Chocky, Page 6

  ‘I don’t think he does,’ Mary told her.

  ‘Ah, that’s what I meant about the fresh eye. He does to me. And my Tim tells me he talks to himself a lot.’

  ‘Many children think out loud.’

  ‘Of course, but according to my Tim he often says some rather odd things, too. There is such a thing as a child having too much imagination, you know.’

  Mary paused in her knitting.

  ‘What kind of odd things?’ she asked.

  ‘Tim doesn’t remember, really, but they seemed to him distinctly – well, odd.’

  I felt it was time I took a hand.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can understand that. Matthew is perhaps a trifle too sensitive. Your Tim is so unmistakably a healthy extravert type. Mens stulta in corpore sano, and all that.’

  Janet heard what she expected to hear.

  ‘Exactly,’ she agreed. ‘And that, of course, makes one so conscious of the difference between them.’

  ‘It’s bound to,’ I agreed. ‘Your Tim is so splendidly normal. It’s hard to imagine him saying anything odd. Though I sometimes think,’ I went on, ‘that it’s a pity that thorough normality is scarcely achievable except at some cost to individuality. Still, there it is, that’s what normality means – average.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t call Tim average exactly,’ Janet protested, and went on to explain, with instances, why Tim was not. The subject of Matthew somehow got lost in the exposition, and was not revived.

  ‘I’m glad you headed her off,’ Mary said, when we got upstairs. ‘Though you were a bit hard on her, Tim. He’s not all that dull.’

  ‘Of course he isn’t, but your sister, darling, is an inquisitive, and, I’m afraid, not very intelligent, woman. Like all parents she is dichotomous, what she really wants is a child genius who is perfectly normal. She hinted that Matthew isn’t quite normal, and put us on the defensive. So I hinted that Tim, while perfectly normal, isn’t very bright. So she promptly went over to the defensive. Elementary, my dear.’

  ‘All the same, she was right about one thing. We don’t know anything of Matthew’s heredity, do we?’

  ‘And we certainly don’t know that his heredity has anything to do with this Chocky business, so let’s just wait and see what Landis has to tell us tomorrow.’

  Janet and her lot were, inevitably, late in getting under way, but we managed to wave them off at last about twenty minutes before Landis’s car slid into our drive. He arrived, as becomes a with-it medical man, in a large, well-groomed Jaguar.

  I made the introductions. Mary appeared a little reserved, but Matthew, I was glad to see, seemed to take to him easily. After lunch we all adjourned to the veranda for a quarter of an hour or so, then, by arrangement, Mary took Polly off with her, I mentioned some work I must do, and Matthew and Landis were left alone together.

  Tea time came, and I looked out to find Matthew still talking hard. Landis caught my eye, and decisively frowned me away.

  The three of us decided not to wait, which was just as well, for it was nearly six o’clock before the other two broke up their conclave and joined us. They appeared to be on excellent terms. Matthew in rather better spirits, I thought, than he had been lately; Landis, inclined to be quietly reflective.

  We let the children have their supper first, and get along to bed. Then, when we sat down to our meal there was a chance to talk. Mary opened up with:

  ‘Well, you two certainly did have a session. I do hope Matthew wasn’t too tedious.’

  Landis regarded her for a moment, and shook his head.

  ‘Tedious!’ he repeated. ‘Oh, no. I assure you he wasn’t that.’ He turned to me. ‘You know, you didn’t tell me the half of it,’ he said, with a touch of reproof.

  ‘I don’t suppose I know half of it,’ I replied. ‘I told you most of what I do know, but to find out more I’d have had to press him for it. I thought that might be unwise – I’m not so old as to have forgotten how intrusive one’s parents’ interest can seem. That’s why I asked you to come. Quite apart from your professional experience, I hoped he’d feel freer to talk to you. Apparently he did.’

  ‘He did indeed,’ Landis nodded. ‘Yes, I think you probably were wise not to push him – though it meant that I felt a bit ill-briefed to start with. I found him more puzzled, and more in need of someone to talk to about it than you had led me to expect. However, he’s got a lot of it off his chest now, and I think he’ll be feeling the better for that, at least.’

  He paused a moment, and then turned to Mary.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs Gore, normally – that is to say before this Chocky business set in – would you have called him a highly imaginative boy?’

  Mary considered.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘As a little boy, he was very suggestible. I mean, we always had to get him safely out of the room before anyone turned on a tap – but that’s not quite the same thing, is it? No, I’d not say he was highly imaginative – just ordinarily.’

  Landis nodded.

  ‘An open mind is a difficult thing to keep. I must admit that from what David told me I rather suspected he might be an imaginative child who had been reading too much fantastic stuff – to a point where he was having difficulty in distinguishing it from reality. That set me on the wrong track…’

  ‘He must have read some. They all do,’ I put in, ‘but his taste in fiction really runs more to simple adventure stories – “Biggies”, and so on.’

  ‘Yes, I got on to that fairly soon. So I changed my line of thought… and then had to change it again.’

  For quite a long pause he toyed with the cold meat on his plate until Mary became impatient.

  ‘But what do you think it is now?’ she asked.

  Landis delayed another moment or two before he looked up. When he did so, he stared at the opposite wall with a curiously far away expression.

  ‘After all,’ he said ‘you are not consulting me professionally. If you were, I would say it is a complex case needing more than a short examination can reveal: I would stall. But I am going to be unprofessional. I am going to confess that I don’t know: it has me beat…’

  He broke off, and fiddled with his knife. Mary’s eyes met mine. We said nothing.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Landis repeated. ‘I know what it looks like – but that’s sheer nonsense…’

  He broke off again.

  ‘What does it look like?’ I prompted, a little sharply.

  He hesitated, and then drew a breath.

  ‘More than anything I’ve ever come across it resembles what our unscientific ancestors used to consider a case of “possession”. They would have claimed quite simply that this Chocky is a wandering, if not a wanton, spirit which has invaded Matthew.’

  There was a silence. I broke it.

  ‘But that being, as you said, nonsense…?’

  ‘I don’t know.… One must be careful not to be as dogmatic in our way as our ancestors were in theirs. It’s easy to over-simplify – that is just what Matthew himself is doing when he says he “talks to”, or is “talked to”, by this Chocky. The ancestors would say he “hears voices”, but that is only a manner of speaking. Matthew only uses the word “talks” because he has no word for what he really means. When he “listens” to Chocky there are no words: he is not really hearing sounds at all. When he replies he doesn’t need to use words – he sometimes does, particularly when he is feeling worked up, but he does it because it is his natural way of expressing his emotions, not because it is necessary. Therefore his “hearing” a voice is a metaphorical expression – but the conversations he holds with this imagined voice are not metaphorical. They are quite real.’

  Mary was frowning.

  ‘You’ll have to explain that more,’ she said.

  ‘Well, for one thing, it is quite indisputable that there is some kind of sound intelligence somehow involved,’ Landis said. ‘Just think back to some of the questions he has been asking, and the things he has
said to you and David. We’re satisfied he did not invent them himself; that’s why I am here at all, but wasn’t it characteristic of all of them that they were naively, sometimes childishly expressed?’

  ‘After all, he’s not quite twelve,’ Mary pointed out.

  ‘Exactly, and in fact he has an unusually good vocabulary, for a child of his age – but it isn’t adequate to express clearly the questions he wants to ask. He knows what he wants to ask, and often understands quite well what he wants to tell. His chief difficulty is in finding the words to make the ideas clear.

  ‘Now if he were passing on questions he had heard, he wouldn’t have that particular difficulty. He’d simply repeat the words, whether he had understood them, or not. Or if he’d read the questions in a book he’d know the words. In either case he’d be using the words he needs instead of having this trouble with the limits of his vocabulary.

  ‘It follows, therefore, that he did not, in the ordinary sense, hear these questions, nor read them; yet he does understand what he is trying to ask. So – how did the questions get into his head without the words necessary to carry them there? – And that really is quite a problem…’

  ‘But is it-any more than it always is?’ Mary said. ‘Words are only names for ideas. Everybody gets ideas. They have to come into minds from somewhere before they can be given names.’

  I knew the pitch of her voice. Something – possibly, I suspected Landis’s use of the word ‘possession’ – had made her antagonistic.

  Landis went on:

  ‘Take his use of the binary code. If anyone had shown him, or if he had seen it in a hook, the odds are that the symbols used would have been nought and one, or plus and minus, or possibly x and y, and he would naturally have used the same symbols himself. But the way he did get them appeared to him simply as an affirmative and a negative, so he conveniently abbreviated them to Y and N.’

  ‘But,’ Mary objected, ‘if, as you say, there aren’t any words so that he isn’t listening when he seems to be, what is going on? I mean, why this idea of this Chocky who “talks” at all?’

  ‘Oh, Chocky exists all right. Naturally, I looked at first for some personification of his subconscious, however I was sure quite soon that it wasn’t that. But where Chocky exists, and what she is, beats me completely at present – and it beats Matthew, too.’

  That was not what Mary had hoped to hear. She said: ‘I can understand that for him she exists. She’s quite real to him: that’s why we’ve been playing up to it, but…’

  Landis cut her short:

  ‘Oh, Chocky has a much more definite existence than that. I am quite satisfied that whatever she is, she is more than his own invention.’

  ‘His conscious invention,’ I qualified, ‘but might she not be the product of a complex?’

  I wished I could name that gynandrous Greek: surely they could not have missed a thing like that out of their mythology, but it still eluded me.

  Landis shook his head.

  ‘I don’t think so. Considered as a projection of his own subconscious she isn’t viable. I’ll tell you why. Consider the car incident. Now, no boy of Matthew’s age would dream for a moment of calling a brand new model of a modern car old-fashioned. He thinks it’s wonderful. Matthew himself was proud of it, and anxious to show it off. But, according to your account, what happened was exactly what would have happened if another child – or anyone else, for that matter – had been scornful of it – except that no other child, nor his own subconscious, would have been able to explain how it ought to be radically different.

  ‘And here’s another one he told me this afternoon. He was, he said, explaining to Chocky about the use of step-rockets for space-flight. She laughed at the idea, just as she had at the car. According to him she thought it ludicrous, and old – I think he meant primitive. Weight, she told him, is a force, and a force is a form of energy: it is both costly and foolish to oppose one form of energy directly to another. First one should study to understand the nature of the hindering force. Once it is properly understood, one is able to discover the way to negate it, if not the way to make it work for instead of against one. Thus, the proper way to operate a space-ship is not to attempt to smash it into the sky with explosives against the whole pull of gravitation, but to develop a means of screening-off that pull.

  ‘In this way, she explained, by balancing the reduced pull against the centrifugal force, you achieve a smooth take-off and a steady rate of acceleration. A reasonably supportable rate of acceleration giving only two or three Gs soon builds up to a far greater speed than any rocket could ever attain, without causing any distress. By manipulating the gravity-screens you can determine your direction, and increase or decrease your speed as you wish.

  ‘Rocketry, she told Matthew, was simple (I think he meant naïve) like powering a car by clockwork, or petrol – once you’ve used up your stored power, you’re finished: but with.… And this is the point where we came unstuck – Matthew couldn’t get the concept. It was a kind of power. It seemed to him something like electricity, but he knew that it was really quite different.… Anyway, with this source of energy which can be picked up from space radiations and converted to operate motors or gravity-screens, there is no question of running out of power. The limit of speed which you can reach eventually is that of light. But you still have two obstacles to efficient space-travel. One is the altogether excessive time taken by acceleration and deceleration, and shortening this by increasing the Gs can only give too slight an improvement to bother with – and that at the cost of exhausting strain. The other, more fundamental, trouble is that the speed of light is far too slow to allow one to attempt to cover the vast interstellar distances. Somehow a way round that difficulty has to be found, the present most hopeful theory is – but there Matthew lost her again, among ideas that were quite beyond his grasp. As he put it to me: “She kept on going on, but it didn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t turn into proper words”.’

  Landis paused. Then he added:

  ‘Now, that again, I’m quite satisfied, did not come out of books. It could have done, but it didn’t. If it had, he would not have stumbled as he did in trying to find words to express what was quite clear in his mind.’

  ‘I must say it’s far from clear in my mind. How did all that about space-ships get into it at all?’ Mary asked him.

  ‘Simply as an illustration. He has somehow been told that space-ships are inefficient, just as he was told that cars are inefficient.’

  ‘And all that stuff seemed quite sensible to you – I mean, you feel that it makes sense?’

  ‘Let’s say that as far as it keeps within the bounds of his understanding, it is logical. One would rather it were not.’

  ‘Why?’ Mary demanded.

  ‘Because if there had been some slips caused by misunderstandings, or by embroideries of his own which did not fit in with the rest, there’d still be the chance that he’s concocted it out of things he’s read. As it is, he freely admits he couldn’t understand a lot of it, and it appears that for the rest he’s doing an honest job of reporting. It would be a lot simpler if one could believe that, even subconsciously, he had compiled the whole thing for himself.

  ‘And there were other things, too. Apparently, according to Chocky, we, in our civilization, are still suffering from a primitive fixation on the wheel. Once we had discovered rotary motion we applied it to everything; only recently are our inventions beginning to show signs of breaking free from the wheel-obsession. Now, where would a boy pick up an idea like that?’

  ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘suppose we agree that subconscious promptings are to be ruled out. What’s to be done about it?’

  Landis shook his head again.

  ‘At present I’ve, quite frankly, no idea. At the moment I can’t see – quite unscientifically can’t see – anything for it but to take a catch-phrase literally – I don’t know what’s got into him. I wish I did. Something has.’

  Mary got up from the tab
le abruptly and decisively. We loaded the dishes on to the trolley, and she pushed it out. A few minutes later she came back with coffee. As she poured it out she said to Landis:

  ‘So what it amounts to is that all you have to tell us is that you can’t see any way of helping Matthew, is that it?’

  Landis’s brow furrowed.

  ‘Helping him?’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know. I’m not even sure that he needs help. His chief need at the moment seems to be for someone he can talk to about this Chocky. He doesn’t particularly like her, in fact she frequently irritates him, but she does supply him with a great deal that interests him. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be so much Chocky’s existence that troubles him, as his own self-defensive instinct to keep her existence hidden – and in that he’s wise. Until now you two have been his only safety-valves. His sister might have been another, but she appears to have let him down.’

  Mary stirred her coffee, gazing at its vortex with abstraction. Then, making up her mind, she said, forth-rightly:

  ‘Now you’re talking as if this Chocky really exists. Let’s get this straight. Chocky is a convention of Matthew’s. It is simply a name for an imagined companion – just as Polly’s Piff was. One quite understands that that is not unusual, and nothing to worry about – up to a point. But carried beyond that point it is something to worry about because it has ceased to be normal. Very well, then, it has seemed to us for some little time now that Matthew has passed that point. Something abnormal has happened to him. It is because of that that David appealed to you for advice.’

  Landis considered her for a moment before he replied:

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t have made myself clear,’ he said. ‘Any resemblance between Chocky and Piff is quite superficial. I would like to believe what you wish to believe – and what my training tells me I should believe – that the whole thing is subjective. That Chocky is a child’s invention, like Piff – an invention of Matthew’s own which has got out of hand. But I can only do that by ignoring the evidence. Well, I’m not bigoted enough to twist the facts to suit what I have been taught; Chocky is, in some way I don’t understand, objective – she comes from outside, not from inside. On the other hand I’m not credulous enough to accept the old idea of “possession”, although it fits the evidence much better…’ He broke off in thought for some seconds, and then shook his head: