The Anti-Death League, Page 2

  All four men burst into laughter.

  "These repressed lesbian tendencies of yours," said Dr. Best, smiling. "If it's all right with you I want to go into them rather more deeply than we had time for last week. Do you agree that we should?"

  "Yes," said Catharine. "If you want to."

  "It isn't what I want, Mrs. Casement, it's what you want. And I ask you whether you want to because, as I've warned you several times before, whenever we go down at all deep we're virtually certain to find something rather unpleasant waiting for us. Do you follow? Something that must be pretty shocking or it wouldn't be hiding away from us like that."

  "Just carry on, doctor. Another shock or two won't make much odds to me."

  Dr. Best chuckled and shook his head in a kind of admiration. "You're incorrigible, Mrs. Casement. The very first time you were able to talk to me intelligibly, just after Christmas, you made exactly the same point, and I told you then what I see I must tell you again now, that a mere unpleasant experience, however much it may happen to distress you, does not in itself constitute a shock in the scientific, psychoanalytic sense. Let me tell you a couple of typical stories, both relating to patients that have been through my hands in the past year, which I hope will make the distinction clear to you."

  The doctor's manner became even more relaxed than hitherto, if that were possible, and there was a note of affectionate reminiscence in his voice when he continued, "A little girl, ten years of age, is going home from school through a public park. It's a winter evening and dusk is falling, but it isn't dark yet, the park is only a few hundred yards across, and at this time there are usually plenty of people about-but not, unfortunately, on the evening in question. A man springs out on her, drags her into the bushes and rapes her, very thoroughly. After a time she makes her way home and is naturally taken to hospital.

  "Today that child is happily watching television and playing her gramophone records just as before. Even her work at school has shown no significant decline in quality. It's true that there are gynecological complications which may affect her ovulatory capacity, but emotionally and mentally she's quite untouched. What happened to her, you see, was an unpleasant experience.

  "The picture's very different I'm sorry to say, with the second case. Here we have a young man of twenty-five-which leads me to make an important secondary point. I say ‘a young man of twenty-five' because this is how we customarily refer to persons of that age-group. But in psychoanalytic terms that man is no longer young. This is very far from being a technical quibble, Mrs. Casement. All our experience shows that the psychoanalytically young are far better equipped to resist both unpleasant experiences-as we saw with the little girl-and shocks in comparison with, let's say, the psychoanalytically non-young. Of which group you yourself are a member. (Indeed, at thirty-two you are hardly young in any sense.) I mention this distinction by way of reinforcing my warning to you about the dangers of beginning to go down deep.

  "But to resume my story. Our young man, or man, was in the cinema one evening when the man in the next seat made a sexual assault on him. This probably amounted to no more than a hand laid on the knee or thigh. We can virtually rule out the idea of any genital contact, even through clothing. But I suppose we can never be quite sure, because… Because that young man, after a short period of violent mania, is now in a state of deep and perhaps irreversible depressive withdrawal. He, you see, had had a shock, the shock, I have no doubt, of finding that something buried in him was deeply responsive to the assault. The sudden flash of insight into his own unconscious homosexual tendencies was too much for his sanity. Which brings us, Mrs. Casement, to the point we reached five minutes ago."

  Catharine had started trying not to listen as soon as she realized the sort of thing that was going to happen to the child in Dr. Best's first story, but she had to go on looking at him, because whenever you looked away from him he stopped talking, waited for you to look at him again and went back to the beginning of his last sentence but one. Going on looking at him made it harder not to listen to him, and it was not until she had heard what happened in the park that she was able to push the meaning out of his voice by hearing it as a flow of little cries and moans separated by puffs and clicks.

  To keep this going, she had to push the meaning out of the doctor's face in the same sort of way. At the start, it was more of a face than most people's: a glossy pink bald crown with a patch of thick curly hair above each ear, wide and shining blue eyes, a nose that seemed too big for its nostrils, a band of broken veins across each cheekbone, lips of which only the lower one did any work, a bottom row of narrow black-edged teeth. As she concentrated on it, all this turned into shapes and colors, some parts moving, others not, as important and as unimportant as the whites and pale greens and lines and corners that were the papers on the desk, the dark greens and ovals and pinks of the flowers, the rectangles and dark blues and dark reds along the wall, or best of all the bands of light and shade everywhere. This was the method of dealing with things that she had learned very quickly six months earlier, just after finding out that there was nothing about her life that she liked.

  Making it so that either everything she saw and heard was important, or nothing but unimportant things were anywhere, had helped a lot at first. But as soon as she was really good at it, and could keep it up most of the day, she had begun having trouble with sizes and distances. It was about that time that her sister and brother-in-law had got Dr. Best to look after her.

  The trouble began again now. What was the doctor's face must be an ordinary size and an ordinary distance away. But, as she looked at it, it suddenly grew and receded at the same time, so that very soon it was, or seemed as if it was, yards across and yards and yards away, like a mountain miles off, a cloud in the sky. Then, with an invisible flick that she always expected but could never time, it was very small and near, the size of a penny at arm's length, a pinhead so close that she would brush it with her eyelash if she blinked.

  Hardly frightened at all, Catharine said to herself, meaning it very sincerely, that what she was looking at was Dr. Best's face, attached to the rest of him behind the desk in his office, surrounded by papers and all those flowers and the books, with bars of sunlight from the Venetian blind falling on the walls and floor and furniture. And after only a few seconds everything was back as it should have been. Now she knew she was getting better.

  Just then the doctor stopped talking. She felt so cheerful that she smiled at him and asked casually, "What happened to the man? Did they catch him?"

  "What man?"

  "The man in the park. The one that raped the little girl."

  He clicked his tongue, thrusting out his lower lip. "I don't know- that's none of my concern. Really, Mrs. Casement, I do beg you most seriously not to identify yourself with other victim-figures in this way. It's childish, childish in the technical psychoanalytic sense as well as the semantic."

  "I was only asking. I wasn't identifying. I wasn't raped."

  "No no no, I meant… Let it pass, let it pass. We've wasted quite enough time already. Now. You agree you've been warned that investigating your lesbian tendencies may lead to your suffering a shock?"

  "If you like to put that in writing I'll sign it."

  "That won't be necessary. Your oral consent is sufficient. Very well. You appreciate that unless you answer my questions fully and to the best of your knowledge and ability honestly there is no point in my putting them to you?"

  "Yes, all right."

  "Good. Now just running over what you told me last time… You've never taken part in any overt sexual activity with another member of your sex, never so much as embraced passionately with another girl or woman, never made a sexual approach to one or had one made to you by one, never entertained any romantic sentiment towards one. Do you agree?"

  "Agree? Of course I agree. It's what I said myself, isn't it?"

  "I merely wondered if you'd had any second thoughts on the matter. I'm particularly interes
ted in your friendship with this… Lady Hazell. Would you care to tell me something about that?"

  "It's just a friendship, doctor. There are such things, you know. Lucy is a widow and very rich and I met her through my first husband. When I left my second husband she said I could come and stay with her until I got myself sorted out. Only as you know I didn't get myself sorted out. But I must have told you this when I first came here."

  "In a rather different way. Do go on."

  "Well, that's all there is. She's been very kind to me and she makes me laugh and I'm fond of her."

  "What does she think of you?"

  "I don't know. I suppose she's sorry for me. I suppose she likes me."

  "Is she ever… physically affectionate, does she put her arm round you, hug you and the like? For instance, does she ever dance with you?"

  Catharine laughed heartily. "Dance with me? No. She doesn't ever dance with me. She's got quite enough male dancing partners."

  "So I confess I rather assumed," said the doctor, hissing slightly. "Oh yes, she came to see me after visiting you last week. Without an appointment, I may say. In fact she didn't even knock at that door. Fortunately I was disengaged. She said I wasn't giving you the right treatment and became abusive on the point."

  "I'm sorry, Dr. Best. I didn't know she was going to do that."

  He gave a brief snorting laugh, probably to show how trifling had been the effect upon him of Lady Hazell's intrusion. "Yes. She runs a sort of permanent salon for young men, doesn't she, at that grand house of hers? Officers from the camp and such? Parties and the rest of it till all hours?"

  "She gives parties, yes."

  "A curious environment, it must have been, for a woman undergoing a breakdown. Did you join in the parties when you were there?"

  "I just gave people drinks sometimes."

  Dr. Best said suddenly, "A very attractive person, I mean physically, wouldn't you say?"

  "Yes, clearly. But if you mean have I ever wanted to go to bed with her the answer's no."

  "Living in that house you must often have seen her naked or semi-naked, in the bathroom and the bedroom and elsewhere. Have you ever experienced sexual excitement at such times?"

  "No."

  "You haven't been aware of your nipples hardening or any genital phenomena?"

  "Christ, certainly not. I told you I get little enough of that with men."

  "We'll come to that later. Meanwhile I can't help being struck by the extreme emphasis of your denial, Mrs. Casement. Over-stressed reactions to such inquiries always tend to suggest that the subject is concealing an opposite reaction. So please think carefully. You have never in any way been sexually attracted towards Lady Hazell or any other girl or woman as far as you are aware, is that correct?"

  "Yes," said Catharine in a tone heavy with moderation.

  At this assurance Dr. Best's cordiality, which had been falling off ever since he ended his pair of anecdotes, vanished altogether. He curled his lower lip over his upper one, then drew it away with a plop. "It's clear that these tendencies of yours are buried more deeply than I suspected. We must try another line of attack."

  "May I ask a question?"

  He sniffed and shrugged. "If you wish."

  "I know I'm very ignorant about all this, but me not ever feeling attracted to girls, mightn't that just mean I wasn't attracted to them? I don't see how-"

  The doctor's good will was immediately restored. "As you say, you're ignorant. That's natural enough. But there's nothing mysterious about this. Tell me. What do you think is the reason for your prolonged history of… let's call it failure with men?"

  "Well, I suppose some of it's bad luck."

  "There's no such thing as luck in this field, I'm afraid. What else?"

  "I told you I sometimes feel a bit afraid of them. There was that man early on who pulled the knife on me, you remember."

  "Yes, very good, that's certainly relevant, though its real meaning is rather different from the one you appear to attribute to it. You'll agree that threatening somebody with a lethal weapon is a manifestation of aggression? Yes, now what's the most probable exterior cause of aggression, not coming from inside the person who becomes aggressive but from outside?"

  "Something you don't like?"

  "Very nearly. Something that doesn't like you. Somebody else's aggression. Do you follow?"

  Catharine considered. "You mean I didn't like him? But I spent all my time thinking how nice he was. I wanted to-"

  "That was what you thought consciously, Mrs. Casement. All this is buried very deep, you know. Just look at your sexual career. Over the last months I've accumulated something like thirty pages of notes on it. And what does it amount to?" The doctor picked up the file in front of him and threw it a few inches farther away on his desk, then, slowly folding his hands, laid them on his crossed legs. "Nothing very hard to interpret. Two broken marriages. Literally dozens of affairs, starting at an unusually-"

  "They weren't what you could call affairs, most of them, they didn't last any time at all. I kept wanting them to last when they started, but they kept going wrong and I couldn't make them last."

  "Because of your deep… unconscious… aggression… towards… men. Oh, it's a familiar pattern. You betray unconscious hostility, the man unconsciously senses it and begins to react overtly, you retreat, he responds to the primitive flight-situation with more hostility and so on. All of which increases your latent hostility yet further and makes the next failure that much more inevitable. Your course was set a long time ago. Originally, probably, your attitude to your father was what-"

  "I loved my father."

  "No doubt, no doubt. I'm not a Freudian, so we can safely leave all that on one side. I'm not interested in the semi-mystical origins of mental disease. I'm a doctor, not a theologian." Dr. Best ran his tongue to and fro behind his lower lip. "Anyway, in case you're still unconvinced, let me if I may draw attention to your physical type. Your shape, Mrs. Casement. Would you mind standing up for a moment? Thank you. Oh yes. Oh yes, it's all there. Tall… shoulders tending to be broad… small breasts… rather narrow hips… long legs. Turn round, would you? Quite so. You can sit down now. Quite typical semi-androgynous characteristics. You belong to-"

  "I know, that means man-plus-woman, doesn't it? Well, if you think I'm not properly a woman or something you're wrong. All my men, all the men I've ever had anything to do with, were always complaining about the very opposite. I couldn't do a thing without them all saying it was just like a woman. Bloody woman. Pull yourself together and stop acting like a bloody woman. And there was nothing wrong with my shape according to them. Whenever they weren't angry with me they were always going on about my shape, all of them. And my face. If you think I've got a face like a man all I can say is you've seen some pretty queer men."

  "Oh, I have, Mrs. Casement, I have." Dr. Best seemed delighted. "Some very queer men indeed. Including a number who were unaware of their condition until I pointed it out to them. Why, only yesterday I was talking to a young fellow under treatment here for alcoholism, an Army officer from the camp. Well educated, highly intelligent, you'd have said quite worldly and sophisticated. And yet when I suggested what was patently obvious, that he was drinking himself to death in order to conceal from himself his unconscious homosexual tendencies, he told me with evident sincerity that the idea had never crossed his mind. He meant his conscious mind, of course. In his case there was the fact that his appearance and demeanor and so on were those of a normal male, which in his uninstructed way he seemed to take as some sort of evidence of his basic heterosexuality. I lost no time in exposing the fallaciousness of that view.

  "Yes yes yes," the doctor went on with momentary petulance, perhaps repressing a negative reaction from the depths of his unconscious, "the world is full of male counterparts of yourself, Mrs. Casement. Undoubtedly the men you attract are of this type. The self-hatred engendered by their hidden recognition of this is what leads them to react so aggressively
to your own aggressions. It's hardly surprising that the outcome should be unfortunate on both sides. Such men would do well to recognize their homosexual psyche and set about coming to terms with it, as I told our young friend."

  Dr. Best gave a bright nod by way of conclusion and reached for a vase of wallflowers, the scent of which he inhaled with a clear nasal whistle.

  Catharine said, "You're advising me to start sleeping with women, are you?"

  "My dear Mrs. Casement, men in my position never advise anything, any more than we condemn anything. All we try to do is explain. And the explanation I offer you is that all your difficulties spring from an unconscious preference for your own sex. In other words, you are a lesbian."

  He put so much into this last sentence that Catharine tried quite hard to respond with appropriate indignation or concern. But perhaps she had taken too much to heart his repeated warnings against giving him the kind of answer she thought would please him. Anyhow, the best she could do was to ask in an interested tone, "Do you really think so?"

  The doctor put the flowers down firmly but quietly. More thoroughly than before, he searched his mouth with his tongue. "You seem unaware of the seriousness of your position. You became a patient in a lunatic asylum because you went mad, I've never gone in for sentimental euphemisms about mental hospitals and psychologically disturbed and the rest of it and I'm not going to start on your account. One of the marks of your condition is a fear of insight, understandable enough in view of what that insight would entail. But what I find far less… explicable is your obstinacy. An individual personality defect. You are of your own free will resisting that recognition of the truth, that shock which alone will enable you to undergo what's known as a psychic shift and reveal the true nature of your disorder. Very evidently, nothing I can do here will bring that about. Very well then. We'll see how you get on in a rather less cozy and warm and safe environment. I've feather-bedded you against reality for too long."