Weekend (19 page)

She listened to the comfortable sounds he was making in the next room, preparations for departure. She liked hearing them. They were the sounds of ordinary life maintaining its preoccupied rhythm, regardless of what might be happening around it. She could luxuriate in banality a little longer. Her
elopement from reality would soon be over but not quite yet. Let what was waiting for her wait. She would have her bath and get dressed and return to the room she was supposed to have shared with Marion. She was sorry about the distance she had created between herself and Marion but she had not wanted to compromise Andrew. Surely Marion would be understanding, knowing what lay ahead for her.

She began to wash herself slowly. As she soaped her breasts, she remembered Andrew’s clumsily extravagant compliments. He didn’t realise that his praise of them had been their epitaph.

Freud had his ideas about this as he had about so many other things. And new and arresting ideas they usually were. Enough to give Edwardians and Victorians the vapours. He could explain the hold the Oedipus story had on us, the meaning of the myth. Oedipus was a psychological archetype of the male unconscious. All men had, buried somewhere darkly in them, the impulse to supplant the father and claim the mother. It was shocking news, the Oedipus complex. Enough to make the dinner-table feel like a war zone, the bedroom turn into no man’s land. It must have made family life seem suddenly to many like a masked ball, where you couldn’t be quite sure who – or what – was behind the mask.

Marion paused the tape. She was thinking of her own family, the distortions of themselves they had created out of being together. Were her brothers, in what they had become within the family, anything like a just expression of themselves? Was her mother? Was she?

She supposed that was the legacy her father had given them. His own life had been suffocatingly narrow but that hadn’t diminished his authority in judging the lives of others. She saw him as a kind of descendant of the Victorians, although in pygmy form, the runt of an exhausted lineage. He had their certainty with none of the vision that had sent them all over the world to fulfil that certainty.

Still holding the tape, she noticed that the curtains hadn’t been opened. She crossed and pulled them and stood looking out. Contemplating the sweep of the grounds, she felt intimidated, not so much by the sheer scale of them as by the self-confidence behind them and the building she stood in. The Victorians could at least do this. They had built places she couldn’t psychologically inhabit. She thought of a place she had lived in before she bought the flat. It had been part of a large Victorian house that had been subdivided into many bedsits. She and the other residents had come and gone like squatters in a grandeur that had never been their own. So temporary were their stays there, so vague their presences, so small the space their lives took up, they might as well have been living in tents pitched within the permanence of the building.

That same feeling of being inadequate to her surroundings, of being found wanting when measured against the size of other lives, had come back to haunt her here. Almost guiltily, she admired the Victorians. She had been taught them as being more or less defined by their hypocrisy but she suspected their hypocrisies might have come from the need to unfetter the
energy of their idealism from some of the darker realities that would hobble it. Any critics of the Victorians she’d read always found themselves at least admitting their stature. She thought of Lytton Strachey writing about Florence Nightingale. He had peeled her image pretty well naked but even he had written a sentence which seemed like bowing reluctantly in print. She had written the sentence down so that she could keep it, like a definitive portrait of a woman who had always fascinated her. She tired to remember it now: ‘She poured forth her unstinting usefulness … with a bitter smile upon her lips.’ That small twisted woman had changed the future by sending her passion through the world like an antibiotic.

Florence Nightingale was an example of some kind to her. It wasn’t that she wanted to be a nurse, just to do something of her own that made her not the almost invisible Mouse. The man they had been talking about this weekend, Stevenson, what was it he had said? ‘Admire and do otherwise’? Or ‘do other’? Anyway, it came to the same thing. Use your appreciation of other people’s ability to have a larger life than is defined by the headstone. Find your own way to do the same. She thought of the computer in her box-room. She wanted in some way to memorialise the fact that she had been here.

The man who had built this place had certainly done that. Whatever his story had been, it seemed a big one to her. Like those Greek myths Harry Beck was so fond of. Oedipus. Watching a new day greening, she pressed the button on the machine, wondering what relevance to the brightening scene the words on the tape could have.

Yet, when you think of it, Freud gives what might be seen as a comfortingly chintzy interpretation of the myth. And he does this by twisting the terms of the story out of shape. The linch-pin of his interpretation is that it is
because
Jocasta is his mother that Oedipus marries her, and it is
because
Laius is his father that Oedipus kills him. But surely this is to take the more comfortable interpretation at the expense of the darker one. For the whole narrative line of the myth drives home the significance that Oedipus murders a man who
happens
to be his father and marries a woman who
happens
to be his mother. The point may be that, without the necessary, continuing and contrived set of social circumstances (which haven’t been experienced by Oedipus), the most basic social relationship we have is meaningless. Its importance is not intrinsic to our animal selves. Our social selves have invented its importance. Now that is a truly frightening message. To tell a civilised man that he so wishes to possess his mother that he has, hidden in him, an urge to displace his father, that is surely upsetting enough for him. It means that the living-room is not perhaps all of his natural habitat. But it does still preserve the sacred importance of the basic unit of society – the family. His deeper motives are still a cipher, however obscene to some, contextual with his life within society. But to tell him that his mother has no particular relevance to his deeper nature at all, that if he takes her it is merely because she has the animal equipment complementary to his own and happens to be handy, that removes the keystone of society. It puts each of us in a separate wilderness, utterly alone to resolve the stresses and discords of our nature, and it tells us that society is never a resolution of these stresses, merely an imposition on them. I wonder too if, in Freud’s interpretation of the myth, psychoanalysis didn’t find its own ‘place where
three roads meet’. For there seems to me something in Freud’s reading of the myth definitive of the use to which society has subsequently put psychiatry. The tendency with psychoanalysts has not been to liberate the divergent individual from the authoritarian pressure of his society so much as to liberate him from the conflict which that has created, to defuse the uniqueness of his identity, so that it can function without untoward danger (to himself, as well as to society, it has to be admitted) in a social context. In fact, to make his unique individual dilemma merely a part of the norm, to incorporate each psychic crisis into the static definition of what it means to be a social being. Instead of allowing it to fulfil the dynamism of the experiencer’s drive towards his or her own individual freedom.

Marion clicked off the tape. She checked her own bed and Vikki’s bed. Vikki hadn’t said much when she came to collect her stuff from the room but she had seemed calm then, and at breakfast. Given the pressure she knew Vikki was under, Marion hadn’t wanted to ply her with questions. Perhaps she might talk about it later. Marion made sure the bathroom was empty of all their things. She checked that her notes were safely stowed. She had heard the bus arriving and now she could hear the voices of the others gathering outside. Still holding the recorder, she took her key. She pressed the button.
I think Freud’s interpretation only works by bypassing what is central to the myth – the meaning of the riddle of the Sphinx. When you focus on that, you begin to understand that the Oedipus myth is telling us not so much a psychological truth as an evolutionary one. Perhaps Freud’s patriarchal preconceptions distorted his focus. The myth, it seems to me, is telling us not something narrow and gender-specific. It is telling us something species-specific. The high priest of its content isn’t Freud but Darwin.

Darwin would have to wait. Marion silenced the tape-recorder and put it into her bag. She went round the room, checking that all the drawers were empty and that everything was in the place where she had found it. She lifted her bag, closed the door and locked it. As she came along the corridor, she noticed that the door of the strange woman’s room – Sandra – was closed. She still couldn’t imagine who could have tried the handle of her own door during the night. She paused and listened, but heard nothing. Having looked out earlier this morning when she had heard someone knocking at the woman’s door, she had seen David Cudlipp. She assumed the woman must be his wife. If she were, something must be wrong there, for she wasn’t letting him in. The problem between them must have been what the shouting that had frightened her last night was about. She wondered if the woman had left yet.

She checked her watch. Everyone else must have been gone for a couple of hours. The hotel sounded empty now. The two-day contingent had come and gone. The study weekend was over. All those voices, mainly young, had chattered into silence. Now there was only the occasional sound of some member of staff calling to another, the closing of a distant door.

She hadn’t been able to bear the thought of leaving with the others. She didn’t feel a part of anything any more. She had to work out who she was becoming. She had to know who it was who would be leaving. There was a place she had to get to before she could go on. She didn’t know where that place was, except that it was inside her head. She just hoped that she would recognise it when she got there.

She must move soon, though. She had decided that. It was all she had decided so far. She would leave on the later ferry. It was the last ferry home, wherever home was. Gordon Mitchell had said she could stay as long as she wanted, whoever she was. He had been nice. Maybe David had told him something. Gordon had come to the room. They had spoken at the open door. He hadn’t come in. He had asked no questions about what had happened but simply said she could stay until she felt like going and there would be no charge. He had suggested food but she didn’t feel like it.

She looked at the open packet of sandwiches. One was half-eaten. She wondered when that had happened. She couldn’t remember. It was as if a part of her had conspired against her bleakness, had secretly infiltrated her belief that she couldn’t go on and subverted her denial of herself with supplies, however meagre. She rose, taking the glass, and went through to the bathroom, ran the cold tap till the water chilled her fingers and filled the tumbler. She came back through and sat
down. She finished the stale remains of the sandwich, chewing methodically and helping the food down with water. The action was an admission made to herself, she knew, but she was also aware that it was a bitter admission. Perhaps that was why she ate the stale bread and not the fresher sandwich, which she threw, still in its package, at the waste-basket from where she was sitting, deciding that, if it went in, she would be all right. It did.

It was hopeless digging in the past of her marraige for meaning. She couldn’t tell the significance of anything she unearthed there. Every certainty she tried to find crumbled on contact, atomised into such doubt that she couldn’t tell his betrayal from her fantasy. She could get no purchase on the past. Shock had temporarily paralysed coherent reaction, like an emotional stroke which left her incapable of articulate response. She felt she would have to relearn the grammar of her nature painfully before she could understand her final reaction, let alone express it.

Her profound resentment somehow had to find a way to become the future. But it was the future she had carried in her to this place that he had most effectively destroyed. Him and someone else from the anonymous others. Veronica Hill? Those others, she thought, they had descended on the island like a flight of aimless arrows, one of which had hit her without her even being known as who she was. And it hadn’t been noticed. Outside the window, she had heard them leaving at lunchtime, their self-satisfied voices babbling indifference at her. She felt the coldness of betrayal all about her. Permafrost would be cosy compared to this.

A memory appeared to her suddenly, like the ghost of who she might have been. She was in the garden at Langbank with Myra when Darren, who had been playing near them on the
grass, came up to his mother and asked something very matter-of-factly: ‘Mum. How do they make the sky?’

She would never be the answer to such sweetly impossible questions. That was most of all what she couldn’t accept about what he had done. Cheating her of her past was painful. Cheating her of a future she had dreamed of for years was unbearable. It was how close he had let her come to the dream before casually erasing it that measured the depth of his contempt for her, shamed her before herself. His easy acceptance of her decision on Thursday evening not to come to Cannamore, which she had taken as a gesture of consideration for her at the time, meant something different now. Presumably he had already made his plans to be with that other woman. Each had had a secret the other couldn’t know.

At least her secret had been benign, although that benignity had curdled into self-contempt in this room. If she didn’t tell him that Angela had changed her mind again and had phoned to say they could adopt the baby after all, it was because she wanted everything to be definitely settled. She had wanted to surprise him with an incontrovertible fact: he was going to be a father. She had arranged to visit Angela on Saturday, which was the day she had said suited her, and finalise things between them, make certain there was no going back on the decision this time. There wasn’t. Angela was utterly sure.