Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

If I’m doubtful about Dr Webster’s abilities, perhaps it’s because of this: my recollection of Vera that afternoon. Her capacity for empathy was astonishing, and I don’t mean to diminish it in any way when I locate its source in her consciousness of her own odd physical appearance. To be listened to in the way Vera listened to me then was a profound and redeeming experience. I began by telling her about the immediate crisis: the loss of Leonora and my family. There was something active and almost physical about her mode of attention. She seemed to draw my story out of me with a hypnotic softness. The scope of our conversation widened: Ron, Lucius, Sarah; and the bereavements that had blighted my adolescence and youth.

And yet she didn’t just listen in a validating silence. She probed, questioned, was sceptical about some of my conclusions. I remember, in particular, her insights about my relationship to Ron. I found myself drunkenly reciting my usual litany of his virtues: his omnivalent curiosity, his spirit of humane endeavour, his generosity towards those he taught . I waited for her approval, her sympathy. Rather coldly, she said it sounded like an obituary. ‘Perhaps this is significant,’ she said.

I asked why.

‘From the moment of your severance, he was dead to you.’

‘I know, it was awful.’

‘It was intolerable,’ she agreed, ‘because it fulfilled your deepest, most guilty wish.’

I looked at her with some perplexity.

‘Think of Hamlet,’ she went on. ‘What appals him is not the terrible death of his father, but a guilty glimpse of the dark part of him that willed it.’

I tried to pooh-pooh the suggestion, telling her that I too had read Ernest Jones’s essay on the play, but she waved my objections aside. ‘Harbottle and you were not mentor and disciple, you were father and son, with all the shades of Sophocles that entails. You resented the joint authorship. The bulk of the work was done by you. And on a psychic level, you wished him dead. Long before Tilda Swann, you wanted to usurp his throne. But when he — as it were — took his own life, the guilt almost destroyed you.’

The barman darted inscrutable glances at us from his station. From time to time, Vera would go outside to smoke, and I would sway to the Gents and encounter the wondering eyes of my unsteady reflection in the mirror. Every time I came back, Vera seemed more lovely; her eyes behind their thickly made-up lashes tender with sympathy, her broad mouth with its liverish lipstick, the touch of her gloved hand on my knee fierce and protective like the raised wing of a mother swan. The waitress silently renewed the empty bottle and brought the calamari that Vera insisted I eat to temper the alcohol. And, for what felt like the first time in my life, I tasted the joy of self-revelation to a compassionate intelligence, of constructing a workable self out of all the dissonant parts of me: a transaction that eerily foreshadowed the Procedure.

*

We returned to the St James’s Square mansion together. I babbled about Johnson, recalling the nights he had spent with Savage in this very square, railing against the hardships of a writer’s life. We had linked arms and she watched me in silence, with her all-seeing, all-forgiving smile.

Our first kiss was of an extraordinary, breathless intensity. I remember the leather calliper she wore on her crooked leg. I remember her womanly shape and her skin which smelled of rose petals. I remember calling her name in the darkness.

She woke me up gently just after 4 a.m. There was birdsong in the square. ‘You must go,’ she said. She came downstairs in her dressing gown to let me out. I paused in the hallway.

‘I feel I should say something,’ I said.

‘We are both terribly lonely, Nicholas.’ Her voice was deep from sleep and cigarettes, and her rumpled face looked almost monkey-like under her tangled hair.

‘About Jack …’

‘Things will go on much as they always have,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Nicholas.’

I bent down to kiss her and she pecked me on the cheek.

Later that morning, I sent her a rather perfunctory text. I was taken aback by the turn of events and it seemed easier to behave as though it hadn’t happened. I knew it wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t feel she could expect much else from me.

There was a new orderly handing out the evening medication last night and I managed to palm my sedative. I’m sick of this chemically aided sleep that deprives me of my dreams. For a while I lay awake, listening to the noises of the ward: shoes squeaking on the lino, trolley wheels, snoring, shrieks and howls. Someone — surely Caiaphas, our resident Jehovah’s Witness? — cried out: ‘Forgive him, Jesus!’ Someone else laughed. Then it began to rain outside. There was a subtle change of pressure inside the unit. The soul quickens in the aftermath of rain: an inkling of redemption. All the lost children in this place. Their unbearable sadness. At least I had … What did I have?

The dreams when they came were almost intolerable: a hideous mish-mash of Nicky’s and his , and a flashback to the Procedure itself. The awful intensity of it, the redness of everything, that bucket with its unspeakable contents.

Caiaphas yesterday with his Watchtowers : ‘God has a plan for you too, Nicholas!’

*

Every July, as one cohort finished its exams and moved off into the world, the university opened its doors to the summer students. I was predictably contemptuous of them — tourists, dabblers — when I started teaching at the summer school five years ago, but by selling six weeks of my holiday, I could earn an unignorable six grand. Then I began to enjoy it. I liked the older, widely read enthusiasts whom the school attracted. They wanted exactly the kind of unfashionable courses on Jane Austen, or eighteenth-century poetry, that had fallen out of favour with the faculty. I looked forward to teaching them. And in the summer after Leonora left, the contact with my students restored a sense of balance to my life. We mixed the classes up with theatre visits and sightseeing: Chawton, Stratford-upon-Avon, Richmond. One of my students, a man from Iowa, was ninety-seven years old, and had been stationed in London during the war. He walked unsteadily on and off the bus himself, unaided, followed by his grey-haired children. Through the eyes of the visitors, London recovered some of its charm for me.

In my free time, I worked on a paper I’d been invited to give at a conference in Italy about methodological issues raised by the late letters. On July 18th, a Saturday, I flew to Florence.

Italy was, initially anyway, a restorative. They’d put us in university accommodation, but we were near enough to the city to walk in. I was a guest of honour at the dinner on the first night. We ate and drank like Borgias. Best of all was being with my peers in academia. I had a taste of camaraderie.

The second night, Erik Betsen, Saul Lumsdaine, Horst Schnittingen and myself went out to get bistecca — that huge Florentine cut of meat the size of an Old Testament sacrifice. We resembled rowdy middle-aged brothers. Saul was the provocateur: teasing us, goading us to drink more. Erik was reading a paper the next day, so Saul, Horst and I ended the evening together, wandering drunkenly around the streets by the Duomo, whose lamplit marble facade looked as though it was made out of peppermints. It was a weeknight but high season, and the place was jammed with tourists and language students and hawkers selling knock-off designer handbags on the street corners.

Saul and Horst are both divorced. Saul’s first marriage ended years ago. He is in his late fifties now and shamelessly cohabiting with a former student in Boston. He was gratifyingly effusive about the Letters and my satire book. Loosened up by his praise, I found myself confessing some of my involvement with Hunter. Horst had disappeared into a back alley to pee. ‘When did he get in touch?’ Saul asked. I told him it had been in April. ‘He tried me first!’ he said with a note of triumph.