Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Adam Cornford. Qualifications. First classes, research fellowship at Trinity, membership of the Royal College of Physicians, psychiatric training. Few groups had ever had more academic skills than his family and Margaret’s and their Cambridge relatives. Like a number of them, like Margaret herself, he looked abnormally young for his age. He was actually forty-six, within months of Margaret’s age. His hair was fair, he was good-looking in a fashion at the same time boyish, affable and dominating. His voice, as with Austin Davidson, was light and clear.

From the beginning, he spoke unassumingly, without any affectation, but also like a man who hadn’t considered the possibility of being outfaced. Yes, he had been asked to examine Miss Ross. He ought to explain that he hadn’t been able to make as complete a psychiatric examination as he would have wished. At their first meeting, she wouldn’t communicate. We’ll come to that later, said Benskin. She did talk to you at later meetings?

To some extent, said Adam Cornford. Then he went on, stitch-and-thread through the questions, Cornford easy but conscientious, Benskin as clever, trying to smudge the qualifications down. Miss Ross was in intelligence well above the average of the population. She was not in any recognised sense psychotic. She had some marked schizoid tendencies, but not to a psychotic extent. A great many people had schizoid tendencies, including a high proportion of the most able and dutiful citizens. Those tendencies were often correlated with obsessive cleanliness and hand washing, as with Miss Ross. It was important not to be confused (Cornford threw in the aside) by professional jargon: it was useful to psychiatrists, but could mislead others. Schizophrenia was an extreme condition, which Miss Ross was nowhere near, and she was no more likely to be afflicted by it than many young women of her age.

“Nevertheless, Doctor Cornford, you would say her personality is disturbed?”

“Yes, I should say that.”

“You would say that she has a personality defect?”

“I’ve never been entirely happy about the term.”

“But, in the sense we often use it in cases such as this, it applies to her?”

“I think I can say yes.”

“She has in fact an abnormality of mind?”

“Again, in the sense the law uses that expression, I should say yes.”

All of a sudden there was a quiet-toned legal argument. Cornford had been called as a witness to the mental state of Cora Ross: he said that he could do it “in any sort of depth” only if he could discuss her relation with Miss Pateman. By permission of her lawyers, he had been able to conduct professional interviews with Kitty Pateman: who, so Cornford said, had been much more forthcoming than her partner and had given him most of the knowledge he had acquired. Wilson (this had, it was clear, been prearranged) told the judge that he welcomed Dr Cornford giving any results of his examination of Miss Pateman. The judge asked Bosanquet if he wished to raise an objection. For some moments, Bosanquet hesitated: he wasn’t spontaneous, he was hedging on protocol, it was, I thought, his first tactical mistake during the trial.

“I should like to give the defence every opportunity to establish the prisoners’ states of mind, Mr Recorder,” said the judge.

“The position is very tangled, my lord.”

“Do you really have a serious objection?”

“Perhaps I needn’t sustain it against your lordship.” Politely, not quite graciously, Bosanquet gave an acceptant smile.

Cornford had listened, he said, to both of them about their relationship. It was intense. Probably the most important relationship in either of their lives. That was certainly so with Miss Ross. She had said, in a later interview, when she was putting up less resistance, that it was all she lived for.

Benskin : I have to put this question, Doctor Cornford. This was an abnormal relationship?

Cornford, harmoniously: I shouldn’t choose to call it so myself.

Benskin : Why not?

Cornford : I don’t like the word abnormal.

Benskin : Most people know what it means.

Cornford : Most people think they do. But persons in my profession learn to doubt it. If you ask me whether there was a sexual element in the relation of Miss Ross and Miss Pateman, then the answer is, of course, yes. If you ask whether there was any direct sexual expression, then the answer is also yes.

But it was easy to misunderstand some homosexual relations, Cornford said. Persons outside thought the roles were easily defined. Often they were not. In this case Miss Ross appeared to be playing the predominantly masculine role. When that happened, it could throw a weight of guilt upon the other partner: for Miss Pateman was behaving like a woman, without the full satisfactions, without the children, that in her feminine role she was ready to demand. That might be particularly true of her, because in her family the women seemed to be expected to be submissively feminine, more than ordinarily so (was that the total truth? had Cornford had any insight into Mrs Pateman?). Perhaps that was why she had sought a relation with a woman — so as to be feminine, and rebel against males, at one and the same time. But in doing so, she took upon herself more guilt, more a sense of loss and strangeness, than Miss Ross.

For Miss Ross had lived an isolated life, without those intense family pressures. Her father had deserted her mother, her mother had died young. She had been supported by an uncle. In adolescence she had been somewhere near, without being part of, a circle without many constraints. They were committed to a creed of personal freedom. She had made acquaintances there, but not close contacts. Perhaps she was too indrawn a character, or perhaps she was already finding it necessary to make a masculine compensation.

She had, said Cornford, an unusual degree of immaturity. For example, she preserved every scrap of printed matter — programmes of cinema shows they had attended together, even bus tickets — relating to Miss Pateman. That sometimes happened in an intense relation, but he had never seen it carried to this extent. She had drawers full of objects which Miss Pateman had touched, including handkerchiefs and sheets.

In a different fashion, Miss Pateman showed her own, not quite so unusual, signs of immaturity. She kept up a large collection of dolls, and apparently took one or two with her whenever she left home.

Through the questions and answers — Benskin was skilfully feeding him — Cornford, unflustered, equable, drew his psychological profiles. It sounded, to listeners in court not used to this kind of analysis, strangely abstract, a dimension away from the two women’s bodies in the dock. Several times, in the midst of the articulate, lucid replies, I glanced at them. Cora had her head thrown back, almost for the first time in the trial. So far as she was showing emotion, it looked something like pride: but beside her Kitty was frowning, her face crumpled with anger, her eyes sunk and glittering, as in a patient with a wasting disease, when the skin is bronzing and the eyes sinking in.

Benskin Q, Cornford A. The two young women found each other, they responded to complementary needs, they were driven to escape from unsatisfactory environments. Very soon they began to live in a private world. A private world with their own games, rules, fancies. That was very common in many intense relationships. It was part of a good many marriages. It could be a valuable part. The married couple got great exaltation from living in a world made for two. This happened frequently in intense homosexual relationships. Sometimes it gave them unusual depth and strength. But it had dangers, if the relationship was overloaded with guilt. As in the case of Miss Ross and Miss Pateman. When there was a component of bad sex rather than good sex. When the sexual expression was not full or free or sufficient in itself. That needn’t happen in a homosexual relation: far more often than not it didn’t: very occasionally it did. It was rarer, but not unknown, in heterosexual relations also.