The Mind of Mr Soames (3 page)

‘How could he? I don’t even know the man.’

She hesitated for a moment, as if uncertain what to say. ‘As a matter of fact, Dave, I saw Andy McCabe a few minutes ago. He asked me to have dinner with him this evening and he’s got tickets for a show afterwards.’

Conway remained silent.

‘That new American musical,’ she went on. ‘ “What are Little Girls made of?”—it’s had very good reviews.’

‘When I saw Andy in the theatre about half an hour ago he didn’t seem in a fit state to know even what little boys are made of,’ he commented dryly.

‘Morry’s party, I suppose.’

‘Something, like that.’

‘Well, he’s washed and shaved since then and he looks reasonably civilised.’

He finished his coffee and stood up wearily. ‘Well, have fun, Ann.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said, eyeing him reflectively. ‘I can’t help wishing it was you, rather than Andy. You know what I mean, don’t you, Dave?’

‘Yes, I know what you mean. Some other time, perhaps. Tonight I have a previous engagement with Mr Soames’s brain.’

He began to walk away, but halted abruptly and turned back.

‘If you
should
find out what little girls are made of you’ll let me know, won’t you? It might help me to understand big girls.’

She said nothing, but just looked at him in a melancholy way, so he shrugged in what was meant to be a nonchalant manner and went on his way.

Back in his room he telephoned his wife, Penelope, but there was no reply from her Chelsea flat. The ringing tone repeated and repeated in the telephone earpiece, as it invariably did these days, until he hung up.

Dr Takaito
was more than an hour late in arriving at the Institute, and this delay, coupled with the non-appearance of the Under-Secretary of State for the Ministry of Health who had promised to be on hand to welcome the Japanese VIP, had thrown Dr Alex Breuer into a bad-tempered flap. Breuer was the Director of the Institute, the man responsible for policy and planning, and the co-ordination of the various clinical programmes. He was big and fleshy, with a tentative moustache shading his upper lip like a half-grown mould culture, and he always wore impeccable dark suits which never varied by more than about one per cent from his favourite shade of grey. Between four and five o’clock he had his secretary telephone the House of Commons seven times to discover what the devil had happened to the Under-Secretary, only to learn on each occasion that an important debate was on in the House and a division was expected at any instant; until this momentous event had taken place it seemed unlikely that the Undersecretary would abandon his Parliamentary duties to shake the hand of the Japanese visitor who, in any case, was merely dropping in on his way to the USA.

By the time the big black Humber hired to convey Dr Takaito from the airport to the Institute rolled silently up the yellow driveway and stopped outside the administrative building, Dr Breuer was halfway through his third whisky and retrospectively drinking a toast to Guy Fawkes. He promptly rushed down to the main entrance, closely followed by Dr Bennett, his personal assistant, and Dr Slade, in charge of psychoneural research. Together they greeted the little Japanese specialist with beaming cordiality, and Dr Takaito in return beamed even more cordially through his heavy concave glasses. The chauffeur unloaded two large suitcases from the boot of the car, and solemnly the procession made its way back up the stairs to Dr Breuer’s private office.

Dr Takaito spoke English very well, but in the flat expressionless manner of the semantically insensitive oriental. Yes, he said in answer to the inevitable question, he had had a very fast and comfortable journey—these new jet-clippers were the last word, the very last word—but they had been held up for nearly an hour at Lydda due to some trouble with the radar. Yes, he had brought back the stereo x-rays of Soames’s brain and he wouldn’t need them any more as he had already prepared a complete set of working drawings. The operation would be a success, he was convinced of it. True, he had not yet encountered such a condition of synaptic coma in a dog, but—and this was the important point—he had been able to induce an equivalent coma by artificially creating certain types of neural barriers between specific cerebral lobes, and had restored normal brain functioning by removing the barriers. The Soames x-rays contained indications of great physical similarity. To prove the point he had brought along a selection of colour transparencies of excised dogs’ brains before and after treatment illustrating the remarkable resemblance with certain physical aspects of Soames’s brain.

Back in the office Dr Breuer and his colleagues inspected the transparencies with considerable interest while Dr Takaito, uninvited, helped himself to a sizeable whisky and soda with a practised hand while maintaining an intermittent running commentary.

‘That frontal view, for example, Dr Breuer. The meningeal layer is stained green. You can see that it has overgrown, as it were, and folded upon itself. The fold has forced its way between two small anterior lobes, setting up a partial neural barrier. It is not enough merely to remove the excess of meningeal tissue. One has also to restore a positive neural connection between the isolated lobes, and that calls for a refined grafting technique.’

‘Very interesting,’ Breuer murmured raptly. ‘By the way, do help yourself to a drink, Dr Takaito.’

‘Thank you, I will,’ said Takaito, finishing his drink and pouring another.

‘It seems to me,’ Breuer went on, ‘that here you have something new in cerebroneural surgery.’

‘New for humans, but not for dogs. One rarely encounters such a condition in a natural form, and even so, one hardly knows how to diagnose it without killing the patient first in order to stain the brain tissues and carry out a microscopic examination. Good for research, perhaps, but hardly therapeutic.’

‘As you know, we have made certain arrangements.’ Breuer explained. ‘Nearly two hundred doctors and specialists in psychoneurology have been invited to the Institute—indeed, they have been arriving most of the afternoon—to watch your operation with the aid of colour television. We also propose to have a film made, and we should be most grateful if, during the operation, you would comment on your procedure and explain each step as you carry it out. The commentary will be recorded on tape, of course, and will eventually be transferred to the film as a sound track.’

‘Of course,’ Takaito said generously, then wagged a cautiously reproving finger at the other man, ‘providing the operation is a success. If it should fail, then you will kindly do me the courtesy of erasing all permanent records.’ His lips twisted sardonically. ‘After all, as you know, we Japanese do not like to “lose face”, as you put it.’

‘Well...’ Breuer began doubtfully.

‘One does not want to have one’s failures preserved for—what is it you say?—for posterity.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ Bennett commented, while Dr Slade merely nodded his head in a half-hearted fashion.

‘I still think the record would be valuable from the point of view of surgical technique,’ Breuer insisted stubbornly.

Dr Takaito smiled thinly. ‘A futile technique has no intrinsic value. However, as I am quite sure that the operation will succeed, the difficulty is hardly likely to arise—in which case I have no valid objection to your film cameras and tape recorders.’ His smile broadened affably. ‘And now, Dr Breuer, there is one small favour which I in turn would like to put to you—a reasonable favour, I feel, in view of the part I am to play in the experiment.’

‘Yes?’ Breuer said rather brusquely, putting the transparencies on his desk.

‘The after-treatment.’ Takaito folded his arms in a gesture of superficial humility. ‘I have a profound interest in psychotherapy. After all, one does not play with dogs just for amusement.’

‘I don’t understand, Dr Takaito...’

‘Let us assume that as a result of my operation Mr Soames suddenly finds himself with consciousness. What next? He has a mind—a blank mind, but he is an adult male. His mind has to be trained and orientated so that, in the course of time, he can take up a normal life as a useful citizen in your society. It will not be easy. There will be many problems. I should like to play my part in helping to solve those problems.’

‘Well,’ said Breuer thoughtfully, ‘I see no objection at all, but won’t it be rather difficult to play an active part from the other side of the world?’

Takaito pursed his lips primly. ‘I made my diagnosis and planned the operation from the other side of the world, as you so neatly put it, Dr Breuer...’

‘But surely,’ Dr Slade interposed, ‘the one is a matter of physical observation, while the other’—he smiled in a disarming way—‘well, one can see the brain—but not the mind.’

‘What Dr Slade means is that instructional psychotherapy can only be accomplished at first hand,’ Breuer said, pursuing the point. ‘Clearly the Institute’s psychiatric specialists must be the first authority in a case like this, though naturally we should always be willing to consider advice.’

‘Even from Tokyo?’ Dr Takaito’s narrow eyes seemed to glitter sardonically behind his concave glasses. ‘I am not suggesting that I should be allowed to assume full responsibility for the treatment of the Soames case by proxy, as it were. But I must remined you, Dr Breuer, that I have spent more than twenty years gaining experience in how to destroy behaviour patterns—and, more important, how to create them.’

‘In dogs.’

Takaito nodded amiably, but his lips were a little thinner and colder. ‘In dogs, as you say, and also in humans, occasionally. The basic cerebral mechanisms are by no means dissimilar. The problem with Soames will be which behaviour patterns to impose in which order, but even so, you will find the process tactical rather than strategic.’

‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ Breuer demanded, slightly put out by the Japanese doctor’s bland manner.

‘I think it will explain itself in the course of time. It is one thing to train and educate a child who is amenable to discipline and adult authority, but quite another to plan the mental evolution of a grown man who knows nothing, absolutely nothing, beyond his instinctive urges. How will you compel him to learn his seven-times table if he does not choose to? Will you smack him as you would a child, or deprive him of food? Suppose he rejects the intricacies of spelling in favour of a sexual assault on one of his nurses—a not unlikely possibility for a mature man with a simple, undeveloped mind.’

‘I think you are rather exaggerating the difficulties, Dr Takaito,’ Breuer stated impatiently. ‘Naturally the entire educational process will be carefully planned in the greatest detail, and every possible contingency will be allowed for.’

‘You have no programme ready?’

‘Well, no, of course not. These things take time.’

Dr Takaito helped himself to more whisky, and sipped it with considerable sensual enjoyment. ‘But, Dr Breuer, the patient may be conscious for the first time in his life this very evening—in perhaps three hours from now.’

Breuer glanced quickly at his colleagues as if seeking some kind of moral support in face of Takaito’s undeniably critical attitude, but Bennett and Dr Slade were wearing blank faces and were clearly absorbed in the Japanese doctor’s line of thought.

‘It is highly improbable that Soames, even if conscious, will be in a fit state to absorb education for some weeks, particularly after a major trepanning operation,’ Breuer said with a hint of acerbity in his voice. ‘That will allow us adequate time to produce a suitable programme to cover the first few months of his... his awakening.’

Dr Takaito shook his head smugly. ‘On the contrary, the education of Soames will begin the very instant he discovers that he can see, hear, feel and smell—and those first impressions may prove to be very important.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Breuer said shortly. ‘We all appreciate that, but in the absence of
thought
... or do you not agree that to
think
without language is impossible?’

‘He already has a language of a kind—the obscure, inarticulate language of dreams.’

‘Ah!’ Breuer exclaimed triumphantly. ‘What dreams? Soames has been unconscious for thirty years, and even if he were capable of dreaming he has no store of remembered images and sounds to form a basic dream vocabulary. How can a man dream who has been deprived of all his senses from birth and is incapable of human thought?’

‘Dreams are of the subconscious,’ Dr Takaito pronounced solemnly, ‘and even in the blank vacuum of his dormant mind there must be a subtle awareness of the mute flexings of the latent forces in his body—the incessant rhythm of the heart, the flow of air in and out of the lungs as the muscles of the thorax rise and fall, the slow sensation of physical growth over the years, the attenuated hunger of the stomach for solid food, the excretory reflexes and the distinctive experience they produce, and, of course, the sex instinct itself exerting its physical pressures under the stimulus of the hormones in his blood. They are the undefined and elemental things that grope in the darkness of his sleeping mind. They are all he knows. They have been his world for thirty years.’

‘If you’re suggesting that Soames should first be psychoanalysed on Freudian lines...’ Breuer began, but Takaito shook his head briefly.

‘Not at all. I am merely trying to show that the mind of Mr Soames may not be so absolutely blank as we imagine. Our task will be not so much to create his mind as to
recreate
it—to start with the undefined sensations of his subconscious and interpret the real world in terms of them, so that he will advance step-by-step to a full understanding of his place in the pattern of life.’

Breuer stared at the Japanese doctor doubtfully. ‘Well, yes—or perhaps no. What I mean is, there’s no point in speculating at this stage, and we don’t really know whether Soames has experienced any sensations of the kind you suggest at all, do we?’ His manner became more jovial, and he refilled his glass, inviting his colleagues to do likewise, which they did with grateful alacrity. ‘Let’s get our man conscious, first, eh?’ he went on. ‘Before we can do anything we need a surgical miracle, and for that we’re all depending on you, Dr Takaito.’