The Goose Girl and Other Stories (49 page)

‘My dear Isobel,' I said, ‘you can't expect me to register surprise and consternation when you tell me that.'

‘No,' she said, ‘I realise that he isn't like us, and doesn't behave like us. But great writers—he
is
a great writer!—can't be expected to find satisfaction in the ordinary things of life: the ordinary, middle-class measure of life. Torquil has often drunk too much, just to get out of the ordinary measure. But lately, for the last couple of weeks, he's gone too far. He's drinking in bed.'

‘In your bed?'

‘Oh, no! I wish he was. He hasn't slept with me for a fortnight. He's sleeping in his dressing-room, and he hardly ever gets up except to go downstairs for another bottle of whisky. He's too frightened, you see.'

‘Frightened of what?'

‘I don't quite know. I really mean, I don't understand. All I know is that he had a bad dream.'

I listened, with growing impatience, to her confused and meaningless story—in her incapacity to give a clear and reasonable account of what he was suffering, she looked extraordinarily young, innocent, and, from a man's point of view, I suppose, desirable—and interrupted her to ask, ‘Does he know I'm here?'

‘Yes, I told him you were coming. He was angry, at first, and then he said, “All right, I'd like to see her.” He can be so sweet, he quite disarms you, doesn't he?'

I had never been in Torquil's dressing-room before. I had been to see Isobel in their bedroom, and that, by the opulence of its furniture, had slightly disgusted me. There was a double bed of inordinate size, with silk hangings, velvet curtains on the windows, a French sofa, a dressing-table of ridiculous luxury, and a wardrobe with an open door that disclosed hillocks of silk underclothes. I compared it with my own bare room—my skimpy chest-of-drawers—and felt a revulsion that may, in part, have been a mask for jealousy. But when I saw Torquil's dressing-room, and him in bed there, I was, in a quite simple, instinctive way, antagonised by the richness of its comfort. It was, absurdly, all in white—ivory, cream, or white—except for a quilt of gold satin and one great picture full and over-full of peaches, pineapples, purple grapes, a pheasant or two, and yellow plums—and staring from the general pallor, spectacular in its pride and luxury, there was the enormous, splendid skin of a polar bear, deep-furred,
silky and resilient, with the cruel, proud head mounted to show its teeth in an eternal snarl.

Even in so rich a room it dominated, made the first impression, and with hardly a glance at Torquil—but I saw he had not shaved for two or three days—I was down on my knees to stroke the smooth white head and ask, ‘Where did you get this?'

‘It's more interesting than I am, isn't it?' he said. ‘I've had it for a long time—and I still like it.'

‘Well,' said Isobel, ‘I had better leave you,' and went out, and closed the door.

‘I've never seen anything that made me so immediately envious,' I said; and reluctantly got up. ‘But you're the patient, not the polar bear. Tell me what's been happening.'

‘In the first place, how glad I am to see you! I should have asked you to come and help me—oh, long ago—but I was too ashamed. It's very shameful, for a man of my sort, to tell a woman that he has been frightened into illness—frightened by a dream. But that's the truth of it.'

‘Are you drinking a lot?'

‘More than I have ever done.'

‘Because you're frightened?'

‘Yes.—And, of course, because I like it.'

He had, as Isobel said, a quality, a charm, that could not be denied and was capable of disarming the most unfriendly critic. I, at that moment, felt no touch or breath of friendship for him—a dissolute, unshaven man, stinking of whisky in a room of theatrical luxury—but as he sat up in bed and leaned towards me, and his voice deepened, as it seemed, in honesty and self-reproach, I knew that I must guard myself against the sympathy he would try to evoke; and perhaps could. I looked again at the skin of the polar bear, let envy run into my heart, and thought: Envy will keep sympathy at bay.

‘You had better tell me,' I said, ‘something about your dream.'

‘It's going to be difficult,' he said, ‘because it wasn't like a dream. It was much more like something that happened in another dimension of reality. An impalpable dimension, but not less real because of that.'

I listened to his story, and had to be told who Cuchullin was. I had never heard of him. I recognised, of course, some of the minor symbolism of the dream, and admitted to myself a little malicious pleasure when I realised, what was obvious enough, that at some time he had been rebuffed, or at least disappointed, by Beatrice; whom I disliked intensely. But I was fascinated and perplexed by the story as a whole.—He told it so well that, even to me, the Hound seemed to
exist and have its own personality. It wasn't till he had finished, and I had given him a weak whisky-and-water—for telling the story had exhausted him—that I saw the obvious association.

I waited till he grew calmer, more composed, and then I asked him, ‘How long have you had this rug?'

‘Oh, a long time.'

‘Where did you get it?'

I waited a full minute before he answered. Then he said, ‘It was after the war. When I was in Berlin.'

‘Does it remind you of anything?'

‘Well, of course. Of Berlin. Of everything that happened there.'

‘But of anything in particular? Among the things you remember in a general way, is it associated with any particular event?'

Again he was silent for a long time—I supposed he was thinking, jogging his memory—before he said, ‘No.'

And now I must make a confession; for what I said next was not dictated by medical theory and a doctor's professional insight, but by the stark envy I had felt when I first saw the enchantment of that great, white, silky skin. I had wanted—absurdly, but quite positively, with a surge of adolescent or romantic abandonment to sheer physical desire—to undress and lie on it, naked; and I could hardly endure the knowledge that Torquil owned it. So I said to him, ‘You ought to get rid of it. You know as much about the unconscious as I do, so I needn't go into tiresome explanation. But it seems probable that the rug is associated with something you want to forget—that consciously, perhaps, you have forgotten—and your compulsive dream of a Great White Hound, with its obvious likeness to a polar bear, is the work of your unconscious mind rebelling against a prohibition you have put on it. So get rid of the rug. It's a constant reminder—if my guess is a good one—of something of which you don't want to be reminded. So burn it, or give it away, and stop tormenting that part of your mind which, like the butt-end of an iceberg, lies out of sight and communication.'

‘No,' he said, ‘I can't do that.'

‘I'll give you some sleeping-pills—you like nembutal, don't you?—but that's only a palliative,' I said. ‘I want you to go for a good walk every day—get Isobel to go with you—and try not to drink anything before six o'clock. But what really matters, of course, is to find out what's frightening you, and eliminate that. We'll have to work by trial and error; and for a start I suggest—my advice is—that you get rid of the rug. Burn it, or sell it.'

At that moment, I believe, I had in my mind the thought, the hope,
that I might buy it. But he disappointed me by repeating, ‘No, that's what I can't do.'

‘Then nembutal and healthy exercise are all I can offer you,' I said. ‘I'll give Isobel the pills.'

It was not till a week later that Isobel telephoned again and said, ‘Torquil is going to send away that white bearskin. He asked me to tell you. He's going to send it to London, to be sold for the Lord Mayor's relief-fund. I don't know what you said to him, and I don't know what it all means, but I feel much happier. It's a lovely rug, but I've never liked it—perhaps because he would keep it in his own room—and I'm very glad it's going. For the last two days he's been hardly human.'

I felt angry and self-contemptuous when I heard that my prescription—designed primarily for my benefit, not his—had been accepted, and my profit was to be nil. The rug might indeed be a clue to the psychological origin of his dream; it probably was, and the degree of probability, or my conjecture of it, was a reasonable excuse for the advice I had given. But the purpose of my advice had been to get the rug for myself. And, being defeated, I felt resentful of defeat and ashamed of the shabbiness of my motive. It was a very unpleasant moment.

I said to Isobel, ‘You will need more nembutal, and I'll send you some. But keep the pills in your own room. And you must get him out of doors and make him take some exercise. Try to make him physically tired . . . . '

I avoided both of them for some weeks, and an autumn crop of gastric ‘flu in the schools and rheumatic pains in the old, made that easy enough. But the tantalising thought, the damned enchantment, of that white luxury of arctic fur returned to me night after night as if I had been infected by the compulsion of his unholy dream. A dozen times I dreamt—of it, not him—and woke ill-tempered and self-hating.

It was shortly before Christmas that I read, in the
British Medical Journal,
a tendentious, kite-flying article on psychosomatic distempers in Melanesia by C.J. Patrick Ryan—and recognised Paddy Ryan, whom I had known in Berlin: an Irish doctor of ebullient temper and sometimes brilliant intuition whose gifts were often obscured by the triviality of his interests. He had a village appetite for gossip, an old woman's nose for scandal. . . and having remembered this, it occurred to me that he might have known Torquil, or something of him.

I sat down after supper and wrote him a long letter. I told him about myself, I spoke admiringly of his article, and presently said something of my interesting patient. ‘A man you may have known in Berlin,' I
said. I didn't go into details, I only said that Torquil was suffering from a neurosis about which I could do very little unless I knew more of the background in which it had been planted. ‘And that's where you may be able to help me,' I wrote.

I was, I think, extremely tactful. I made no reference to Ryan's fondness for gossip, but spoke of his reputation for wide and judicious knowledge of men and their surroundings. I said, disingenuously, ‘I remember how often people went to you and asked, “What's the truth of this story about So-and-So? What really happened to him?'”—Oh, there was substance in his reputation! He had a genius for gathering, sifting, and remembering the news of the day, and he never forgot a face or a good story. I flattered him, as was right and proper in the circumstances, but I went too far, perhaps, when I wrote: ‘How much I would like to see you again! You must, I suppose, have leave from time to time, and when your next leave is due, think seriously of what Morissey can offer. I‘ll promise you brown-trout fishing far above the average, and if you're lucky a run of sea-trout in early July that you'll remember all your life.'

I addressed my letter ‘care of the B.M.J.' and got no answer till the end of February; and that, when it came, was cryptic. He wrote: ‘I never met Torquil Malone, but I know all that was said about him, and if you want the substance of it, read the Second Book of Samuel, chapter XI, and ponder the order, “Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle.” In his case Uriah and Bethsabe were Poles—and that, for the present, is all I shall tell you.'

He went on to protest an affection for me that he had never shown when, for several months, we had met three or four times a week; and finished his letter with an explosive, ‘Bless you, dear Anne, for the invitation to fish! I shall, beyond doubt or peradventure, come to Morissey next June, when my leave is due, if I survive my next tour among black headhunters in the New Hebrides, and thereafter can discover the whereabouts of your island, of which I never heard till now. But love of you, and of sea-trout, will be my guide.'

The address he gave was ‘Somewhere off Malekula, rolling heavily', and I guessed that when he wrote he was not quite sober. But I looked up the Bible my mother had given me—I had not used it much—and read some of the Second Book of Samuel. I read more than I first intended, for those ponderous great words, that thunder into meaning like boulders down a stream in spate, carried me with them, and the stories they told dismayed me with their news of the perennial wickedness of human creatures.—The eleventh chapter tells how King David fell in love with Bathsheba, or Bethsabe as Ryan called her, and
slept with her. Her husband, Uriah, was a good soldier, and when David sent him up the line again, he went willingly, and was killed. And David got Bethsabe, who much preferred a live king to a dead colonel, or whatever Uriah had been. Well, I know others like her.

But it took me some time to digest Ryan's assertion—a vaguely drawn but seemingly confident assertion—that Torquil, in some sort of way, had played David to an unknown Pole; whose wife, by inference, he had coveted. And when I had digested it, it meant, perhaps curiously, very little to me. The Bible may be to blame for this: the Bible had told me of men's wickedness through all recorded time, and because I knew nothing of the people whom Torquil had betrayed and loved, he took his place, almost anonymously, in a long, long queue of sinners, and all I felt was a justification and stiffening of my dislike for him.

But dislike, in our times, when most of us have discarded the hard spine of morality and called our weakening ‘progress', doesn't show itself in action. A day or two later I dined with Torquil and Isobel, and with a rather grudging pride considered the marvellous improvement in his health. He looked well and happy, and I could, I suppose, claim to have cured him—though I was doubtful if my medical colleagues would accept ‘Remove the bearskin' as a scientific prescription. But I was glad to see him better, and rather against my will I was a little moved by the evident affection that still held them. They were going to Jamaica for a month. ‘A reward to Isobel,' he said, ‘for the persistency of her kindness and the loyalty of her devotion to such an utterly worthless creature as I am.'