The Complete Short Stories (53 page)

But then she spoke. ‘It
will take time,’ she said. ‘A very difficult patient, of course.

Basil nodded. Dr Gray
swung her legs, and looked professional. She was in the right, she looked like
our games mistress who sometimes sat on a desk swinging her legs.

Before I returned to
school I saw Basil one morning at his shop door. ‘Reading glasses all right
now?’ he said.

‘Oh yes, thank you.’

‘There’s nothing wrong
with your sight. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.

I walked on, certain
that he had known my guilty suspicions all along.

‘I took up psychology during the war. Up
till then I was in general practice.’

I had come to the summer
school to lecture on history and she on psychology. Psychiatrists are very
often ready to talk to strangers about their inmost lives. This is probably
because they spend so much time hearing out their patients. I did not recognize
Dr Gray, except as a type, when I had attended her first lecture on ‘the
psychic manifestations of sex . She spoke of child-poltergeists, and I was
bored, and took refuge in observing the curious language of her profession. I
noticed the word ‘arousement’ . ‘Adolescents in a state of sexual arousement,’
she said, may become possessed of almost psychic insight.’

After lunch, since the
Eng. Lit. people had gone off to play tennis, she tacked on to me and we walked
to the lake across the lawns, past the rhododendrons. This lake had once been
the scene of a love-mad duchess’s death.

‘… during the war.
Before that I was in general practice. It’s strange, she said, ‘how I came to
take up psychology. My second husband had a breakdown and was under a
psychiatrist. Of course, he’s incurable, but I decided … It’s strange, but
that’s how I came to take it up. It saved
my
reason. My husband is still
in a home. His sister, of course, became quite incurable.
He
has his
lucid moments. I did not realize it, of course, when I married, but there was
what I’d now call an oedipus-transference on his part, and…’

How tedious I found
these phrases! We had come to the lake. I stooped over it and myself looked
back at myself through the dark water. I looked at Dr Gray’s reflection and
recognized her. I put on my dark glasses, then.

‘Am I boring you?’ she
said.

‘No, carry on.

‘Must you wear those
glasses? … it is a modern psychological phenomenon … the trend towards
impersonalization … the modern Inquisitor.’

For a while, she watched
her own footsteps as we walked round the lake. Then she continued her story.’…
an optician. His sister was blind —
going
blind when I first attended
her. Only the one eye was affected. Then there was an accident, one of those
psychological
accidents. She was a trained dispenser, but she mixed herself the wrong
eye-drops. Now it’s very difficult to make a mistake like that, normally. But
subconsciously she wanted to, she
wanted
to. But she wasn’t normal, she
was not normal.’

‘I’m not saying she was,’
I said. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m sure she wasn’t a
normal person,’ I said, ‘if you say so.

‘It can all be explained
psychologically, as we’ve tried to show to my husband. We’ve told him and told
him, and given him every sort of treatment — shock, insulin, everything. And
after all, the stuff didn’t have any effect on his sister immediately, and when
she did go blind it was caused by acute glaucoma. She would probably have lost
her sight in any case. Well, she went off her head completely and accused her
brother of having put the wrong drug in the bottle deliberately. This is the
interesting part from the psychological point of view — she said she had seen
something that he didn’t want her to see, something disreputable. She said he
wanted to blind the eye that saw it. She said …’

We were walking round
the lake for the second time. When we came to the spot where I had seen her
face reflected I stopped and looked over the water.

‘I’m boring you.’

‘No, no.’

‘I wish you would take
off those glasses.’

I took them off for a
moment. I rather liked her for her innocence in not recognizing me, though she
looked hard and said, ‘There’s a subconscious reason why you wear them.’

‘Dark glasses hide dark
thoughts,’ I said.

‘Is that a saying?’

‘Not that I’ve heard.
But it is one now.

She looked at me anew.
But she didn’t recognize me. These fishers of the mind have no eye for outward
things. Instead, she was ‘recognizing’ my mind: I daresay I came under some
category of hers.

I had my glasses on
again, and was walking on.

‘How did your husband
react to his sister’s accusations?’ I said.

‘He was remarkably kind.’

‘Kind?’

‘Oh, yes, in the
circumstances. Because she started up a lot of gossip in the neighbourhood. It
was only a small town. It was a long time before I could persuade him to send
her to a home for the blind where she could be looked after. There was a
terrible bond between them. Unconscious incest.’

‘Didn’t you know that
when you married him? I should have thought it would have been obvious.’

She looked at me again. ‘I
had not studied psychology at that time,’ she said.

I thought, neither had
I.

We were silent for the
third turn about the lake. Then she said, ‘Well, I was telling you how I came
to study psychology and practise it. My husband had this breakdown after his
sister went away. He had delusions. He kept imagining he saw eyes looking at
him everywhere. He still sees them from time to time. But
eyes,
you see.
That’s significant. Unconsciously he felt he had blinded his sister. Because
unconsciously he wanted to do so. He keeps confessing that he did so.’

‘And attempted to forge
the will?’ I said. She stopped. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Does he admit that he
tried to forge his mother’s will?’

‘I haven’t mentioned
anything about a will.’

‘Oh, I thought you had.’

‘But, in fact, that was
his sister’s accusation. What made you say that? How did you know?’

‘I must be psychic,’ I
said.

She took my arm. I had
become a most endearing case history.

‘You must be psychic
indeed,’ she said. ‘You must tell me more about yourself. Well, that’s the
story of my taking up my present profession. When my husband started having
these delusions and making these confessions I felt I had to understand the
workings of the mind. And I began to study them. It has been fruitful. It has
saved my own reason.

‘Did it ever occur to
you that the sister’s story might be true?’ I said. ‘Especially as he admits
it.’

She took away her arm
and said, ‘Yes, I considered the possibility. I must admit I considered it
well.’

She saw me watching her
face. She looked as if she were pleading some personal excuse.

‘Oh do,’ she said, ‘please
take off those glasses.

‘Why don’t you believe
his own confession?’

‘I’m a psychiatrist and
we seldom believe confessions.’ She looked at her watch as if to suggest I had
started the whole conversation and was boring her.

I said, ‘He might have
stopped seeing eyes if you’d taken him at his word.’

She shouted, ‘What are
you saying? What are you thinking of? He wanted to give a statement to the
police, do you realize …’

‘You know he’s guilty,’
I said.

‘As his wife,’ she said,
‘I know he’s guilty. But as a psychiatrist I must regard him as innocent. That’s
why I took up the subject.’ She suddenly turned angry and shouted, ‘You damned
inquisitor, I’ve met your type before.’

I could hardly believe
she was shouting, who previously had been so calm. ‘Oh, it’s not my business,’
I said, and took off my glasses to show willing.

I think it was then she
recognized me.

The Ormolu Clock

The Hotel Stroh stood side by side with the
Guesthouse Lublonitsch, separated by a narrow path that led up the mountain, on
the Austrian side, to the Yugoslavian border. Perhaps the old place had once
been a great hunting tavern. These days, though, the Hotel Stroh was plainly a
disappointment to its few drooping tenants. They huddled together like birds in
a storm; their flesh sagged over the unscrubbed tables on the dark back
veranda, which looked over Herr Stroh’s untended fields. Usually, Herr Stroh
sat somewhat apart, in a mist of cognac, his lower chin resting on his red
neck, and his shirt open for air. Those visitors who had come not for the
climbing but simply for the view sat and admired the mountain and were sloppily
waited upon until the weekly bus should come and carry them away. If they had
cars, they rarely stayed long — they departed, as a rule, within two hours of
arrival, like a comic act. This much was entertainingly visible from the other
side of the path, at the Guesthouse Lublonitsch.

I was waiting for
friends to come and pick me up on their way to Venice. Frau Lublonitsch welcomed
all her guests in person. When I arrived I was hardly aware of the honour, she
seemed so merely a local woman — undefined and dumpy — as she emerged from the
kitchen wiping her hands on her brown apron, with her grey hair drawn back
tight, her sleeves rolled up, her dingy dress, black stockings, and boots. It
was only gradually that her importance was permitted to dawn upon strangers.

There was a Herr
Lublonitsch, but he was of no account, even though he got all the marital
courtesies. He sat punily with his drinking friends at one of the tables in
front of the inn, greeting the guests as they passed in and out and receiving
as much attention as he wanted from the waitresses. When he was sick Frau
Lublonitsch took his meals with her own hands to a room upstairs set aside for
his sickness. But she was undoubtedly the boss.

She worked the hired
girls fourteen hours a day, and they did the work cheerfully. She was never
heard to complain or to give an order; it was enough that she was there. Once,
when a girl dropped a tray with five mugs of soup, Frau Lublonitsch went and
fetched a cloth and submissively mopped up the mess herself, like any old
peasant who had suffered worse than that in her time. The maids called her Frau
Chef. ‘Frau Chef prepares special food when her husband’s stomach is bad,’ one
of them told me.

Appended to the
guesthouse was a butcher’s shop, and this was also a Lublonitsch possession. A
grocer’s shop had been placed beside it, and on an adjacent plot of ground —
all Lublonitsch property — a draper’s shop was nearing completion. Two of her
sons worked in the butcher’s establishment; a third had been placed in charge
of the grocer’s; and the youngest son, now ready to take his place, was
destined for the draper’s.

In the garden, strangely
standing on a path between the flowers for decorating the guests’ tables and
the vegetables for eating, facing the prolific orchard and overhung by the
chestnut trees that provided a roof for outdoor diners, grew one useless thing
— a small, well-tended palm tree. It gave an air to the place. Small as it was,
this alien plant stood as high as the distant mountain peaks when seen from the
perspective of the great back porch where we dined. It quietly dominated the
view.

Ordinarily, I got up at seven, but one
morning I woke at half-past five and came down from my room on the second floor
to the yard, to find someone to make me some coffee. Standing in the sunlight,
with her back to me, was Frau Lublonitsch. She was regarding her wide kitchen
garden, her fields beyond it, her outbuildings and her pigsties where two aged
women were already at work. One of the sons emerged from an outbuilding
carrying several strings of long sausages. Another led a bullock with a bag
tied over its head to a tree and chained it there to await the slaughterers.
Frau Lublonitsch did not move but continued to survey her property, her pigs,
her pig-women, her chestnut trees, her beanstalks, her sausages, her sons, her
tall gladioli, and — as if she had eyes in the back of her head — she seemed
aware, too, of the good thriving guesthouse behind her, and the butcher’s shop,
the draper’s shop, and the grocer’s.

Just as she turned to
attack the day’s work, I saw that she glanced at the sorry Hotel Stroh across
the path. I saw her mouth turn down at the corners with the amusement of one
who has a certain foreknowledge; I saw a landowner’s recognition in her little
black eyes.

You could tell, even
before the local people told you, that Frau Lublonitsch had built up the whole
thing from nothing by her own wits and industry. But she worked pitiably hard.
She did all the cooking. She supervised the household, and, without moving
hurriedly, she sped into the running of the establishment like the maniac
drivers from Vienna who tore along the highroad in front of her place. She
scoured the huge pans herself; wielding her podgy arm round and round; clearly,
she trusted none of the girls to do the job properly. She was not above
sweeping the floor, feeding the pigs, and serving in the butcher’s shop, where
she would patiently hold one after another great sausage under her customer’s
nose for him to smell its quality. She did not sit down, except to take her
dinner in the kitchen, from her rising at dawn to her retiring at one in the
morning.

Why does she do it, what
for? Her sons are grown up, she’s got her guesthouse, her servants, her shops,
her pigs, fields, cattle —At the café across the river, where I went in the
late afternoon, they said, ‘Frau Lublonitsch has got far more than that. She
owns all the strip of land up to the mountain. She’s got three farms. She may
even expand across the river and down this way to the town.’

‘Why does she work so
hard? She dresses like a peasant,’ they said. ‘She scours the pots.’ Frau
Lublonitsch was their favourite subject.