The School of Night: A Novel (10 page)

Occasionally I would say something and she would contradict me.

‘No, Sean, you didn’t do that until the following year.’

I would think for a moment and realise she was right. This mastery on her part of my formative details began to unnerve me. I felt as though my experiences were being extracted one by one, like teeth.

‘I wonder if it might not be significant, Sean, that your migraines began at Oxford? The mind was extruding a barrier of pain; your unconscious created a membrane between yourself and a reality you found intolerable. It was a way of blocking out the whole of a world which made you so angry.’

‘But it blocked out the whole of a world that didn’t make me angry as well. Why do you always assume it all came from inside anyway?’

‘What?’

‘That’s not the way it feels.’

‘How does it feel?’

‘That it’s something trying to get in. The corkscrew’s being turned from the outside.’

She had still not decided at that stage whether to lean towards Freud or Jung. I didn’t know too much about either, but felt implicated in the decision, despite my severe doubts about this particular technique of soul-surgery, since I had unwittingly become her central case study. She would startle me sometimes with insights I found hard to ignore. One day I asked her to give me a clue as to how the method worked. She put a book by Freud in my hands and the first thing in it was his study of the Wolf Man.

I knew a little, inevitably, of the Viennese assault upon the coherence of the personality, its manifest coherence anyway, this exploration of a hiatus, a dereliction somewhere between desire and urbanity – our modern wasteland, ruled by gangs with surrealist names, Id and Superego, whose strategies are unpredictable, at times even lethal. It would be hard to make your way across any part of the contemporary world without at some point taking a look at Freud’s psychic map. Where once a legend read, ‘Here Be Monsters’, now it reads, ‘Here Commences the Unconscious’. And so I started working my way through his ‘clinical account’ of the history of the Wolf Man. Dominique sat across the room at the little round table, writing up her notes.

The Wolf Man, it seemed, was a very wealthy young fellow from southern Russia. His ‘neurosis’ or his incapacitation made him entirely dependent on the assistance of others, like the private doctor and valet who travelled with him. Freud came to link that present incapacity with a sisterly seduction and a witnessing of parental sexual intercourse at the age of one-and-a-half, later transmuted into a four-year-old’s dream. After years of treatment with Freud, a cure was effected, though some years later the Russian returned with a different problem. I read it through once in silence, then went back to the beginning of the text and started again, this time with a pencil in my hand.

‘Can Freud really mean this?’ I said to Dominique, who looked up brightly, her face glassy and composed. ‘I’ve read this passage three times now, and it has only one logical implication, which seems to be that a one-and-a-half-year-old child wanted to be anally penetrated by his father.
Wanted to be.
’

‘Unconscious desire, or the Id if you prefer, doesn’t acknowledge any civilised rules of existence, whatever the age of the host.’

‘But presumably the age of unconscious desire must be related to the age of the host? I can’t be a one-year-old with a fifty-year-old unconscious, can I?’

‘The unconscious doesn’t recognise chronology either, only desire. That’s its only rule, the one law that governs it. Whatever it wants it takes, unless prevented.’

‘And if it’s prevented?’

‘Then it throws things about inside the psychic household. Breaks things up. Its protest against the repression imposed upon it is illness and neurosis. That’s what it does when it complains at being denied its freedom of expression. That’s my job now, pursuing those signs.’ She looked at me severely, signifying, I suppose, that I was one of her signalmen. I read on. Freud found nothing very remarkable in any of these goings-on. According to him, they were no more and no less than the normal movements of ‘infantile sexuality’. The primal scene he identified as lying behind the dream of wolves in a tree, which gave the case study its name, came about because the child had been asleep in his cot, in his parents’ bedroom, but woke up, possibly as a result of a rising fever, at five o’clock in the afternoon. It was a hot summer’s day, said Freud, and the boy’s parents had therefore retired,
déshabillés
, for an afternoon siesta. The boy then wakes and sees an act of coitus ‘a tergo’, which was repeated two more times. His mother’s genitals were clearly visible to him, as well as his father’s memorable organ. Freud said that all this was somewhat banal. It didn’t strike me as banal, nor did it strike me as even glancingly believable. I began to experience something very close to anger – an emotion I then very rarely felt (or, according to Dominique, very rarely felt I was feeling). If my study of history had taught me anything it was to be fastidious in identifying sources and querying their reliability. I pointed this out to her, with considerably more vehemence than usual. She became intrigued at my tone. She was watching me attentively. I had the unpleasant feeling she was making notes again. The child, I said, was a mere one-and-a-half years old at the time of the supposed experience, though the material was then recapitulated in a four-year-old’s mind. I hadn’t been aware that a child of one-and-a-half could even count, so the preternaturally endowed voyeur here observing the thrice-repeated acts of sexual athleticism surely couldn’t have been the infant, spotting first female then male genitalia, even noting (another act of remarkable precocity) the deviation from the missionary position.

‘This isn’t history, Dominique, though it’s claiming that status for itself.’

‘It’s not history,’ she said.

‘Then what?’

‘People forget he was trying to make a map in the dark.’

‘A map of what?’

‘The darkness still inside our heads.’

‘A map in the dark of the darkness. I reckon he’s adding to it, myself. I don’t believe the Wolf Man was ever cured of anything by Freud. All we’ve got here is an accumulation of interpretation, most of it whimsical, over the given data. If this had been an essay Freud had been writing for my old tutor on the Holy Roman Empire, so much recklessness and unwarranted assertion would have forced him to take it away and start all over again.’

‘There can be no
a priori
assumptions here,’ she said quietly. ‘
A prioris
belong to logic and morals. The unconscious doesn’t recognise them. But I’m intrigued by your anger. It’s the same anger that produces the migraine, but you hardly ever express it verbally.’

I spent the rest of the day leafing through Dominique’s other books. I hadn’t realised that the psychoanalyst now had a whole iconography to himself. There was an etching by Max Pollack from 1914, with Freud gazing out over his desk, pen in hand, eyes distracted with a nimbus of luminosity. The shadowy figures foregrounded on his table were the primitive gods, but in silhouette only. Freud’s vision obviously projected above and beyond them – he had passed through the stage of needing to make images to confront the dark and the light. There were photographs: the diagnostician of the uncanny in Berggasse 19 in Vienna, surrounded by emblems of the psychic past of man. Here the Roman and Greek gods and goddesses were mingled in perplexed proximity with Egyptian falcon-headed deities and Etruscan warriors. The only unifying factor seemed to be the transcendentally analytic mind of Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, the first redeemer into significance of these markings in the cave of man’s dark history.

There were even a few stills from John Huston’s film
Freud.
Montgomery Clift trembled with intelligence and insight as the dark backward and abysm of time opened itself to him alone, then the lame and the halt started to walk again.

By the evening I’d calmed down, though I hadn’t changed my views. We sat on the sofa. Some music, nondescript but passable, was seeping from the radio. Symmetric violins and cellos.

‘But how do we even know there is an unconscious?’ I said. ‘What is it?’ My hand had slipped inside her blouse. I was stroking and squeezing her flesh. I did this so often that I seldom noticed it was happening.

‘A signature detectable in the manoeuvres of consciousness,’ she said, ‘a passage in the psyche you only know exists because of the distorted evidence it leaves elsewhere.’ I unfastened another button. ‘A symptomatic reading, if it’s intelligent and persistent enough, might just divine it. You always reach for a breast when you’re confused, Sean. Why do you mock Freud for trying to make a map in the dark when you spend most of your waking hours pursuing some chimera called the School of Night?’

‘It’s not a chimera.’

‘You’re always looking outside yourself for something you think is hidden in the dark. Why not look inside instead? There’s no shortage of darkness there.’

‘Wait a minute. I just want to get something straight,’ I said. ‘You say that the unconscious recognises no law except its own desire. That is what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. But the desire is normally repressed and that makes us ill.’

‘If desire had to choose a career for itself, wouldn’t it be crime? The realm where no inhibitions apply? So if that’s the logic, then we’re all either criminals or ill.’

‘Or both,’ she said, as I coaxed the last button from its hole.

2

Daniel arrived one evening unannounced, as we were ladling spaghetti from a large white bowl. He handed me a bottle and sat down at the table, without waiting for an invitation.

‘I’m famous,’ he said and threw a copy of the
Telegraph and Argus
at me. ‘Court Section.’ I read the article. It seemed that one of Dan’s lorries had been used for highly illegal purposes.

‘The boy was a brilliant mechanic,’ Dan said, helping himself to some pasta. ‘The best I’ve ever had, so I let him keep the vehicles over the weekend. I knew he was probably up to something, but I didn’t really mind. He was so reliable with his maintenance work that if he wanted to do a bit of moonlighting to make a little extra, that was all right with me. He always clocked the speedo, so I didn’t know how far he was driving. But I’d no idea he’d been doing anything like this.’

I started reading the article to find out precisely what he had been doing. The writer began by describing a world unknown, he said, to most respectable inhabitants of Britain. A world in which vehicles would set off to Essex or Wales or Liverpool, collect their legal freight then bring it back up north, waiting till nightfall to start making other journeys, not to ports with customs officials hovering about clutching clipboards and tipping their peaked caps, but to empty lanes and disused airfields, to vacant lots by derelict factories or the edges of out-of-season caravan sites. And there, with no pro forma invoices or shipping manifests, men of few words in something of a hurry would unload cargoes from one vehicle and stack them smartly into another. Then they would drive off in different directions. It was still the transport business apparently, but this was its nocturnal side, manned by anonymous legions.

Dan’s boy Simon had such an affinity with vehicles that he could hear the sound of a sick motor and tell you straight off what was causing its moans and squeals, why the great beast was hurting as it howled its way through the gears. He had also become involved in the shipment of furs. This had been going on for some time, and would have continued for longer except for a dispute that had arisen between himself and his partner, who had appropriated from Simon some of the furs which had so recently been appropriated from others elsewhere. Simon, Dan explained, was a big boy. Having realised after a while that the proceeds of the night were not being fairly divided between the two furriers, he had gone round to see his partner, taking with him the baseball bat he had acquired during a brief enthusiasm for American sports.

It had been argued in his defence in court that his temper might not have become as frayed as it did, had he not arrived in time to see his partner’s girlfriend, who had not long before been his own girlfriend, trying on a pile of furs one by one. She was apparently wearing very little else. Hardly pausing to express his displeasure, Simon had brought the bat down with such force on his partner’s right hand as it rested on the table that five different bones had smashed simultaneously. And as his colleague howled with the pain of it, pulling his hand instinctively into his belly, he had shouted ‘You’ve broken my hand, you mad bastard’, which had only made Simon crosser.

‘You’ve still got another hand though, haven’t you?’ he had said, then the bat had whistled through the air once again until it found his partner’s knee. His left knee. One smashed right hand; one broken left knee. Simon obviously liked to leave a job looking symmetric. Even then, the matter would not have come to the attention of the police had it not been for the girlfriend. She had become hysterical and had remained hysterical for some time, all the while ever more determined to see Simon behind bars. During the investigation the whole story had come out, including the use of Dan’s lorries. Dan refilled his glass from the bottle.

‘Remember what our old headmaster used to say, Sean, just before he belted us: that the use of violence is always and everywhere an admission of failure.’ Dan was staring at Dominique and smiling. She never took her eyes off him, but she wasn’t smiling.

‘Now what moral would you draw from this episode?’ he asked her and she shrugged. The more I had told her of Dan in our informal analysis, the more she had seemed to disapprove of him, particularly his relationship with me.

‘Sean?’ he said, and I thought for a moment.

‘Take care in picking your mechanics?’ I said. Dan snorted.

‘What an unimaginative fellow. You must work for the BBC. No, the lesson to be drawn is simple. People only buy fruit during the hours of daylight. But transportation is needed twenty-four hours a day. Even when darkness descends, the work continues.’