Surrender to Mr. X (18 page)

I love all my family, of course I do. We're a clever lot: we all enjoy the life of the mind. The conversation over the dinner table is lively and instructive. My mother relates the news of the parish—always a source
of diversion and amazement; my father instructs us—like Alden he has a tendency to instruct rather than to converse—upon the fragile state of Western civilization. So it was a great relief to be out of London, and to be Vanessa not Joan any more, allowed to have an intellect. It is as difficult to appear stupid when one is not as vice versa. In London I always had to remember to leave repartee to Alden and Ray, and the effort of not delivering a smart line over dinner could be almost as tiring as being a mixture of experimental animal, sex slave and sex toy all night. And it was so good to be amongst books again: I realized how few there were in Alden's house. This is what gave it its desolate air. Ray at least had a few old paperbacks about and some old Phaidon art books on which he perched and spilled his coffee mugs.

The week off was also an opportunity for various rather bruised, abused and battered parts of my anatomy to rest and heal, and for my heightened state of arousal to be calmed down by the kind of familiar, comforting boredom that sets in whenever a girl visits home.

But even after a couple of days' quiescence I still seemed to be emitting a field of orgone energy. My mother had asked a theology professor friend and his wife round to dinner, and he played one-sided footsie with me under the table, with the calm confidence that suggested he realized the kind of girl I was. That shook me. I'd given him not the slightest encouragement that I was aware of. One likes to be seen as a good girl
until revealing the bad girl, not the other way round. Sex begets sex, I suppose. It gets into the air. He was at least sixty five. They were old family friends, and came to dinner every few weeks. I respected him for his book—
The Decline of Western Religion
. I liked his wife very much. I jabbed his foot with a stiletto heel and he didn't try again. My mother didn't like me wearing heels around the Rectory: she was convinced they were bad for the floors and would cripple my feet and give me bunions—but then she didn't know how useful heels can be as a weapon in defense of one's virtue. She'd never had to do much to protect hers.

I took the opportunity during the week of going to see Dr. Philip Bardsey, our family physician. He was very busy but found space for me after hours on the Thursday evening. He was a fleshy, jowly man, now on the edge of retirement, a smoker and overweight, with stubby, not always very clean, fingers and blurry eyes—but a good diagnostician. He had been my doctor since I was twelve; he'd been giving me thorough internal examinations since that age, too.

On the very first occasion indeed he broke my hymen, by mistake, but told me it was just as well. Blood could build up in the uterus and that would not help my mental state; which was an issue at the time, since my mother had taken me in to him complaining that I was over-excitable and hysterical. He told her he preferred to see me alone. She'd made a scene, and admittedly so had I, but eventually he convinced
her and she went on home and left me with him. He asked a list of questions, and then told me to lie down on his couch and face the wall with my knees up. In went his hand, latex-gloved; which was a mixture of the horrible, the strange and the delightful. A sudden sharp pain for me and a small cry of surprise from him—and when I was back on my chair, after a little spurt of blood had been mopped, he suggested that since my mother, of the two of us, seemed marginally the more hysterical, it might be better if I kept quiet about the matter of the hymen. I could see he was right.

I trusted him enough at the time to ask him if there was anything the matter with me, and he said actually he thought I might be Bipolar Two—I was a bright girl: I could look it up sometime—but it would be to my advantage not to get an official diagnosis. He was not going to write anything in my notes. Keep up the sex once you get to it, he said, keep up the shopping, take a tranquilizer if inside the head gets really bad, steer clear of psychiatrists and you'll have a good life. It was really good advice, if not what my mother would have liked to hear.

Since then we had been in a kind of collusion. He knew something about me—that I was Bipolar Two and wouldn't grow out of it, but he would save me from a damaging diagnosis if he could. I knew he had taken my virginity and the internal examinations weren't strictly necessary, but I would shut up about it.

Later when I was at college the diagnosis was
confirmed by the shrinks at the student health center. I'd been sent to them as a result of my involvement in a gang-bang scandal: but what the authorities saw as sexual excess, I saw as the perfectly normal pursuit of pleasure and excitement. They told me at the center that lithium might help stabilize my moods: I took it for a little and then stopped. I liked my moods as they were. My problems were more to do with my studies interfering with my sex life than the other way round.

Now I thought I should report in to Dr. Bardsey about the sudden surges of mental over-activity I was experiencing and see if he had any more suggestions.

I stayed in the waiting room until the last limping old lady and wheezing old man had left and then Dr. Bardsey opened the door and asked me into his consulting room. I stripped off to my bra and pants and lay on the couch. Why hang about?

“Straight to the point,” said Dr. Bardsey. “How have you been, Vanessa?”

I said I was fine, other than that my brain was firing on too many cylinders and he asked if I'd taken any unusual drugs lately and I said perhaps, but they came from the tropical rainforest and were perfectly safe.

He asked if I had ever been to a rainforest and I said no. He said he had, and they were foul, dripping, moldy, sinister places and that with a few notable exceptions such as curare, anything that came out of them was likely to be baneful, fungoid and evil. Never take anything, he said, except substances that are
formally banned: they're safer. I was probably suffering from rainforest medication: now a new health food store had opened in the area he was getting all kinds of cases of unexplained toxicity. It would probably wear off. He'd prescribe a higher dosage of tranquilizer if I liked. I said yes but I assumed I'd have to earn it, so I wriggled out of my pants, turned to the wall and pulled my knees up and in went the cold gloved hand in the familiar way.

“You're quite swollen in there,” he said.

“Over-use,” I said.

“Better that way than the other,” he said. A finger from the other hand, ungloved and warm, now circled my clitoris. I shuddered and came.

“It's so nice in there, Vanessa,” he said. “You really are my favorite patient. You're so uncomplicated.”

“What do you like about doing that?” I asked.

“It's the source of everything,” he said. “I never get over the marvel of it.” And he was such a greasy, unhealthy, flabby, crude kind of person from the outside, too. Reluctantly, the hand withdrew.

“Thanks,” he said. “I hope one day you have babies.” He was such a dear, romantic old softy.

I asked him if I could have a good supply of morning-after pills. For Alden had come to the conclusion that the birth pill I was on was impairing my libido and not helping
Thelemy
—
The Murmur of Eternity
, and that since sexual energy was strongest when a woman was fertile, the best thing to do was avoid any contraceptive
precautions other than
ex post facto
ones; which made sense. Dr. Bardsey said he'd thought I was on the pill: and why did I think I needed them? I explained and his hairy eyebrows shot up and he asked had I gone mad? What was the matter with me? My hormonal balance would go to hell; and that was the last thing an undiagnosed Bipolar Two needed.

I wondered why I hadn't thought of it myself. Being “under will”—and you never knew when you were and when you weren't—was rather like living in an advertisement. All looked normal, but you had to detect the truth in what was missing, in the gaps between sentences. I knew quite definitely I had to bring home morning-after pills and that was that. Obliging Alden was more important than any hormonal cycle of mine.

“I'll have full sex with you if you give me the prescription,” I said, and he looked bewildered and upset and said perhaps he was wrong about all this; perhaps I should see a psychiatrist after all.

I backed off quickly and apologized. He had his own way of doing things and I must respect it. I would tell Alden I had the morning-after pills and actually just go on taking the contraceptive pill. There was nothing wrong with my libido, I was sure of that. If it was damped down it was probably just as well. Otherwise I would explode.

I took off my bra and sat on the chair so he could palpate my breasts, as was his custom. I am shyer about exposing my breasts than my cunt. I suppose by the
time you get to your cunt, it's too late. While it's breasts choices can still be made. Breasts seem so personal, so individual; cunts seem much of a muchness if you are a woman, though I suppose for men they do come over as more individual.

Good breasts—and I am proud of mine, though I tend to like to keep them to myself—are a family tradition, though it has by-passed Katharine and Alison. The twins once came giggling in to show me a naughty postcard they'd found in the family papers. It showed this lovely thirties-ish girl with a bare bosom, a delicate hand hiding one and the other proudly open to public gaze. It was my grandmother. The twins—they must have been about twelve themselves at the time—asked if I thought they would look like that one day, and I said no. They were flat as pancakes, and of a less robust build than the rest of the family, almost as if they shared one physical being between the two of them. They were not pleased by what I told them, but it was true. Just as I was not pleased to be told I was Bipolar Two, but it was true.

Dr. Bardsey came round behind me and felt my breasts carefully and lovingly. I was glad I hadn't frightened him away. I should not have been so head-on: that was bloody Alden's doing.

“You don't ever have to worry,” he said. “These breasts will never get cancer. There's too much pleasure in them.” He took his time. One hand felt; I don't know what the other hand attended to, but it was no part of
me, and I didn't strain my imagination. When I was dressed we parted formally, shaking hands.

I left with prescriptions for tranquilizers, sleeping pills, birth control pills, a blood test done, but no morning-after pills. Well, I would manage.

Families are complicated. Return to the safety of home, and find you can't say “please pass the salt” without it being a loaded statement. It will be heard to mean “the food is under salted” or “you're neglecting me,” or “why didn't you notice I needed it?” Because all the other unanswered questions are lying festering behind every simple pass-the-salt request: the important ones like, “Mother, why did you leave me standing at the school gate for hours when I was seven?” Or “why was I sent to a state school when Robert went private?” Or the really big one for me, “why did you have an affair with my best friend, Daddy?”

Such subtext infests every passing inanity; though the past is more or less forgiven, it's never forgotten. Families are too complicated for comfort. So when I went back to London I was sad to miss them, and yet glad to be gone. One orgasm, and that clitoral, in one week, was just not enough. If my mother suspected what was going on she didn't say, and it would never occur to my father that it could.

I got back to Paddington at 4:15, caught the tube to Liverpool Street Station, and was there on the dot of five for Loki to pick me up and take me back to the bosom of my real life with Alden and Ray.

L
OKI TOOK ME STRAIGHT
back, not to Little Venice, but to my new, virtual home in Hampstead, but when I got there things were in chaos. The house, usually so quiet, rang to the noise of shouts and ill temper. There were builders in the bedroom dismantling the bed. The whole great structure had to be moved to the Lukas showrooms to be renovated and repaired, and the electronics modernized. It would take two weeks. Alden raced about in his chair getting in the way, insisting that no-one knew what they were doing except him, and fretting. When he excoriated the builders they reacted badly, put down their tools and said a job which would have taken three hours without his interference had taken six. They would be back in the morning to see if he'd calmed down.

Lam had backed into a corner and stared out with haunted, astonished and confused eyes, like a frightened dog on Fireworks Day: he hated noise from the outside world. At least Ray had got his head out from under
the bedclothes and had found the energy and spirit to come down and play the diplomat with the builders, who agreed to stay if Alden would just let them get on with it in their own way. Alden sulked and went upstairs to his Bluebeard studio.

I made a move to come too but he said, “No. I need to think,” and then as a cursory afterthought, “Glad to have you back.”

I picked my way through workmen and sections of bed back to my room and sat down. I had no desire to be banished to Little Venice, which felt as if it belonged to someone else. I was still needed here, even though the place of employment, my tool of trade, the bed, was apparently no longer usable. I think sex has this rooting effect on women. That's why when it's with guests at the Olivier it seems okay. You leave the room but you don't leave home.

But the presence of other people in the house was unsettling for me, as it was for Lam; it made it seem far less special and extraordinary: the real vibrations of the builders banging about rubbished Alden's more “cosmic” vibes. At last the builders left, which was a great relief, even if they had taken the bed; I helped Lam fold the patchwork quilt which had been left in a pile on the floor. I gave the room a good sweep and the floor a polish. I was a dog marking its territory. I was Joan again.