The more I learn about these times, the more I find myself wondering how people managed to live in an age of fear, with the dark clouds of violent death, the plague and lawlessness always ready to rain thunderbolts on them. I doubt if it is fully possible to inhabit their minds. It is hard enough to understand the minds of others in your own time and in the same room. In the absence of any other places to turn to, myth, the Church and relics like the Holy Cross provided necessary comfort. People who do not have – or do not accept – rational explanations have always turned to whatever they could find to serve the purpose. My father was one of these.
At the same time I am becoming increasingly confused. Already my notes have filled ten Ryman’s wide-ruled pads.
Still I carry on: if I am right, Richard and Hubert Walter would have found time when Richard had exacted revenge on his enemies to dig up or seize the True Cross wherever it was hidden. Clearly they didn’t find it, but it must still exist. In the meanwhile, in my increasingly volatile mind, I see some bedraggled knights burying the Holy Cross in a southern churchyard, attached to a simple Romanesque church, before separating and heading for home.
But I can no longer follow all my own notes or my charts and maps.
14
Ed says he
is worried about me. When I ask him why he’s worried, he says that I have been behaving erratically. Also, we no longer meet in the pub and I seem to be too preoccupied to watch the rugby internationals.
‘I know you have suffered and it must be terrible, but you must not work so hard. And you aren’t eating.’
His words are well intentioned, but they irritate me.
‘Ed, I am grateful to you. You’ve been a pal. But if you have had enough of me, and I wouldn’t blame you if you had, I’ll go.’
‘I didn’t mean that at all. It’s just you have stuck all sorts of charts to the wall. A lot. And you are often up most of the night.’
‘Dates, Ed, key dates, key places. But I see that you and Lettie need some space. Some personal space. To grow, to grow boldly.’
‘Not at all. You’ve been wonderful for me.’
‘All good things come to an end. You’ve been great and I will for ever be in your debt,
amigo
.’
‘Why are you speaking like this?’
‘Like what? I’m telling you the truth.’
‘Lettie will be upset if you go.’
‘She is one in a million, Ed. Follow your destiny.’
‘Please, Rich. You are not well. Have something to eat. Have some cottage pie.’
‘Don’t mince your words, Ed. I’m fine, as good as gold. Right as rain. Like a pig in shit. Top of the world.’
And I know in one part of my mind that I am cracking up, but only on the rational level. Deep down I am fine. I am speaking important truths to Ed.
‘Reality as we know it, Ed, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed or otherwise immaterial. I copied that from Wikipedia, Ed. My Noor has been raped by five or six towel-heads, Ed; that’s not immaterial. Or do you have another view? Do you come from another school of philosophy? Ed, my advice is, fuck this thesis about Adam Smith. Fuck Lettie, metaphorically speaking – I wouldn’t want to intrude on your personal life, what goes on tour stays on tour – but she looks like trouble to me, if I am honest. Fuck your thesis. Ed, I’m worried about you, mate. You don’t give a toss about Adam fucking Smith and his touchy-feely side – nobody does – but you were hurt by your rejection by the City, deeply hurt, so you are trying to rebuild your shattered self, because only by putting the self together again can you be happy. Solipsism, Ed, is what you need to study, that’s the theory that the self is the only reality. Am I right? You have been schtupping Lettie the Lettuce, ace spy by the way, my contacts tell me, a woman seeing forty approaching like a fucking express train on the wrong track. The age that frightens women – prospects of childbirth low et cetera, and you’re thinking she’s a halfway house to my full recovery from humiliation, which will only be complete when I have a worthy thesis accepted by the owl-aspected examiners – that will show those hedgies and shorters and gamblers – a well-received, even acclaimed, Ph.d., or D.Phil. as we like to call it in old Oxford, Ed my old chumba-wumba. And your rehabilitation will be complete when some foxy publisher’s editor with nice little tits, not too large and not too floppy and common, but nicely perky, and wearing just the right clothes from Joseph, sexy but not obvious, asks you to write a small book, for a modest advance, less than some of your lunch bills at Nobu, a book expanding on your thesis, and putting it into the kind of accessible language every dim-shit can understand and use to big himself up with his unspeakable friends – no women will buy it – and you will have a tumultuous sexual experience with this young woman, who falls for you totally, introduces you to the real Italian food in her tasteful flat in London Fields – not far from the Lido, once a green and frog-loud relic of outmoded thinking –
get the little thin-chested, consumptive Cockneys out in the fresh air
– now the Mecca of the not-quite-rich-enough middle classes – this woman with the nice tits invites you to the Groucho Club where you will meet interesting people who never talk about medium-term gilts – in fact they haven’t a fucking clue what they are – but about life, its meaning, and what a lot of shits publishers are and mine’s a Sauvignon Blanc, no, I said big glass. Bingo – pig in shit. I know these things, Eddie, because down the road in the old wank factory that is Bodley, which made me the unscrupulous opportunist I am – those are your words, Ed, one day to be spoken – yes, down in the bowels of the Bod, another loser is trying to come to terms with the fact – the material fact – that his fiancée – horrible chavvy word, “fiancée”, you are thinking, am I right? – has been raped by gyppo beardies and that our baby was terminated by doctors in Toronto after a departmental conference, the bland leading the bland. They could have done a DNA test, but no, that would have involved the alleged father giving some samples, and that would have been messy, in both senses.’
‘Stop, Rich, stop.’
So it seems I
am
actually speaking to him.
‘Ed, this is the talking cure that you – and I – have been avoiding for so long. While we were watching rugby over a pint down at the old Red-Arsed Ferret, on the ninety-inch plasma screen, we were really thinking we’re both fucked. Lettie the Lettuce confirmed it. We are both vulnerable. She said it. The Ace Spy said it. Maybe her contact told her. I would watch out for him, by the way, he’s dodgy.’
‘When did she say this?’
‘Oh, off the cuff. Totally impromptu. Unpremeditated. But she smacked the monkey, didn’t she, eh, Jimmy, know wha-ah mean, pal? Richard the Lionheart, three lions on his chest, that’s the story. The genocidal ten-foot-high ginger-haired anti-Semitic poofter is my fast track to fame. Just like your bright idea of a thesis which isn’t going to happen by the way, we both want to produce something, an actual, actual something in this world to tell them we are here. That we exist.
Somos màs
. But, Ed, you’re ahead of me: you’re already on Google, admittedly only because you and your pal lost nearly a billion, but I am not. I haven’t registered a flicker on the public consciousness, not even a mouse’s fart. I must go to bed, Ed.’
Wheh – wheh-wheh-wheh – w-hooop-w-hooop
.
When I wake some time – some days later – it takes me time to understand what has happened. I am, I decide, after a long, detached inspection of the pale blue curtains and the tubes attached to my arm, in a hospital. To judge by the strange hyena cries, it’s probably a mental hospital. I have read about the powerful drugs they use in these places and I wonder how long I have been sedated. Some hours later, the cries die with the dawn light and a doctor comes in to see me. She tells me I am in the Warneford Hospital, Headington. She is a tall and blonde woman of about my age. Despite the chronically tired, greyish skin that hospital doctors acquire, her eyes have come through unscathed. They are friendly, ceramic blue, like Delftware, like new-born babies’ eyes.
‘Ah, you are awake, Mr Cathar. I’m Dr Wettinger – Ella – and I am in charge of your case.’
‘My case.’
‘You, yes. It looks as though you have had what we call a psychotic break. We like a label; it’s just a convenient term. A psychotic break is most usually brought on by extreme stress. Now that you are with us, I want to take your history. Particularly I want to ask you about stress. Have you had bereavement or other catastrophic disruptions to your recent life? And have you had this kind of episode before?’
‘Yes, to the catastrophe, and no, I have never had this kind of episode before.’
‘Can you tell me about it? I will probably need to talk to you again tomorrow, and by then you should be out of bed and walking around the grounds.’
‘I feel very strange now. Am I heavily sedated?’
‘No, not heavily. Your motor was racing too fast when you were brought in, so we gave you some beta blockers and benzodiazepines. You needed a period of calm and sleep. And boy, did you sleep.’
‘How long?’
‘Two whole days.’
‘Am I going to be all right?’
‘In what sense?’
‘I mean, I’m not officially bonkers now, am I?’
‘No, no. A psychotic break is usually a temporary condition as I said, and often a one-off event. Do you want to tell me now what happened in your life?’
‘Can you tell me who brought me in?’
‘An ambulance, and your friend Edward Laing brought you in. He was very worried about you. Apparently you were ranting for an hour.’
I am touched. Big, lonely, chubby Ed. I am the lodger from hell. He was looking for friendship. He was looking for empathy.
‘Last thing I remember, I was shouting loudly, screaming in fact, at Ed and telling him he was a loser.’
‘Don’t worry, he didn’t take it to heart.’
She smiles. She has a nice smile. A nice smile is not a meaningless cliché. Hers is warm and interested and she has lovely regular teeth. I am grateful for it. For a moment, which I am sure seems like ages to her, I stare at her smile. I desperately want her help and approval.
‘As we doctors say, are you ready to answer some questions?’
‘I’m certainly ready to ask some.’
‘It doesn’t really work like that.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
I feel that I can trust her. It’s a relief to hand over to her my self, some of it, anyway. I see that she’s not going to subject me to that sub-Freudian nonsense which I had inflicted on Ed.
‘One last thing, can I ask you if my friend was really not angry with me?’
‘No, not at all. He was just very concerned about you. In fact he came in yesterday and sat by your bed for an hour.’
‘Thank you. He is one of the good people.’
‘Surprisingly, there are lots of them around, I find. OK, let’s carry on.’
I decide right away that I must answer almost all of her questions. My medical notes are open in front of her and she has a notebook.
‘Do you take drugs?’
‘No, I never have. Probably because of my father. He did.’
‘Before this incident, were you more or less stable in your life?’
‘I think so. I’ve been working on a project in the Bodleian Library and in London. I went to Israel to do some research and I met a Canadian journalist, and we fell in love. We were planning to get married. But she was taken captive by an armed group in Cairo. That was very stressful. She’s been released, but there are all sorts of things I don’t understand and haven’t been told. She was raped and that has really upset me. I don’t mean on my own account, but on hers. I can’t imagine what hell she went through. Actually I can. That’s the problem.’
Slow down. Slow down. I am gabbling.
‘Where is she now?’
‘She’s back in Canada.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘No, they won’t let me. But I have spoken to her aunt.’
Does this sound paranoid? Psychiatrists explain the world in very different terms.
‘Who are the people who won’t let you speak to her?’
Over the next two hours I tell her the whole story, minus only the incest. She listens calmly and takes notes. I am aware as I talk that this is not so much my psychiatric history, as a kind of narrative that I am stringing together, partly for my own understanding. She may even think I am a fantasist.
‘If you ask me,’ Ella says, ‘I think it is a classic case of extreme stress leading to a psychotic break. To be honest, I think you have coped with it pretty well. It’s often uncertainty that triggers these incidents. We are designed to look for answers and conclusions. Ambiguity and uncertainty, as in your case, are destructive.’
‘Are you married?’
‘I am. To another doctor. He’s a GP.’
‘Are you happy?’
She smiles. Her smile is now more wintry.
‘It’s my job to ask the questions. So why did you ask me?’
‘Because I have a feeling that after the way I was brought up I don’t understand family life. I’m interested in it, in other people’s lives. I don’t understand quite a lot of mundane things. My father was a sort of hippy, as I said, with grand but delusional ideas, and we never spoke for years. I have a very weak idea of what normal domestic life is. At this moment, talking to you, I want to reconnect, but the problem is I don’t know what that entails. With Noor I could see where I was going and now that’s been taken away.’