And there we decided to leave it for the time being.
But only briefly. I collected my next specimen the following day.
For our Sunday afternoon walk Matthew and I had chosen the river bank.
I had not mentioned to him the conversation I had overheard, and did not intend to. But as a result of it, and of my talk with Mary, I observed Matthew with more attention than usual. It was not well rewarded. As far as I could tell he seemed to be quite his ordinary self. I wondered if he were not a shade more noticing, showing ever so slightly more awareness of the things about us… I couldn’t be sure. I suspected it of being subjective – simply that I was being more noticing and aware of things about Matthew. I could not detect any significant variation of his interests and questions – not until we had been going for half an hour and were passing below Five Elms Farm…
The path there led us through a field where a couple of dozen cows blankly eyed us on our way. Only then did Matthew take a swerve off his usual beat. We were almost across the field, just a little short of the stile in the far side hedge, when he slowed to a halt, and stood there, regarding the nearest cow seriously. The cow looked back at Matthew, with a tinge of disquiet, I thought. After he and the cow had contemplated one another for a few moments Matthew asked:
‘Daddy, why is it a cow stops?’
It sounded at first like a why-does-a-chicken-cross-the road question, but as he asked it Matthew continued to study the cow with great concentration. The animal appeared to find this embarrassing. It started to swing its head from side to side without taking its glassy eyes off his face. I decided to take the question straight.
‘How do you mean?’ I inquired. ‘Why does it stop what?’
‘Well, it gets a bit of the way, but then it doesn’t seem able to get any further, ever. I don’t see why not…’
I was still out of touch.
‘A bit of the way where?’ I asked him.
The cow lost interest, and decided to move away. Matthew watched it thoughtfully as it went.
‘What I mean is,’ he explained, ‘when old Albert comes to the yard gate there, all the cows understand that it’s milking time. They all know which stall to go to in the shed, and they understand about waiting there until they’ve been milked. Then, when it’s over and Albert opens the gate again, they understand about going back into the field. But there they just stop. I don’t see why.’
I was beginning to get his drift.
‘You mean they just stop understanding?’ I tried.
‘Yes,’ Matthew agreed. ‘You see, they don’t want to stay in this field, because if they can find a gap in the hedge they get out. So, if they want to go out why don’t they just open the gate for themselves and go out that way? They could, easily.’
‘Well, they – they don’t know how to open it,’ I said.
‘That’s just it, Daddy. Why don’t they understand how to open it? They’ve watched Albert do it hundreds of times – every time they’ve been milked. They’ve got brains enough to remember which stall to go to; why can’t they remember how Albert opens the gate? I mean if they understand some things, why not a simple thing like that? What is it that doesn’t go on happening inside their heads so that they stop?’
That led us on to the question of limited intelligence which was a concept that baffled him entirely.
He could grasp the idea of no intelligence. You just hadn’t got it. But once you had it, how could it be limited? Surely if you went on applying and applying even a little intelligence it might take a longish time, but it must come up with the answer sooner or later. How could there possibly be such things as boundary lines to intelligence?
It was a discussion that continued for the rest of our walk, by the time we got home I had a good idea of what Mary had meant. It was not the sort of inquiry – and by no means the sort of subsequent debate – that one associated with Matthew. She agreed, when I reported it to her, that I had collected quite a good specimen.
It was about ten days after that that we first heard about Chocky. It might well have been longer had Matthew not picked up some fluey germ at school which caused him to run quite a temperature for a while. When it was at its height he rambled a bit, with all defences down. There were times when he did not seem to know whether he was talking to his mother, or his father, or to some mysterious character he called Chocky. Moreover, this Chocky appeared to worry him, for he protested several times.
On the second evening his temperature ran high. Mary called down to me to come up. Poor Matthew looked in a sorry state. His colour was high, his brow damp, and he was very restless. He kept rolling his head from side to side on the pillow, almost as if he were trying to shake it free of something. In a tone of weary exasperation he said: ‘No, no, Chocky. Not now. I can’t understand. I want to go to sleep.… No.… Oh, do shut up and go away.… No, I can’t tell you now…’ He rolled his head again, and pulled his arms from under the bedclothes to press his hands over his ears. ‘Oh, do stop it, Chocky. Do shut up!’
Mary reached across and put her hand on his forehead. He opened his eyes and became aware of her.
‘Oh, Mummy, I’m so tired. Do tell Chocky to go away. She doesn’t understand. She won’t leave me alone…’
Mary glanced questioningly at me. I could only shrug and shake my head. She sat down on the side of the bed, propped Matthew up a little, and held a glass of orange juice for him to drink.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Now lie down, darling, and try to go to sleep.’
Matthew lay back.
‘I want to go to sleep, Mummy. But Chocky doesn’t understand. He will keep on talking. Please make him shut up.’
Mary laid her hand on his forehead again.
‘There now,’ she soothed him. ‘You’ll feel better when you wake up.’
‘But do tell him, Mummy. He won’t listen to me. Tell him to go away now.’
Mary hesitated, and glanced at me again. This time it was she who shrugged. Then she rose to the occasion. Turning back, she addressed herself to a point slightly above Matthew’s head. I recognized the technique she had sometimes used with Piff. In a kindly but firm tone she said:
‘Chocky, you really must let Matthew be quiet and rest. He isn’t at all well, Chocky, and he needs to go to sleep. So please go away and leave him alone now. Perhaps, if he’s better tomorrow, you can come back then.’
‘See?’ said Matthew. ‘You’ve got to clear out, Chocky, so that I can get better.’ He seemed to listen. ‘Yes,’ he said decisively.
It appeared to work. In fact it did work.
He lay back again, and visibly relaxed.
‘She’s gone,’ he announced.
‘That’s fine. Now you can settle down,’ said Mary.
And he did. He wriggled into a comfortable position and lay quiet. Presently his eyes closed. In a very few minutes he was fast asleep. Mary and I looked at one another. She tucked his bedclothes closer, and put the bell-push handy. We tiptoed to the door, turned off the room light, and went downstairs.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what are we supposed to make of that?’
‘Aren’t they astonishing?’ said Mary. ‘Dear, oh dear, it does very much look as if this family is landed with another Piff.’
I poured us some sherry, handed Mary hers, and raised mine.
‘Here’s to hoping it turns out to be less of a pest than the last one,’ I said. I set down the glass, and looked at it. ‘You know,’ I told her, ‘I can’t help feeling there’s something wrong about this. As I said before, Piffs aren’t unusual with little girls, but I don’t remember hearing of an eleven-year-old boy inventing one.… It seems out of order, somehow.… I must ask someone about it…’
Mary nodded agreement.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but what strikes me as even odder is – did you notice? – he doesn’t seem to be clear in his own mind whether his Chocky is a him or a her. Children are usually very positive about that. They feel it’s important…’<
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‘I wouldn’t say the feeling of importance is entirely restricted to children,’ I told her, ‘but I see what you mean, and you’re perfectly right, of course. It is odd.… The whole thing’s odd…’
Matthew’s temperature was down the next morning. He picked up quickly. In a few days he was fully recovered, and about again. So too, apparently, was his invisible friend, undiscouraged by the temporary banishment.
Now that Chocky’s existence was out of the bag – and largely, I was inclined to think, because neither Mary nor I had displayed incredulity – Matthew gained enough confidence to be a little more forthcoming about him/her.
To begin with, at any rate, he/she seemed a considerable improvement on the original Piff. There was none of that business of him/her invisibly occupying one’s chair, or feeling sick in teashops to which Piff had been so prone. Indeed, Chocky quite markedly lacked physical attributes. He/she appeared to be scarcely more than a presence, having perhaps something in common with Wordsworth’s cuckoo, but with the added limitation that his/her wandering voice was audible to Matthew alone. And intermittently, at that. There were days when Matthew seemed to forget him/her altogether. Unlike Piff, he/she was not given to cropping up any-and-every-where, nor did he/she show any of Piff’s talent for embarrassment such as a determined insistence on being taken to the lavatory in the middle of the sermon. On the whole, if one had to choose between the two intangibles, my preference was decidedly in favour of Chocky.
Mary was less certain.
‘Are we,’ she suddenly demanded one evening, staring into the loops of her knitting with a slight squint, ‘are we, I wonder, doing the right thing in playing up to this nonsense? I know you shouldn’t crush a child’s imagination, and all that, but what nobody tells you is how far is enough. There comes a stage when it begins to get a bit like conspiracy. I mean, if everyone goes around pretending to believe in things that aren’t there, how on earth is a child going to learn to distinguish what really is, from what really isn’t?’
‘Careful, darling,’ I told her. ‘You’re steering close to dangerous waters. It chiefly depends on who, and how many, believe what isn’t really is.’
She declined to be diverted. She went on:
‘It’d be a most unfortunate thing if we were to find out later on that we’re helping to stabilize a fantasy-system that we ought to be trying to dispel. Hadn’t we better consult a psychiatrist about it? He could at least tell us whether it’s one of the expectable things, or not.’
‘I’m rather against making too much of it,’ I told her. ‘More inclined to leave it for a bit. After all we managed to lose Piff in the end, and no harm done.’
‘I didn’t mean send him to a psychiatrist. I thought just an inquiry on general lines to find out whether it is unusual, or simply nothing to bother about. I’d feel easier if we knew.’
‘I’ll ask around if you like,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s serious. It seems to me a bit like fiction – we read our kind of fiction, children often make up their own, and live it. The thing that does trouble me a bit about it is that this Chocky seems to have barged into the wrong age-group. I think we’ll find it will fade away after a bit. If it doesn’t we can consult someone about it.’
I wasn’t, I admit, being quite honest when I said that. Some of Matthew’s questions were puzzling me considerably – not only by their un-Matthew-like character, but because, now that Ghocky’s existence was acknowledged, Matthew did not always present the questions as his own. Quite frequently he would preface them with: ‘Chocky says he doesn’t see how…’ or ‘Chocky wants to know…’ or ‘Chocky says she doesn’t understand why…’
I let that pass, though it seemed to me rather a childish foible for a boy of Matthew’s age. What made me more uneasy was Matthew’s trick of appearing to take part in any ensuing discussion merely as a go-between. He sustained the role of interpreter so well.
However, one thing at least I felt could be cleared up.
‘Look here,’ I told him, ‘I get all confused with this he-and-she business. On grounds of grammar alone it would be easier if I knew which Chocky is.’
Matthew quite agreed.
‘Yes, it would,’ he said. ‘I thought so, too. So I asked. But Chocky doesn’t seem to know.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s rather unusual. I mean, it’s one of those things people are generally pretty sure about.’
Matthew agreed about that, too.
‘But Chocky’s sort of different,’ he told me earnestly. ‘I explained all the differences between hims and hers, but she couldn’t seem to get it, somehow. That’s funny because he’s really frightfully clever I think, but all he said was that it sounded a pretty silly arrangement, and wanted to know why it’s like that.’
I recalled that Mary had encountered a question along those lines. Matthew went on:
‘I couldn’t tell her why. And nobody I’ve asked has been much help. Do you know why, Daddy?’
‘Well – er – not exactly why,’ I confessed. ‘It’s just – um – how it is. One of Nature’s ways of managing things.’
Matthew nodded.
‘That’s what I tried to tell Chocky – well sort of. But I don’t think I can have been very good at it because she said that even if I had got it right, and it was as silly as it sounded, there still had to be a why behind it.’ He paused reflectively, and then added, with a nice blend of pique and regret: ‘ Chocky keeps on finding such a lot of things, quite ordinary things, silly. It gets a bit boring. He thinks animals are just a hoot. I don’t see why – I mean, it isn’t their fault if they’re not made clever enough to know any better than they do, is it?’
We talked on for a while. I was interested and showed it, but took some pains not to appear to pump. My memories of Piff suggested that pressure brought to bear on a fantasy is more apt to produce sulks than forthcomings. From what I did learn, however, I found myself feeling a little less kindly towards Chocky. He/she gave an impression of being quite aggressively opinionated. Afterwards when I recollected the entirely serious nature of our conversation I felt some increase in uneasiness. Going back over it I realized that not once in the course of it had Matthew even hinted by a single word, or slip, that Chocky was not just as real a person as ourselves, and I began to wonder whether Mary had not been right about consulting a psychiatrist…
However, we did get one thing more or less tidied up: the him/her question. Matthew explained:
‘Chocky does talk rather like a boy, but a lot of the time it’s not about the sort of thing boys talk about – if you see what I mean. And sometimes there’s a bit of – well, you know the sort of snooty way chaps’ older sisters often get…?’
I said I did, and after we had discussed these and a few other characteristics we decided that Chocky’s balance did on the whole lean more to the F than the M, and agreed that in future, provided no strong evidence showed up in contradiction, it would be convenient to class Chocky as feminine.
Mary gave me a thoughtful look when I reported to her that that, at least, was settled.
‘The point is it gives more personification if Chocky is one or the other – not just an it,’ I explained. ‘Puts a sort of picture in the mind which must be easier for him to cope with than just a vague, undifferentiated, disembodied something. And as Matthew feels there’s not much similarity to any of the boys he knows…’
‘You decide she’s feminine because you feel it will help you and Matthew to gang up on her,’ Mary declared.
‘Well, really, of all the nonsensical implications I ever heard –’ I began, but I broke off and let it go. I knew by her non-listening look I would be wasting my breath. She spent a few moments in reflective silence, and emerged from it to say, a little wistfully:
‘I do think being a parent must have been a lot more fun before Freud was invented. As it is, if this fantasy game doesn’t clear up in a week or two we shall feel a moral, social and medical obligation to do something about
it.… And it’s such nonsense really.… I sometimes wonder if we aren’t all of us a bit morbid about children nowadays.… I’m sure there are more delinquents than there used to be…’
‘I’m for keeping him clear of psychiatrists and suchlike if we can,’ I told her. ‘Once you let a child get the idea he’s an interesting case, you turn loose a whole new boxful of troubles.’
She was silent for some seconds. Running over in her mind, I guessed, a number of the children we knew. Then she nodded.
So there we let it rest: once more waiting a bit longer to see how it would go.
In point of fact it went rather differently from anything we had in mind.
Three
‘Shut up!’ I snapped suddenly. ‘Shut up, both of you.’ Matthew regarded me with unbelieving astonishment. Polly’s eyes went wide, too. Then both of them turned to look at their mother. Mary kept her expression carefully non-committal. Her lips tightened slightly, and she shook her head at them without speaking. Matthew silently finished the pudding still on his plate, and then got up and left the room, carrying himself stiffly, with the hurt of injustice. Polly choked on her final mouthful, and burst into tears. I was not feeling sympathetic.
‘What have you to cry about?’ I asked her. ‘You started it again, as usual.’
‘Come here, darling,’ said Mary. She produced a handkerchief, dabbed at the wet cheeks, and then kissed her.
‘There, that’s better,’ she said. ‘Darling, Daddy didn’t mean to be unkind I’m sure, but he has told you lots of times not to quarrel with Matthew – particularly at meals – you know he has, don’t you?’ Polly replied only with a sniff. She looked down at her fingers twisting a button on her dress. Mary went on: ‘You really must try not to quarrel so much. Matthew doesn’t want to quarrel with you, he hates it. It makes things very uncomfortable for us – and, I believe you hate it, too, really. So do try, it’s so much nicer for everyone if you don’t.’
Polly looked up from the button.
‘But I do try, Mummy – only I can’t help it.’ Her tears began to rise again. Mary gave her a hug.