For years, all her life, the world of mental illness, and the doctors who dealt with it, had been alien. Not even frightening: it was too distant from her. Looking back, she was able to remember people: a friend, the husband of a friend, someone’s mother, who had ‘a breakdown’ of some kind. But she hadn’t thought about it. Fear? She had been afraid? No. Because, from the moment it was said: so-and-so is mentally ill, so-and-so is having a breakdown, then it no longer concerned her: the words, the labels, had removed them from her, whisked them out of her experience. Yet all her life she had lived in atmospheres of strain, stress, neurosis, which were freely admitted, freely discussed. People were neurotic. People said they were neurotic. Other people said people were neurotic. Once upon a time, it had been said of people, So-and-so’s unkind, or bad-tempered, or intolerant, or a bully. Now, they were neurotic. Yet, between this climate, the ordinary air in which one had always lived, and that other, where people were under psychiatrists, had been an absolute separation.
Yet, now, suddenly, because she was experiencing it, she felt as if she had been blind. For, suddenly, far from mental illness (as distinct from neurosis) being something that happened somewhere
else, it was all around her; and, which was odder, had been all around her for a long time. Not only Lynda and Dorothy, there were their friends, formerly thought of as people who had unfortunate leanings towards Rose Mellendip. Martha remembered that Gerald Smith, one of the comrades (he had already become an ex-comrade), had a wife in a mental hospital. She inquired of Mark what was the matter with the wife. She, Martha, had not met her: Mark had. Mark said merely that she seemed a nice enough girl, a bit harassed. What was wrong with her? She had been depressed; but she had been given shock treatment, and was, they thought, a bit better. Gerald said she might be coming home soon, but in the meantime they were trying more shock treatment. There was Patty Samuels, from whom Martha got desperately jolly letters from Essex: Patty wanted to know, of course, about Mark, and Martha told her. Patty had said in one of the recent letters that she thought that perhaps she was a bit screwy, ‘I’d better admit it, and be done with it.’ She was going to a psychiatrist in Norwich. And, coincidentally, there was Mavis Wood: it turned out that Jimmy had been married since he was twenty. Mavis Wood was unhappy about her marriage. She had been to see her mother and her two married sisters, who had asked her, if Jimmy was a good provider-the mother; if he fulfilled his marital duties-one sister; if he was kind to the children-the other sister. Mavis had said yes, to all three; and was left plunged in guilt. Clearly, it was all her fault that she was miserable. Pressed by Mark to say what she felt was wrong, she could only weep that sometimes she thought Jimmy wasn’t all there, but, of course, it must be her fault if Mark said that he was.
Mark brought this to Martha, who said that of course Jimmy wasn’t all there: though God only knew what part of him wasn’t. Mark, who continued Jimmy’s devoted admirer, said that geniuses were notoriously difficult to live with, and anyway Mavis was obviously not very bright. Poor Mavis had, last week, started screaming, and had continued to scream for two solid days, while Jimmy bobbed and smiled around the house, asking her what was the matter. Mavis had gone into hospital, and the two children were being looked after by one of the sisters-the one who had asked if he was kind to the children. Jimmy, said Mark, must be very upset, but he didn’t have time to be, luckily: there was so much to do in the factory, and anyway it turned out that he had taken to writing. He was writing space fiction: that was what it was
called though Mark couldn’t see why’space’, but he supposed one word did as well as another.
There were only two days to go before the appointment with Dr Lamb. The letters from Mrs. Quest were now arriving in batches, every day. Martha forced herself to read them. Even the act of reaching out her hand to pick up a letter, and to rip open the envelope, started up in Martha, as if buttons had been pressed, or sluice gates opened, two violent, but opposing emotions. One was pity, strong, searing, unbearable. The other was a wild need to run-anywhere. Under the bedclothes if there was nowhere to run. Therefore she sat and raged useless rebellion. Against what? A poor, lonely old woman whose life had never given her anything she wanted, or never for long. But, and this was the point, as she sat and raged, she was able to revive a part of her past that had got lost. She remembered herself as the violent, aggressive adolescent, who had reached out on all sides to grab up anything at all as a weapon in the fight for survival: her own body manipulated into a challenging attractiveness, clothes, ideas, thoughts, books, people-anything. That person she had certainly been, and was now, as she read the pathetic, heartbreaking letters. And as she sat, being that adolescent girl, she remembered that even then, there had been that other person, the silent watcher, the witness. Nothing else was permanent. She returned to the mirror and remembered the face of that girl: she saw it again, a shadow behind the face she saw now, two faces, the present face and one of the faces of the past. They were connected by the eyes.
Then something happened which seemed impossibly cruel. Dr Lamb’s secretary telephoned to say that Dr Lamb was ill, he had very bad ’flu. They would make a provisional appointment for two weeks ahead.
Martha collapsed. She crawled back under the covers. Her mother was going to arrive before she could grab hold of that baulk of floating timber in an angry sea, Dr Lamb. She was abandoned, defenceless, and Dr Lamb was cruel, he was letting her down. (But a part of her watched these so predictable reactions, described so graphically in the books she had recently read.) Watching, she smiled; reacting, she wallowed and panicked and wept.
A letter came from Mrs. Quest saying that she had postponed her sailing date for a couple of months. She was staying with friends in Cape Town. At the time Martha grabbed at just this one fact: she
was saved. Later, reading this letter, she saw that Mrs. Quest, as terrified of this visit as Martha, had put it off to give herself time to face the pain which she knew (somewhere or other inside her) was coming. But Mrs. Quest had not admitted to herself that this was what she was doing. The fear of pain, the foreknowledge of it, twisted and became a flood of reproaches against Martha, who was unkind and uncaring: why had she not answered the last two letters? And she had said nothing about the vests which Mrs. Quest asked her to buy. Well, it was perfectly plain to see that Mrs. Quest would have to get them herself, though surely it had not been too much to hope …
The ordeal was postponed: but it was on its way. Dr Lamb, the cruel betrayer, might betray again. And Martha lay in the dark, not moving.
Later she believed that this double postponement was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her. If it had not happened, if Dr Lamb had not had ’flu, and Martha had gone to him unprepared, without learning anything of what she could do for herself-well, she believed she would have been lost. Perhaps. Perhaps not. And perhaps there’s no such thing as luck, as there’s no such thing as coincidence.
But as things were, Dr Lamb did not get back to his work for a month, and Mrs. Quest stayed on with her friend in Cape Town, where the oak trees reminded her of England, and the slopes of the mountains were covered with vineyards, and where she could see the ships coming in and out of Cape Town harbour from her bedroom windows high above the slopes of the lower town.
Martha crawled out of bed. She sat looking at the tree. Once she had lain above rough boards through which rose the smell of freshly-watered earth: the boughs of a tree showed through a high square of window, carrying loads of wet, smelling of wet, carrying sun-scented air. She tried to put herself back into that other small high room, see the boughs of that other tree: what she saw was this one, the sycamore. She tried. Two shapes of tree fought in her mind’s eye, and the sycamore dissolved into a tree glowing orange under an African sun. It went, dissolved back into the sycamore. She fought. She was in the loft, or rather, was in a warm compost of scents, wet growth, soaking dust, tree-air, roses. The loft took shape. Into the loft climbed Thomas a strong brown man with farmer’s hands. She held it. She held Thomas. Holding Thomas,
using his strong presence as guide, she moved out of the loft, into the café with its smell of the army, and hot fat, and floor polish. She let the great room and its eating people come back, with Athen, with Solly and joss and Jasmine; holding them, she moved up into the avenues and the gardened house where her mother … and now pain came in a hot sear, and it all collapsed.
Spent, she lay, everything she had got back, gone again. Slowly, she sat up, took up a thread, a fragment, a scrap; sunlight on a wall, a voice, a smile, and worked again to the point where she had to enter the house where plants stood on sunny veranda walls, and where Mrs. Quest… she held it. As one puts a hand into hot water, withdraws it, puts it back, gingerly, hold it there, withdraws it-so she worked. The house in the avenues had come back, and she walked into the room which smelled of drugs and faeces and saw her father’s white face on a pillow. Soon her mother came in, and she watched her fill a glass with pink medicine, and go frowning to the bedside, heard her voice:’ Alfred, I should take this now if I were you, you had all that chicken for supper.’
Then she collapsed, lay unable to move, to feel, to think. But what she had excavated, remained. Small self-contained landscapes, lit with pain, remained. She was able to move in and out of them. She went back then to the house on a hill in the veld. Nothing remained of it. Of the farm, nothing remained but a hot sunlight, a glitter of stars. On starlit nights they had sat out in deckchairs and watched the stars, watched the fires burn in chains of red light over the hills. She sat there again. The roughness of canvas. An owl. The lamplight fell on a slope of stony soil. A strong scent of verbena-her mother stood, outlined by light from the door, saying in a cheerful indoors voice:’ Time for bed, it’s late.’ Pain came, swallowed everything; back went Martha, patiently, to a scent of flowers, an owl hooting, the smell of her father’s pipe. Soon she moved into the house. Room by room she created it, or rather, holding on to a detail, a cushion, the grain of a curtain, light on a strand of thatch, she allowed the rest to come back. Slowly. It was very slow. It was very painful. It was completely exhausting. Her stomach clenched and hurt. She fought.
Who
fought? She could sit on a chair, or rather feel herself held on soft support, and look at a tree, or rather, a brownish-grey thing that stuck out of the pavement and became a green mass, which was made up of a thousand little pieces of green-look, feel, as
empty as a pool. Who? Into the pool came a word, sycamore. Came, chair. Into the pool came scents, sounds, voices, pictures. When scents, sounds, pictures, words, went, she remained. Who? If one day she found herself memoryless in a new city, and they said, ‘What’s your name?’ she might say, Let’s see, Rosalind Macintosh. Or Montague Iones. Why not? The sense of herself which stayed had no sex. Suppose shutting her eyes, holding that sense, that presence, she imagined herself into the body of a man? Why not. An elderly man, large-framed, broad, with guttering flesh, blue-eyed, a slow ruminative man, with a history behind him of work and women and children. Why not? Or a young man, Aaron, Rachel’s brother, a lithe, sparkling boy. Or even, letting the sense of herself go into a different shape, a horse, a small white horse. She saw it; into it she fitted herself, saw the world on either side of her head in two outstretching expanses of grass, bushes. Who are you then? Why, me, of course, who else, horse, woman, man, or tree, a glittering faceted individuality of breathing green, here is the sense of me, nameless, recognizable only to me. Who, what?
This being moved in and out of the house on the kopje, every detail of every room clear, sharp, visible. But, let this person become Martha-she was swallowed in a wash of hot pain. Right then, fight it.
She fought. The house was back, the country around the house was back, she was able to sit in imagination under the tree and look across the valley as it had been, a low scrubby valley, with its varying tints of green and red and brown. But there were great gaps in her memory. There were still months, even years, where she could say nothing but: I was in these and these rooms, these streets; at that time these people were around me. She worked, laying hold of a detail, a cushion, a flower, a voice, the light on the lenses of a pair of spectacles. White shoes: small white shoes, a child’s: a small girl with a pink dress and shining black curls. She turned her face towards Martha, a small, rather sharp face, watchful. Her smile was strained. Martha reached towards the smile, saw it dissolve in tears: Martha heard herself crying. She wept, while a small girl wept with her, mamma, mamma, why are you so cold, so unkind, why did you never love me?
Day after day, Martha loafed about, lay about, sat about the room in Radlett Street: performed what duties were necessary adequately. ‘Would you like some dinner cooked tonight, Mark? Very
well, what time?’ Mark and Martha sat on either side of a dinner-table, and chatted. He did not like, was uneasy about her forthcoming visit to Dr Lamb.
‘I don’t really see what they can do for you, these people, but if you say you …’
Dr Lamb could do nothing for the person, or being who was there always; the sense, only, of existence. But he could, he must do something for Martha.
Somewhere a long way back, beyond where she could reach with memory, an angry fighting resentful Martha had been born. It was a result of a battle against pity. Pity, a long time ago, had been an enemy. Pity could have destroyed.
What Dr Lamb must do for her was to give her back pity, the strength to hold it, and not be destroyed by it. She must be able, when her mother came, to pity her, to love her, to cherish her, and not be destroyed.
Dr Lamb turned out to be a middle-aged man, wearing a good dark suit. He had a strong guarded face. On inspection it became clear the armoured look was due to spectacles. His quick instinct for what his visitors felt was shown by how he removed them, at the moment Martha discovered she was looking at the spectacles as at a defence she couldn’t penetrate. A rather nice-looking man; the eyes, thoughtful, shrewd, quick; the mouth firm, held to contain humour in its right times and places. At conferences, reports of which she had studied, Dr Lamb showed a nice dry style of wit. An altogether likeable man. She looked at him. She heard what Lynda had said of him; what Dorothy had said; what Mark had said. ‘Not a bad sort of chap, I suppose.’ Lynda had once screamed that he was a devil.