He turned and made his way back to the front door. The saliva began to leave his mouth as he approached; a knot began to twist slowly in his gut. Dear God, he thought as he mounted the step and pulled the bell: please let it not be Grogan. The spyhole swivelled, an eye peered out and there was the sound of bolts and chains. A burly, youngish man with a leather cap and a cigarette in his mouth asked him what he wanted; his manner was crude, but he had one great advantage in Thomas’s eyes: he was not Grogan.
‘Dr Faverill’s up in the West Tower. He told me you was coming. Third floor up. Down the corridor here, into the—’
‘Yes, I remember the way. I shall need a master key, shan’t I? Unless of course you have done away with all the locks.’
‘No fear. You can borrow this one.’
As Thomas set off towards the corridor on the women’s side, there was a throaty laugh behind him. ‘Mind where you step.’
When he pulled the door closed behind him, Thomas felt the smell of the asylum cover him in a wave: the rotting asphalt, faeces and paraldehyde; the damp brick and unmopped waste that tacitly admitted that humans were no better than the beasts and that any aspiration to be so was a folly.
Electric lights had replaced the gas, though what it showed was better left unilluminated, Thomas thought, as he burrowed on down the tunnel. The doors into the wards had also been renewed and now had glass upper panels, reinforced with wire, through which he could glimpse the lunatics as he walked. Doubtless he would already have passed by some of the same patients who were there twenty years ago: that Welsh woman, for instance, with the erotic mania – was her ardour undiminished after all this time or had it burned away the brain all round itself and left her senile?
Eventually he came to a gallery at the foot of a ventilation tower, where he left the corridor by a small side door and emerged into a brighter area, a hall where once a banner had been strung from the banisters, its message picked out in winter flowers, white and pink: ‘WELLCOME’.
Thomas climbed the stairs, and at once his spirits lifted. He quickened down a passage, turned and climbed again. He was not far from where his own room had been, with its solitary bookcase on which he had so proudly displayed the sum of human knowledge on insanity. Faverill’s name was written on a wooden plate beside his door.
‘Come in. Ah, Midwinter. How extremely good to see you.’
An old man Thomas barely recognised was starting to lever himself up from a chair at the fireside.
‘Do come and take a seat. We shall have some tea in a moment.’
‘It is very good of you to see me, sir. I was not sure you would remember me. I was not here for long.’
‘Remember you? Dear God, of course I remember you. I had never had an assistant with more of a gift for mad-doctoring. I think I said so at the time. I was sorry to see you go.’
‘Thank you, sir, I—’
‘You had better not call me “sir”. I am not your senior officer. You could call me Faverill if you liked, though if that is too intimate for you, my Christian name is William.’
Faverill’s fairish hair, such of it as was left, had turned white and he had lost his beard, though there were patches of white whisker that had escaped the razor. He wore a velvet jacket over a waistcoat and shirt that bore the marks of dropped food and drink. His eyes were rheumy, and there was a tremor in his hand as he filled a pipe with tobacco from a jar on the table.
‘Tell me all you have done,’ he said. ‘I have few visitors. My sister occasionally, no one else. So tell me your story at length, Midwinter. I am all ears.’
Thomas smiled and began. He stopped occasionally to ask Faverill about himself.
‘I am seventy-five years old now, and am retired from work, though they allow me these rooms and a small pension. In theory I remain a “consultant”, though the present superintendent has never in fact consulted me. He is a very rum fellow in my opinion. Name of Arrowsmith. Not disagreeable, but very decided in his opinions. Not a very scientific man, I fear. Now go on. You were in Paris, with Charcot and your French friend. He sounds a splendid man, I must say.’
‘He certainly is, though we have had our difficulties, I am afraid to say. Are you familiar with theViennese School?’
‘Indeed,’ said Faverill. ‘I read the early communications with enormous interest. These Viennese seemed to be the first people to be offering a cure of any description for mental distress. A cure! A remedy! Only people such as you and I who have laboured in the mad-doctoring business could know the allure of those words. I read the case histories with great enjoyment. Are you familiar with the short stories of Harrison Lindsay? A little-known Scottish writer, rather splendid in his way. His stories are like intricate detective puzzles, full of clues. They all come out right in the end. Most satisfactory. Where was I?’
‘The Viennese School.’
‘Ah yes. I found their stories equally entertaining. But when I read that it was proposed to apply their techniques not to the comfort of high-strung Viennese girls but to the treatment of psychosis . . .’ Faverill spread his hands wide. ‘I confess that at that stage I lost interest. I despaired.’
Thomas went on to describe his own work and his attempts to reconcile his beliefs in some sort of theory that even if it would not answer every question could at least provide a stepping-stone for others.
Faverill nodded as he listened and occasionally smiled, not unkindly. ‘Proof, my dear Midwinter. That is what you are going to lack for this great scheme of yours.’
‘I know. In the absence of molecular proof – something that will take a hundred years or maybe more – the best I can do is shore up my theories by quoting good authorities who have thought in similar ways.’
‘Yes. But if I were you, I should forget about the Europeans. Charcot’s work in this area is discredited. The Germans, the Viennese . . . Hmm. You may find more sense in the West Riding Asylum. Or in Hughlings Jackson, a very fine neurologist – the English Charcot, you might almost say, though fortunately still with us.’
There was a knock at the door and a woman in a green overall came in carrying a tea tray.
‘Thank you, Susan,’ said Faverill, picking up the pot.
When the maid had left, Thomas said, ‘And may I ask, how is Matilda?’
‘Alas, alas,’ said Faverill, putting down the pot again in a hand that shook. ‘I am sorry to say that she was taken from us – almost five years ago now. She did not enjoy good health – physically, I mean. She had had consumption as a child. A severe case of pneumonia carried her off one winter.’ He passed his hand across his forehead. ‘And, oh, the difference to me.’
‘I am very sorry to hear that.’
‘Indeed. I had the misfortune to choose a branch of medicine in which I have seen almost no one cured. It has been dispiriting. We have struggled on, giving what comfort we can. For myself, I found the company of Matilda gave me joy despite it all. She gave me leave to hope. I was devoted to the woman.’
‘I know. I am very sorry.’
Faverill at last poured the tea. ‘I have arranged for you to stay in your old room,’ he said. ‘It was on the floor below, was it not?’
‘Yes, directly under this one.’
‘I suggest you take dinner in town. There is a chop-house on the high street and they say the dining room at the Lamb and Flag is reliable. The food in the asylum has suffered somewhat. Then in the morning you can come back here and I shall accompany you on your visit to the wards, if that is still what you would like.’
When he returned after dinner at the Lamb and Flag, Thomas found an old copy of the British Medical Journal from March 1884 on his bed. Pinned to it was a note in Faverill’s hand that said, ‘I thought you might be interested by the passages I have marked on page 591.’
Thomas turned to the page, which reprinted The Croonian Lectures on ‘Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System’, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, March 1884 by J. Hughlings Jackson M.D., F.R.S., F
.R.C.P., Physician to the London Hospital.
Faverill’s pencil had underlined with vigour.
1. Evolution is a passage from the most to the least organised; that is to say, from the lowest, well-organised, centres up to the highest, least organised, centres . . . 2. Evolution is a passage from the most simple to the most complex . . . There is no inconsistency in speaking of centres being at the same time most complex and least organised. Suppose a centre to consist of but two sensory and two motor elements; if they be well joined, so that ‘currents flow’ easily from the sensory into the motor elements, then that centre, although a very simple one, is highly organised. On the other hand we can conceive a centre consisting of four sensory and four motor elements in which the junctions are so imperfect that the nerve-currents meet with much resistance. Here is a centre twice as complex . . . but only half as well organised. 3. Evolution is a passage from the most automatic to the most voluntary.
So far, Thomas thought, what he had read was unremarkable, though he had seldom seen the word ‘evolution’ used so suggestively in a medical journal. It confirmed his own belief that the most highly evolved, most characteristically human systems were what Hughlings Jackson called the ‘least organised’, or in other words most vulnerable.
Faverill’s underlining pencil had wavered on.
Dissolution being the reverse process of evolution . . . is a process of undevelopment; it is a ‘taking to pieces’ . . . Evolution not being entirely reversed, some level of evolution is left. To ‘undergo dissolution’ is to be ‘reduced to a lower level of evolution’. Disease is said to ‘cause’ the symptoms of insanity. I submit that . . . all positive mental symptoms (illusions, hallucinations, delusions and extravagant conduct) are the activity of nervous elements untouched by any pathological process; that they arise during activity on the lower level of evolution remaining.
Under the closing phrase, Faverill’s hand had doubled its emphasis. Thomas thought of Olivier; he thought of Achilles and the Psalmist, hearing voices. Now he was excited by what he read.
In health, each person’s normal thought and conduct are . . . survivals of the fittest states of what we may call the topmost layer of his highest centres: the highest level of evolution. Now suppose that from disease . . . the topmost layer is rendered functionless. This is dissolution, from which arise the negative symptoms of the patient’s insanity. I contend that his positive mental symptoms are the survivals of his fittest states – on the lower, though highest functioning, level of evolution. The most absurd mentation and most extravagant actions in insane people are the survivals of their fittest states . . . We need not wonder that an insane man believes in what we call his illusions; they are his reality. His illusions, etc., are not caused by disease but are the outcome of what activity is left of him (of what disease has spared); his illusions are his mind.
In the morning, he received a telegram from Edgar telling him that their mother had died.
XX
IN THE FOLLOWING year, a German-born physicist declared that there was no such thing as absolute time or absolute motion, but that everything, even the order in which events happened, depended on the observer. While his father and uncle debated these findings, the most significant event of the year for Daniel Rebière was that, on their eighth birthday, his cousins were finally permitted to attend the village school with him. Their mother had made a number of excuses about their fragility and the length of the daily winter journey, but what really alarmed her was how quickly they seemed to be growing up. Most people with two children had a younger one to hold on to and to spoil; they had a chance to catch and relish the fading days of innocence. But both Kitty’s children were her oldest; both galloped away from her; and while the relativity of time was all very well in theory, not even Mr Einstein had devised a way that she could keep her girls forever young.
She waved them off sadly on the cable-car, in Daniel’s fierce custody, wrapped her arms tight round her ribs and went back to her empty house.
Daniel showed the girls off to Freddy and his other friends with silent pride. They wore matching dresses of holly-leaf green wool with red woollen stockings and buttoned boots; they had had their curly hair cut just above the shoulder; Charlotte had a green ribbon in hers and Martha a red, but at lunchtime they quietly exchanged them. They traded on their similarity to give themselves double protection in the new world of chalk boards, boys, wooden forms and spelling. Only Daniel could in fact see through their ribbon swaps and double bluffs: Charlotte was a fraction taller, Martha’s eyes were a shade darker, though neither of these details was of any use unless they stood side by side. Daniel’s way of knowing was instinctive and depended on the way they looked at him; there was just something more Martha-ish and less Charlotte-like about Martha. Perhaps it was the voice, perhaps only the way the light caught the eye.
Charlotte excelled at arithmetic, to Daniel’s alarm, and was moved up to the class he was in, under Herr Baumgartner. In the summer, Martha was also promoted. The following year was Daniel’s last at the village school before, at the age of eleven, he would move to the big school in town and he felt it was important that he should not be overtaken by his cousins before he left. He doubled his efforts in grammar and spelling and elementary Latin, but long division continued to trouble him unless Martha allowed him to look over at her slate, as she frequently did. In the rest period after lunch, Daniel sat next to one or other of the girls while the teacher read the class a story. Charlotte sometimes pretended to be Daisy with her electrical apparatus and ran the tips of her fingers over his bare thighs, between the bottom of his shorts and top of his socks. Or, if he asked her nicely and gave her some of the fruit pie his mother sent in with him, Martha would sit behind him and stroke the back of his neck and hair, so that he heard the folk tales of Europe in a trance of delight.
Sonia underlined to Daniel that it was his duty to make sure his cousins were not bullied and that they returned home safe each day with the right books, with their clothes untorn and their hands and faces clean. Since the girls seemed rather better adapted than he was to the world of school, this was not a troublesome responsibility for him and he received his mother’s praise with equanimity.
In fact Sonia was less worried about her son or her nieces than about her husband. Since Olivier’s death, Jacques had changed. He had become colder, and sometimes seemed dismissive of other people’s feelings; on the days that he went to the hospital in town for his clinic, he was distracted on his return. He often came back late, and although she did not press him for a reason, she noticed that he offered none. He was going through another turbulent period in his life, it was clear to her, but her previous experience had taught her that it was best to leave him to it.
They frequently dined with Hofrat Drobesch and his wife, despite the fact that both of them thought him insufferable and Sonia thought Roya untrustworthy.
‘Well, one meets other people there,’ said Jacques. ‘It’s a way of getting off the confounded mountain top and away from the society of lunatics. And the wine is good.’
It was true that the evenings were enjoyable in their way. Sonia could still be excited by the process of dressing up and going out; she was still interested to hear the stories of the people she met and see how they managed to deal with the demands of their lives.
Jacques also sometimes called at the house in the afternoons, when only Roya was there. At first it was every three months or so; then every month.
She always expressed surprise and delight when he called in. She told him she was lonely by day, with little to do but practise her violin; the other wives in town were . . . Well . . .
‘I know,’ said Jacques. ‘You are an exotic flower to them. They do not understand strangers. They live where they were set down. They are autochthonous.’
‘Does that mean plump?’
‘Invariably.’
He persuaded himself that Roya benefited from his visits. When the clinic closed, he looked a
t his watch. I should hurry home, he thought, but on the other hand, the poor girl, alone in that big cold house . . . She needs a little conversation. It is not as though the slightest impropriety . . . Well, one quick kiss, but that was years ago, and we are friends, emancipated people of the twentieth century in which it appears that women will shortly have the vote. Our friendship is one of equals. We talk of the issues of the day – painting, Russia, the Balkan question, music; it is actually my duty to welcome the foreigner at the gate and to make her feel welcome.
Three years had passed since he had first seen her again at the concert, and Roya gave no sign that she looked for anything more than tea and conversation. Even when the frequency of his visits increased to once a week, and then were planned in advance; even when he found hand-delivered notes in his pigeonhole at the hospital hastily rearranging times (‘Drobesch unexpectedly back from Vienna’) – at no point did their exchanges move beyond the bounds of a sophisticated, modern friendship. Jacques was proud of his restraint and was able to remain unconscious of his deeper feelings; he saw no need for caution because he saw no danger.
Thomas laboured on. He was hurt by a teasing remark from Jacques about his lack of published work; he was almost fifty years old and he did not want to end his working days like one of those old Fellows of his college at Cambridge who had published nothing. Relations between him and Jacques were difficult again. Although Jacques did not blame him for his brother’s death, Olivier had been Thomas’s patient and Thomas did feel to some extent responsible. He had become openly hostile to the Viennese School, to Jacques’s manifest irritation. After the case of Fräulein Katharina, Jacques had had no choice but to disavow his own similar line of inquiry, but Thomas knew that he secretly still had hopes for it.
There was also the question of Jacques’s friendship with Hofrat Drobesch and his wife. The reappearance of Roya, the girl from St Jakob’s Church in Rothenburg, was troubling to Thomas. He remembered the disconcerting effect she had had on him at the time, more than twenty years ago. When he saw her now, as he occasionally did when he was in town, he did not think, from a close if covert examination of her skin and her physique, that she could possibly be more than thirty-five, so at the time that she had so disturbed him when he glimpsed her in the church, then later at her father’s house with the cat on her shoulders, she might have been as little as fourteen years old . . . As if this thought were not worrying enough, he suspected that Jacques had formed an improperly intimate friendship with her. He had once been in the same room, at a party after the theatre, and he sensed a kind of thunderous closeness, a charged and crackling air between them. It aroused a primitive jealousy in him, which he tried to extinguish by concentrating on the question of his sister’s welfare.