Aphrodite's Hat (14 page)

I was in the process of moving my old patients' files to a new filing cabinet when I came across the file labelled ‘Troubles'. I knew I would open it again eventually.

‘All the troubles of the world stem from man's inability to sit still in a room,' my grandmother used to say.

She was qualified to pronounce. Both her husbands were killed after enlisting, quite needlessly, to fight in the First World War. The second was killed a year and a day after the first. They were brothers, her young husbands, and my grandmother told me she always felt guilty about the first one, Charles, because she had fancied his younger brother, Oswald, more and wondered if she had somehow managed to will Charles's death. She was not of a generation which talks about the unconscious but she intuitively understood its power. It was true that she had a great unconscious herself; I wouldn't be surprised if it had snuffed out poor Charlie.

She paid for it later though, because she really was in love with Oswald, my father's father. When he died, blown up at Vimy Ridge, my father was a four-week-old embryo in his mother's belly. I believe something blew apart then in my grandmother too. After she died, I found a silver cigarette case she had given Oswald to take to France before he became her husband and my grandfather. Engraved on it were the words,
With thou away even the birds are mute
… I don't think the birds sang for her much after August 1916.

When I was eighteen my grandmother gave me £100: ten big brown notes, larger than the current flimsy issue, bold as she was. When I asked her why (having been sure to thank her properly first for her generosity: you minded your manners with my grandmother) she said, ‘I walked past a tramp once. He asked me for some money for a cup of tea and I was frightened. He had kind eyes.' I placed the money on a horse called Tramp and it came in at 10 to 1. That was the first time I became aware of the way the unconscious speaks. It was my first bet, too, and the money I made on betting later funded my psychoanalytic training. Of course, psychoanalysis is all about sitting still in a room.

My grandmother's words about the restlessness of men (which I learned later were really Pascal's but out of loyalty I always think of them as hers) came back to me when I met Jean Martin. He was a big, wild-looking man, of French Canadian origin, with one of those faces which look as if they have been hacked out of the Rockies, like an American president. He had my name from a psychiatrist who had heard me lecture on war and trauma.

Jean Martin sat looking out of my window, which opens on to one of the commons which make a green showing amid London's filth. Outside, on the pavement below, a child was screaming.

‘You'd think someone would pick the poor little sod up.'

‘It distresses you?'

‘No,' was the faintly pained answer. ‘Why d'you think it would?'

Well, that was a start. One doesn't usually strike such a rich seam so soon: anger, pain, and a defensive untruth all in an opening couple of remarks.

‘I was wondering if maybe you felt sorry for the child?'

A shrug. He was beaten, or something, as a kid, I thought.

My patient stared moodily out at the green and then, still looking out of the window dropped the first of what I came to recognise as his kind of redherring.

‘Have you ever been in a helicopter?'

There are all kinds of reasons why I like my job but perhaps the easiest to explain is its variety. In no other profession does one have the opportunity to discuss such a range of topics. But I could think of no one before who had introduced helicopters.

‘No,' I said.

That is not what we were trained to say. We were trained to reveal nothing of ourselves, to say, ‘What is it about helicopters that …?' Never reveal one's personal preferences or experience, is the canonical position. But I have a different view. The truth has advantages. It's more consistent. It shall set ye free, as a not inconsiderable healer once said; and although he was speaking of the larger truth that one must learn to tell oneself, he might have agreed that one can make a start by telling truths to others. So I see no harm in meeting questions with truthful answers.

‘You should,' he said, ‘it's good for the imagination.'

I could see this might be true. All that curving and cutting through the air must act as a powerful release. ‘Tell me about it,' I said, and sat back. I guessed I was about to be enlightened.

He was a consultant engineer but, he explained, he had been taught to fly years before. Although he was vague about the circumstances, I gathered that there had been some military connection. Whatever the reason, the accomplishment had since become an enthusiasm: his craggy face shone with his account of mountain flying.

When people tell us their stories, we allow our minds to wander a pace above, or below (I never quite know where to locate it) their drift. So we track what is being said as it were from a moving position. It struck me now, listening to what Jean Martin was saying, that this position is very like a helicopter's tracking flight. One has to fly in and out of some odd places in the mind.

And it prompted me to say, ‘It reminds me a little of what I do.'

At that point the child started up again and this time he said, ‘For Christ's sake, why don't they pick it up?'

‘What would you do with him?' I asked. I wasn't having any truck with that ‘it': it was pretty clear whom we were talking about.

But either he wasn't ready or my timing was out. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘How d'you mean, it's like what you do?'

The first meeting is everything. You do all the essential work in the first meeting and the rest is putting it in its place. It's the same with a love affair: when you meet someone and fall in love, you know all there is to know about them. Then you forget, wishing reality to be otherwise. After a while you see the way things are, as if for the first time (you forget you've known it all along) and that's when the hard work has to start. Once that has set in, love – real love, I mean – has a chance. It is not so different with patients except, unlike a love affair, you shouldn't forget what it is that needs to be granted another's blessing, or charity, or forgiveness. It is your business to notice that.

I watched Jean Martin shifting about in the chair, as he talked about his helicopter flying, and my grandmother's maxim came into my mind. What troubles has this man been caught up in? I wondered. And what is it caused the restlessness?

He left after fifty minutes were up and I still did not know why he had come to consult me. But I knew what I needed to know: whatever was haunting him was connected to an inability to sit still in a room.

I was right about the child. It took some time for the full story to emerge but it was a miserable tale of physical and emotional violence. It had bred in him a combination of resentment and idealisation, a tough mix to live with. There were repeated examples of unnecessary courage, pointless generosity, over enthusiasm for this person or that position, followed by a biting of the hand that fed or loved him. He idealised me: it was obvious from the start he would.

The first time a patient fell in love with me I became alarmed. Even with all the preparatory theoretical training, nothing quite prepares you for the reality of the experience. It is unlike unrequited love in ordinary life because the love a patient feels for you is not unrequited: but the love with which one answers is of a different quality. But it is still love – which can be bewildering. ‘It is part of what we must suffer,' my old supervisor said. ‘Stop fussing about it. It goes with this job. Accept it. It won't last.' Later I saw it as not unlike the love of one's children – only ours for a space.

When Jean Martin fell ‘in love' with me he fell very hard. I watched it happen almost before my eyes and I wanted to say then, ‘It's all right. You'll get over it. One day you will see my real face again and I will seem merely a friendly middle-aged woman who does not mind what you say to her.'

I remember the day it happened because I had had a row with my husband. Sometimes I work better when I am having a row – it sharpens my attention. I was wearing a dress I like, a blue dress with a bias in the cut. I had put it on so that my husband would be aware of what he might miss if I walked out on him.

Jean Martin came into the room and sat down in the chair opposite. For once he didn't shift his buttocks about in his usual restless way. He sat upright looking dead at me. Then he said, ‘Your dress is the colour of the sky. I shall see you in it when I fly.'

I didn't reply. I just waited, noting that he had made a small poem with his words.

‘There's no point, is there?' he said then.

I guessed what he had in mind but all I said was ‘I suppose that depends what you mean by “point”.'

‘You're married, aren't you? You have a husband.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I am married. I have a husband.'

‘I love you,' he said. He said it without rancour.

‘Yes,' I said. And waited.

We sat awhile in silence. I wondered whether he had been brought to his declaration by some invisible communication of the row I was having with my husband.

‘It's pointless asking if you love me back?'

‘There's every point,' I said, ‘but the kind of way I may love you may not seem very satisfactory to you.' Long ago a clever tutor said to me, ‘You shouldn't have affairs with your patients. It may or may not hurt them but it will certainly hurt you.' I extend this prohibition to platonic love affairs.

There was silence. Then Jean Martin left the room. After a bit, I heard his tread coming back up the stairs. It was still his session time so I let him in again and returned to my chair and sat there, waiting to see what he would say. Or not say.

‘Don't talk about me, will you?' he said. ‘I mean not to your husband.'

Jean Martin showed no sign of ringing me in the night, or of hanging around our house. He didn't sit all day on the flight of steps which lead up to our Richmond home or overwhelm me with letters, or interrupt the process of enquiry we were engaged in together with sighs or mournful asides. Indeed, he was tactful with his feelings – only murmuring from time to time, ‘You won't say anything, will you?'

The row with my husband had long since blown over and we were out together one day in Richmond Park. I had been racing our dog, Mishkin, and had slipped, fallen and twisted my foot. Bill, who is quintessentially a rational man, was struggling to be kind when he plainly thought that what I had done was daft and my own fault. I had mud on my knees and on my skirt and my face was flushed with the cold and the running and perhaps also with some anger. (Bill could make me feel silly when I didn't act my age.)

I was sitting on a bench with my boot off, massaging my ankle when someone approached and said, ‘Can I be of assistance?' It was Jean Martin.

Bill was about to utter some polite rejoinder when I saw him pause. Just for a second he seemed – what was it? Not quite his usual urbane self? No. More than usually his urbane self, that's what it was. To Jean Martin he said, ‘Thanks, old man, she's with me. She'll be fine.'

Sometimes, if one is lucky, one catches these moments as they occur, like a kingfisher flashing in front of the eyes before one has had time to register it. As I observed that pared-down pause between the two men, who had together bent their heads towards my injured foot, I witnessed something. They knew each other. More than that, they had a history.

‘Nice of that chap,' Bill said as he escorted me to the Volvo.

‘Mmm,' I said. I didn't reveal that I knew him.

On the morning we met next, Jean Martin made no mention of the Richmond Park encounter. He sat with his usual restlessness describing aspects of his adolescence. Taking my cue from his silence I too said nothing. There was nothing remarkable in what he told me that morning, save that, unusually, I was bored, and boredom is a clue. Generally, it means there is something artificial in whatever is being said. I was so bored that at several moments I found my eyelids weighing and a longing for sleep creeping over me. So it was a jolt when he said, ‘I shan't be coming any more.'

‘Ah,' I said, playing for time. I was genuinely surprised. And then, because it seemed best to become blunt, ‘Why?'

But I had guessed the answer. It was Bill.

I could not exactly define the moment when I first suspected that what Bill did at the Foreign Office was not entirely straightforward. He was older than me by ten years and had been up at Cambridge at the period when recruitment to MI5 was still persuasive. His position, I knew, had taken him, in the days before our marriage, on various lengthy trips abroad. It's my job to piece together bits of lives to make a whole so it is hardly surprising that I pieced together Bill's.

‘You're a spy, aren't you, or were, anyway,' I said one Sunday over breakfast. The thought had come to me while we had been making love that morning.

‘Don't be absurd,' Bill said. But his hand carrying the cup to his lip made just a fractional pause. It was the same kind of pause I witnessed in him when, twenty years later, Jean Martin had come upon us in Richmond Park.

Now, sitting in my consulting room, with the sparrows rowdily chatting in the eaves, Jean Martin did not pause but said, ‘Because it may be dangerous if I stay.'

I knew he hoped I would suppose he was referring to his feelings for me but what struck me was the directness with which he spoke. His words, although ambiguous, were not deceitful. By now, I was definitely wide awake.

‘For whom?' I asked. ‘Dangerous for whom?'

He didn't answer this but he said something startling. ‘I know, knew, your husband.'

‘Yes, I had gathered.' This was risky but it felt right.

‘But not from him?' Anxious now.