze … The Mississippi … The Thames … The Avon … The Seine … Not to mention the greatest river of all – the Liffey!”

  “Ah yes, the Liffey,” echoed Mr Beckett, his eyes flickering towards the clock.

  “I forgot to tell you about Miss Beach’s lending library when I saw you last week. She’s the lady who published Ulysses. It’s the best library and bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, on the rue de l’Odeon.”

  Mr Beckett shuffled awkwardly as though he had pins and needles in his feet.

  “We’d be nothing without her,” I continued. “How are you enjoying the City of Light, Sam?”

  Mr Beckett looked nervously over my shoulder again. “I don’t want to be late for your father. Shall I knock on his door?” He frowned as a crackling and unfamiliar voice floated towards us.

  I laughed. “He’s teaching himself Spanish by ear, from the gramophone. He had his Russian lesson with Mr Ponisovsky this morning and now he’s doing Spanish.”

  Mr Beckett’s eyes grew larger. “How many languages does he speak?”

  “He’s always learning new ones. Every holiday we go somewhere so he can research his book and he tries to learn the language. Flemish, Welsh, Provençal …” I rolled my eyes and shrugged helplessly as if to indicate the trials of living with a genius.

  Mr Beckett cleared his throat and looked at the clock again. I was about to regale him with stories of Babbo and me learning Dutch together when Mama appeared, scowling, her fingers glistening with soap suds.

  “Lucia, show Mr Beckett to the study. Now. Jim’s been waiting these last five minutes. Mr Beckett, go straight through.” She flapped her soapy hands as though she was shoo-ing off a pair of stray cats.

  “He’s listening to his Spanish,” I protested. “Anyway, I’m telling Sam about Miss Beach’s bookshop.”