Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (26 page)

Yes I
do
know whether to laugh or to cry. This morning I am laughing and God knows it is about time.

So the love of the century begins, in Birmingham for the most part, but a busy and popular Professor of Classics with a wife and two sons hasn’t all that much time left over for amusements, and the Silly Shop Steward hardly ever sees her Love. In the meantime this same Stupid Shop Steward has a beau, a Steady, a faithful love, being the Shop Steward on the Men’s Component’s Floor, where Men make plastic containers for transistor radios, for since they are Men and therefore more advanced and evolved, they can put on those difficult buttons and screws and handles and things, much more tricky than detergent containers. This faithful and loving swain gets the boot from the Silly Shop Stewardess, because of the Love of the Century. Forlorn and alone she says Boo hoo, Boo hoo, marry me, and he says, the Mad Professor says, Don’t be absurd. But what about your vows, your love, your passion, she cries?
He says, anyone who believes a word anyone says in bed deserves what she gets.

How’s that for a Professor?

But I’ve twice changed my whole life for you, she cries, sobbing, weeping, wailing.

No one asked you to, says he, taking the pipe out of his mouth for the purpose.

What shall I dooooooo, she wails. I’ve lost my true real right love, the Shop Steward, and I can’t have you, my life is empty and I want a Famileee.

To which he replies, Well, what’s stopping you?

You’d think the girl would have learned by now? You would, wouldn’t you?

Well, now. You’ll remember that bit, if you have time to remember at all, as a lot of very sloppy letters from me. But actually what was happening was that I was thinking, Well, what
is
stopping me? For as it happens I was pregnant, but only half knew it.

So I went back to Birmingham, had a fine bouncing son, eight pounds, two ounces, keeping my job more or less throughout and with the aid of some kind and loving plastic-container packers and—that was two years ago.

Boo hoo, boo hoo, all the way.

Yes, the child is two and his name is Ishmael, how do you like
that?

No, I don’t want a damned thing from you. Nothing. If you want to see the boy, fine. If you don’t, fine.

I don’t care.

I can manage by myself thank you very much.

It occurs to me actually, yes, it’s true, and
thank you very much
, I mean it. I don’t need anyone, no, not I.

I’m leaving Birmingham next month and shall spend the summer with a kindly aunt in Scotland, and I shall teach Greek to some misguided idiots who would be better employed learning Useful Italian, French and Spanish. But which, alas, I am not equipped to teach anybody, thanks a thousand times to you. No, I am not blaming you, like hell I’m not.

I heard from an old school chum yesterday that you are going about saying that the classics are a load of old rope and all current teaching absolutely ropy, and that no one understands what it was all really about. Except, of course, you.

Congratulations. Oh congratulations. I’m not surprised that you’ve lost your voice—so a little bird tells me? and can’t utter!

I’ve told you, you are preposterous.

With hate. I mean it.

CONSTANCE

DEAR DOCTOR X
,

I can answer your question very easily: yes, Charles Watkins did come to see me in the middle of August last. It was late one night. I think a Wednesday, but I can’t really remember, I am afraid.

Yours truly,

ROSEMARY BAINES

DEAR DOCTOR Y
,

After I posted my letter—two letters, actually—I remembered something about Charles that perhaps you should know.

It is about the last war. Of course to me it is rather old hat, but almost from the start of knowing Charles really well I thought that the last war hadn’t done him much good. I once met a friend of Charles (with Charles) who said that Charles once said to him that he—that is, Charles—had decided early in the war that he wouldn’t survive it. He was in danger a lot. His friends, that is, the men he was fighting with, were all killed off around him, twice. He was the only one left alive in a group of buddies, twice. Once in North Africa and once in Italy. When he reached the end of the war he could not believe he was still alive. He had to learn how to believe that he was going to live, said this man. Whose name is Miles Bovey. I’ll put in the address for you because perhaps you should ask him. He said that Charles had a long stretch at the end of the war when he did not want to begin living. He was drinking then. So Miles said but I have never seen Charles drink more than usually. Then Charles went back to University. Charles once said something to me that I have remembered. He said that ever since the war he couldn’t believe that people really found important the things they said they found important. He said he had had to learn to “play little games.” He said Miles Bovey was “the only person who ever really understood me.” I asked him what little games and he said “the whole
damned boiling.” Needless to say, I said: Love, too? I don’t remember what he said to that.

Yours sincerely,

CONSTANCE MAYNE

DEAR DOCTOR Y
,

Thank you for your kind and explanatory letter. It was not possible to gather very much from Doctor X’s letter.

Yes, I suppose one could say that Charles Watkins was “not himself” that evening, but you must remember my knowledge of him to that date was confined to hearing him lecture, and some remarks about him by mutual friends.

I can’t tell you if that lecture was important to him. It was certainly important to me. I wrote him a long letter telling him it was important and why. Perhaps writing it was a mistake, but looking back I don’t regret it. We sometimes have to take the chance of embarrassing people by claiming more than they want to give—or can. My letter was a claim. Of course I knew it was. You may ask: what did I say in it? but to answer that would mean writing the same letter. Suffice it to say that I heard him lecture, and things he said started me thinking in a new way. Or experiencing in a new way. Of course not in any dramatic exterior way. I did not get an answer to my letter. I thought once or twice of writing again, in case the first letter had not reached him, but there was no reason to suppose it had not. I concluded that my letter had been tactless, or
perhaps ill-timed, and that I would not hear at all from him.

But I was sitting that evening in a little Greek restaurant in Gower Street where I go fairly often. Frederick Larson was with me—the archeologist. Suddenly Charles walked in and sat down with us saying: I thought I would find you here.

This was not nearly as odd as it looks. For one thing he knew where I lived, for he
had
received my letter, and had been to my flat to see if I was in. When he found I was not, he walked about the adjacent streets to see if I was in a pub or a restaurant. As indeed I was.

But his unconventional arrival matched the general oddness of his manner. At first both Frederick and I thought he was drunk. Then, that it might be marijuana, or worse. Then Frederick began pressing him to eat and, clued by this, I realised that his clothes had that peculiarly unconvincingly grubby stale look that grubby clothes get when they are obviously clothes that are usually kept clean. Because he is not the kind of person one would ever expect to wear clothes that have been slept in, this stopped me from seeing at first that everything he wore had a rubbing of grime, and that he had grime marks on his hands. And he had a stale tired smell.

At first he kept refusing food, or rather, seeming not to hear when he was offered it. Then he began eating some rolls on the table, and Frederick simply ordered some food for him, without asking him again, and when it came we could see he was ravenous. He was talking
in a disconnected sort of way all the time. I don’t really know what about. It made sense while he talked. He was chatting away as if we were both very old friends and able to pick up all his references to people and places. The thing that made this less extraordinary was that both of us indeed felt we were old friends, for we had talked of him a great deal. He was making references to some voyage he was thinking of making, and even seemed to think we would be with him. Of course by then we had understood he was not at all “himself”—as you put it.

When the meal was over we asked him back to my flat. The three of us walked. It was not more than a couple of hundred yards. In my flat he did not sit down. He was restless and walked about all the time, examining objects very carefully, examining the surfaces of walls, and so on. But I got the impression that he had forgotten or lost interest in the thing he had just examined so carefully by the time he put it down. This went on for two or three hours. He was talking about getting out of the trap, getting out of prison, of escaping—that kind of talk. And it did not seem as odd to us as perhaps you may think it should, because our own thoughts were running on similar lines—or it sounded like that, but I am sure you have often found that one may talk for hours—indeed for days, or a lifetime, with a friend, and then discover that the words you use stand for very different things.

I have no way of knowing how real to Charles that night were the prisons, the nets, the cages, the traps
that he talked about. If you can call so disconnected and rambling a stream of words “talking.” But I and Frederick Larson have very definite meanings for such words. But Charles? I can’t say. Once when Charles was out of the room (he suddenly noticed his hands were dirty and went to wash them) we discussed whether or not to call a doctor, but decided not. He did not seem to us unable to look after himself. Perhaps we did wrong—after all, there was the evidence of his grimy clothes, and his obvious need for food, and the general strain and exhaustion. But I am one who does not believe that other people’s crises should be cut short, or blanked out with drugs, or forced sleep, or a pretence that there is no crisis, or that if there is a crisis, it should be concealed or masked or made light of. I am sure that other people, and they would be those that a doctor might consider responsible, would have arranged for a doctor to come and take Charles into custody—forgive me for putting it like that. But his state of mind—as far as I could judge it—seemed not unlike my own at times in my life which I have found most illuminating and valuable.

And then, too, I wanted to go on listening to him.

While his remarks may have been scattered, there was an inner logic to them, a thread, which sounded at first like a repetition of certain words or ideas. Sometimes it seemed as if the sound, and not the meaning of a word or syllable in a sentence, gave birth to the next sentence or word. When this happened it gave the impression of superficiality, of being “scatty” or demented.
But we have perhaps to begin to think of the relation of the sound of a word with its meaning. Of course poets do this, all the time. Do doctors? Sounds, the function of sounds in speech … we have no way yet of knowing—have we?—how a verbal current may match an inner reality, sounds expressing a condition? But perhaps this sort of thought is not found useful by you.

At about midnight it was clear that the framework of ordinary life was going to make a pressure for Charles. For without it, he would not have made a move. Frederick had to go home. His decision to go brought to Charles’ notice that it was in fact midnight. He went with Frederick. It was an automatic going. He might just as well have stayed. In the street, he said to Frederick: “I’ll see you next time round.” And walked off. And that was all we knew of Charles until I got a letter from Doctor X at your hospital.

I hope that this rather inadequate account of that evening may be of assistance. I am sorry he is so ill. I have it in me to envy him. There is a good deal in my life that I would be very happy to forget. May I visit him perhaps? I would like to, if it would be helpful.

Yours sincerely,

ROSEMARY BAINES

DEAR DOCTOR X
,

I am of course only too happy to help in any way possible.

I knew Charles Watkins off and on during our schooldays.
We were at different schools. When the war started we both found ourselves in North Africa. Charles saw more fighting there than I did. I was in Intelligence and at that stage less active. We met from time to time, but then I went to Yugoslavia and he went to Italy. Yes he had a hard time in the war, but more in the sense that he had a steady hard slog right through it, infantry, and then tanks. We did not see each other until the end of the war. In 1945 we met again and spent some months together. We both found ourselves pretty well shaken up and needed the company of a person who understood this. Personally I do not believe that people are “changed” by stress. In my experience certain characteristics get emphasized, or brought out. In this sense I did not find Charles Watkins “changed” by the war. But he was certainly ill after it. I would like to see Charles if it is possible. I think his C.O. may help you. He was Major General Brent-Hampstead of Little Gilstead, Devon.

Yours sincerely,

MILES BOVEY

DEAR DOCTOR X
,

Charles Watkins served under me for four years. He was satisfactory in every way, responsible and steady. He refused a commission for some time although I brought pressure to bear, because of friends he did not want to separate from. Understandable, but I was glad when he changed his mind, towards the end of the war. That was during the Italian affair. He ended up a
lieutenant, I believe, but we are talking of twenty-five years ago. I am sorry to hear he is not too fit.