R.H.I. Read online

  Was she conscious enough of living in VANISHED TIME, PROBLEM TIME, to mention it? If so, what better forum? Here, with these people who spoke with the voices of the dead (well …) there was no limit to what could exist. Whenever she opened her mouth, however, she rapidly shut it again. She opened it and weighed strange words on her tongue. She couldn’t say what she meant. Did she even know it? It was an inarticulate truth, one whose words were never quite right. She also half wanted them to put in a connection to her father. What would this achieve? As if she might ‘transfer’ his identity onto the batty old woman who seemed to have the knack for ‘crossing over’. No, she didn’t even think it. (It could be said that she ‘had’ these thoughts, that they were ‘in’ her, without her thinking them.)

  However, when the medium began to speak with a new voice, Joan had a sudden uncanny sense of listening to herself—a future self or past self, or a self in which there was no longer a distinction between the past and the future. It was as if she were suddenly inside a dream—one of those dreams where one is split in two, and can see oneself perfectly well from the outside. If it had seemed outlandish that this woman might ‘become’ her dead father, now it seemed that she ‘was’ Joan herself. As such, the conversation that Joan now struck up wasn’t exactly a dialogue, having as it apparently did only one participant, but nor was it a monologue, since its questions and answers were so genuine and urgent.

  The woman said, ‘What a life it would have been.’

  Joan surprised everyone by saying, ‘What?’

  ‘I mean could have been.’

  ‘What life?’

  ‘Sometimes I get words wrong.’

  ‘Your life?’

  ‘It could have been good. There was so much promise.’

  ‘What life? Is it your life? Who are you?’

  ‘The nurse said that I was a sick child. She thought that I wouldn’t understand. I didn’t understand her words, but I understood something else. Maybe it was just the expression on her face. I loved her. She said I was sick and I became sick.’

  ‘Did the nurse make you sick?’

  ‘I made myself sick.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It seemed right. Then I would be remembered.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘… Can you tell me about the nurse?’

  ‘She was always bending.’

  ‘Weren’t they all?’

  ‘I only remember the one. But it’s not the nurse, even though I would have done anything for her. She was only doing a job.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Why do you keep asking that?’

  ‘I want to know who you are.’

  ‘I’m not really very interesting. There are better things to talk about.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Danger.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘I’m interested in how people always assume that the worst danger is death. How they always assume it comes from outside.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Back to that again, are we?’

  ‘I want to know why I should listen to you.’

  ‘I never said you should. But you seem to be.’

  ‘Well, I’

  There was a silence. The woman stared in front of her like a broken machine. Her uncle said, ‘Oh, dear. Sorry, Joan—excuse me …’ He stood up and pushed past, towards the old woman. He placed a hand on each of her shoulders and gave her a shake. He said, ‘We take a sceptical view.’

  The woman was sitting quietly now, with her head down—as was Joan, as if the two of them were suddenly embarrassed by the conversation. But Joan looked up, whereas the woman gave no indication that she was aware of what had just passed.

  Her uncle said, ‘But you had your fun, didn’t you? I’ve no idea what all that was about.’

  ‘Nor do I!’

  ‘Quite.’

  19. We know from the records that something began during the visit to her relatives in Cambridge. A book that none of the members could quite read had been circulating around the Society. Maybe Joan’s German would be up to the task? Freud’s theories had been the object of rumour rather than serious study amongst them. Here was the hint of ‘another side’ that they were seeking, they thought—another side that was also right here.

  Here was something of danger: the book’s story of the primitive brothers conspiring to kill the father and replace him with a representation. Something to worship—a grotesquely carved totem. What was the danger in Freud’s myth of patricide? It wasn’t only a danger for the father who is killed, but also for the brothers themselves, in carving out his representation. The figure’s grotesque face contained a harsher reality than their living father, and it was a face created by them alone.

  But yes, the language itself seemed to do something of the carving. It took her back to her time in Germany, to its buildings with their ‘aura’. That had been last century. She struggled to remember. Something odd about her memory was this: although she remembered the conversations and the walks, standing outside the windows of the Kaltwasserscher Saal in the Hotel Tivoli and, once, attempting to peer in, she couldn’t quite remember any of this in German. Nor were the remembered conversations in English. Instead, the language of her memory was a language somewhere in between, a synthesis of the two—an impossible language.

  If German were the language for carving out a totem, if English were an empty commerce of words, what was this third language that seemed incapable of saying anything except pointing at the irreconcilable difference between the other two?

  Well, so many thoughts—and, despite her own intelligence, not easy ones. She half wanted the medium back, or at least the mysterious ‘person’ she had given voice to, in order to confront her with more questions. How, after all, could a mere representation be so dangerous? A carved figure, a picture, a word? A language for that matter? Well, what would the mysterious (and, if she thought about it, quite frankly non-existent) person have to say that might shed light on anything?

  20. On her return, she felt it more strongly. Felt what? And what did her husband and her daughter make of all this? There was nothing to notice. Joan remained difficult to pin down, though with an aura of gravity that meant she could never be described as flighty. This was what Evelyn had fallen in love with, this sense of never quite ‘having’ her. It was her promise—a promise all the more satisfying because never fulfilled. On his first meeting with her, she had refused to speak German; she had spoken out sharply about the drawing, moved by things that he still found baffling, and that seemed to have something to do with her time on the continent. But he wasn’t naïve—he cultivated his bafflement, realising how valuable it was to him. If he had fully known her, she would have been less herself, and he would have lost her.

  But maybe now something was slipping. He started to sense some threat, some other thing that might claim her. It was a balancing act between this ‘thing’ on the one hand, and the danger of his own full possession, which would also take her away, or worse, destroy her. Actually, he wouldn’t have owned up to this if questioned, possibly not even to himself. But it did give him a worried expression from time to time.

  Their daughter had never known anything different. She never asked why her mother didn’t pay her more attention, and what distracted her. In fact, her mother had begun to do something surprising: she would come in and interrupt whatever was going on with her governess, and insist on having a talk. Joan wore a serious face when she did this, and the child would be pleasantly interrogated. What did Joan want to know from her? Was her daughter happy? Yes, she was happy. What did she learn? She had learned a few words of French. French! Yes. And sometimes the girl would then get carried away and repeat her lessons to Joan, as if verbatim, talking increasingly fast. Joan would listen with a smile. At these times
the two of them were close together. Were they? Were they as mother and daughter ought to be? And how is that? Joan remained something constant for her, a presence, a mother, especially since the help would never last long, would be dismissed easily and often.

  The child came to think of the succession of governesses as the world. They came in as representatives, for a short time. The latest was younger still than all the rest—younger than her mother, almost a girl herself, and nervous. There are no records of her name. Temporary and nameless, how are we to think of her? She was educated and young, and her room was larger than those of the housemaid and cook. A few cheap prints were on the wall of her room, from one of her predecessors—she left them where they were. She brought little with her. Her employer was somehow upright and formidable. The governess, like Joan’s husband, began to think about Joan’s secret, her mystery: what was it about this woman? Joan seemed to be taller than herself. Perception is a strange thing. Why was this young woman a governess? Weren’t there other opportunities for her? Was she unable to attract a husband or find some other work?

  When Joan came into the room, to talk to her child, she stood for a minute, leaning on the door frame. She smiled at the pair: the girl, her teacher, with a book of arithmetic between them. The smile was the smile of a sick person, someone struggling to take another step. Was it? It was, for a moment, as if she couldn’t drag herself closer. But, more, this sickly expression, this look of exhaustion, came across as part of Joan’s strength, meaning that when Joan finally did come nearer, having taken a lungful of air, she was all the more triumphant and, to her daughter, glorious. But in that look there was also a meeting of eyes between the governess and the employer: a mutual recognition, a brief contact, as might take place in a mirror; each weighed the other with her eyes, and searched the other’s face. Each was the truth of the other—was that it? And what on earth could that mean?

  Joan and the governess also saw each other after the lessons, when the woman reported to Joan on her daughter’s progress. Had the governess been in Germany? Joan didn’t ask. The girl was not being taught German. All the same, Joan found herself wanting to speak German with the governess—here was an educated woman who must know something of the language. If she didn’t, then she would be dismissed. No. Joan didn’t broach the subject. And it wasn’t quite German that Joan wanted to speak, but, yes, that other language, that half-German that had infected her memory. Here: everyone was waiting, waiting for war, for what was inevitable, for what had already come to pass but was not yet actual, and one word from this in-between language might break through all that. Could it be spoken? The language might stitch time back together, bring Joan back to her past, fix the hole that had opened up between her father’s death and whatever it was that was going to happen to the world, and communicate across the gap between people. It would bring this young woman’s eyes into fuller contact with Joan’s. It would stop everything from flying apart. No, it would trigger that event once and for all. Experience, life, would be full, unified but diverse, and nurturing in its danger. Joan longed, perhaps, for something like this full, overwhelming chaos that would bring about an end to the quiet hours in the house. The waiting time was a form of death. Everything was routine. Money was becoming more of a problem. Maybe she could focus on that for a while. And then there was the child, the need to protect her.

  21. When the waiting time finally ended, in 1914, and the tension broke, it seemed at first like it might be a relief; however, it soon became clear that what was expected, or wished-for—a cleansing wave, an ecstatic dissolution—would not come. Instead, it was a slow descent. Time did not seem to alter. Why did it seem both vanished and omnipresent? There was so much of it in the day. And each day was alike. There was a surfeit of time in which nothing seemed to move. And at the same time, everything (the world) was all in motion. The war came as news, or propaganda, or as the marching of soldiers in the streets, and the measures taken on the home front filtered in day by day.

  What could Joan hope for now? There was nothing for her but paralysis; she slowly let her body stop. The language she had discovered was a language without words. When Evelyn came back one day, Joan was seated, alone, in the sitting room, and she didn’t look up.

  ‘Joan?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  She sniffed, kept her eyes away from him. An expulsion of anger would have been misplaced, having no object. Evelyn had done nothing to deserve animosity; rather, it was ‘all this’. If only she could have indicated ‘this’ by pointing, but it wasn’t here as such—in the room, the house, the city. It was nowhere, the cause of it all, but it had weight, felt on the sternum, in the sockets and joints—bony instruments for detecting it. Suffragists had smashed windows, and now she thought of their display of violence. The violence—Joan was afraid of what she felt about it—was meant to clear things away in order to rebuild something new. It was meant to make people—people walking past, people caught in their lives—to make them stop. Joan’s own desire for violence (was that it?) was the same: she wanted to clear something away. But what was her object, her target? If she clenched her fists to strike, she had no option but to keep them clenched and still.

  Evelyn understood, or seemed to. Or, there was nothing to understand, and at least he didn’t make the mistake of questioning her. There was no surprise here, though her behaviour was unprecedented and sudden. Because she was so surprising, she couldn’t surprise him. Around them, the city was growing darker. In their room, the governess was with the child. In the silence, there was a sudden awareness between them of normalcy, of the small sounds of the world (the small ticks of the room and the larger noises from outside in the city, muffled through the walls). Neither of them was now waiting; each was simply there. Her hands were still in the shape of fists, but relaxed—they only tensed again when she tried to unclench them. Something hidden was revealed, but revealed to be nothing but its own hiding—in being revealed, it disappeared. Did that mean that everything was now ‘all right’? For a minute, Joan thought so—but, no, no, it was only all right as long as she and Evelyn stayed like this, unmoving, listening, not quite looking at or seeing each other. This was all very strange. How could she know herself so little? How, in this moment of simply sitting while Evelyn stood, in a darkened and darkening room, could she in fact disappear, and take part in her own disappearance? Yes, quite odd—things hadn’t been quite how they should have been with Joan R for some time, and this only confirmed it.

  All that was only a few seconds. Then she gave up, and allowed herself to be led to the bedroom.

  ‘Do you want to see someone?’

  ‘See someone?’

  ‘Someone to help.’

  ‘Evelyn. Who could—’

  ‘A doctor.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A doctor might be able to give you something, or at least talk to you.’

  ‘Would that help?’

  ‘I don’t know, Joan.’

  ‘What do you think is wrong with me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is anything wrong with me?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  The only ‘Freudian’ doctor that she knew of was Jones, whom she had met. It was at a party of some sort, and what she remembered most about Jones was that he was almost exactly her height. Looking straight ahead, they had looked into one another’s eyes. It was for the briefest moment, and meant nothing. Nonetheless she remembered it. And if she talked to Evelyn about Jones, she would not mention this meeting of eyes—how could she, it meant nothing!—and still, not to mention it would be to obscure something.

  22. The house was at the base of a valley. Where was its stream? No doubt it ran underground in drains that took the water out to a deep sea. Great trees were all around, and houses. She walked out and stopped, looked, stopped. When she overheard speech, she stopped again. People were speaking in her language. How was that possible? It was a language without words, and still, it was spoken, held
in people’s mouths.

  How could she tell this? How could she report it, except in one language or another?

  She walked in the midst of a community formed in this valley. There was no sense of a wider world. There were lions sleeping. And all this, this was all part of her as she was part of it. What this meant was that her father would be here! And, not only here, but he would reveal his fluency. Sure enough: as soon as he was in her thoughts, he was in front of her in the street that ran along the base of the valley. The street ran a short distance then stopped. This world, where was it? Can we picture it? Can we describe it? The trees bloomed in remarkable colours. But to translate it into words means making decisions, means reducing it to symbols that falsify whatever they touch. She was walking in this place as if asleep, not remembering anything from one minute to the next, not capable of knowing what was around her; she was an infant here, but one who walked, who talked the wordless language of infancy. A prior language, one not yet broken into its ‘English’, its ‘German’.

  Her father said, ‘The lions, they are mine. Their job is to guard me, but I let them sleep.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to show that I can be trusted, and that I trust. Everything here is open, everyone is trusted. We trust you when you walk among us. But you know all that, you know it without it needing to be said.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know it without knowing it. The knowledge forms part of you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing can be hidden.’

  ‘But still, the lions are here. What if they wake up?’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘I am afraid of them.’