Human Traces (61 page)

would hear. It was a voice, quite soft, and it was not calling her; it was engaged in conversation; it was talking to another. It was a woman's voice, low and melodic, but somehow unsettled. Sonia began to move slowly towards the sound, which seemed to be coming from the next room what had once been the scullery. She went silently to the doorway and looked in. The shutters were closed and it was hard to see at first, but then she was gradually able to make the outline of a figure: a young woman, slight, dark-haired, elegant in a white summer dress and with eyes full of laughter. She was speaking to someone who was not there. Then, aware, it seemed, of Sonia's presence, she turned towards her. For a moment, in the half-light, the two women looked into one another's eyes. Sonia thought the other woman smiled, a little. Still talking softly, she moved and walked away, through the door into what had been Grand-mere's room. Sonia waited for a moment, not sure what to do, then followed quietly; though she knew, really, what she would find when she looked into the room. There were no doors from it but the one that she herself stood in; the windows were closed, the shutters barred, and there was no one there. She returned to the parlour and stood for a moment looking up at the stained stripes of ceiling between the grey-painted beams. When her heart had resumed a normal pulse, she found a feeling of peace beginning to spread through her limbs. There was no fear, and she was content not to understand what she had seen; she was more than content: she was reassured to know that there were things that could not be explained. One last time she looked about the room, then left and locked the front door behind her. Her watch told her she had half an hour in which to get back to the pharmacy, where she had engaged the cab to return for her, but she did not want to go back just yet: she wanted to be outside, in the rain, on the earth that Jacques and Olivier had trodden as boys. So she set off towards the headland, thinking of the two brothers and their brief time of innocence together. After a minute, it was the voice of her own brother that she seemed suddenly to hear. "We must turn our lives, so near as we can manage it, day by day, into an extended rapture..." She remembered when he was a child of five or six, and if it was cold, how he would climb into bed with her: the pattern of the candle shadows on the wall, the fiery little boy who needed her arm round him to make him sleep. And now he too was gone: gone into a different world contained within this one, and she was left almost alone to carry on. The rain beat into her face, but she did not feel it; she was unaware of the wind that flattened her clothes against her. One day, when he was small, about three or four years old, she had given Daniel a bath with her; he sat at the other end of the tub describing the story that he wanted her to tell him, specifying how much of the fox and the rabbit, how much of the bear and the bird, he wanted in it, like someone ordering from a menu in a magnificent restaurant. When she had finished the prescribed story to his satisfaction, got out of the bath, dried and dressed herself, she plucked the small boy from the water and wrapped him in a towel, then carried him through to her bed. She put him gently down, then laid herself on top of him, so that her eyes were against his. She felt the thrumming of the laughter in his tiny ribcage against hers, and her soul moved within her as every cell in her body shuddered with her ravening love. And was it worth it? Was it worth the agony of loss? Was this the best that the random evolution of physical matter had thrown up? Her jaw hardened a little as she walked onward. It was enough. It was enough, because nothing in any other world that might by chance have existed could have surpassed in majesty what she had felt; and she was transfigured by that joy, always, and even beyond death. She turned to walk back towards the village, stiff with age. Beneath her clothes, her breasts hung flat against her ribs, the flesh of her upper arms was loose and the joint of her hip ached. She plodded on, an elderly Englishwoman in a foreign country, though still feeling in her mind a refusal to admit the years, aware of an appetite for whatever lay ahead, still hoping to go on. And as she walked, with the faint taste of Abbe Henri's tea in her mouth, she could feel the ghosts of her dead boys, one unborn, one killed among the mountains: they lay along her nerves like dew on morning grass. She heard Daniel's voice; she saw the flesh of his boy's arm creased by the weight of his wicker basket full of toys. The bones of his beautiful hands lived in the cells of her mind, preserved, and open to remembering. The rain was pouring from her hair; and while her eyes were fixed on the path beneath her feet, she accidentally brushed her arm against the extended twig of a larch tree rooted in the earth, which, when it rebounded, sent drops of water over her hair and face. She flinched; she was alive, and so was he. In the rain, she kissed the skin of his neck and laid the back of her hand against his cheek. "My love," she said. With difficulty, she raised her head from the path in front, her neck and shoulders seized with damp, and through the drifting columns of rain, she lifted up her eyes to the uninhabited low hills. This is what it means to be alive, she thought again; this is what it feels like to be human. There were questions to which her husband and her brother had bent their minds had sent themselves as good as mad in trying to answer; but it seemed to Sonia at that moment, drenched and tired as she was, that, perhaps for quite simple reasons connected to the limits of their ability to reason, human beings could live out their whole long life without ever knowing what sort of creatures they really were. Perhaps it did not matter; perhaps what was important was to find serenity in not knowing. Her footprints now were in the mud: left and right, the regular, shortish pace of an adult female clear marks for a moment on the earth. She watched carefully where she placed her feet, not wishing to slip and damage her brittle bones; she saw the pools of water and the white stones that punctured the dark soil ahead of her. Then the long trail of her footprints, stretching back towards the sea, became slowly indistinct as each one filled with water and edged in upon itself; and in a matter of minutes, as darkness began to fall, the shape of the foot was lost at every pace until the last vestiges of her presence were washed away, the earth closing over as though no one had passed by.

The End

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The main characters in this book are fictional, but readers might like to know that all the doctors whose work is either quoted or referred to were real people and did hold the views ascribed to them. The actual words of the lectures on hysteria and traumatic hysteria given by Professor Jean-Martin Charcot in chapters seven and eight have been invented, but they are intended to reflect accurately what Charcot taught and are based on the content of his published lectures. Professor Charcot's renown, his style of lecturing and his audience were as described here. My depiction of the Salpetriere at that time is as close to the reality as I can make it, and the various disciples of Charcot, including Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Marie and Joseph Babinski, existed as described, as did Mile Cottard and Blanche Wittmann. Of the many books on Charcot, the one on which I drew most was Charcot: Constructing Neurology by Christopher G. Goetz, Michel Bonduelle and Toby Gelfand (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and I acknowledge this debt with thanks. Throughout the novel I have aimed for factual accuracy in matters of real people, dates and so on. To this end, I enlisted the help of several specialists in their field, all of whom, I hope, are thanked below. Dr. Wilhelm Flless held the views ascribed to him on page 381 and published the book whose title is there mentioned; he was a minor but significant figure in the early days of psychoanalysis. The letter quoted on page 495 was indeed received by him on the date mentioned. Jacques Rebière's theory of psycho physical resolution, outlined in chapter ten, is intended to bear a close resemblance to that of its famous contemporary, psychoanalysis. I am indebted to The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry by Henri F. Ellenberger (Paris; New York: Basic Books, 1970) for its description of the published nineteenth-century French and German writing that could have enabled a pupil of Charcot's with an appetite to read further to develop his own theory without reference to work in Vienna. I should like to thank Richard Webster for his many stimulating thoughts, particularly on traumatic hysteria. I am also grateful to Dr. Michael Neve at the Wellcome Trust Centre for History of Medicine at University College, London for directing me to the work of Pierre Janet as providing further historical precedent for this kind of procedure outside strictly psychoanalytic circles. Readers unfamiliar with early case studies in psychoanalysis may be surprised at the flexibility of some of the logical connections made in the course of the fictional history of Fraulein Katharina von A. Those who have read these gripping documents, on the other hand, will recognise that the use of paradox is central to their method as is a willingness to move between conscious and unconscious, concealed or transparent motivation, or to invoke a mixture of the two, according to what the circumstances of the narrative appear to require. My rule of thumb in this chapter was that every leap of connection made by Jacques should have in the published literature of psychoanalysis a precedent (preferably several) that was more energetic or more fanciful. I do not think that novels should contain bibliographies, because making lists of books at the end of a work of fiction is usually an attempt to shore up a flimsy text as though all art aspired to the condition of a student essay. However, I feel that, in this instance, because I have had to draw on expert opinion to an unusual extent, I must make an exception and acknowledge a few selected people on whose work I depended. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1977) is a controversial book, sometimes referred to, with due warning lights, as a 'cult classic'. One does not have to accept all Professor Jaynes's speculations in neuro science archaeology or anthropology to be stimulated by his main thesis: that the hearing of voices was once commonplace and that the loss of the ability to hear them coincided with the generation of modern human consciousness. What Thomas Midwinter tells Hannes Regensburger in Africa is inspired by Jaynes's remarkable book as well as by Thomas's education and personal experience. For the theoretical backbone of Thomas's lecture in chapter 20, I also drew to some extent on The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (London: Bantam, 2001) by David Horrobin; and on Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought by Anne Harrington New York Princeton University Press, 1987). The latter was recommended to me by T. J. Crow, Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford University and Director of the SANE Prince of Wales Centre for Research into Schizophrenia and Depression. Professor Crow considers that the concept of the genetic predisposition to schizophrenia as a component of the variation generated in the speciation event was first introduced in his papers, "Constraints on concepts of pathogenesis; language and the speciation process as the key to the aetiology of schizophrenia' {Archives of General Psychiatry 1995, 52: 1011-1014) and "A continuum of psychosis, one human gene, and not much else the case for homogeneity' {Schizophrenia Research 1995, 17:135-145). He kindly invited me to one of his graduate seminars in Oxford and drew my attention to the quotations that I have used from the work of J. Crichton-Browne and E. E. Southard. Professor Crow's work in this field is extensive; I am indebted to it, as was David Horrobin. Oscar Baumann led expeditions to German East Africa at the times stated for the German Anti-Slavery Committee. He left a diary of his travels and an elegant, though sketchy, map. Hannes Regensburger is a fictional character, so Baumann's mention to him of a specific site is invented, though the existence of a rift valley had excited the interest of palaeontologists by this time. The actual footprints described in the novel are based on those discovered by Mary Leakey at Laetoli in 1978. Although they differ in some respects and are not in exactly the same place, I was so taken by Mary Leakey's book, written with J. M. Harris, Laetoli: A Pliocene Site in Northern Tanzania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), that I wished to include some of her detail, and I acknowledge this debt with admiration and gratitude. The site itself is hard to find and has been covered to protect it from the elements and the Masai cattle, but there is an accessible replica, cast in plaster, in the nearby Oldupai Gorge museum. (This name is more usually written "Olduvai', though local scholars assured me this was a faulty transliteration by early German visitors.) I would like also to thank Professor Michael Benton of the Department of Earth Sciences at Bristol University, Professor Jeffrey Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History. The operation described in chapter 23 was made famous by Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute in the mid 1930s. A detailed description was given in Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain by Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper (Boston: Little Brown, 1954). However, Sir Victor Horsley had undertaken similar procedures in London before the First World War, and the operation was carried out in Vienna and Zurich in the 1920s. I would like to thank Michael Powell of the National Neurological Hospital in Queen Square, London, who talked me through some aspects of brain surgery. My thanks are due to a number of other doctors and medical practitioners, notably: Lawrence Youlten, Martin Scurr, David Sturgeon, James Anderson, the late David Horrobin, Trevor Turner, Gwen Adshead, Professor Vichy Mahadevan, Professor Uta Frith and Professor Christopher Frith. The Imperial War Museum, not for the first time, was exceptionally helpful, and I must thank Dr. Roderick Suddaby, Dr. Simon Robbins, Dr. Christopher Dowling and the staff of the documents department. I am grateful to Alice Ford-Smith and other staff of the peerless Wellcome Trust Library in London, and to the National Maritime Museum, whose beautiful photograph of the City of New York took six weeks to reach me by post from Greenwich exactly the time, oddly enough, as the vessel herself took to cross the Atlantic in 1896. Other institutions which helped me were the Library of the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, London; Bethlem Royal Hospital in Kent and its archivists Patricia Allderidge and Colin Gale; Springfield Hospital in London, particularly Hazel McElligot and John Cheetham; and the public relations office of the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Books I would further like to acknowledge are: the works of Andrew Scull, particularly Masters of Bedlam (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), written with Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey; Psychiatry for the Poor by Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (London: Psychiatric Monograph Series, reprinted by Wm Dawson and Sons, 1974); A History of Psychiatry by Edward Shorter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997); Presumed Curable by Colin Gale and Robert Howard (London: Wrightson Biomedical Publishing, 2003); and Hearing Voices: A Common Human Experience by John Watkins (Melbourne: Hill of Content Press, 1998). Mapping the Mind and Consciousness by Rita Carter (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998 and 2002) are sometimes called 'laymen's' guides, but perhaps only because they are so clearly written. My thanks for help in locating source material to Kate Roach, David Loveday, Liz Sturgeon and Charlie Miller; also to Rethink, a national charity that helps those with severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, and can be found at www.rethink.org or on 0845 456 0455. For assistance in other areas, I am grateful to Andrew Ferguson and Electra May; William Sieghart; Gillon Aitken, Sue Freestone and Rachel Cugnoni. Claire Tomalin and Margot Norman made many helpful comments on an early draught of this novel. In Carinthia I was helped by Julian Turton, Olivia Seligman and Linda Hardy; in California, by Jane and Stephen Moore and by Diana Faust; in Tanzania, by Anael and Olle Moita; in Brittany, by Caroline d'Achon. I would like to thank my wife Veronica for many things, but particularly for accompanying me 3,207 feet up Echo Mountain in a rainstorm and going with me one afternoon into the remotest, trackless parts of Masai country, where the Land Rover broke down in the dark. My mother, Pamela Faulks, did not live to read this book, but convinced me many years ago that it was legitimate to have an interest in the way the mind works. The individual to whom this novel owes most is Janey Antoniou, for whose assistance this acknowledgment can be only a token of what I owe her. The Mount Lowe railway existed as described in chapter 15, and the remains of Echo Mountain House and the machinery at the top of the Incline can still be seen today if you walk up from Pasadena. The railway carried millions of visitors into the hills, but after a succession of characteristically Californian disasters, including fire, flood and bankruptcy, the entire system closed for good in 1937. They never did reach the top of Mount Lowe.