On Loving Josiah (3 page)

‘I like you,’ she said. ‘We have about twenty minutes. Then they can carry me out.’

But Mr Upton resisted her (though not her money, as it
transpired
), as did the policeman, even when Eve told him she wouldn’t budge an inch unless he put handcuffs on her, and proffered him her fine wrists. The policeman’s colleagues down at the station resisted her too, despite her requests to be strip-searched; and the duty social worker resisted her, despite being a lesbian, and the duty psychiatrist resisted her, because it was his daughter’s school play that evening and he wanted to get back in time to see it. So what alternative was there than to admit her to Fulbright Hospital with the full intention of sorting it out in the morning? Only the duty psychiatrist hadn’t reckoned on Dr Fothering doing a ward round that Tuesday, and Dr Fothering couldn’t resist her. No, for Eve de Selincourt captivated Dr Fothering from the very first moment they met. Dr Fothering, you see, was a closet postmodern Freudian analyst, and had spent two years in the U.S. studying the primacy of the female orgasm under the celebrated Weichian psychiatrist, Dr. Anselm Bott.

For there was something so
fluid
about Eve, something so
innocent
, something so unscathed by the demands of living in a society, that intrigued Dr Fothering. There was one way in which she was the most mentally healthy person he had ever met; and yet another
in which she was a sociopath, who needed to understand that the values of others were worth considering, even if she did not hold them herself.

‘Are you suggesting that I be duplicitous?’ the winsome Eve asked him, on his suggestion that she might be more aware of others’ sensitivities.

‘Perhaps human beings are supposed to be, to a certain extent, duplicitous. A self without others can’t exist. You need others to forge your very identity. You either beat ’em or you join ’em.’

‘I’ve always beaten them!’ said Eve with some pride. ‘But look where it’s got me. Look where integrity gets you nowadays. Now, I do so hate this sterile room. Can’t we go to a pub or something?’

‘Stick to the point, Eve!’

‘But what is the point?’ asked Eve, listlessly. ‘Isn’t the very point that there is no point?’

‘Has there ever been a point, Eve? Has there ever been a time in your life when there’s been meaning in it?’

During the eighteen months of Dr Fothering’s in-depth therapy, Eve never referred to the one decent and wonderful thing, or rather, dreadful and most terrible thing, which had ever happened to her. She never even breathed the name of Gilbert Fitzpatrick. Though this did not mean she didn’t think of him, particularly when Dr. Fothering would begin, ‘I want you to remember something that made you sad. You are not connecting to your ability to be sad.’

‘I thought your job was to make me happy.’

‘Don’t you wish to be out of here?’

‘I never made any friends at University. Everyone hated me in the end. Why would I want to go back to a place where everyone hates me? You at least don’t hate me, do you?

‘No, of course I don’t hate you.’

‘Then,’ purred Eve, ‘It’s in my interests to stay here.’

‘Have you ever wondered why people hate you?’

‘No.’

‘Not ever?’

‘It’s none of my business,’ said Eve, demurely.

Dr Fothering’s relationship with his boss proved rather more testing. Eve’s consultant, Dr Goodman, was more amused than alarmed by Eve’s early morning ritual, in which she would sneak round the wards and lay her hand on the brow of each and every patient, murmuring, ‘May you receive my love.’ (Indeed, it was Gibson Nelson’s assurances that he had received it that brought him to her attention.) Dr Goodman understood that she fascinated his young registrar, and he also understood that she was proving good fodder for Dr Fothering’s MSc dissertation; but Eve’s reluctance to leave and Dr Fothering’s reluctance to see her go were in themselves not sufficient causes to keep her as a patient in Fulbright hospital: her bed was needed for more pressing cases. This was as much the truth now as it had been six months previously, the last time Dr Fothering had invited Dr Goodman to read his files on the case, with all the trepidation and possessiveness of a young writer with his first novel.

The working title of Dr Fothering’s thesis was,
The Self and Society:
A Case History.
To give him his credit, he was most excited by the fact of Eve’s turning on its head much of what he had held dear. Eve was a radical, a megalomaniac: not in the realm of politics, where we might begin to identify with her, but in the realm of
Self
. She demanded absolute power, and achieved it by behaving in exactly the way she chose when she chose. But the most enthralling and
gratifying
thing about Eve was that all Dr Fothering had to do was massage her eyelids, and she was in command of the maximum orgasmic tilt, the Weichian definition of supreme mental health. No wonder the beleaguered registrar found it quite impossible to discharge her.

Dr Goodman, however, was a drugs-orientated man and was by nature suspicious of therapy. He held that people
qua
people could
be talked into and out of everything, and it was certainly not the business of a mere doctor to claim to know what his patient should be talked into or out of: rather he should seek to find a physical
malfunction
in that most complicated of organs, the brain, and attempt to alleviate the symptoms accordingly. Psychiatrists were not
demigods
, he reminded his students: and they would do well to stick to the finer points of chemistry, for it was the correct dosage of a drug, and not the
mot
juste
, which would, in the end, cure them.

So Dr Goodman had scanned his registrar’s much-loved files on the subject of Eve right there, right in front of his nose. Eve’s
description
of the sexual act as ‘a beautiful integration of the self’ afforded Dr Fothering material for an entire chapter: Eve, he suggested, had achieved an extraordinary short-circuit to genital primacy, which he had spent several sessions exploring with her. He discovered that she had no envy of the penis; and even, as a child, had been quite
conscious
of wanting her father to make love to her, but was also aware of the time when that desire was displaced onto other objects.

‘No child can be conscious of the displacement of desire,’ said Dr Goodman.

‘You should question her yourself. I’ve never witnessed anything like it,’ insisted the registrar.

‘You know I don’t like this approach, Michael.’

‘I’ve found a supervisor in Peterborough, Graham Peterson. He’s more sympathetic to Freudian analysis.’

‘I want that in writing if you please, said Dr Goodman curtly.

‘But understand what an extraordinary case this is! It’s her very state of consciousness which sets Eve apart, she’s not shrouded her natural instincts as the rest of us do, in layer upon layer of socialization…’

‘Then why is she the patient and we, us poor socialized sods, her doctors?’

‘Don’t you see? Early Freud would have agreed with you, the sense
of power her body had given her is quite remarkable, but later Freud developed the idea of the super-ego, which is akin to the conscience, and results from the introjection of parental authority. But Eve’s never done that, don’t you see? She’s never introjected her parents’ authority, and therefore can’t regulate her own moral behaviour. In a nutshell, Eve’s mother was too strict with her, and never provided the space in which Eve’s super-ego could grow, but made it
superfluous
by doing all the regulating on its behalf. That’s the kernel of it: there’s been little or no internalisation of parental values!’

‘You are too taken by the girl, Michael. I wish you well with your thesis. It seems well-written with enough footnotes to publish in a book on their own. But Eve shouldn’t be in this hospital. She doesn’t seem to me to be either particularly unhappy or particularly damaged. She suffers from neither visual nor auditory
hallucinations
; she certainly doesn’t suffer from psychosis, schizophrenia or even a mild neurosis. I’ll grant you, she borders on what some might consider a personality disorder, though the term is so vague as to be faintly irritating. She is manipulative, has a marked lack of self-
criticism
, and is abominably fickle. However, to compensate for such failings, she’s pretty and has a good share of social skills. I doubt she has little idea about constancy and the maintaining of a sustained sexual relationship, but I’m a doctor, Michael, I’m not a judge. The only thing I feel quite certain of is that she shouldn’t stay in this
hospital
. It’s the world that should be taking Eve on, not you, Michael.’

Dr Fothering had snatched his beloved files from the
consultant’s
desk and cried, ‘Are you saying there’s no truth in this? Are you saying I’ve been wasting my time this past year? Are you giving me no credit at all?’ And even his super-ego couldn’t prevent him from storming out and slamming the door.

This was the summer of 1983; Eve had been at Fulbright a full year, and at this time, surely, the guard and his pretty prisoner might have called a truce and gone their separate ways. But Dr Fothering’s

rage and sense of umbrage would have none of it. When another consultant, a Dr Aggs, professed an interest in the case over lunch in the cafeteria, and even read and approved of the abstract for his thesis, Dr Fothering introduced them, and an informal
arrangement
was set up in which Dr Aggs became Eve’s consultant, and Dr Goodman was barely aware that Eve was still in the hospital. But this new arrangement was never set up as it should have been; the literature on the case never re-filed under ‘A’, nor the case closed under ‘G’. Hence, on this particular day, the 15th March 1984, the day when Mrs de Selincourt felt both her first and last maternal
feelings
towards her daughter, it was towards Dr Goodman’s office that the impregnable woman strode, her invitation to her daughter’s case conference held tightly in her fist.  

Barely had Mrs de Selincourt begun her onslaught than Dr Goodman realised she had the grounds to sue both him and the hospital. Indeed, it was cases like Eve’s that were to force the closure of so many mental hospitals a few years later. For Mrs de Selincourt was right: the hospital was filthy, Eve had been ‘allowed to languish in this dire place’; she, her mother, had been kept entirely in the dark as to what was going on, and what was all this about Eve having a liaison with a gardener? And above all, how dare that man Fothering try and keep her away from the case conference that afternoon, as though its outcome didn’t concern her?  

And it’s true, if the dynamics of their meeting had been ever so slightly different, if Mrs de Selincourt had not registered, deep, deep within her psyche that Dr Goodman’s Harris tweed suit was bespoke, then her fury and her threats might have been such as to make Dr Goodman postpone his game of golf at two and actually attend the meeting in question. But this annual game of golf with a good school-friend was a fixture he was very loath to give up, and anyway, he knew the susceptibility of women such as Mrs de
Selincourt
to both charm and breeding, in addition to which he had a
whole hour to placate her, to apologize unreservedly, to explain that Dr Fothering’s methods were not his own but psychiatry was not an area in which there was a right and a wrong, and whatever the outcome with the gardener he would personally see to it that Eve was discharged within the week, and if she chose not to return home with her, would make it a priority to find her suitable
accommodation
. Half way through their meeting he summoned tea and biscuits, and they sat on the lower, more comfortable chairs. Soon after, they discovered that they had both holidayed in Provence, and by the end of their jolly meeting they realised that Mr de Selincourt was a good friend of a good friend of Dr Goodman’s. Extraordinary
coincidence
! What a small, small world! So they said good-bye on the best of terms, with the assurance that he would personally look into any conclusions reached at the case conference. ‘And one final piece of advice,’ he said in a charmingly conspiratorial voice, as Mrs de Selincourt stood up to go, ‘Don’t talk too much. Just observe. Mark my words, to observe is to have power. And be my spy. I’d like to know what they talk about.’  

‘I’ll do that, Dr Goodman. Thank you,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll let you know just what I think.’

Hospitals are places of great drama, the fodder of every screenwriter. Mrs de Selincourt, Dr Fothering, Eve herself, are about to take their bow, as well as various others assigned to the case. Events can no longer be controlled by any of them.  

Conference room BH8: at first, semi-darkness, till a nurse releases a dust-laden blind to reveal ten low-slung orange chairs haphazardly arranged around two coffee tables. Without comment, the same nurse picks up two old coffee cups from the table and says, ‘Laura, could you rinse these out, please?

Laura is a student social worker who’s on a placement for six weeks; a pretty thing in a fashionable denim pinafore and a flowery shirt. She’s presently shadowing Alison, who walks in now, senior social worker in the Branston team. She’s thin and spiky but
efficient
; she looks about her for Dr Aggs, Gibson Nelson’s consultant psychiatrist, and Fothering’s ally, but he’s not arrived yet, nor has June Briggs, who is going to be Eve de Selincourt’s senior field social worker once she’s discharged. Instead, she notices Eve’s mother, or at least, an alien force, someone who ought not to be there at such sensitive proceedings. She walks up to her and introduces herself. Mrs de Selincourt is on best behaviour and nods courteously. Alison relaxes. She can stay if she’s quiet, she thinks. Dr Fothering makes a joke about the bad coffee, and suggests to Mrs de Selincourt that when asked it might prove a safer bet to choose the tea. She ignores his remarks; Dr Fothering begins to sweat.