Four Gated City (38 page)

He was a round man: round face, round head, rounding body, and the hands that go with it: sensible and confident hands. He sat in a black leather chair, his back at an angle to the window, so that its light would fall full on his visitors. The room was entirely functional. Square, white, it had a desk, a neat black leather couch, with a tartan rug folded at its foot, a couple of leather armchairs. There was no object in this room that connected with Dr Lamb as a person, except, perhaps, the rug. For the kind of room that Dr Lamb would choose, as a person, was not this room. When he put on that suit in the mornings, he put on his profession; when he came into this room, he entered the impersonal. Yet, if one could only see
them, this room’s air must be saturated, crammed, with painful and violent emotions: years, probably, of anguish and terror were concentrated in it. The walls must be sodden, vibrating with them. Emotions. But not Dr Lamb’s.

Sitting there, while Dr Lamb waited, courteously, for her to speak, she had. all at once, such an extraordinarily strong sense, of this proceeding, this process, that she was struck into silence by it. Hundreds and thousands of people, millions of them, came into this room, or others like it, to Dr Lamb, or people like him, their lives having run out into dry sand. A hundred years ago, what had they done? A hundred years hence, what would they do? In such a short space of time, this phenomenon had come into existence, Dr Lamb, who, because of several years spent taking degrees in universities and in medical schools, could sit there adjudicating, could say, this is wrong with Martha, that is wrong;
was prepared to take the responsibility
for the results of what he decided; was unmoved whether Lynda screamed that he was a devil, or that Mark said he was a decent chap. Society had willed it. Had suffered it, then: Martha, too, who was prepared to come several days a week for goodness knows how many years, and to spend every penny that she had in the bank.

If he beat his wife, or was cold to his children; if he was an arrogant man, or a humble man-it was all the same. Like a character in a play who wore a mask which said ‘I am Wisdom’, it did not matter what he was personally. If Martha decided, on the evidence on which she conducted her life outside this bleak room, that Dr Lamb was lacking in insight, or was arrogant, then in this room, this decision could mean only that she fought, resisted, her own higher self, as represented by Dr Lamb. For any emotions in this room, any attitudes, beliefs, were hers, never his. Dr Lamb might choose to sit absolutely silent for months or years; or, to give advice and direct (according to his persuasion)-but as far as he was concerned, and society too, as long as Martha reacted against him in awe or in criticism it was her own best development that she thwarted.

Yet outside this room, he might go off to a meeting of fellow practitioners where they would disagree; or might write papers for medical journals which contradicted other papers; or might not love his children, so that they became the patients of other men or women wearing masks that say: Wisdom. Truth.

Well, what was she doing here then?

Because she had nowhere else to go.

He shifted his position in his chair, and spoke. About Lynda, first, and about Mark, then about Dorothy. This was to find out if his treatment of the two sick women might have to be adapted because of Martha: or if Martha was here because of either of them.

As he talked, she noted that her attitudes to Dr Lamb became less and less objective, took on Lynda’s and Dorothy’s: she was seeing him as powerful, to be placated. With this, came resentment. By the time they had gone around to her, she noted that she was even sitting in a position which said: I am resentful, I fear you. He watched her, missing nothing.

Asked why she had come to him, she put forward the view of his profession, as she had been seeing it, only a few minutes before, and inquired if, with this attitude, he believed anything could be done for her. Now, while she had toned down, softened, out of sheer politeness, what she had been thinking, it came out aggressively enough. He listened with blandness, as if the situation she had described, extraordinary from any point of view, could have nothing to do with him.

He inquired if there was an immediate problem which brought her here.

She said it was that her mother was about to pay her a visit. Her problem was that what her intelligence said had no effect at all on her emotions. The first said that her mother deserved, at last, a pair of loving arms and someone to comfort her until she died. Her emotions put her into bed with the covers over her head, made her a creature without will or energy … well, of course, that had not been entirely true. But here she remembered Lynda’s warning and was able to keep quiet.

‘Hmmmm, ’ commented Dr Lamb.

Here he glanced at his clock, prominently in evidence. She was astounded to find that over half an hour had passed. She had another quarter of an hour.

Here Dr Lamb made a series of statements all of them to do with his particular school of thought’s approach to the human soul, with which she was bound to disagree. But of course he knew she was bound to disagree: watching, while tides of anger arose, she saw that he was choosing precisely what he said. Extremely angry, she countered what he had said with her own position. With five
minutes to go, she had talked herself into rejection of everything Dr Lamb stood for. At which he reasonably said that in that case he did not think he could help her. She reacted in a flood of being rejected, refused, turned out, which caused her to beg for another appointment at the very earliest moment. Tomorrow?

Alas no. Dr Lamb was so busy: but in two days’ time perhaps?

She left. In the taxi she noted two things. One, she was exhausted. The sudden burst of anger, so skilfully evoked by him, had drained her. She was emotionless. Second: He had not at any point not known exactly what he was doing: nor, had there been any point when she had not watched what he was doing, and understood it.

She went home to bed. She had planned for that evening some hard work, on recovering more of her past. But she did not have the energy. For weeks she had had the energy, for this hardest of all effort, had had it even when busy, worried, or
almost
incapacitated by the thought: She’s coming, she’s coming.

Yet tonight, not. Yet she knew, absolutely, without any doubt at all, that this ‘work’ was more important than anything, more important than anything Dr Lamb or anybody else could do. Yes she was committed to return to Dr Lamb.

She remained listless, merely a person who, at such and such a time, would return to Dr Lamb. She was not able to work on her past. Indeed, the person who had been able, seemed farther away.

During that hour, she talked. That was the process, the patient talked and talked, the doctor listened. The process made sense. She could understand it, not only theoretically, but out of experience. One talked, one did this or that: finally, one ‘heard’ for the first time what one’s life had been saying over and over again, in various ways, for years. One hadn’t heard before, because one had had nothing to ‘hear’ with. Living was simply a process of developing different ‘ears’, senses, with which one ‘heard’, experienced, what one couldn’t before.

Dr Lamb, then, embodied that growing principle in life which fed one, developed one, so that one had ‘ears’ where one hadn’t before?

She talked. She was emotionless. She had had no emotions since she had sat there last, two days before. When she left it was as if nothing had happened. Well, no, that was not quite true: for she had gone there-that had happened. And this process, submitting
oneself to Dr Lamb, seemed to annul the other, the work prompted by the silent watcher.

On the third occasion, she knew from the moment she sat down that Dr Lamb was trying something different from what he had done yesterday. With great skill, playing her like a fish, he brought her again and again to points where she would be angry. Watching, she avoided, fought, backed away, because more than anything else she dreaded the exhaustion that would follow. Then she cracked as she was bound to: she wept, she screamed, she shouted. He remained bland, unmoved. She crawled home, like a fly on sticky paper, and crept into bed. Now, the idea that she had once had the energy to sit in a chair and fight with her own mind, her own memory, seemed utterly ludicrous. She knew she ought not to go back to Dr Lamb. If her own self, her own self-preservation was being destroyed, then that was more important than anything, and she should stand by that.

‘Ah, ’ she remembered Lynda saying, ‘But you get sucked in.’

She rang Lynda downstairs, and asked her to come up and see her. Lynda came, in a pink dressing-gown that, as always, seemed very faintly soiled. In her hand she carried the small jewelled box, a present from Mark, in which she kept her pills.

Lynda sat in the chair. The cat, purring, jumped on her lap. Martha lay in bed, watching Lynda.

‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’ Lynda observed Martha, from her distance, shrewd, rather sour perhaps.

‘When you talked with the doctors, had psychotherapy, did it do anything for you at all?’

‘Well you learn things about yourself, I suppose.’

She did not go on. When she used that tone of voice, Martha knew it meant that one was being stupid. Lynda had come up here, she was sitting there, she was quite prepared to talk-but Martha must ask the right questions.

‘What does he do for you now then? When you go and see him?’

‘They give me pills now.’

A silence. Impasse. Lynda crooned at the cat. After a decent interval, she got up to go.

At the door she said:’ If I were you, don’t take pills, I mean, if they give you pills, don’t take them. Whatever you do.’

She left. Martha lay and thought that these two women lived on
pills, their lives were regulated by pills, and their visits to the doctors where they got prescriptions for more pills.

Of course, Lynda was paranoic: one of the doctors she had been to had said so.

Next day she said to Dr Lamb:’ Would you mind telling me what my diagnosis is? What’s wrong with me?’

‘Certainly, Mrs. Hesse, ’ he said instantly, announcing it with the willingness to come clean that was the policy of his particular sect:’ You’re manic-depressive, with schizoid tendencies.’

Now Martha suppressed a joke which she would have made had Dorothy not used it continually:’ If that’s depression, then when’s the mania?’

One of Lynda’s diagnoses (not by Dr Lamb but by another doctor) had been that she was manic-depressive with schizoid tendencies.

‘Dr Lamb, what is schizoid?’

‘Well now, that’s quite a question!’

‘Well, just a rough working definition?’

‘It doesn’t mean that you are two people.’

Doesn’t it?’

‘That’s a layman’s view of it.’

‘It would have nothing to do, for instance, with that part of me that watches all the time?’

She said this, deliberately, daring danger, listening to Lynda’s warning. She had to say it: this process, sitting here, opposite the silent listener, in this case Dr Lamb, forced you to say it, say everything. She knew now that it made no difference what resolutions she might make outside this room, not to say this and that, to be this and that: he played her like a fish. The antidote was cunning. That was Lynda’s weapon. It was not Martha’s. Cunning was the weapon of the desperate. Martha then, was not desperate?

He had picked up her fear at once, for he now said, heartily reassuring:’ Well, if it did, what of it?’

He waited for her to go on.

Deciding she would not go on, she went on:’ Dr Lamb, what words would you use to describe that, how would you put it?’

A hesitation. Now he laughed. ‘I’d rather you told me, Mrs. Hesse.’

Martha listened to the bells of warning for a moment and said:’ The best part of me. The only part that is real-that’s permanent, anyway.’

‘Ah, ’ he said, affably. ‘I see.’

He waited. It was as if gages had been flung down, the ground marked out.

She waited.

Her interview came to an end while they sat silent.

She went back home, feeling that she had betrayed herself.

She was lying on the floor, face down, the lights out, when she saw, not six inches from her face, a shoe with a foot in it. She turned over. Mark sat in the chair, the cat on his knee, watching her.

‘Well, ’ he said.

Then, as was bound to happen, for the third time in his life Mark found a woman clinging to him, ‘Save me, save me’ and again he became the all-strong, the all-consoling.

A man’s body: that country she had not been in for-four years was it?

Of course they should have done this years ago, right from the beginning. What fools they had been! (For, in this-country, where the ordinary rules of life are put aside, one says such things, pretends that the long sad affair with Patty Samuels had not been as inevitable as this was, since both belonged inside the laws of growth.)

The room was outside pain. It vibrated with shared intimacy, trust, happiness, love.

Except that somewhere in Martha sat the person who watched and waited. Oh God, if only she could kill that person, send her, it, him, away, make it silent, be able just once again to vanish entirely into this place of smooth warm bodies whose language was more beautiful and more intelligent than any other…

‘Mark, is there somebody in you who always watches what goes on, who is always apart?’

And now, a sudden tension in the loving body. After a time:’ No.’

‘Lynda said something like that, did she?’

‘Yes, I believe she did.’

So, quick, make love again, cover it all over, this moment when ordinary life came in again-forget it, quick.

‘Martha, tell me-have you always had it-the other person?’

‘Yes. And more and more.’

He comforted her. He was infinitely kind and strong.

‘Tell me, Mark, when you were a boy, were you ever with Margaret when she was ill-something like that?’

‘I don’t think my mother has ever been ill in her life.’