R.H.I. Page 7

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Apart from the bullets and bombs and gas, all that—well, you get used to the idea of just dying, or partly used to it—apart from that, there was a different fear. I can’t quite name it.’

  ‘You were afraid of enjoying it.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Sometimes we’re mostly afraid of our own enjoyment. Of what it will mean.’

  ‘Is that something your doctor tells you?’

  ‘…’

  The soldier said, ‘Oh, maybe you’re right, partly. Well, afraid of letting it all in.’

  ‘Letting it all—’

  ‘And, what would happen, then, to me?’

  ‘What did happen to you?’

  ‘You know all that.’

  She said, ‘No, not all of it.’

  ‘Why do you insist on that? You know. I told you—it was minor, a gas attack, faulty mask, and buggered me up for the rest of the war.’

  ‘For the rest of your life.’

  ‘Probably.’

  They looked at each other—stared a little, even, as if this had been an argument. Then both smiled. For a second he was charming again, as he had been on the road up the hill. This change in him, or his tendency to change—of his face to collapse and crease, then as suddenly rejuvenate—was partly what made Joan suspect something more in him. Why was she drawn to it? Did she, for once, see the dual nature in someone, even though he was a stranger; see it because he clearly struggled, the concern, the fear breaking out in him as if he were out of control (whereas Evelyn’s panics, his flusters, were almost a part of his control, and anyway occurred increasingly rarely)?

  She supposed that the motorcycle she thought she had heard wasn’t, by now, Jones’s. An engine breaking the day. The three of them? Would it have become, even more, a therapeutic meeting? Maybe she didn’t want Jones around, not now.

  She said, ‘Yes, it was something my “doctor” told me. Our strongest wishes are deeply buried. Really, the deepest wishes we have can never come to light.’

  Their look continued; their smiles, faint, even ‘secret’, except that each was aware of the other’s. Then Joan looked to one side. Had she thought that Jones would come, or just wished for it? And did she invite the soldier in simply because she was alone here?

  ‘How did your husband die?’

  She hesitated. Then: ‘He was sick.’

  ‘With?’

  ‘… Rheumatic fever.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring him up. I don’t know why I did.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘You’ve hardly mentioned him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve lost people, of course. Comrades, friends. My parents are still alive, in London. I’ve never lost anyone like that, so close.’ The soldier seemed genuinely moved for a second. And why not? Again, Joan looked away. Why had she lied about her husband? The lie, perhaps, had some truth to it, though only if ‘dead’ could be allowed another meaning. Evelyn was trapped in life, and Joan longed instead for a bursting forth—it was along these lines that ‘death’ and ‘life’ might arrange themselves. The analyst and the soldier—if there was something that united these two men, it was that each represented something deeper. Had Evelyn once meant that also? No, with him there was happiness, but happiness wasn’t enough. She was feeling a need, even a command (and from whom?) to go beyond this mere happiness—it was something to do with the war, something to do with the dismantling of everything that had been known. All this tearing down, the explosions, the horror, all this could only make sense as a way through to something—something must justify it. This attracted her to Jones, to the soldier; it was the thing that collapsed time. Joan couldn’t put all this together, at least not while faced with the soldier.

  He sat, seemingly unsure what to say, thrown again into a collapsed state. Unlike Evelyn, he didn’t wave his hands or begin to mouth words. He had no need to prove anything about the situation—the situation, simply, of the two of them sitting there. For the soldier, perhaps, there was no longer any normality, like there was for Evelyn—nothing to restore with his hand waves, his words. Instead, the soldier’s words probed, felt, questioned, and moved. His words constantly threatened to touch her. Did she have the same effect on him? Did they reach across the space separating them with words, touch each other’s skin? Could something happen (simply by talking) to collapse the two of them together, to entangle them? Fear and, well, something else; these two factors kept Joan and the soldier at a remove, an orbit, and one that felt unstable. If the game she played with Evelyn (and why did his name keep intruding like this?) was one of negotiation and contract, breach and apology, adding its layers of reality, here the game was one of a too-real glance that threatened to break through reality, a glance alternately risked and avoided.

  He said, ‘Some people see my invalid’s uniform and treat me like a hero.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘For what I’ve been through, for the war effort.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. But I don’t treat myself as a hero. I didn’t do anything more than anyone else. I didn’t do anything—it all happened to me. I didn’t choose to go to war.’

  ‘Do you object to it?’

  ‘Not as such. No. No. The war itself? No. But being treated like a hero because of it? Because I wear a uniform and have difficulty walking and breathing sometimes?’

  ‘You must have been brave.’

  ‘Yes. But it’s all part of it, it’s the same thing, this fear that I’ll …’

  ‘You’ll?’

  ‘Disappear.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That I’m a vehicle for bigger things.’

  ‘How grand!’

  ‘No, not a vehicle for—. Or, that I’m nothing more than my uniform. That I’m meant to be one thing—a soldier for the Empire. That I am that thing so completely. And what would it mean if I were to become …’

  ‘Become?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What are you resisting?’

  He laughed. He said, ‘You’ve been taught to ask that. I can already tell, though I’ve only just met you, that your doctor is speaking through you.’

  ‘Doesn’t anyone speak through you?’

  ‘That is my fear! But of course. Maybe. All the time. My uniform speaks, not me. That is the fear! What if I were to wear another uniform? Or no uniform at all? What would become of me then? Would there be anything left of me?’

  ‘I don’t wear a uniform.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Not a uniform. But I understand. I make my own clothes.’

  ‘Because you want to make yourself.’

  ‘Ha ha! Because it’s easier to afford, and I enjoy it.’

  He said, ‘All right. Anyway, why am I going on like this?’

  ‘I don’t mind. I like our conversation.’ She gave her look, she hoped, a dangerous seriousness. She had met this man for a few hours at most. She knew nothing about him. At times he seemed to be trying to persuade her of something; at others he seemed himself desperate to be persuaded.

  In the midst of all this the soldier stood up. It broke some kind of tension, added movement to the room, and to the house. Joan felt herself released, relieved, felt his movement in her body as he walked slowly and looked at pictures, at furniture, blankly, without appraisal. Did she note that he walked like her father? In fact, did he? Here, now, his slowness seemed a matter more of deliberation than illness. He occupied the room more, and in so doing he opened it up. He didn’t have his stick with him. Why did she think of his stick? He didn’t seem diminished without it. Well, if anything he seemed enlarged, able to walk without leaning. There was a sensation in her as she watched him, a feeling or knowledge that he was aware of her gaze. Her awareness of his awareness thrilled her—it made his movements into a performance, as if h
e were acting out himself. Was he? She imagined him at a masquerade, able because of his mask to act more freely. Looking at him she had a sense of ‘looking out’, as if through the eyeholes of her own mask: and that mask, her own non-mask, gave her the same freedom. It was a sudden awareness of what had always been there: her face. Not a self-conscious awareness, an over-awareness, but a knowledge of what might be its ‘defensive structure’. Nothing could penetrate it! And at the same time, didn’t its existence mean its possible removal, its possible negation? Something like that. She might stand and join him in a dance. Well, she might, but she didn’t. Or in her mind she did. But, all the same, this dance, this imagined dance, was something she was unaware of (a ‘deepest wish’?). Only her eyes danced. No, he wasn’t performing—the idea never occurred to her. Sit and watch. He picked up a frame from a side table and looked at it.

  ‘Is this your doctor?’ He didn’t look at her while asking, and didn’t seem to expect a response. It was less a question than a statement, and in any case her silence was taken as assent. He held and looked at Jones for a minute longer, as if taking possession of him. Joan half expected the soldier to pocket the photograph at the end of this extended study. Would she have objected? Jones was particular, and would have missed it, noticed its absence on his next visit. Still, she might not have minded risking this. Why? Why did she find herself liking the idea of the soldier stealing the photo? The soldier’s possession of Jones would have been complete, as if the photo were a ‘fetish’, as if it might give the soldier some power over Jones. But then, didn’t the soldier have this power already? Joan was in a position to exchange secrets with him. Here they were, while Jones was off somewhere else. Here was a secret: Joan’s husband was still alive. What if she had told that to the soldier? That, it seemed, might unleash something. The soldier would see through her—her lie laid bare, and the reasons for it. But she hardly knew the reasons. Revealing the lie to him would bring something into being that hadn’t existed, even for Joan herself: a clear understanding of why she had lied. Now that she had lied, the lie became a barrier. Maintaining the lie was to maintain reality—was, strangely, to maintain truth; going back on the lie would be the first step to dismantling that truth, to destroying it. Well, well! There was, though Joan didn’t really think it, not really, a paradox in all this. The paradox was given a chance to emerge in the silence, while the soldier ‘danced’ (no, he didn’t). The paradox, that a lie, once committed, must be preserved in order to maintain truth, was something that might have struck her. What does a paradox like this do for us? Does it make us look back, for the lie, the original lie, the one we’ve forgotten, the one that must be preserved in order for truth to survive?

  Was Joan, having lied, and sitting in this room while the soldier stood, once again trapped into something?

  26.

  27. Now Joan held something back intentionally from Jones, for the first time. She didn’t mention the soldier to him. Why should she? But something seemed changed in their sessions: Jones himself seemed different. He looked at her searchingly when she entered his rooms. Was it because she was hiding something? Was there a change in her, the hidden thing rising unwilled to the surface and so unhiding itself, some kind of symptom? But here is where time’s collapse, brought on by her inviting the soldier into the cottage, here is where that collapse really came into its own: the past was changed. All of what she had gone through with Jones, all that was now different. If going to see Jones was driven by something, and inviting the soldier into the cottage was, yes, driven by the same thing, then Joan was now withholding from Jones the very thing that had brought her to him. Here was a lie, one brought into being in the past. Now that she had met the soldier, invited him in, it suddenly came about that he had always been there. He was there with Joan when she ‘secretly’ first went to see Jones, and he was a secret. Deciding to keep the soldier from Jones meant placing a lie deep in her past. That was no small achievement. The logic was something like this: if she mentioned the lie to Jones (was the soldier a lie?) then something would be destroyed.

  Destroyed? Didn’t the word come too easily? As if mere talking, mere words, might destroy. The destruction was happening elsewhere. But there certainly was something fishy happening: all this confusion with time, with talking, with the mind of this woman—and what was wrong, anyway, with that mind? Joan hardly seemed ‘sick’, to need her ‘doctor’, at all. But then, at the next moment, she would look around and the world would be shifted. The United States had entered the war, following an explosion on their soil. Another explosion in London. In Mexico revolution was ending; in Russia it was beginning. Explosions everywhere! Another weapons factory exploded; and another. Things—weapons, and what else?—were piled up and left dangerously in warehouses. What might move and set them off? The earth’s surface, for now, stayed the same solid dome, wrinkled here and there, scratched and shorn bare by the activities of men. Yes, it was men, specifically. Joan looked, and, yes, a plane flew over, a wind blew, posters in the streets, soldiers, shortages, all that, but nothing else moved—except everything moved. And if, despite the explosions she knew were occurring, there was no explosion, she felt the explosions without feeling them, didn’t that mean that, partly, the explosions were taking place in her? Her uncle and aunt in Cambridge would approve of such logic. Joan herself wasn’t so sure. And each time, she stood, she shook her head a little, sat again, looked up and out (if she was inside) at the sky, which was now altered, torn. Then she couldn’t move for a while. What if—well, what if the thing that caused the explosions was her? Better to stay put for a minute or two. No, of course it wasn’t her. But she became afraid of her own power (as Jones had explained). She didn’t want to be caught with it, with her ability to change the world (well Jones didn’t quite use those words). She could—she felt it in herself—drive onwards, push through, break through barriers! She felt such energy in herself. Jones knew all this, he knew it. The word he used was phallus. The first time he used it—it was hardly a surprise to hear the word, since she had already become familiar with Freud’s writing—she was glad that he sat behind her, unable to see her face.

  But what could he have seen? She had discovered that her face hid as much as it revealed—even, that hiding and revealing were not necessarily so different. Mightn’t her face be like the soldier’s uniform? Mightn’t its form, its external form, really define her? And, if so, was there some anxiety that there was too little left beneath that face?

  Jones only said, ‘Was the stay fruitful for you?’

  ‘Of course. Though I did wonder what I was doing there.’

  ‘No one made you go but yourself. Or, rather, you seemed interested in the opportunity.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been my first rest cure. The chance to rest without becoming the inmate of a sanatorium …’

  ‘And still, you wondered what you were doing.’

  ‘While there I felt distinctly well.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Which made me think that I wasn’t being overly productive.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘But it also made me think that the place was really quite good for me.’

  ‘I’m sure of that, too.’

  ‘Really, Ernest, I think it seemed like your offer to use the cottage came from a friend, not from a doctor.’

  He was silent. Something uncomfortable was in the air. His room was dark, but sparsely furnished. All this was only the session’s preliminary chat, the light conversation before things got ‘really started’; and yet something had been stumbled upon. Wasn’t it while they were thus ‘chatting’ that Jones had initially offered the cottage? The whole seemed somewhat informal. Usually, when they crossed some boundary (‘How would you like to begin today?’), then tension was expected, and meant things. Was she perhaps in love with Jones? What a question! She didn’t ask it of herself. It wasn’t so much that the possibility didn’t occur to her—of course she could love him, she might, in fact,
but no, and didn’t love have something to do with … no, not love. She didn’t think this, in any case. She worried, instead, that she was incapable of love. Didn’t her ‘turns’, the painful, well, also anaesthetised sensations of paralysis that crept over her, didn’t they have something to do with the loss of sensation, with the loss of feeling, with the inability to feel love? But, weren’t they equally about too much feeling, the feeling, instead—a feeling, strangely, that she didn’t (quite) feel—of everything impacting on her, everything? Here, too much seemed to coincide with not enough. No doubt some complex, some conflict within her was not quite resolved, so that apparent opposites were combined—the love of Mother, the love of Father, and of course their love for each other. And how did the soldier fit in to all of this? When the session did start, it was as if there were two conversations proceeding at once, a conversation in reality, and one that, though it didn’t take place, was real.

  He said, ‘Tell me again about the coffin dream.’

  She said, ‘My daughter is in the coffin, already an old woman, having lost her hair. She looks more like an old man. It’s moving along a broad avenue on a cart, swaying and surrounded by the military music of a marching band. It’s almost celebratory, as if the funeral dirge were a dance tune. The casket’s open for crowds to see. The cart is like one at a peasant funeral. Its wheels seem loose. I’m looking at all this from above, and I can see her face up close. Diana’s face is—it seems to register everything. The movements of the muscles. Her forehead has a slight frown.’

  He said, ‘You were with someone.’

  She said, ‘So it was you! I thought I’d heard the sound of your motorcycle, but then you didn’t come in.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘I saw him ahead of me, moving along the road—he was moving so slowly, Ernest. We were walking up the hill, up to the barrow mounds you told me to visit. We met—well, I talked to him. He seemed to be having a hard time. He was strange. You would have found him interesting.’