MARCH HOUSE Read online

  ‘There’s blood on your carpet,’ I said to Miss Maud. ‘Shall I sponge it? The stain won’t come out once it dries.’

  I went into the corridor. Dr. Laver must have taken Stewart to the downstairs lavatory; I could hear him saying, ‘Not what I call full-bodied, mind you, but a good colour nevertheless.’ He fitted into the house much better than Stewart. If I had never met him before I would not have been surprised if Miss Maud had introduced him as a distant relative or even the brother who had gone abroad. I made my way to the kitchen where I found a grimy cloth in the sink and wetted it under the tap. When I returned to the drawing¬room the cat was sitting on the trolley licking the top of the chocolate cake while Miss Maud caressed its head. ‘His name is Pewter,’ she said. She watched me for a moment or two and then said crossly, ‘Do you usually insist on doing the cleaning when you come to tea?’

  I reflected on this for a moment and then replied, ‘I thought perhaps the sight of blood might upset Bridget.’

  There was a prolonged scuffle and a lot of squawking in the corridor and Dr. Laver came in carrying a scrawny hen, followed by Stewart looking pale with his handkerchief tied round his hand and feathers on his coat sleeve. The cat and the hen were obviously old enemies and while Dr. Laver and Miss Maud contrived to keep them apart, we made our farewells and departed.

  ‘What an extraordinary man!’ Stewart said as soon as we were out of the front door. I did not comment on this because Dr. Laver had not seemed as extraordinary in that house as he had done at the clinic. ‘Wherever did he come from? I’ve never seen him before, and he’s hardly the sort of person one would overlook.’

  There was no sign of a car and the country buses did not run on Sunday afternoon.

  Stewart said, ‘He’s no more a doctor than I am! What doctor would wear a suit and a shirt like that? Do you think we should tell the police?’

  ‘He only came for eggs.’

  We walked the length of the field in silence, throwing long shadows across the grass. I knew that I should explain to Stewart about Dr. Laver but I could not bring myself to do it. My parents had been to March House in the past and now my father had encountered Dr. Laver. I wanted the unreal world of the clinic and the real world of my home to remain in their separate compartments. Beyond the field, the footpath turned sharply to the right and traversed a field of oats. Mill House slipped out of sight.

  Chapter Seven

  Iris, Douglas and Di were having an informal meeting in my room. Earlier in the week they had decided to reject hypnotism and now they were trying to marshall the arguments they would shortly present to Dr. Laver.

  ‘I don’t have to be hypnotised,’ Di said. ‘I know what he’s going to say about me without that.’

  ‘You are going to be the one who says it.’ Iris assumed the role of Devil’s Advocate automatically; then, recovering herself, added, ‘Or so I understand it.’

  ‘I’ll say what he’s fed into me,’ Di rephrased obligingly.

  ‘It won’t be fed into you, Di. Something which is already within you will be revealed.’ Iris was standing by the mantelshelf staring in the mirror, whether at herself or at Di it was hard to tell.

  Di said, ‘I’m not revealing anything to him. He’s kinky, with those cut-glass eyes.’

  ‘In what way do you mean “kinky”?’ Iris turned her head slightly, definitely looking at Di now. Douglas looked at her, too. He had become very prickly since his liaison with Eddie.

  Di brooded. I could understand her problem. Since she had worked at the clinic so many things she had thought to be kinky had been judged acceptable that she was finding it hard to come up with something that Iris and Douglas would find impressive. ‘I’ve known lots of fellows,’ she said, unwittingly playing her strongest card. ‘And this one’s kinky.’

  Iris looked gravely in the mirror. After a moment, she raised her hands and folded them over her head so that the cloud of white hair was almost eliminated.

  Di said, ‘Anyway, anything I revealed would be pretty crude.’

  Douglas said, ‘The subconscious is crude.’

  ‘But this isn’t the subconscious.’ Iris tilted her head, glancing at the mirror image at that angle where one has the illusion of catching it unawares. ‘It is a rediscovery of one’s past self.’

  ‘I’ve spent the last year trying to get away from my past,’ Douglas retorted. ‘He can hypnotise the clients if he wants to, but he’s not going to hypnotise me.’

  ‘How could we justify that?’ Iris asked the mirror. ‘Our clients are encouraged to examine things in themselves which they will find disturbing, so shouldn’t we be prepared to do the same?’

  ‘More and more I am coming to subscribe to the “tea and sympathy” school of therapy.’

  ‘Why worry about the clients?’ Di asked. ‘The poor sods never get to see the psychiatrist.’

  Iris smiled and the woman in the mirror smiled back. Douglas said, ‘Now that Dr. Laver is here it will be different.’

  ‘He hasn’t seen many clients so far, has he? If you ask me, he’s more interested in us than the clients.’

  Iris looked dubiously at the woman in the mirror. Something, some trick of light and shade, had disturbed her; or perhaps it was that she had looked so long that the image had ceased to seem familiar, just as one can sometimes be struck by the strangeness of a familiar word.

  ‘What do you think about all this, Ruth?’ Di asked.

  ‘I agree with the tea and sympathy idea. In fact, I plan to leave here and run a teashop.’ The disquiet which I sensed in Iris was affecting me.

  ‘You mean you would get more of a kick running a teashop than working here?’ Douglas seemed glad to welcome distraction.

  ‘I’d make my own bread and lots of different jams. And I’d make muffins, too; everyone talks of muffins as though they’d gone out with the Great Auk, but why shouldn’t we have muffins again in England?’

  ‘Why not, indeed,’ Douglas murmured. ‘Will you perform this service to the nation on your own, or will you bring back holy matrimony along with muffins?’

  ‘My husband will run the local pub; not the big one with ivy growing over the stone walls and the cobbled carriageway and horse brasses and genuine thirteenth century wood beams; the one at the unfashionable end of the high street with a piano in the back room and linoleum on the floor and a picture of the local fire brigade on their 1911 engine.’

  ‘Very dull,’ Douglas said.

  ‘Stimulating, articulate people will be regarded with suspicion and at the first whiff of culture they will be asked to leave.’

  Iris said, ‘Once, a long time ago, I wanted to be a missionary.’

  There was a startled silence, then Di said, ‘What would you have used for God?’

  Iris turned away from the mirror. ‘It was a long time ago.’ She seemed as startled by the revelation as we were.

  I was glad when Dr. Laver buzzed on the intercom, and asked me to come into his room.

  He was sitting at his desk going through the register. He had been doing this for several weeks now, but little seemed to have come of it. He was still wearing the same suit and shirt and I began to wonder whether he was inextricably built into them and unable to step free.

  ‘I have been studying the register and the case histories,’ he said.

  This seemed too self-evident to warrant a reply.

  ‘Who is responsible for accepting the clients?’ he asked.

  ‘Iris.’

  He made a face and I said, ‘The clinic would have closed if it hadn’t been for Iris. She has kept it going by sheer strength of will.’

  ‘You think well of Iris?’

  ‘I think she is very able.’

  ‘Rather lukewarm praise.’

  ‘She has a lot of courage and she is very ambitious, not just for herself, but for women generally. In another age she would have been a suffragette and enjoyed going to prison. In a way, she’s missed her period.’

  ‘What nonsense
you do talk!’ He looked sour. I had noted before that praise of other people, however lukewarm, did not please him. ‘In an earlier age, Iris would have been mother of a large family of boys and her only rebellion would have been keeping a diary. Very few people break out of the patterns of the past. You, for example, would be looking after your sick mother and then your sick father and then you’d find another sick relative to look after.’

  ‘I don’t see myself as a downtrodden female.’

  ‘How do you see yourself? A loner, perhaps?’

  ‘No. That’s just as bad.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’m me. And before you laugh—what about the way you talked to Iris about the language in her reports? I don’t like your language. You always talk about people as specimens, loner, isolate, middle class. I don’t see myself that way.’

  ‘How would you describe yourself?’

  ‘Someone who likes to find her own way . . .’

  ‘Inexact as well as being a delusion.’

  ‘Because it’s inexact it allows for complexity and contradiction, growth and change. But “loner” is something that types a person for ever; they spend the rest of their life living up to it—like “rebel”.’

  ‘The delusion is what principally worries me. It is impossible for anyone to find their own way. We are all born into a way of life—even you, Ruth, had a mother and father, a family group; you went to school and began to see yourself as part of a larger group. Or, at least, that is what should have happened. But it seems to me that even for an only child you are very resistant to seeing beyond the family group.’

  I wanted to strike back, to tell him that when I came into the room I had thought he was the prisoner of his suit and shirt. But I was inhibited by the memory of our meeting at Miss Maud’s to which he had never referred. He had seen me with my father. I did not want the two worlds to mingle. So I tried to be conciliatory.

  ‘I expect you are right,’ I said, and then made one of those Freudian errors. ‘It’s just that none of this psychological, sociological talk seems real to me.’

  He homed in on target. ‘What do you mean by this distinction between the real and the unreal? Do you, for example, subscribe to the silly notion that a collier’s life is more real than an Oxford don’s? All people’s lives are real or unreal, take your choice which, but they’re all the same. And the things which happen to people are either real or unreal, even their dreams.’

  ‘Bugger their dreams!’

  ‘Now, there’s a nice bit of the real coming out in you.’

  The door opened and Douglas came in. ‘Are you ready for us?’ he asked. Iris was standing thrustfully behind him. They came in without waiting for an answer. Di was the last; she had the look she often had at case conferences, as though her desirable body was an embarrassment and she was not sure what to do with it. I was comforted by this, because it was familiar; Di had not changed, but I was not sure of the other two.

  After they had seated themselves there was silence. This was a technique which both Iris and Douglas had employed successfully in the past. It did not work in this case. Silence was a vacuum which Dr. Laver filled. As those bright eyes looked at each one of them in turn I had again the feeling that he knew things about people which were hidden, not only from others, but from themselves. He said, ‘There is a lot of tension in this room. What are we to do about it?’

  Di said helpfully, ‘We could open the window.’

  I hoped they might leave it at that; but Iris said, ‘I suppose anxiety is our particular occupational hazard. Are you saying that the level is unacceptably high?’

  ‘I find the level of stress extremely high. In fact, I find the situation here quite unacceptable.’

  ‘I hope we are going to be able to discuss this quietly and rationally,’ Iris said. ‘A certain amount of stress is to be expected, is it not? We are, after all, probably more self-aware than most people. Perhaps that is another occupational hazard, but surely you would agree that it can also be a positive factor?’

  Dr. Laver had until this moment been responding to Iris in a provocative and lively manner. Now the current of energy was switched off. He seemed no longer interested in us and it had the effect of making one feel suddenly cold. He spoke looking down at the surface of the desk. ‘Constant self-analysis renders a person incapable of taking a clear view of anyone, particularly himself. It is a distorting glass in which we see a creature so fragmented as to be barely recognisable as a human being.’ This statement was made with sombre conviction.

  Iris turned her head away; the movement was sharp and caught my eye. I noticed the tension of jaw and throat and wondered if she had been pushing herself too far lately. Then I forgot about Iris because I became aware that the room was rather small and I wanted to get out of it. I looked at my watch; it was a quarter past ten. In half an hour I could suggest that I should make coffee. Half an hour was a long time.

  Dr. Laver studied us all; at first, we seemed to perplex him and he narrowed his eyes, bringing us into focus. Energy began to flow from him again, but when he spoke his voice had a quality I had not heard before, between pleading and tenderness. ‘I should like to ask for your trust. Self-analysis is harmful and ultimately destructive. There are surer, and gentler, ways of allowing the hidden self to speak. When we analyse ourselves we do it with our conscious mind; but our conscious mind is the jailor of that hidden self.’ Iris was looking at him with the same fascination with which she had examined the woman in the mirror. Now, looking back, I believe that he had already begun to hypnotise her. He repeated, ‘Our conscious mind is a jailor. Do we really believe in the tyrant who sets the prisoner free?’

  Douglas spoke for the first time. His voice sounded level and reasonable as it did when he was angry. ‘Another way of looking at it is that over many years we learn to effect a balance between the positive and destructive sides of our nature and it would be wilful to destroy that balance. I speak as a layman in these matters, of course.’

  ‘And who decides which is the destructive side?’

  Douglas’s face became blank.

  ‘But you may be right, of course,’ Dr. Laver conceded silkily. ‘It would be nothing short of monstrous to interfere with that rare person who has effected such a balance at not too great a cost.’

  Di, who was sitting near to me, whispered, ‘Christ! It doesn’t do to step out of line with him.’

  Dr. Laver turned sharply to look at her and she hunched her shoulders and folded her arms beneath her breasts. She would never have a confrontation with him; I had the feeling that of the people in this room she was the least likely to fall under his spell. Perhaps he sensed this; he turned towards Iris who had been unusually quiet. ‘I think that this is the time when we should make the experiment to which we agreed previously.’

  It was an outrageous statement; there had been no such agreement and I waited for one of them to tell him so. But they said nothing. It was as though he had laid down his terms for peace and they felt constrained to accept them. Or was it as simple as that? Was Iris curious about the woman in the mirror, just as I had been curious about the dark secrets of Miss Maud’s house, in spite of my fear?

  Iris said, ‘What do I have to do?’

  Douglas turned to her in consternation.

  Dr. Laver said, ‘How are you most comfortable?’ Iris clasped her hands in her lap and frowned down, willing them to be quiet. Dr. Laver said, ‘Never mind about your hands; relax your shoulders.’

  Douglas put out a hand and Dr. Laver said, ‘Yes, touch her by all means; it may help her,’ and Douglas withdrew his hand as though it had been stung.

  Dr. Laver said, ‘You are tired and tense. You probably have a slight headache. I will take that away when you go to sleep.’ He spoke in a light, conversational tone so that we supposed he had not yet begun the business of hypnotism. I waited, expecting that he would give the same impression of complete absorption in the subject which Iris and Douglas gave when they
were talking to their clients.

  He went on in the same light, easy voice, ‘Try to think of something that is pleasing to you, something visual; water, perhaps? Do you like the sea?’ Iris nodded. ‘Good. Then lie back and float, let it carry you, gently, gently . . . It’s a warm day and there is blue sky above you. The water is bearing you, taking all the weight.’ He rambled on. I would have doubted if he had ever succeeded in hypnotising anyone had I not found myself feeling rather sleepy. I looked at Iris. Her head had rolled to one side, her eyes were closed, and her mouth was half-open, the lips parted in a loose- jawed smile. She was asleep and looked peaceful in a bovine way.

  I glanced at Douglas and Di. They both looked incredulous. Dr. Laver said, ‘She is asleep. If you like I will send her into deep sleep and we can have a little demonstration. Has anyone got a needle?’

  I said that I had one. I was glad to get out of the room. Perhaps I could ask Mrs. Libnitz to deliver the needle. But I found that something stronger than curiosity impelled me to return. When I re-entered the room Iris had not moved; she was no longer smiling and she was breathing differently. Dr. Laver took the needle and plunged it in her arm, just above the wrist; Douglas, Di and I all flinched, but Iris did not. He put the needle down on the blotter. There was a bubble of blood on Iris’s arm and he dabbed at it with a piece of cotton wool. I felt sweat on my forehead.

  Dr. Laver looked out of the window, one arm swung over the back of his chair, tapping the wooden frame. Tap, tap, tap . . . I was closer to him than the others and could see that he was trying to compose himself. When he turned and placed his hands on the table, his face was grave, but I had had a glimpse of his triumph. ‘Now, we are going to find the reason for some of this tension.’ He spoke in that same easy, quiet voice which for some inexplicable reason gave me a picture of snow flakes coming gently down, down, downy . . . I jerked upright. Dr. Laver was saying, ‘You are coming out of deep sleep. You can hear my voice, can’t you?’ Iris nodded her head. ‘I am going to send you back to your eighth birthday. It is the afternoon of your eighth birthday.’