Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (33 page)

The Professor, an agreeable, smiling, middle-aged man with distinguished greying hair and kindly blue eyes, took the girl’s hand in his, and said: “I’m sorry if you are upset.
But I do feel a bit at a loss. For one thing, they won’t hear of our sharing a flat. But I suppose it was unrealistic.”

“It was only unrealistic because we didn’t insist on it. What am I going to do now? Where shall I go? I don’t have anybody.”

“Well, if as I hope I do remember, then I’ll be well and you can come and stay a while with Felicity and myself and the children.”

There was a furious silence.

Then he said: “I’m sorry. I know that that is dishonest. Or it could be. But I suppose if I am Professor Thingabob and I have a home then I can have people to stay?”

“You’ve settled for that. Why, why, why?”

The Professor examined the two sleeping men in the beds opposite him, and then the man on the same side of the room as himself who sat straight up in bed, smiling with pleasure, and sometimes laughing a little out loud, as he listened to the radio programme.

The Professor said: “There’s only one thing they all seem to agree on. It is that the electric shock might jolt me into remembering.”

“Yes and it might not. You know as well as I do what some of them get like. They’re like shadows. They’re like zombies. It isn’t as if you haven’t seen what happens.”

“But some are perfectly all right and they improve.”

“But you are taking the chance.”

Feet were coming along the passage to this room, and a cheerful voice was saying Goodnight, Goodnight, Goodnight, and lights were going out in the wards off the passage.

“But supposing I remember what I want to remember?
They take it for granted that I’ll remember what they want me to remember. And it’s desperately urgent that I should remember, I do know that. It’s all timing, you see. I know that, too. It’s the stars in their courses. The time and the place. I was thinking and thinking … I lay awake last night and the night before that and the night before that … I was working something out. Why do I have this sense of urgency? It’s familiar. It’s not something I’ve had only since I lost my memory. No. I had it before. Now I think I know what it is. And not only that. There are lots of things in our ordinary life that are—shadows. Like coincidences, or dreaming, the kinds of things that are an angle to ordinary life, do you follow me, Violet?”

She nodded. Her sad woman’s eyes were looking towards the door, where the nurse would stand in a few moments. This was the last ward of this set of wards.

“The important thing is this—to remember that some things reach out to us from that level of living, to here. Anxiety is one. The sense of urgency. Oh, they make an illness of it, they charm it away with their magic drugs. But it isn’t for nothing. It isn’t unconnected.
They
say, “an anxiety state,” as they say, paranoia, but all these things, they have a meaning, they are reflections from that other part of ourselves, and that part of ourselves knows things we don’t know.”

“Well now,” said the nurse, arriving, and seeing the man and the girl in bedtime chat. “It’s time you were in bed and asleep Miss Stoke.”

“I’m just going,” said Violet, instantly transformed into a sulking three-year-old.

The nurse was turning off the ward’s central lights.

“My sense of urgency is very simple,” said the Professor. “I’ve remembered that much. It’s because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that’s what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand to mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else before they die—and so the mental hospitals are full and the chemists flourishing.”

“Would you like a sleeping pill, Professor?”

“No thank you, Nurse.”

“And I must remind you not to eat anything in the morning, please. You’ll have your breakfast after your treatment.”

“I’ll turn out the light in just a minute. Can I?” demanded the girl peremptorily, all flashing eyes and pouting lips, trying out her three-year-old powers.

“All right, Miss Stoke. But please, the Professor needs his sleep tonight, and so do you, dear.”

She went out. “Dear yourself,” muttered the girl.

The two now sat close, in a half dark. The man sitting up listening to the radio laughed out loud, held his breath in anticipation of an expected joke, and laughed again.

“So that’s why, you see, Violet. The shock might shock me into remembering what it is that I know is there, the shadow I can see out of the corner of my eye.”

“But it might turn out to be just that—you are Professor Charles Watkins?”

“I know I am taking a chance. I know that very well. Perhaps the shock will make me forget what I already know. That I should be living quite differently.”

“Yes, but how, we all say that, we do keep saying that, I know that is the point of everything, but how?”

“There’s something I have to reach. I have to tell people. People don’t know it but it is as if they are living in a poisoned air. They are not awake. They’ve been knocked on the head, long ago, and they don’t know that is why they are living like zombies and killing each other.”

“Like Eliza Frensham after a shock.”

“Or like me, tomorrow, after mine. Yes I know.”

“But how can we be different? How can we get out? If you find out, will you come and take me with you?”

“It’s all timing, you see. Sometimes it is easier for us to get out than other times.…”

“Miss Stoke!” said the nurse from the door.

“Coming,” said the girl. “I said I was coming and I am. Right?”

She slipped off the bed and stood close to the elderly man’s pillow.

“There are people in the world all the time who know,” the Professor said. “But they keep quiet. They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the trap. And then, for the ones who have got out, it’s like coming around from chloroform. They realise that all their lives they’ve been asleep and dreaming. And then it’s their turn to learn the rules and the timing. And they become the ones to live quietly in the world, just as human beings might if there were only a few human beings on a planet that had monkeys
on it for inhabitants, but the monkeys had the possibility of learning to think like human beings. But in the poor sad monkeys’ damaged brains there’s a knowledge half buried. They sometimes think that if they only knew how, if only they could remember properly, then they could get out of the trap, they could stop being zombies. It’s something like that Violet. And I’ve got to take the chance.”

“I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow morning.”

“Goodnight my dear.”

“Goodnight Charles.”

“Goodnight Professor.”

“Goodnight Nurse.”

OH MY DEAR DEAR CHARLES
,

Doctor Y telephoned me to say you are yourself again. I’m coming up to fetch you on Thursday. Oh my dear dear dear dearest darling Charles. And the boys are so happy and so looking forward. I can’t write … this is just to say I’ll be there on Thursday at four with the car.

FELICITY

DEAR CHARLES
,

Felicity tells me you are restored to yourself. It goes without saying that I’m delighted. I had planned to give the series of lectures you had engaged for this term—as well as holding the fort for you in various other
directions. But I’m only too delighted to hand back the responsibility to you. The first is The Homeric Epithet, Part I, The Iliad. It is on Monday week. If you don’t feel up to it, never mind. Please let me know.

JEREMY

DEAR JEREMY
,

Thank you for everything. I’m sorry I’ve been such a bore. I seem to be in full possession of my faculties again. I do remember all about the lecture series. I feel quite well enough to undertake them.

Yours,
CHARLES

DEAR MILES
,

I have to thank you for your very kind interest while I was ill. But I am better again. Are you thinking of coming up to London at all this winter? If so we could have a meal? Do let me know if you are. Or a family weekend in Cambridge?

Yours,
CHARLES

DEAR MISS BAINES
,

I am sure you will be pleased to hear that I am fully recovered again, and so expect not to be such a burden on your continuing kind interest. Incidentally, I have to thank you for your patience on the night when I inflicted myself on you in what was an unforgivable
way. Please apologise on my behalf to Mr. Larson. As I shall be back in Cambridge and extremely busy I am afraid I shall not be able to accept your very kind invitation to dinner.

Yours sincerely,

CHARLES WATKINS

AFTERWORD, OR END-PAPER

A SMALL, RELEVANT REMINISCENCE

Some years ago I wrote a story for a film. This story was the result of a close friendship with a man whose senses were different from the normal person’s.

BLAKE ASKS:

How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way
,

Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?

To know very well, and for a long time, a person who experiences everything differently from “normal” people, poses the same question.

The point of this film was that the hero’s or protagonist’s extra sensitivity and perception must be a handicap in a society organised as ours is, to favour the conforming, the average, the obedient.

The script was shown to various film-makers, several of whom toyed lengthily with the idea of doing it—as is the way of that industry, but they all asked the same question: What is wrong with the man in the film?

Now, it had not occurred to me to think of that before, partly because to my mind the way I had written the thing made the question irrelevant, and partly because, in life, the original of the hero, or main character, had been diagnosed by the medical profession so variously and contradictorily for so many years, that thinking on these lines seemed unhelpful.

Also, one has to be particularly trained to believe that to put a label on a feeling, a state of mind, a thing—to find a set of words or a phrase; in short, to describe it—is the same as understanding and experiencing it. Such a training is the education obligatory in our schools, the larger part of which education is devoted to teaching children how to use labels, to choose words, to define.

I thought of something to do. I sent the script to two doctors. One was the Consultant Psychiatrist at a teaching hospital attached to a large university—a man who trained future doctors and who treated patients. The other was a neurologist working at a large London teaching hospital, who had a Harley Street practice.

In short, these were men at the head of their profession.

I asked them to read the script and to tell me what was wrong with the man, as dispassionately as if he were a patient coming to their consulting rooms or outpatient departments.

They were kind enough to do so, taking trouble over it, and time.

But their skilled and compassionate diagnoses, while authoritative, were quite different from each other’s. They agreed about nothing at all.