Inglorious (8 page)

She set down her pen. She folded up the list and put it in her
pocket. Then she turned to the room. Jess’s flat was at the junction of several fields of noise; always you heard cars skimming past the front and trains hammering along at the back. Jess lived in denial of hostile elements. She didn’t care that a gas tower squatted at the windows and a nearby billboard said
Abandon Hope.
She had furnished the place with care. First she had bought up a stock of self-assembly furniture. She had fitted in a long beige sofa and some shelves. The chairs were fold-away, because the living room was so small. Jess had built-in cupboards like stowage on a boat, with novelty portholes. On the wall she had put up framed posters from exhibitions she had seen at the Tate. She had painted everything pale pink. The furniture – such as it was – had been angled carefully round the TV. The kitchen Jess had painted yellow. Everything in the kitchen was yellow: the crockery, the kettle, the washing-up bowl, the cupboards and even the fridge stood behind a yellow door. It was moving, how colour-coordinated Jess had made her flat. A Roman blind obscured the graffitiladen tracks behind, the names of taggers and the word
TEMP
. Rosa, who slept in a room at the back, woke with the early trains. She liked that, though now it was nearly winter it meant she opened her eyes before the sun rose, and lay in the darkness wondering what time it was and if she should sleep some more.
No need to complain now,
she thought,
when you
are leaving anyway. So, the cheap accommodation hasn’t suited
you! Well, now you can find some more!

TEMP
, she thought.
Temper. Temperature.
The tempo of the times. Time’s grasping temper. The temperature of the city. Was that what it meant? She couldn’t be sure.
Temptation.
The temptation to do nothing. It was heavy upon her. A few months ago she had still been industrious. She went out seeking advice from anointed experts. She had been to see Dr Kamen in September because she was concerned her mood had dipped. She wasn’t ill, she explained. She just needed something to steady her, calm her nerves.
I have undertaken a
labour.
If she was honest, she was sometimes disturbed by the intensity of her thoughts, the way they held her. She couldn’t control her obsessions. Months after leaving her job, she was still undisciplined, still quite out of sorts.
I feel myself driven
towards an end that I do not know. I have been panicked. I am
seized by the play of opposites,
she had suggested to Dr Kamen, as they sat in the small room where he worked, a room like a throat lozenge – purple walls, tapered sides. ‘You know, the usual ones, being and not being, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, the rest.’ It was nothing serious, she said, smiling in embarrassment. ‘It just stops me using my time properly. Getting on with things. Work, that sort of thing. I just walk around and read and run my overdraft closer to the limit. I make long lists of things I have to do. It’s hardly the way to use a life. Time is so short, and there I am drifting quietly, lagging out the days.’ Perhaps it wasn’t her thoughts that were the main problem. A few thoughts never harmed anyone, she added. The thing was she would try to get back to earning money and there she would be, dropped back, inert, prone, quite incapable of action. To earn was not to think, she explained. Work – the sort of work she was fitted for – and thought were, though ideally allied, not necessarily – when thought was excessive – best friends, not strictly speaking teeming with mutual amity. ‘Do you understand?’ she said to Dr Kamen. Dr Kamen said, ‘Not quite yet, but we’ll soon get to the bottom of it.’ Dr Kamen was a good doctor; Rosa had always liked him. He took her temperature, peered in her ears, made her stick out her tongue. He asked her if she had any aches or pains. He did some blood tests and said he would send them away to a lab. Then he wrote something in his notes.

Kamen told her to explain her problems as she saw them. Rosa saw them in lots of ways which never quite formed a cogent pattern, but she talked quickly, qualified herself, decided that wasn’t what she meant, began again, lost herself in tangents, dried up and stared at the rug. She thought her symptoms might be psychosomatic, she added.

‘I can’t be sure until the tests come back, but I would say you are not physically unwell,’ he said, a man with a brown beard and greying hair. He had an avuncular air, it made her submit to what he said. ‘You are young, fit, you say you exercise. You are thin and should try to eat a bit more. But the skin is healthy. The eyes are healthy. You might be a bit worn out, or agitated. Do you sleep well?’

The room they were in was tight and cramped, with a low door which you had to stoop to get through. You entered bowing and Dr Kamen bowed too. Despite his cramped quarters, Dr Kamen kept up the gravitas. He was a neat man; his beard was trimmed and his clothes were freshly ironed. He was certainly reassuring. Through the window there was a view of bricks and grey sky. They were in Kilburn, on a street of bay windows. The area was suburban without being friendly, full of the disenfranchised and uncertain. She had seen them walking outside, the minorities left to stew, piled in together, and the single mothers pushing prams in high heels, bellies out, and the truant gangs on the corners. She wondered briefly about Dr Kamen. What did he do on Sundays? Did he play cricket? Go to the pub? Not, she thought, to the church. She imagined he liked a pint. She saw him with a beer and a bag of crisps, reading the papers by a fire. She was sure he had a well-organised life. Time management, the relegation of certain things to certain parts of the day – he looked the sort. He didn’t seem troubled by global war or the rule of violence. He had crinkled eyes; his face was neither young nor old. He was easy with his gestures, self-confident but not flashy. He was a measured, contemplative man. Alert to the frailties of the human frame, of course. Quite aware of the skull beneath the skin and the rest. As a doctor you could hardly ignore it, you could hardly bury your head in myth and hope it wasn’t happening. But it didn’t stop him getting up in the mornings. He must be pragmatic, she thought, as he said, again, ‘Are you finding it hard to sleep?’

‘I don’t sleep especially well,’ she said. ‘But I never have. I
have always been a light sleeper, I mean. But I don’t have insomnia, no.’

‘Do you wake early?’ Dr Kamen was saying.

‘Yes, quite early.’

‘Do you have panic attacks, anxiety attacks, difficulty breathing?’ he said. In his hand he held a pen. He had her notes on a computer screen, her small ailments of the last decade. Sometimes she was troubled by flu and once she had turned up with bronchitis. Then he had told her to stay off work for two weeks. On his desk there was a photo of his family – a wife, three children, it looked like, but Rosa couldn’t quite make them out. Young children, she imagined, looking at the crayon drawings pinned to the wall behind his desk. A tractor. Signed Oliver.

‘No no, nothing like that,’ said Rosa. ‘I just feel a bit withdrawn.’

‘Withdrawn, you say?’ Dr Kamen looked slightly concerned.

‘There’s just something, like an unseen impediment.’

‘An impediment?’

‘A temporary something, you know, I can’t see. Some basic fact. Or a conjunction of facts. Perhaps not even facts, just things. And then some days I think that maybe this is what I’m trying to get to, this fact – or facts, this thing – or things – that would explain everything.’

‘And why do you feel that?’ said the doctor with an eyebrow raised.

‘Because …’

She stopped short, reluctant to dwell on things she didn’t understand. She was aware she seemed recalcitrant. Now they were staring at each other, and then she felt awkward and dropped her gaze. She fiddled with her nails, bit one, scratched her ear. Still Dr Kamen was waiting patiently, glancing at the screen, at his watch, clicking a pen in his hand.

‘Because, you say?’ he said finally, after the clock had scraped round a few more minutes. He wasn’t going to sit there in silence for ever.

‘I was aware I was stuck in the – you know – the rut people mention, when they’re on this subject. Eyes down. Head to the desk. Nose to the grindstone, you know. And I was angry with other people. Bystanders, all of them. Then I realised how comic it was. Quite impossible, the whole thing. But I haven’t progressed. I was trying to focus my thoughts, but I’ve found the last few months have been as confused as those that went before.’

‘Well, we all feel that,’ said Kamen, smiling. ‘Particularly after a bereavement. You are bound to feel confused, knocked back, depressed.’

He meant it was hardly a pathology, hardly deviant at all.

‘Now I feel as if everyone speaks something else, some other language,’ said Rosa. ‘I really find I can’t raise myself to the challenge. There is something I am still failing to understand. A gap. Truth.’ Kamen nodded, perhaps impatiently. It didn’t sound any better the second time. ‘Perhaps beauty,’ she said, but that didn’t go so well. Kamen wasn’t interested in Rosa’s under-cooked theories of truth and beauty, her mixture of other people’s ideas and prevailing cliché.

‘Yes?’ said the doctor, expectantly.

‘I feel as if the real world, with its laws of time and space, its economics, politics, and even morality, has dissolved. Or I have been detached from it, and have emerged somewhere – I’m not quite sure where. But really it’s much better here, on the edge. It affords quite the best view. The only problem is debt, of course. And that’s why I need to change a little, sort things out.’

He smiled. She thought it was simple enough. There must be a reason behind it all. What did she and Dr Kamen know about the order of the universe? What could they know? Everything might be preordained. It might be part of an immaculate order, impossible for them to understand. Of course as Stoicism would have it no action that befell the individual – death included – could be bad, because everything that was part of
logos
was fundamentally good. In that case, her mother’s death was part of
logos
, and her current state must also be, and who
was she to resist? If it left her quite shattered that was simply her impoverished perspective. She lacked
pneuma
perhaps, she was deficient in life force, but she was sure that things occurred for a reason. She was, she said to Dr Kamen, no Epicurean. ‘My mother disagreed,’ she added. She was explaining this to Dr Kamen, adding that they were a very primitive species, with very little to be proud of, while he nodded slightly. He wrote something down on a piece of paper.

‘I think,’ said Dr Kamen, straightening his tie, ‘you’re depressed. You should have a holiday. Go to see some friends, some good friends who cheer you up. I’m going to prescribe you some antidepressants and see if they might help you. At this stage of things you really just have to manage. If things get worse I could refer you to a psychiatrist. At present, try this course of tablets, and we’ll make another appointment soon to see how you’re getting on.’

‘Thank you very much. Very kind,’ said Rosa. He had her wrong, she was thinking. She wasn’t depressed at all. Earlier, she had been depressed. Now she woke each day at dawn; it was her excitement that was making her rise so early. That and the grinding of the trains. It was just her thoughts, she wanted to say. But Kamen had his eye on his watch, so she stood up. As she walked away, he said, ‘Don’t worry, your prince will come.’ It made her stop with her hand on the door.

‘My prince?’ she said. She thought she had heard him wrong, but he was smiling back at her.

‘Yes, your prince,’ he said. His face had wrinkled up and he meant to be kind. Like so much these days, it made her quite confused. She couldn’t think how to reply. Well, perhaps she appeared solitary to him – was it the deep lines in the centre of her brow, or something else about her all-over aspect, that made him think she was questing for love? She wanted to say ‘No, no, you’ve got me wrong, all wrong, that’s not the point at all’ but it got tangled up. She ended up blushing and backing out of the door.

Now she heard the distant chimes of a church clock. 1 p.m., and she really had to deal with the day’s events, rather than wallowing in thoughts of the past. She had three hours until her interview. She was considering the importance of living in the present when the phone rang. That made her jump and then she edged towards it. Nervously, she held her hand above the receiver. She meant to let it ring, knowing it was likely to be someone either threatening her with dissolution or offering her advice. Yet she lacked willpower. She was too lonely and eager to leave a ringing phone. There was a pause after she answered. ‘Rosa,’ said her father. ‘Rosa, how are you?’ The old rasper, on the phone again.
Good God,
thought Rosa. He wanted to mend her, with his rasping voice. It was with a thick throat that she answered.

‘Dad, hi. I was just about to call you. I did get your messages. Thanks so much. I wanted to call you when I had some news, but nothing so far has happened.’

‘Yes, yes. So what’s happening?’

‘I’m going for an interview later, then I’ll call you and let you know,’ said Rosa. Her father sniffed and paused. He was about to challenge her outright, and then he decided that being wry was best, so he said, ‘Excellent, Rosa, what is it for this time?’

‘Oh, something I’d like to do,’ she said. That wasn’t true, but she didn’t want the inevitable row. She didn’t like lying to her father. But the other option – being honest with him – was out of the question.

‘Well, you really do need to get a move on with it. Speed up a bit. So silly! Such a silly waste of your talents.’ He was still angry. But mostly he was confused.

‘Dad, the last thing I need is more speed. Everything’s fast enough already. Even today – the morning has just vanished.’

‘Vanished has it? Another day! Of course – because you don’t have a plan. Look at me. I’m retired. I woke at 7 a.m., learnt some Spanish, read an account of the fall of Berlin in 1945, took the dog for a walk, went for a Spanish lesson, and
later I’m meeting my friend Adam for lunch, playing a round of bridge with Sarah and two of my neighbours, and finishing that account of the fall of Berlin this evening. And then my doctor tells me to take it easy!’