It fell to Jess to attempt to give Steve’s details: she knew his name and his address, but not his age. (Was he thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? He he had always seemed ageless as well as sexless, an amorphous, absorbent being, a negative capability.) She knew he was single but she did not know the name of his GP or his next of kin. Should she give the name of his stepmother, a woman who was not without a certain public reputation, but whose care for Steve, if he told the truth about her, could not be considered admirable? What about his champion at the small distinguished publishing house, or the literary editor for whom he wrote occasional reviews? None of these characters seemed appropriate, so Jess settled for giving her own contact numbers and describing herself as a ‘personal friend’.
She had landed herself with Steve, for better or worse. No, she did not know if he had ever attempted suicide before, or whether he was on any medication. No, she did not know how many pills he had taken. No, she did not know anything about his general health. Reluctantly, she admitted that he was a ‘freelance writer’.
She was protective about his status as poet. She was sure that these starched young women disapproved of poetry, as they clearly disapproved of suicide, and would take it out on him when and if he came round.
When pressed, they admitted that he probably would come round. He did not seem to have consumed an excessive amount of Veganin, and they did not think the pills had been in his system for very long. He would almost certainly recover. He might have done permanent damage to his liver (they announced this as though they rather hoped he had, and as though he would be last on the list for a transplant), but he would live through the episode. He was already beginning to respond to their unkindly attentions.
Jess, at this point, was beginning to worry about Anna and the effect that this drama might have had on her, and decided she should try to get back to the garden party. She said she needed to return to her daughter, hoping that a mention of her maternal role might soften these hard hearts. It had no such effect, but it was agreed that Dr Speight could be released. (‘No, I’m not a medical doctor’: Jess had at once been made to regret trying to pull rank with her doctorate). Jess said as humbly as she could that she would ring later, and perhaps call round in the morning.
What bus could she catch back towards Camden, she asked them? But if they knew, they were not going to tell her. Their care, they made it plain, ended at the ward door, where the unwelcome and unwanted Steve breathed noisily, high and heavy on a narrow railed bed, a giant cot.
She went out on to the hot street and looked around for a bus stop or a taxi. This was not taxi land. A slight wave of nausea and panic attacked her as she set off down the hill, from which she was rescued by the sight of a red London bus labelled with a promising southward destination: she ran after it, jumped on at the lights, and was on her way to rejoin us, overcome with relief at her escape from overt institutional resentment. She wasn’t very pleased with Steve herself, but she didn’t see why she should be blamed for, or implicated in, his act. It wasn’t her fault. Was it?
Jess rejoined us in Maroussia’s house, and told us the story. Anna listened, though what she took in we could not tell. Not even Jess could tell. The other children, bored with the gloomy adult drama, had gone upstairs to the bunk bedroom to play a very low-tech but gripping football game which involved moving little plastic men about on a green cloth. One or two of them who lived within easy walking distance had sloped off home, to join fathers watching real football on television, but Anna sat with us, listening.
The fathers supported Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur, and enjoyed comparing their merits and their style. None of the mothers, in those days, followed the game.
Jess considered (as did we all) that Steve’s choice of a Wendy House as his potential deathbed was highly significant. Poor Steve, he had found in us (and in Jess in particular) a surrogate family, and had wished to become our child, as Anna was and would ever remain our child. He was a Peter Pan, a motherless lost boy. But clumsy, never airborne, except in words. His mother was dead, his father had disowned him.
Steve had always exuded grief. He must, we thought, have been born sad and mewling and scowling. Anna was pure gold and eager to be happy, if occasionally over-anxious, but Steve was heavy cold wax, with no natural happiness accessible to him.
So that’s what we do, we find a small dark cosy familiar corner of plot, and we curl up in it and die. Or try to die. We regress, we rock ourselves backwards and forwards, we climb back into the cot, the playpen, the Wendy House. We become as little children, and we try to crawl back to a safe place, to a familiar place that needs no exploring. We lose our adventurous spirit, we turn away in fear from the untracked forests and the shining waters, and we seek the comfort of a small known space, where we cling to our sucked blanket, to our worn woolly old knitted rabbit or piglet or bear. A comfort zone, we now call it.
This may happen to us when we are very old. You have seen them, in the care homes, in their recliners, with their thin baby hair.
We go back there
. Steve had attempted to short-circuit the long and dreary circular journey, but he had failed.
We unlatch and open the little gate, and we try to go back. But the place does not always admit us, it will not let us in.
Steve had felt safe in our company, he had felt safe with Jess, he had been happy clearing the brambles and lighting the bonfire and attempting, ineffectually, to help with the construction effort. (We were all ineffectual, and that too was companionable.) We had given him somewhere to be. The sadness of our failing of him subdued us, for a while, that evening, but we were young and strong and healthy and resilient, and by the time we parted we had regained the rhythm of our selves and our selfishness, and were planning the busy week and the weeks and months and years ahead. We forgot about Steve, because thinking about him drained our energy, and we needed our energy for our own lives.
Maroussia did not go into the Secret Garden that night to look at the large low full moon and the stars. She stayed indoors. She looked at the ceiling, and the walls, and then she went into the bathroom and looked at herself for a long time in the mirror.
Jess did not forget Steve, although she tried to, because she found herself unwillingly placing herself
in loco parentis
, a default position to which she was beginning to recognise she might always tend to revert. As Steve reverted to infancy, she reverted to maternity. This is what Anna’s birth and the responsibility of Anna had done to her. Her holiday from her husband Bob Bartlett (Jess never took the name Bartlett and often forgot it was legally hers) transformed itself into a watch over Steve. She resented this, but it happened just the same.
I’m afraid some of us were not very supportive. We couldn’t take the strain. We regarded Jess as our mental-health expert, as Sylvie was our medical expert, and we left it to her. She’d been through so much already, she could go on getting on with it.
Steve was kept in hospital for a couple of days, and then discharged back to his dusty hole of a £6-a-week book-filled bed-sitter over a pawnshop in garbage-strewn Chalk Farm. No psychiatric after-care seemed to have been proposed. He was on his own again, written off with visible contempt. The prison hospital had a psychiatric wing, but Jess’s instinct (rightly) told her that this would not have provided a therapeutic environment, even if he had been admitted to it. When Steve turned up next time on her doorstep (and by now Jess could feel the approaching return of a Caravelle with Bob on it, although she did not have a precise date for his arrival), Jess was anxious to set up something, anything, that would divert Steve from his visits to her and his dependence on her.
Steve, eating his bacon and eggs and fried bread with as hearty an appetite as ever, was a little sheepish about the trouble he had caused, but he remained deeply depressed. His gullet had recovered from the assault on it, but neither his mind nor his spirits had recovered. Jess was convinced he would have another go. She hoped it wouldn’t be in her house, or in front of Anna.
She asked Steve about his doctor, she mentioned his stepmother, but made little progress on either front. She didn’t know where to turn. Steve needed somewhere with company, a refuge to contain and surround him, not a lonely third-floor bed-sit with a dangerous gas ring up steep uncarpeted wooden stairs. Could you kill yourself with a gas ring? Probably not.
Sylvia Plath had put her head in the oven, not so very long ago, and not very far from the pawnshop where Steve lived, but a gas ring wasn’t as powerful as an oven, and anyway, weren’t most of us on natural gas by now? You can’t kill yourself with natural gas, or that’s what we believed. But there was the high window over the hard street, and there was the unprotected gas fire. Jess had visions of Steve drinking a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and clambering on to his window ledge and letting himself fall drunkenly on to the pavement, of Steve setting his ill-hung curtains ablaze and dying of smoke inhalation. She hoped such images did not occupy the screen of his imagination too.
But she knew they did.
After a week of hesitation and another exhausting visit from Steve, Jess rang the editor at his publishing house, hoping his literary patronage could be extended to pastoral care. It seemed that it could not. Noah invited Jess (and perforce Anna) to have coffee and a Danish pastry with him in the café in the British Museum, a neutral and inexpensive venue, and he listened to Jess’s story with interest. He volunteered some colourful information about Steve’s stepmother (a titled society beauty with a penchant for ageing homosexual actors and theatrical impresarios, whom she would escort to dubious nightspots and country houses), and he expressed concern for Steve, but said: ‘Frankly, I can’t cope with him, he’s a nightmare, he’s a vampire, no, not a vampire, he’s a leech, keep away, he’ll suck your blood.’
Had the stepmother seduced Steve? Probably, thought Noah. She seduced anything that moved.
‘Not that Steve,’ said Noah, ‘moves very much.’
At this point I think they both laughed.
‘You should just see her,’ said Noah. ‘The lips, the old-fashioned hair-style, the slinky hips. The Nightmare Life-in-Death is she.’
Was the phrase ‘fag hag’ current in those pre-gay-lib days? I think not.
‘Maybe,’ said Noah, as though the thought had just struck him, ‘she’s a transvestite.’
Noah, also a poet, had a style more animated than Steve’s: angular, skinny, sharp, caustic. Manic, not depressive.
Anna ate two Danish pastries, Noah ate one, Jess ate none.
Jess hated Danish pastries.
Jess batted on: did Noah know any kind and obliging analysts or therapists or psychiatrists who could advise Steve? There must be somebody who could help?
‘You don’t want his blood on your hands, do you?’ said Jess provocatively, who thought she was getting on rather well with Noah by this stage, and sensed that before their elevenses were over he would make a pass at her.
‘I know a woman at the Tavistock,’ said Noah doubtfully, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend her to my worst enemy. And she’s a Kleinian.’
‘I don’t think Steve needs a Kleinian,’ said Jess. ‘What he needs is company. Ordinary physical daily company. I can’t provide it, I’ve got work to do, I’ve got Anna to look after. And my very new husband’s just about to get back from British Columbia.’
‘Pity, that,’ said Noah.
Jess smiled at Noah, her intense and intimate and dazzling smile.
‘Bob won’t want to find Steve in residence, or even in attendance,’ continued Jess, after a significant pause.
‘Psychiatry’s out of fashion,’ volunteered Noah, trying now to be helpful. ‘It’s all anti-psychiatry at the moment. We’re publishing a brilliant new book on the killer family and the throttling umbilical cord.’
‘Steve hasn’t got a family or an umbilical cord,’ repeated Jess. ‘He’s all alone. That’s his problem.’
Noah, at last, appeared to be trying to think.
‘He needs a commune,’ said Noah. ‘There are some. But what kind of commune would want Steve as a member?’
‘He’s quite interesting,’ said Jess. ‘He’s a good poet. That’s something, isn’t it?’
‘A therapeutic community,’ said Noah. ‘We need a therapeutic community, and preferably on the National Health Service. I’ll look into it.’
‘Please do that,’ said Jess firmly.
‘I’ll get back to you,’ said Noah. ‘I’ll give you a ring. When does your very new husband get back?’
‘Any day now,’ said Jess.
Noah smiled.
‘I’ll ring you,’ he said. He wasn’t going to be put off by the existence of Anna, to whom he had been courteous, and he seemed to welcome the challenge of a very new husband.
‘Please do,’ said Jess. ‘And now I’d better go, I promised Anna we’d go to look at the Egyptian mummies.’
‘And you said we could go to SOAS,’ said Anna, who remembered all promises. Anna had a very literal memory.
‘And SOAS,’ said Jess. ‘I said we’d call in there on the way home.’
Anna liked the word ‘SOAS’, a friendly whispering bee-like word which she would sometimes murmur to herself as a reassurance. It was her mother’s mysterious cradle and school and workplace, peopled by important adult names, names prefaced by titles and initials, names which her mother always mentioned with respect. Anna liked to go there, and some of the important people would greet her as well as her mother by name and in a friendly manner.
She also liked the idea of seeing the British Museum mummies, though when she visited them in their glass coffins, she was very disappointed. They were not as she had imagined them, at all. They were inert, and not at all maternal, and they were very dead.
Anna had not really taken to Noah, despite the Danish pastries. He had eyed her mother in a manner that she had found disquieting. She had not found Steve a worry. He hadn’t, in her view, from her position, been a threat. There was room in Anna’s life for plenty of people like Steve.