Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

*

On the whole, he seemed more comfortable with things that he claimed were wholly new to him than with things that had a flavour of the eighteenth century. Once, I made the mistake of taking him to Morden Hall Park when I needed a new lawn sprinkler from the Garden Centre there.

The sight of the big manor house — very similar in style to the Thrales’ — plunged Jack into a deep gloom. It was counterintuitive. You would have thought he’d be happiest of all on the set of a costume drama, taking tea with a lot of people in hoop skirts and britches. But not a bit of it. He was allergic to the very period he believed he belonged to.

It was as though he needed to compartmentalise his competing versions of reality. He could get very obstinate and then aggressive when his internal and external worlds came into conflict. A large instance of this was his behaviour at Gough Square; a smaller one was that I had to stop taking him to the Antelope because he kept asking the Australian barmaid for ‘shrub’ and became very strident when she told him she had no idea what he was talking about. The notion that London in 2009 was not only related to the London of 1784 but was in some ways the same city, he found extremely threatening. It was this, as much as our experience with the police, that stopped me taking him sightseeing in central London. He never even said the word ‘London’ in my hearing, but he often talked of ‘home’ and his ‘friends’, and how different life was there. And I suppose that my working assumption was that his madness or dysfunction, or whatever you want to call it, was some kind of cosmic homesickness.

I appreciate that Dr Webster would be struck by similarities between the symptoms Jack and I present. But the fact is we are very different cases. I came back to a world I largely recognised. Jack only stayed sane, I believe, by not recognising the truth about his situation.

It may seem pointless to take issue with the conceptual shortcomings of the Procedure, given that the most dangerous thing about it is the moral bankruptcy at its heart, but it has struck me many times that it uses an almost fatuously simple set of assumptions about identity. Human personalities are not stable or discrete. They’re embedded in, and constructed from, other things: history, societies, cultures, families. Nor are they unitary. Even post-Procedure, I am conscious of multiple Nicky Slopens, not to mention the residual cohabitee we have usurped.

Johnson has the best phrase for it. In one of his letters, he writes that ‘in the deaths of those close to us, the continuity of being is lacerated’. The continuity of being. The human personality is not an object, it’s a process, a constant state of becoming, that depends on a web of interdependencies, binding us to one another with invisible filaments, to our time, to memories and possessions, and back to our changing selves. And even that image probably overstates the solidity and integrity of the human personality. Strip a person away from the relationships that constitute their identity, the friends, the loved ones, the familiar sounds, and the outcome is bound to be breakdown and madness.

And at a deeper philosophical level, the wholeness the Procedure produces is not only illusory. It undersells the scope of the human by restricting it to a single unitary self. Ask Whitman. Ask Shakespeare. Ask any of the major poets. This castle is really a prison. In its dungeons and hidden chambers lie the disregarded slivers that, used right, might complete its divine intelligence. The total human being reflects back to the teeming world a radiant wholeness. No I, no not-I. From where we come from, there is no division.

*

I had promised to take Lucius and Sarah to Cornwall in the second week of their summer holidays. The date approached with alarming rapidity.

Vera had dropped off the map. I suggested to Bykov that he stay in the house in my absence. He didn’t reject the suggestion out of hand. He asked for time to consider it.

Two days later, he rang to say he’d had a better idea. He’d found Jack interim accommodation: a bedsit in a house near Streatham High Road where his landlord would be a middle-aged Pole called Tadeusz.

Both Bykov and I agreed that it would be wise to allow Jack some settling-in time before I left for Cornwall.

Tadeusz raised an eyebrow at Jack’s minimal luggage, but Bykov paid him two months’ rent in cash, while I explained that Jack would require a certain degree of attentiveness. Tadeusz was unfazed by the special demands. He was gap-toothed, religious, and had the knotty upper body of a weightlifter. He had rebuilt much of the house himself and didn’t look like the kind of person who would forget to give Jack his medicine.

*

I cycled round to check on Jack later that evening. Tadeusz had supplied him with a pile of jigsaw puzzles from a charity shop and when I peered into his room he was assembling a five-hundred-piece version of The Haywain with a look of absorption that was the nearest thing I had seen on his face to real happiness. I decided to leave him in peace.

The house seemed unbearable on my return. After ten minutes pacing restlessly, I found myself with the phone in my hand.

She answered after one ring. I’d guessed she would. This abnormal solicitude, her accessibility to me, was part of the conceit that we were both getting exactly what we wanted. ‘Nicholas?’ But the lack of the diminutive was a kind of hand-off from the start. ‘Lou and Sarah are out with friends.’

‘It’s you I wanted to speak to. I wanted to meet up,’ I said.

‘Let me have a look in my diary … When do you get back from Cornwall?’

‘I was thinking of slightly sooner. Like tonight.’

‘Tonight? It’s almost eight o’clock.’

*

My pushiness and her keenness to maintain the fiction of amicability meant that the outcome was never in doubt, but I knew that I only had so many of these before she closed herself off from me entirely. We met at Embankment — equidistant from both of us — and ended up walking to Somerset House to sit rather frigidly in the courtyard. We must have looked like a particularly poorly arranged internet date. She was wearing some striking new shoes and a tailored coat, and yet I still had the feeling that she’d dressed down for me.

‘It’s nice to see you,’ I said, with a warmth that was enough akin to desperation to make her seem uncomfortable. She smiled and shivered a little. I suggested we go inside, but she insisted she was fine.

‘So. To what do I owe this pleasure?’ she said.

‘I’m having a strange time at the moment.’

‘Of course, love. We both are. It’s going to take time.’

‘I … I had a sort of vision today of how I don’t want to end up.’

Her silence was the precise opposite of the therapeutic one that’s intended to enable self-revelation: if she gave as little encouragement as possible, perhaps I would simply stop talking of my own accord.

I asked her if she remembered the letters that Hunter had asked me to work on. She said she did.

‘They turned out to be forgeries. I didn’t mention it at the time because, because the truth is I was a little taken in by them and I felt ashamed.’

My voice trailed off. The fountains had been displaced by an exhibition of public art — big fibreglass snails behind which two small boys were playing hide and seek.

‘They’re up past their bedtime,’ said Leonora.

Trailing off, I vaulted into the deep end of my planned remarks. ‘Do you ever think we made the wrong decision?’

‘We made a decision,’ she said firmly.

‘I’m not sure I did. I think I went along with the idea that I had a choice because I didn’t want to admit that you were leaving me, but that’s what happened, and the fact is, I don’t like it. I miss the children, and I miss you. I miss being a family.’