A Temporary Life, page 6
‘She wanted to go mad at home,’ I add, or think I add for above the noise I’m not sure that she’s heard. In any case, she never listens; like artists with their pictures, so mothers with a child: it’s the tone of voice that counts.
‘The doctors wondered what it was.’
‘What?’
‘This feeling of guilt.’
‘I don’t think they bother, really, over that.’
‘There’s one doctor there …’ She taps her head.
‘Lennox.’
‘Doctor Lennox.’
It seems crazy in any case that a woman of sixty-seven or eight, white-haired, thin-cheeked, dark-eyed, should, at the ending of her days, be worried about the madness of a child; the child, after all, in its madness, is safer than she is herself.
‘Doctor Lennox seems to feel it’s connected with the child.’ She looks across. ‘With losing it, I mean.’
‘Women lose children all the time.’
‘Yes.’
‘And this one,’ I tell her, ‘wasn’t even born.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was more like an abortion than anything else.’
‘She was four months gone.’
‘Lennox doesn’t think at all. The baby, you know, is propaganda.’
‘What?’
‘She’ll be out again in three months’ time. It’s like having a headache. An arm broken. You just need time for the bits to mend.’
‘The mind, you know: it’s not like anything else.’
‘It’s made up of flesh and blood and gristle. Jab in the right ingredients: like baking bread.’
I don’t know why I adopt this attitude with her; it’s something to do with the place itself. She’s lived here, I suppose, for fifty years; here a child was born, here her husband died; apart from that, endless meals, endless nights, endless wakenings, nothing has happened in this place at all: she grows here like a tree, aimless, uncomprehending. One day they’ll come along and chop it down.
‘Yvonne always talks of you,’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘If it wasn’t for you she wouldn’t be alive, she says.’
‘She might say the same of you,’ I add.
‘Yes,’ she says. She sighs.
The house itself is a kind of tomb: it’s damp; you can smell the river, despite the fumes – and the food she’s recently cooked and, it seems, through some kind of natural absentmindedness, has burnt. You can smell the trains; you can smell clothing which hasn’t been touched, used, washed, disturbed for years; you can smell the sink: you can smell that harsh industrial inertia which everywhere leaves, inside and out, a kind of filth. You can smell the decay, the neglect of life itself.
Through the front window is visible the street outside: terrace houses identical to her own, two up, two down; nothing to denote, on a Sunday afternoon, that they contain any sort of life at all. They might be ovens, or cupboards, with strange, unwantable things inside.
‘It’s the crying I find the worst.’
‘If she didn’t cry, you’d need to be worried more,’ I say.
‘I couldn’t be worried more,’ she says.
Worry in any case, I can see, is a kind of food down here; worry is one of the indispensable ingredients of life. Yvonne herself is full of worries, Vietnam, China, India, Africa; children without food, women without men; men with nothing else to do but fight; napalm, insecticides, pollution: vast abstractions that overwhelm her mind, rendering her incapable of dealing with anything at all. When finally she confronts a person she gazes at them with ever-widening eyes, unable to focus her attention, through this fog of abstraction, on their particular identity or problem: people aren’t people any more, they’re indecipherable elements of some hopelessly confusing cosmic enterprise, engineered, manipulated, directed by forces beyond her comprehension. Instead of flesh and blood, and fuck and cunt, everything is terror, annihilation, anonymity, and death.
‘I’ve never seen her like this before. Not even as a child,’ Mrs Sherman says. ‘I can’t understand, you know, how it all began.’
‘One woman in six,’ I tell her, ‘at some point in her life goes mad.’
‘She worked so hard. We gave her all we had. She went to college. Her degree: they said they’d never seen anything like it quite, before.’
‘Conscientious.’
‘She cares so much.’
She gets up from the chair; she pokes the fire. From overhead, once again, comes the rumbling of a train. It’s like living in an underworld, beneath a stone. I try to imagine Yvonne as a child, coming home, from school, trying to do her work: the smell of the river at the end of the street, the noise of engines thumping, rhythmically, above her head, her father, in overalls and boots, sitting by the fire; and try to create some image that might absorb all this, some vision that might enable her, sitting in this room, to transcend the inertia in which she finds herself. Enter Africa, India, China, Vietnam; enter war and pestilence and fire and famine; enter holocaust and ruin; enter abstraction: enter things that no longer smell and lie: enter dreams of salvation that will take her out of this: enter Yvonne a year before our marriage as I greet her with a kiss, wide-eyed, St George’s or Don Quixote’s wife, she’s not sure which.
‘What I was wondering was, how long you’ll be able to stay,’ her mother says.
‘I’ve got a job.’
‘A job?’
‘Teaching.’
‘Enough,’ she says, ‘to keep yourself?’
‘I’m putting some by for when Yvonne comes out.’
‘You’ve been so good to her,’ she says.
‘She wanted to go mad, you see, at home,’ I add and wonder, briefly, if I’ve said this once before.
‘Have they said how long she’ll be inside?’
‘They never tell you anything,’ I say.
‘It’s strange. She was always full of hope,’ she says.
She wipes her eyes. She turns back to the chair.
‘What I can’t understand are some of the people they put them with. I’m sure, seeing some of them, it only makes her worse.’
‘I was talking to this patient,’ I tell her, ‘the other day. I was thinking, listening to her rattle on, “She’s going to be in here, you know, for years.” Acquired all the characteristics, tone of voice. Next minute another patient calls out, “Nurse!” The one I’m talking to turns round and says, “Don’t worry, now. I shan’t be a minute!”’
She doesn’t laugh; the frown, if anything, has deepened.
‘I don’t like going to the place, in any case,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it doesn’t do them any good putting them all together. I mean, there’s a woman in Yvonne’s ward who’s tried to kill herself.’ She pauses, thinks about this, then adds, ‘Three times.’
She sighs.
‘There’s another one who’s been on drugs. They say she’ll only have another year to live. Eighteen.’ She shakes her head.’ ‘Eighteen years old. It makes you think.’
The rocking of the chair has ceased.
Faintly, from further down the street, comes the shouting of a child.
Mrs Sherman gets up; there’s a complacency, a composure about her existence in the house, like a dog reclining in its kennel. This is the place she’s been told to keep: this is, in a word, her situation. It’s only the limits, unquestioned, that set the tone; morality, after all, is a question of money.
‘There’s one woman there who’s been in eight times. You wonder what it is that keeps them going.’
‘A sort of machine, I suppose,’ I tell her.
‘What?’
‘A sort of mechanism.’
I have fantasies about this house myself; namely, that Mrs Sherman is already dead: that it’s a kind of superstition on my part which makes me insist that she’s still alive, that she’s sitting in that chair still talking or – as now – standing by the fire and, with a kind of groan, reaching for the poker and banging it against the coal.
‘They have lovely flowers.’
‘Flowers?’
‘I’ll grant them that.’
She gestures upwards, backwards, towards the town.
‘At the hospital,’ she adds. ‘And pictures.’ She sighs again. ‘I’ve looked at them, you know, for hours.’
‘They’ve even taken off the gates.’
‘I noticed that.’
‘I never know whether it’s because they’re broken, or whether it’s a political gesture.’
‘Political?’
‘“You too can go crazy: step inside.” A piece of diplomacy, propaganda.’
‘I don’t understand half the things you say.’
‘That’s right.’
She might, conceivably, have gone over to the window; she turns, instead, towards the sink: she begins to wash up the cups from the tea we’ve drunk.
I pick up a cloth.
‘I mean, the amusing thing is, the ones who go inside go inside because they’re crazy: they’ve seen the world for what it is.’
‘Yes,’ she says. She takes a cup.
‘Those gates, you see, are a sign to me of the hospital’s own feelings of paranoia.’
‘Yes,’ she says. She nods her head.
‘I must say, I’ve no great sympathy with this contemporary cult of making madness an everyday event. “A malady that can be cured like any other.” I think these mental health authorities who foster that belief are really going to pieces, succumbing to a kind of dementia even more profound than the one allegedly, they’re trying to “cure”. I mean, the fact is, people like Yvonne have been driven there, and to insist, once they get inside, that the place has got no doors – or only half a door – is surely placing on them the kind of burden they shouldn’t really have to bear. All that those empty gates imply is that their anguish, their torment, is a kind of delusion: they are, after all, still a part of the world outside – the world, that is, that has actually driven them mad. Those gates to me, Mrs Sherman, are an evil sign.’
Perhaps it’s her name that suddenly recalls her: she’s been gazing for several seconds, fixated, at the wall.
‘I mean, fancy putting a mental hospital in someone’s ancestral home. Anyone suffering from delusions of grandeur is bound to find it going directly to their heads.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
I dry the cup. I stack the saucer.
‘I’ve always felt that mental homes should be bare and spartan places. Not the back of the Bastille, exactly, but simple, white, severe, undecorated, unrelieved. The moment you start to make them cosy – all those cafeteria curtains, pots of flowers – they’ve even got television in Yvonne’s, God help her – you begin to place burdens on the patients which they shouldn’t have to bear. I’m sure most of it’s there, in any case, to try and reassure the staff, or people like ourselves, that the kind of suburban taste these interiors reflect are what everybody, really, ought to strive for – functional furniture, contemporary fabrics, the odd reproduction of some modern master – the standards of the very world which, in the first place, has driven the poor old patient crazy.’
She’s beginning to look at me with some misgivings: I can see her thinking, ‘God help me, there’s going to be two of them in there before we’ve done.’ She finishes off the second cup.
‘I mean, I find these insipid decorations a tawdry bolstering-up of the doctors’ own delusions.’
She doesn’t look up: she hands over a second cup with a kind of backward gesture. No doubt she’s heard some of this from Yvonne herself.
‘At least, that’s my opinion, for what it’s worth.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘I think it does.’
The washing-up completed she finds she’s nothing else to do. She moves back, instinctively, towards the rocking-chair. Once there, however, she looks across.
‘I mean, they know what they’re doing,’ she says, ‘or they wouldn’t be there.’
‘It depends what you mean,’ I say, ‘by “know”.’
‘I mean, they’ve been to college. They’ve got degrees.’
Her world, or her aspirations for it, are qualified by ‘education’. Education, after all, is what they struggled to give Yvonne; to raise her, that is, to a better life: yet without any awareness that, when you resurrect the dead, you’ve got to provide them with something to go on living for. A first-class degree, as Yvonne has said, is about as high as Yvonne can ever go: after all, once you’re ‘qualified’ there’s nothing else to do; except exploit it in whatever way you can. Education, after all, is the philosophy of the old.
‘You never went to school,’ she says.
‘Not after the legal age,’ I say. ‘That’s right.’
‘I mean, if you haven’t had the education you can’t really tell.’
‘We’re both in the same boat, it seems,’ I tell her. ‘Us on the outside, without it, level-headed; Yvonne, who’s had it, on the inside, fastened up.’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t believe in it,’ she says. She adds, ‘Education,’ with a slow motion of her hand. It’s as if she offers the room, the house itself, as some indication of where, without it, you might end up.
‘It’s the way the half-baked indoctrinate the uninformed. Like the hospital gates,’ I tell her. ‘It’s propaganda.’
She’s beginning to wonder whether – despite Yvonne’s protestations to the contrary – her only child hasn’t been indoctrinated by what, in other contexts – she’s a regular attender at a spiritualist church – she might describe as ‘an evil influence’.
‘I mean, what things have you done with your life?’ she says, still quietly, almost gently now.
‘I’ve had a career.’
‘As a professional boxer.’ She might, in different circumstances, have begun to laugh. ‘How long were you at it, then?’
‘About four years.’
‘And you gave it up.’
‘I felt the audience on the whole were getting more out of it than I was myself. I don’t believe, you see, in exploitation.’
‘And then you were an artist, after that.’
‘I’ve always been an artist, I suppose,’ I tell her. ‘It’s like having a club-foot. However hard you try, you can never quite disguise it.’
‘I thought “art” was very popular,’ she says. No doubt she’s thinking of the reproductions on the hospital walls.
‘It depends what you mean by art,’ I add.
‘I wonder, with the amount of talking you do, that you never got on.’
‘I’ve got a job as one,’ I tell her.
‘And by “talking”, I can bet.’
‘It’s true,’ I say, and add, ‘You’re right.’
For a while, unhinged by the thought of education, she wanders on. It’s like seeing a train, derailed, steaming on, aimlessly, across the countryside. The image, of a derailed but mobile train, often comes to me when I see Yvonne: the machinery’s all right; they forgot the tracks.
‘If her father could see her now he’d be upset. He spent hours working overtime to send her to that college. He worked his heart out for Yvonne. When she got her degree he couldn’t believe it. “A daughter of mine,” he said. I can see him now.’ She gazes abstractedly to the door itself. It seems strange, looking back, to think that Mr Sherman lived here too: there’s no sign that he existed in this room at all. A photograph on a cupboard against the wall shows a fair-haired man, with a fair moustache, pale-eyed, thin-cheeked: clearly, for a man like that, working in a mill must have been too hard: you can see the unconscious supposition in his eyes: ‘I was born to be this: so it must be right.’
‘He never had a holiday, you know. “My ray of sunshine”: that’s what he called Yvonne. “If I can’t get out of here,” he said, “there’s one ray of sunlight that always shall.”’
She wipes her eyes; in a curious way, Yvonne’s collapse has caught her unprepared; a broken arm, a broken leg; even a miscarriage she might, given time, have taken in her stride: the snail’s pace, in time, encompasseth all. But going crazy: it’s removed, as it were, the filament from the lamp itself; the current’s on, the juice is there, the vacuum in the bulb is right; – she flicks the switch, it seems, again; the glow they guaranteed has died.
‘I can’t understand it happening to a girl like that. So sensible. Well-balanced. She took an interest in so many things. She’s helped old people: she’s organized charities, you know, for all sorts of causes.’ It’s as if, now, she’s reproaching God: ‘Look what she’s done for You, you sod.’ ‘She’s been on inarches; she’s been to Russia. She was even arrested in Moscow for demonstrating outside the palace there.’
‘She’s been a great one for causes, I’ll grant you that.’
‘She said she wanted to give back some of the things she’s had herself. To her own people. To the working-class.’
‘She’s given it back to them, all right,’ I add.
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know what’ll happen to her after this.’ Clearly, for her, Yvonne will never be the same again: an arm might have been mended, a leg straightened, a second child been born; but once they’ve gone crazy – out in the open again you can’t be sure.
‘I’ll have to be going, in any case,’ I tell her.
‘It was very good of you to call,’ she says. ‘I don’t see anyone now, you know.’
She gestures to the door.
‘The people I used to know round here have gone.’
She gets up from the chair.
‘You wonder, sometimes, if there’s any point.’
‘Yvonne,’ I say, ‘is still a point.’
‘I suppose that’s right.’
But that too, it seems, is going too far. She doesn’t look up.
‘Give my love to Yvonne when you see her next.’
‘I shall.’
‘Tell her I’ll bring her clean clothes ironed.’
‘I’ll tell her that.’
‘I was wondering whether to give her any money.’
‘She’s enough for the present, I believe,’ I say.
‘She gives it away, you know.’ She might have added, then, ‘She’s mad.’ ‘Giving it all away, I mean, it’s not as if she’s ever had a lot.’
