R.H.I. Read online

  The gas attack left him with shortness of breath for the rest of his life. At times, running for a short burst, he would experience a minor repeat of the initial pain and breathlessness that must have looked like the sudden onset of anxiety: he would sweat, stop, put a hand to his face and one to his chest and drag upwards at his lungs for a short time, until he reminded himself that it would pass. It meant the end of his active service, though in the following few years he remained in non-active positions in the armed forces.

  As he departed—still always somewhat short of breath now, but able to walk to the truck that was to take him to the camp, on his way home—the nurse approached him, then blushed and looked away.

  He said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Or, goodbye?’

  ‘I guess so. I’m going back to England.’

  ‘I know. It’s nice to hear you talk. I mean really talk.’

  ‘So you won’t have to read any more of what I write?’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ Until she noticed his smile. Then: ‘Well, maybe.’ They looked at each other for a second.

  ‘You’ve got work to do.’

  ‘So I have.’

  ‘Bye, then.’

  ‘So long …’ They shook hands, and she kissed him on the cheek.

  3. It seemed an obvious thing to do, to occupy myself with archives as much as possible. Acid-free enclosures and envelopes and boxes; an aura into which sounds dropped, dulled, and left hardly a ripple. The reading rooms of archives had their textures and smells and a weight to them, a weight in the air itself and in the fragile pieces of paper and small notebooks and diaries brought out to me. Although I was researching this or that, I occupied my time in archives partly for all these sensations. The weight no doubt has something to do with the fact that the scraps and bits that are held there are the only things left of people, like their ashes or bones. And the stillness because, like other remains, the things they tell us are soberingly ordinary: the date and time of an appointment with a doctor, for example. I tried to avoid photographs, though I liked the paper they were printed on or the light shining from a light box through a negative, combining with the reflection of lights overhead on the film surface. There was not much to be gleaned about Joan R in the archive of the British Psychoanalytic Society in London. My wife was looking after the children for the two days before her conference, days in which I could spend some hours there. I was nervous despite myself. I was not one of those who believed every word of some psychoanalytical theory, a convert, as it were. Nor, indeed, was I a passionate opponent of Freud, say. I had no strong feelings either way about him, or about psychoanalysis in general, about its truth or falsity or usefulness or anything else, but found it interesting enough and had come across references here and there to Joan R, my subject. Such vague interest hardly seemed to justify my intrusion into this space. I was here from New Zealand, which seemed a very long way away despite the miracle of air travel etc. I was breathing the air of the institution, however, and had made the trouble to find out enough about Joan R before I came, so that the material relating to her would mean something to me. There was reason enough to find her interesting. She was taken with the idea of masks—not literal masks, the sort of anthropological curiosities that others might collect, but faces themselves as masks, especially women’s faces, a woman-mask that women wear to make themselves women. This idea foreshadowed, influenced even, the kind of thing that philosophers later in the century would begin to say: that we are wearing masks, that we are wearing costumes and pretending to be who we are; that we are addicted to these games, addicted in that we cannot stop playing them, in that behind the mask of womanliness or manliness or what have you, there is precisely nothing. It was an attractive idea.

  But something struck me too, sitting in the strange quiet archive upstairs in London’s Shirland Road—it struck me that Joan R’s handwriting and her notebooks and diaries and letters were a mask, and that they were playing a game. No, but that they were like a mask. It couldn’t be said that she wore them on her face. But they presented a face to me. Can I speak like that? A face that was as easy or difficult to interpret as a mask. And if Joan R’s ideas were correct, that a person, a woman specifically, if a woman was nothing more than her mask, then what I was holding and looking at in the archive was Joan R, as much as anything was. This was her, and the trace of her was like a game that she played with a mask—or better, this material was like the tokens of a game that I could shift around. This thought moved me. It made me take the material I was looking at more, rather than less, seriously. Of course I didn’t seriously think that the material was Joan R, her body or her soul or anything like that. It did occur to me though that, holding it, holding her, I had a responsibility. It was, moreover, a strange kind of responsibility. Here I was, holding her! Yet this was no person but a bunch of old paper with an old paper smell, and a mask, and a set of game tokens, like playing cards or chess pieces, but cards or pieces that played their own game. It reminded me of the idea of a language game that the philosopher Wittgenstein used to talk about, not really meaning that language games were things that happened but that language is like a game, and that we play games with who we are and with our language, not real games but that it’s all make believe, even if it’s not. So my responsibility to Joan R was not to dig and delve, to find her beneath this pile of paper, since there was no ‘beneath’, no magical historical Joan R, no thing back there to contact, to reach across to, but only these pieces/cards/tokens. And yet it was a responsibility, not a game, even though it was a game. I wanted to reach across to her, but there was no across. She was speaking to me, not because she left something to posterity, but because of this strange game, this language game if you like, this game-like piece of language, like all language.

  Having started I had to carry on. Doing what? On the one hand I had to admit to myself that I was here mostly for a warm place to sit. You could say my perspective on life was that it was a series of leaps from quiet into noise, from noise into quiet, and that I found the quiet harder and harder to come by. The city outside the walls of this place was so much noise—everyone knows that—but everyone wanders through it, all the time looking and looking for a way to leap out of it and into quiet. Until, of course, they get bored and need to leap back into noise. It’s the cities we live in that make us like that, and not just the cities, but our whole lives. Then others find themselves with too much quiet, only empty rooms and no noise to leap into. Anyway, I had to keep working, or rather to start working. That is what I found myself thinking at the time. It was partly this question: what would make someone say they were only a mask? That wasn’t quite the question. The question was: what would make a mask say that—what would make a mask be so very honest? I assembled the pieces of paper. I assembled them around me and took a piece of paper thinking I might try to add what I knew or what I could remember. I was in the presence of a person and the only thing I could think to do was to keep building that person, if person was the right word.

  I found her ideas interesting, and I liked them. I liked her, or loved her—a strange thing to say. We had only just met, and she took the relatively unlovable form of some pieces of paper and some ideas floating around in my head. But love is this attempt to cross such divides. Except that the divide doesn’t really divide us, if Joan R was right. There is nothing on the other side; but still, we reach across. Love is this reaching, you could say. I liked all these ideas, and at the same time I grew to like Joan R. This as always could only increase when I sat and looked at her handwriting.

  I knew that she had grown up the eldest, but there was something about her that suggested she was actually the dutiful second child: I knew that her older brother had died as an infant. This was the kind of secret that was unmentionable, one of those secrets somehow known by everyone in the family, though never discussed. As if there were a kind of family romance with death, and as if she sometimes found her body stiffening. Certainly her father experienced pai
ns, and stopped in the doorway before he entered a room, leaning on the jamb. Frequently he would be away for his health. When Joan was upset at his absence, was it the simple selfishness of a child who needs her beloved parent? Or was she worried for him, afraid that the unsheltered world he had gone to might in fact be a danger as much as a cure? And then, identifying overly with him, she would feel the same pains that he felt, and would practise standing the way he stood when he felt them: she would lean on something, look down, look up, then smile. Once, the nurse came in and caught her at this game. ‘What are you doing, sweetheart?’ Joan blushed and straightened. She was always straightening when others walked into the room. Had the nurse already seen it? ‘Here now, it’s as if you’re talking to a young man at a dance. And you, only seven years old.’

  The young Joan, for her part, had already observed the nurse, seen the look that the woman gave her. Joan split herself in two. She loved and hated the woman for her kindness. The first Joan would watch while the nurse bent over the baby, and some portion of her felt the woman bend in the same way over herself; the second Joan, as silent and watchful as the first with the new servants, only thought wordlessly to herself: always bending! And soft, always soft these nurses, short and rounded, bent over us children. They’re scared of our mother. They don’t last long, then they’re replaced by someone identical. Our mother reserves a special look for them.

  Could even the children—Joan, her sister, and her baby brother—feel what was coming? Tensions built up between nation-states found their way indoors, and the hope and optimism in everyone’s minds was held carefully, cupped in their skulls. No one yet thought it would end in an impossible war—the violence of a change in reality. No one had allowed themselves to imagine something real behind this wavering world. Joan’s father returned home and picked her up, and she felt his wrists: under the skin were lumps that were hard but shifted slightly when she touched them—had they always been there? He smiled at her—he was always smiling, but with him she didn’t allow herself to be split. She felt his wrists and, uncontrollably, smiled back.

  When she was old enough to understand that the nodules on his wrists were related to his illness, she no longer looked at them or touched them, but kept her gaze fastened, when she looked his way, on his face and head. He had a sad look, only partly hidden by the beard—and did this look reflect some disappointment, that he wouldn’t be able to take part in the new century that was approaching? Joan, anyway, wouldn’t understand such a disappointment: the coming century was hers, and she still couldn’t imagine others not sharing it.

  She had, consciously at least, forgotten her dead brother. She was taller than her sister, and still bigger than the boy—she saw herself as the keeper of order, her mother’s representative, sharper than the nurse and governess, able to keep watch. But forgetting the older brother required some sort of work, the setting aside of the part of her mind where images of him formed, though she had never seen him. These remained, unnoticed, and because unnoticed they formed a background to her thoughts, silently influencing their direction.

  4. On their first meeting she came into the room to find him there with her mother, brother and sister. He wavered in his speech. He uttered the certainties expected of him when talking about the courts and about parliament. Then, he hesitated—a youthfulness that caused occasional words to drop from his mouth unheard, or simply drop unsaid as his jaw hung down for a second, his eyes flicked in the same direction, before he picked them up again and carried on his speech.

  ‘My daughter has recently returned from Germany. She’s come back speaking like a native, haven’t you, Joan?’

  ‘Well, I speak some German.’

  ‘Say something for us.’

  The man said, ‘I wouldn’t be in a position to judge her fluency. I’ll take you at your word.’

  Joan was still standing half in the doorway, stopped there by the sight of the caller. It was nothing remarkable about him, but simply that he was there unannounced. She felt like she had just woken, was at a loss. ‘Come in Joan. This is Evelyn R. He’s called on us this afternoon. We’ve come to know his parents a little, while you were away on the Continent.’

  She walked into the room, to the table where a cup had been set aside. She poured from the pot, a stewed and cool-seeming brew. Did she take some satisfaction in the tea’s deep colour, in the anticipation of its bitterness? She was standing with her back to the small group, felt its silence grow around her and amplify the rattle of the cup as it filled. Reaching out for the milk jug she knocked it, as if suddenly her fingers were too large to fit through its handle, and its contents spilled in a licking fan across the surface of the tablecloth. ‘Joan!’

  She turned at her mother’s voice. ‘I’ll clean it.’

  ‘No, you stay here. You stay and sit down.’ Her mother stood and came beside her. She hustled the pot, jug and Joan’s cup onto their tray. She said, ‘Sit down.’

  Joan’s eyes felt a heavy stare—a familiar clenching of elbows to her sides. Did she need to make herself smaller? Her limbs seemed to extend beyond herself. When she looked up at the visitor she didn’t see him. Instead, she was conscious of her mother’s bustle, the same energetic activity as when she was correcting the servants’ mistakes. Stupidity! Well, it had been an accident. And her mother put the tray on a vacant chair and swept up the tablecloth, calling to the maid as she left the room.

  The man demonstrated his darting look, a drop of his face down and up. Did Joan notice something in it? Her world was large: she was working for a dressmaker now, and knew about men. She still, a year in, couldn’t get used to the new century. But she wouldn’t allow herself the excitement, but instead took it in, and passed judgement. Why hadn’t she been prepared for the man’s arrival? She was wearing something plain and had come home late, detained by one of the other girls in conversation. The man had dark eyes and eyebrows that were a little too heavy. Was she staring? She was looking at his face and head—and she looked away. Her sister sat upright, breathed heavily, and her brother, absent, distracted, made a loud play of his silence. The man moved his hands in quick reachings, appeared about to stand, but was rooted to his seat. She wanted to say, ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Instead she searched around the room for something to speak of, and saw a charcoal drawing, newly hung.

  ‘This must be new—the drawing.’

  ‘Yes, I …’

  ‘I can’t say I like it.’ She was a little surprised herself at the judgement. Was there a clench left to her body, to her gaze after all? In fact she felt suddenly pleased, even released a little. She smiled briefly to herself, and sat straighter for a moment. ‘Really, I’m sure my mother—I can’t understand her love for these sentimental drawings, representing loyalty or some such virtue. She loves their simplistic emotions, but they’re drawn by some populist with no talent. They must be quickly run off by the dozen and sold for ten times their worth at some market. I can’t account for her taste.’

  He was still caught in his discomfort, frowning and allowing his jaw to stiffen, then opening his mouth.

  ‘Oh, do excuse me, it must seem rude while she’s out of the room. But I must say. Well, tell me what you think, Mr R?’

  Her sister said, ‘Joan.’

  ‘Mother won’t mind, Molly.’ She sat forward towards him. She took the room in with her discussion, in the manner fitting of someone just returned from the continent and returning fuller and more incisive. Why were his eyebrows like that? (Did Joan really care about his eyebrows?) ‘What do you think of the drawing? Don’t you find it sentimental, and even a little vacant?’ Did she want her mother to overhear the conversation?

  The man said, ‘I brought it today. Your mother and I hung it just before you came in.’

  Her sister said, ‘Mr R’s father drew it. He’s a painter, an RA.’

  Maybe the surname had a familiar ring. Molly was grinning or grimacing into the room’s further silence, a leadenness that sealed everything. Her face was
a mask.

  ‘Really, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s …’ She got to her feet and looked more closely at the drawing: a boy with a dog. She looked at the boy’s eyes and the dog’s eyes, both watering slightly—all those soft watering eyes. Her attempt at a studious posture felt immediately mannered and transparent. Its sophistication was forced. She couldn’t speak or move, but was trapped into a pose.

  ‘Please, forget that you said it.’

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see his blinking, the shifting of his face, the very same movements with his eyebrows. Was she imagining it? Why did she stay standing there for so long? Did she want to touch his face, perhaps in an attempt to hold it still? If only she could have turned to him, even given him some comfort perhaps—but at the same time he seemed to want to reassure her.

  ‘I mean, it’s very well drawn, now that I look.’

  ‘Please, Miss V, don’t feel you have to say anything.’

  In a whisper, half-voiced, she said, ‘I’m stupid.’

  ‘No.’

  But she hadn’t wanted him to respond—she hadn’t, for the last utterance, been talking to him. She was aware that she had destroyed something. What was it? Their mother came back in, and Joan couldn’t look at her. Instead, she said, ‘Please excuse me.’ She looked at no one, and left the room.

  ‘Joan! For goodness sake, it’s only milk, nothing to be upset about.’

  But hadn’t she already implicated herself in something? She had seen him there, and for brief moments he was laid bare in a sort of fluster, then in turn she had laid her cruelty bare to him. In turn, this made her guilty of causing the pain she thought she had seen, despite not being able to look directly at him. Something, some contract, had come out of this, a hidden acknowledgement of things not usually acknowledged. Had it, from the start, been because of her stupidity and her clumsiness, and was his look suddenly not a look of vulnerability—had it become what it had been all along, his clear perception of her, his sight, his through-sight?