The Eye in the Door (16 page)

‘In that case I accept your apology.’

A pause. ‘Do you know what I do when I come round from one of these spells? I look at my hands because I half expect to see them covered in hair.’

Rivers made no comment.

‘You’ve read Jekyll and Hyde?’

‘Yes.’ Rivers had been waiting for the reference. Patients who suffered from fugue states invariably referred to the dissociated state – jocularly, but not without fear – as ‘Hyde’. ‘In real life, you know, the fugue state is – well, I was going to say “never”, but, in fact, there is one case – is almost never the darker side of the personality. Usually it’s no more than a difference in mood.’

‘But we don’t
know
. You see, the conversation I’m trying not to have is the one where I point out that you could find out in five minutes flat and you say, “Yes, I know, but I won’t do it.”’

Silence.

‘Well?
’

‘I’m sorry, I thought you said you didn’t want that conversation.’

‘You know, for somebody who isn’t here to be liked you have the most wonderful manner. You used hypnosis at Craiglockhart.’

‘Yes, but in that case we could check the memory. You see, one of the things people who believe in… the extensive use of hypnosis claim – well, they don’t even claim it, they assume it – is that memories recovered in that way are genuine memories. But they’re very often not. They can be fantasies, or they can be responses to suggestions from the therapist. Because one’s constantly making suggestions, and the ones you’re not aware of making – not conscious of – are by far the most powerful. And that’s dangerous because most therapists are interested in dissociated states and so they – unconsciously of course – encourage the patient further down that path. And one can’t avoid doing it. Even if one excludes everything else, there’s still the enlargement of the pupils of the eyes.’

Prior leant forward and peered. ‘Yours are enlarged.’

Rivers took a deep breath. ‘You can get your memory back by the same methods we used at Craiglockhart. You were very good at it.’

‘Is that why you do this?’ Prior swept his hand down across his eyes.

Rivers smiled. ‘No, of course not, it’s just a habit. Eye-strain. Now can we –’

‘No, that’s not true. If it was eye-strain, you’d do it at random and you don’t. You do it when… when something touches a nerve. Or or… It
is
a way of hiding your feelings. You’ve just said it yourself, the eyes are the one part you can’t turn into wallpaper – and so you cover them up.’

Rivers found this disconcerting. He tried to go on with what he’d been going to say, and realized he’d lost the train of thought. After so many hours of probing, manipulating, speculating, provoking, teasing, Prior had finally – and almost casually – succeeded. He couldn’t ignore this; it had to be dealt with. ‘I think… if as you say it
isn’t
random – and I don’t
know
because it’s not something I’m aware of – it’s probably something to do with not wanting to see the patient. For me the patient’s expressions and gestures aren’t much use, because I have no visual memory, so I think perhaps I stop myself seeing him as a way of concentrating on what he’s saying. All right? Now perhaps we can –’

‘No visual memory at all?’

‘None at all.’

‘I don’t see how you think.’

‘Well, I suspect you’re a very visual person. Could we–’

‘Have you always been like this?’

Rivers thought,
all right
. He stood up and indicated to Prior that they should exchange seats. Prior looked surprised and even uneasy, but quickly recovered and sat down in Rivers’s chair with considerable aplomb. Rivers saw him look round the study, taking in his changed perspective on the room. ‘Isn’t this against the rules?’ he asked.

‘I can’t think of a single rule we’re not breaking.’

‘Can’t you?’ Prior said, smiling his delicate smile. ‘I can.’

‘I’m going to show you how boring this job is. When I was five…’

Prior shifted his position, leant forward, rested his chin on his clasped hands, and said, in meltingly empathic tones, ‘Yes? Go on.’

Rivers was not in fact breaking the rules. He intended
to do no more than offer Prior an illustration from his own experience that he’d already used several times in public lectures, but he hadn’t reckoned on doing it while confronted by a caricature of himself. ‘One of the expressions of having no visual memory is that I can’t remember the interior of any building I’ve ever been in. I can’t remember this house when I’m not in it. I can’t remember Craiglockhart, though I lived there for over a year. I can’t remember St John’s, though I’ve lived there twenty years, but there is one interior I
do
remember and that’s a house in Brighton I lived in till I was five. I can remember
part
of that. The basement kitchen, the drawing-room, the dining-room, my father’s study, but I can’t remember anything at all about upstairs. And I’ve come to believe – I won’t go into the reasons – that something happened to me on the top floor that was so terrible that I simply had to forget it. And in order to ensure that I forgot I suppressed not just the
one
memory, but the capacity to remember things visually at all.’ Rivers paused, and waited for a response.

‘You were raped,’ Prior said. ‘Or beaten.’

Rivers’s face went stiff with shock. ‘I really don’t think I was.’

‘No, well, you wouldn’t, would you? The whole point is it’s too terrible to contemplate.’

Rivers said something he knew he’d regret, but he had to say it. ‘This was my father’s vicarage.’

‘I was raped in a vicarage once.’

It was on the tip of Rivers’s tongue to say that no doubt Prior had been ‘raped’ in any number of places, but he managed to restrain himself. ‘When I said terrible I meant to a child of that age. I was five remember. Things happen to children which are an enormous shock to the child, but which wouldn’t seem terrible or or or even particularly important to an adult.’

‘And equally things happen to children which are genuinely terrible. And would be recognized as terrible by
anybody at any
age.’

‘Yes, of course. How old were you?’

‘Eleven. I wasn’t meaning myself.’

‘You don’t classify that as “terrible”?’

‘No
. I was receiving extra tuition.’ He gave a yelping laugh. ‘God, was I receiving extra tuition. From the parish priest, Father Mackenzie. My mother offered him a shilling a week – more than she could afford – but he said, “Don’t worry, my good woman, I have seldom seen a more promising boy.”’ He added irritably, ‘Don’t look so shocked, Rivers.’

‘I am shocked.’

‘Then you shouldn’t be. He got paid in kind, that’s all.’ Suddenly Prior leant forward and grasped Rivers’s knee, digging his fingers in round the kneecap. ‘Everything has to be paid for, doesn’t it?’ He grasped the knee harder.
‘Doesn’t it?
’

‘No.’

Prior let go. ‘This terrible-in-big-black-inverted commas thing that happened to you, what do
you
think it was?’

‘I don’t know. Dressing-gown on the back of a door?’

‘As bad as
that?
Oh, my God.’

Rivers pressed on in defiance of Prior’s smile. ‘I had a patient once who became claustrophobic as the result of being accidentally locked in a corridor with a fierce dog. Or it seemed fierce to him. In that –’

‘Oh, I see. Even the bloody dog wasn’t
really
fierce.’

‘In that case his parents didn’t even know it had happened.’

‘You say you were five when this… non-event didn’t happen?’

‘Yes.’

‘How old were you when you started to stammer?’

‘Fi-ive.’

Prior leant back in Rivers’s chair and smiled.
‘Big dog.
’

‘I didn’t mean to imply there was –’

‘For God’s
sake
. Whatever it was, you
blinded
yourself so you wouldn’t have to go on seeing it.’

‘I wouldn’t put it as dramatically as that.’

‘You destroyed your visual memory. You put your mind’s eye
out
. Is that what happened, or isn’t it?’

Rivers struggled with himself. Then said simply; ‘Yes.’

‘Do you ever think you’re on the verge of remembering?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And what do you feel?’

‘Fear.’ He smiled. ‘Because the child’s emotions are still attached to the memory.’

‘We’re back to the dressing-gown.’

‘Yes. Yes. I’m afraid we are, because I do sincerely believe it may be as simple as that.’

‘Then one can only applaud,’ Prior said, and did. Three loud claps.

‘You know…’ Rivers hesitated and started again. ‘You must be wary of filling the gaps in your memory with… with monsters. I think we all tend to do it. As soon as we’re left with a blank, we start projecting our worst fears on to it. It’s a bit like the guide for medieval map-makers, isn’t it?
Where unknown, there place monsters
. But I do think you should try not to do it, because what you’re really doing is subjecting yourself to a constant stream of suggestion of of a very negative kind.’

‘All right. I’ll try not to. I’ll substitute the Rivers guide to map-making:
Where unknown, there place dressing-gowns
. Or just possibly,
dogs
. Here, have your
chair back.’ Prior settled himself back into the patient’s chair, murmuring, ‘Do you know, Rivers, you’re as neurotic as I am? And that’s saying quite a lot.’

Rivers rested his chin on his hands. ‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Oh, my God, we
are
back to normal. You mean, “Do I feel a nasty, mean-spirited sense of triumph?” No. I’m mean-spirited enough, I’m just not stupid enough.’ Prior brooded a moment. ‘There’s one thing wrong with the Rivers guide to map-making. Suppose there really are monsters?’

‘I think if there are, we’ll meet them soon enough.’

Prior looked straight at Rivers. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘I know.’

When Prior finally left – it had been a long, exhausting session – Rivers switched off the desk lamp, went to sit in his armchair by the fire, and indulged in some concentrated, unobserved eye-rubbing.
Did
he do it ‘when something touched a nerve’? It was possible, he supposed. If there was a pattern, Prior would certainly have spotted it. On the other hand, Prior was equally capable of making the whole thing up.

He didn’t regret the decision to give Prior what he’d always claimed he wanted – to change places – because in the process he’d discovered an aspect of Prior that mightn’t have been uncovered in any other way. Not so much the ‘extra tuition’ – though that was interesting, particularly in view of Prior’s habit of aggressive flirtation – as the assumption that Rivers’s loss of visual memory must have some totally traumatic explanation. That had revealed more about Prior than he was aware of.

Though Prior had been a formidable interrogator.
Whatever it was, you blinded yourself so you wouldn’t have
to go on seeing it… You put your mind’s eye out
. Simply by being rougher than any professional colleague would ever have been, Prior had brought him face to face with the full extent of his loss. People tended to assume he didn’t know what he’d lost, but that wasn’t true. He did know, or glimpsed at least. Once, in the Torres Straits, he’d attended a court held by the British official in collaboration with the native chiefs, and an old woman had given evidence about a dispute in which she was involved. As she spoke, she’d glanced from side to side, clearly reliving every detail of the events she was describing, and very obviously
seeing
people who were not present in court. And he had looked at her, this scrawny, half-naked, elderly, illiterate woman, and he had envied her. No doubt he’d encountered Europeans who had visual memories of equal power, but his own deficiency had never before been brought home to him with such force.

It
was
a loss, and he had long been aware of it, though he had been slow to connect it with the Brighton house experience. Slower still to recognize that the impact of the experience had gone beyond the loss of visual memory and had occasioned a deep split between the rational, analytical cast of his mind and his emotions. It was easy to overstate this: he had, after all, been subject to a form of education which is designed to inculcate precisely such a split, but he thought the division went deeper in him than it did in most men. It was almost as if the experience – whatever it was – had triggered an attempt at dissociation of personality, though, mercifully, not a successful one. Still, he had been, throughout most of his life, a deeply divided man, and though he would once have said that this division exercised little, if any, influence on his thinking, he had come to believe it had determined the direction of his research.

Many years after that initial unremembered experience, he and Henry Head had conducted an experiment together. The nerve supplying Head’s left forearm had been severed and sutured, and then over a period of five years they had traced the progress of regeneration. This had taken place in two phases. The first was characterized by a high threshold of sensation, though when the sensation was finally evoked it was, to use Head’s own word, ‘extreme’. In addition to this all-or-nothing quality, the sensation was difficult to localize. Sitting blindfold at the table, Head had been unable to locate the stimulus that was causing him such severe pain. This primitive form of innervation they called the protopathic. The second phase of regeneration-which they called the epicritic-followed some months later, and was characterized by the ability to make graduated responses and to locate the source of a stimulus precisely. As the epicritic level of innervation was restored, the lower, or protopathic, level was partially integrated with it and partially suppressed, so that the epicritic system carried out two functions: one, to help the organism adapt to its environment by supplying it with accurate information; the other, to suppress the protopathic, to keep the animal within leashed. Inevitably, as time went on, both words had acquired broader meanings, so that ‘epicritic’ came to stand for everything rational, ordered, cerebral, objective, while ‘protopathic’ referred to the emotional, the sensual, the chaotic, the primitive. In this way the experiment both reflected Rivers’s internal divisions and supplied him with a vocabulary in which to express them. He might almost have said with Henry Jekyll,
It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both
…