Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell

“You are, you are, I promise you, Violet.”

“But when it all comes back, I’ll be one of — hundreds?”

“Perhaps it won’t come back.”

“When it does, will you want to be my friend?”

“I am sure I will.”

“But she won’t.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes. I saw her both of the times she came to see you. I was the one who took her in to you, and showed her the way and everything. That was when I was being co-operative and amenable.”

“She is very attractive. He has good taste, the Professor has.”

“Is she what you would choose now, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind at all if I could just go off with her as if I had just met her.”

“But you have only just met her.”

“I know when I’m with her that she is telling me the truth. She hates me, you see.”

“Yes, she does. But it’s not you she hates so much. She hates her life.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes. I saw her face. I took a good close look, both times. I knew what she was feeling.”

“Tell me then.”

“She’s like my mother.”

“But perhaps everyone is?”

“No. Because if that is true it means you are like my father, and you aren’t, you aren’t, you aren’t.”

“Don’t cry then.”

“I don’t cry. Never . Or if I do, it isn’t me that’s crying. I can watch myself cry — it’s not worth anything, not like real sorrow … she was crying like anything last time.”

“They say I lost my memory because I feel guilty.”

“Do you?”

“I think I feel guilty because I lost my memory. I do feel very deeply indeed that it is irresponsible to lose one’s memory.”

“If you feel that, you haven’t lost your memory, but you have only lost some facts, some events.”

“Oh yes, I do tell myself that. But there’s something else. Yes. There’s something I have to remember. I have to.”

“But don’t get excited, it makes it worse.”

“I’ve been here over two months, Violet.”

“Don’t let them send you to that place. Don’t.”

“But if I refuse to go, they say I’ll have to have shock.”

Both of them, the middle-aged man and the pretty girl, turned to look at a person, a woman, who sat in a chair a few feet away, watching the television. The programme had at last started. Then they looked at another person, a middle-aged man, and then at another, and so on, around the room. The people their glances were isolating in this way had had shock treatments, or were in the course of having them.

There was no method of treatment that caused more emotion in the wards, more fear. Yet of the people in that room, more than half had had the electric current switched through their brains. Although some of the new drugs that were being used were as powerful as electric shocks, and although as little was known about their effects as was known about shock treatment, these new drugs did not provoke nearly as much fearful comment and speculation.

“Brian Smith says he knows to a week when he is going to have to come in and have another set of shocks,” she said.

“Mrs. Jones told me she couldn’t bear the thought of living without them,” he agreed.

There was a considerable silence.

“Roger is going out next week,” she said at last. “He says he will be looking for a flat to share. He says we can go and live with him if we like, until we find a place of our own.”

“Oh good. That’s very kind. Yes, I’m sure that would be the best thing for both of us.”

Well now Professor.

Well now Doctor Y?

I’ve got you another two weeks. But it wasn’t easy and I am afraid it’s the last extension possible. It would be so much easier if you didn’t show your dislike of Doctor X so strongly. It is quite irrational you know. I understand that among the patients I’m a goody and he is a baddy. It’s like schoolchildren.

I don’t dislike him.

But you never say a word to him.

There is nothing I can say. He’s not there.

Well, well.

Doctor Y, have you thought at all of what I suggested?

Oh, come now, Professor!

I’d look after her. You don’t imagine … I understand her. All she needs is to be allowed to behave like a little girl.

You fancy yourself as a nursery maid?

Or as her father.

It doesn’t matter what I think, anyway. It wouldn’t be possible. She has two fathers, two mothers, three sisters and a brother. As I know to my sorrow.

But it’s not illegal?

No. But you’d find the whole lot buzzing around you day and night. No, it’s better she stays here where she is allowed to be a little girl without the benefit of her relations.

It is very strange to me, Doctor Y. You say you’d be delighted if I went to stay with Miles Bovey. Or with Rosemary Baines.

Both have said they’d be happy to have you stay with them as long as it would help. Mr. Bovey has a cottage in Wales, he says. It would be quiet for you. And Miss Baines sounds a reasonable type of woman.

And yet I don’t know either of them.

You said you did remember wandering around by yourself that night when you got to Miss Baines?

A little. Not much. It isn’t the wandering around that is the point. No. The point is — there was something I had to remember. Have to remember. I know that. I was looking for something. Somebody.

Yourself?

Words. That’s a word. To you that means one thing, but it’s different to me.

You think you’ll remember if you share a flat with Violet?

I don’t know. But you see, she’s now —do you understand? She’s not like a person in a dream. She can’t suddenly turn into something else— and make up a past for me .

I don’t think either Miles Bovey or Miss Baines would make up a past for you. And above all, it wouldn’t be an emotional pressure, as it might be if you went home too soon.

I don’t know why I can never make you understand. I can get Violet to understand everything I say.

Are you sure she’s not behaving as a small girl would — playing at grownups?

I am sure sometimes, yes. But she is not just a small girl, Doctor Y. Emotionally yes, of course. But in other ways she understands things you don’t.

Well, I’m sorry. What do you want me to do? I can say to you that I agree it might help both you and Violet to spend a period of convalescence together. I could say that. But I am sure there would be other opinions. Not least from her parents. All four of them.

She’s twenty-one.

Legally.

So that’s that.

If you and Violet left tomorrow and set up a ménage together you wouldn’t be stopped physically. But I guarantee she’d come running back to us inside a week.

To be protected from me?

From her feelings about you, first of all. And mostly because of her family.

But why should they know?

It’s extremely easy to find out where people are these days. There is an industry to do just that.

All right Doctor. Then I have one choice the less. And the one that I’ll end up with is my wife and family.

In the end, yes. Because that’s where you belong.

Tell me, was there a point in your life that was a real turning point? You could have chosen to do something else?

No, I think my life has been pretty mapped out for me by circumstances.

But when you think of yourself, you don’t think of yourself as your circumstances, surely.

I could have done other things, of course. But I’ve been the same person.

Then why do I have to be Professor Thingabob? And I’m not Felicity’s husband and the father of James and Philip. Suppose I had gone back to Yugoslavia after the war and married Vera? She was Konstantina’s close friend.