Criminal Conversation (23 page)

But I will stop here. I am not, after all, going to tell you about my early manhood, about Beatrix and why I married her, how I came to acquire and build up this practice, how – or why – I began to seduce my female patients, nor about the unexpected, astonishing successes I have had in so doing. You will just have to use what wits you have.

You are continuing your quiet subterranean war. You have phoned up again for an appointment, I see by the book. Indeed, Miss Maas commented upon it.

“As far as I understand this is some police official. I rather think he's concealing whatever's wrong with him from his office people; he seems unwilling to accept appointments in advance, as though he were afraid of being found out.” She smiled tolerantly. “I imagine he's putting on a good face in front of his world, terrified they should discover he was ill.”

“Is he awkward?” I asked in an indifferent voice.

“No. But he asks for the afternoon of the same day in a soft pleading voice as though he knew that only then could he slip off undisturbed. I asked Mrs Marks whether she minded changing; I knew she wouldn't – she has nothing to do but go to the hairdresser.”

Miss Maas sees nothing odd in this; the eccentricities of patients are the small change of her day. I see, of course, other reasons for your conduct. Oh yes, Mr van der Valk, I do indeed think that you are concealing things from your superior officers. Whatever the evidence is that you certainly possess, you are sitting on it very quietly.

For some reason of your own, and to do you justice I think it is more than a pretence of playing at cat and mouse, you are moving with extreme caution around me. Is it that you really have nothing sound to go on at all? Or is it, which I think more likely, that you
have too much, and cannot dislodge me without stirring up a scandal that would cause heads to roll, involving as it would altogether too many important personages? One of my fortifications is the number of well-known patients I treat discreetly – as I do you. I have a member of the government who gets headaches. He is quite as wary and quite as surreptitious as you are about appointments, which he makes himself; not even his secretary is allowed to know that he consults me.

Or Mrs Marks… She is the soul of virtue, wife of the owner of a firm that is a household word. If there were, later, talk about my female patients, woe to him that began it. I am quite sure that you cannot arrest me.

Yet you press upon my weak spots. When you came today, and I had these last twenty pages still fresh in my mind, I thought that you knew, already, more than is good for you. You sat as has become your habit on the sofa, took out a cigarette and fiddled with it, sniffed happily at the flowers, looked at me with the expression women's magazines would call ‘quizzical'. I looked quizzical right back. I looked at the flowers too. I am fond of flowers, but not the carnations and lilies and orchids of the plate-glass palaces, which I rather hate. The shop-girls pick them out to fill our standing order twice a week. I prefer field flowers, those my father painted. They do not last if cut, but growing they remind me of the road-verges of France, and not of the rarefied glass prisons where Dutch flowers are reared. Of Suzanne, and not of Beatrix.

I did not fiddle with my cigarette; I put it in my mouth and lit it, with a crocodile-and-gold lighter, a present from Beatrix, bought - yes – in the Rue Saint Honoré in Paris. She goes frequently to Paris, where she studies New Looks, New Waves, and New Nonsense. You were plainly leaving me to move the first pawn today.

“My poor van der Valk – aren't you getting a little owlish?”

“How so?” with your grin; you enjoy remarks like this.

“Surely you have realised by now that whatever extraordinary imaginary misdeeds you have lodged in your head, you cannot possibly prove anything at all.”

“That isn't what worries me,” you said quite seriously.

“No? Then I fail to see what does worry you. I feel a duty towards you, since you are inscribed on a folder as my patient.”

“Worries me,” you repeated thoughtfully, struck by the word. “Now why do I say worries? – I'm worrying about that. Yes – you. You worry me.”

“I do? Tell me then; I'm interested in this symptom.”

“That's good, that's very good – that you should be interested. I was afraid you'd continue to pretend boredom.”

“Stop acting.”

You advanced suddenly at the double, your bayonet fixed.

“I find you spend too much time in your tower above here. I find you too apart, from everything. What contact have you after all with the world? You read papers, you will tell me, books, periodicals. You keep up with medicine. You see plenty of people. And between you and all these things I find a barrier. You're too far away altogether; reaching you isn't going to be easy.” You shook your head sadly and made a casual dab at the ashtray, exactly as though you had said ‘I wish it would rain; all this dryness does the crops no good'.

I was irritated, naturally. I had to check this irritation.

“My poor fellow – you have seen me here three times, and you have, I suppose, ferreted out any information in the public domain. I suppose you have questioned my friends. And you have the impudence to come here and talk like this?”

“Oh no, I don't question your friends – they'd all be curious immediately; it would be most unwise. No no, just the public domain. I've seen you of course more than three times. You show too little interest in me, even. Shall I give you an example?”

“Do.”

“You go every week to the athletic club. Tuesday evenings unless there's a concert you particularly wish not to miss. You take this exercise seriously – you never have evening appointments” – smiling in an irritating fashion at the evening appointments – “on Tuesdays. You play squash, at which you're quite an adept. With two or three friends, doctors like you. The little weekly health cure.”

“No mystery or secret about that – come to the point.”

“Why, it is just a coincidence that I go there too, and even play squash sometimes. I haven't followed you; I've gone there for years. Yet you have no notion of that. Your eyes are shut. Last week I practically trod on your feet and you never gave me a glance. You have a wish – which I feel is a bad wish – to obliterate the world, dismiss it from your presence.”

I had no immediate answer. I was, indeed, taken aback. It is true that squash on Tuesdays is an old habit of mine, and it is true of course that I know few people there. There are separate groups though; the fencers, for instance, to whom the club really belongs. I did not offer excuses, which would have sounded feeble.

“I can't say that my not noticing you at a place where I go for exercise rather than conversation is much of an indictment.”

“Who said anything about an indictment? A straw. Take another straw if you like. The day you were kind enough to show me your tower, where you are so delightfully away from the sweaty mob, like me, I glanced at your bedside books. What do I find? Fantasies. Totally imaginary worlds.”

I will admit that you do not leer as though you think yourself clever. But these were half-truths, difficult to admit, pointless to deny. Of course I am fond of those books (an amazing mythological romance by some talented Englishman, a professor of philology or some such science, for he has a great sense of words). They are splendid bedside reading. There is no earthly reason to be ashamed of them, and, of course, to say that liking such books shows a desire to escape from reality is utterly groundless and absurd, the very worst kind of amateur pretend-psychiatry. I said as much tartly. And you laughed heartily.

“The observation,” you said with odious amusement, “was a trial balloon, sent up to see if you would shoot at it. Of course your liking for a book, and I don't care if it's
Justine
or
Alice in Wonderland,
is not in the least an ominous fact. But that you should rush so warmly to your own defence over it shows me that you are aware that there is truth in what I say. The straws are connected with a lot of others
which I don't see. I'll give you a very cunning analogy that has just occurred to me. If you wish to give a quick elementary test to my nervous system you tap me on the knee to see if I jerk. That's exactly what I've just done. Tapped you on the knee. It jerked. Shall we try another?” You were full of a kind of childish enjoyment that I have noticed is a favourite pose of yours – I refrain from drawing superficial conclusions about your character.

“Your analogy is false, and your pretended knowledge of an inexact science is zero,” I said crossly. “A dabble of jargon that lays bare your superficial mind.”

“Very, very good. Shall we try something else? Your foot? – what's the jargon word now for tickling someone's foot and seeing if the toes curl? Mine curl like a bloody octopus at the bare thought.”

I had to smile too.

“A simple reaction test,” I said gravely, “known to the ignorant, like you, as the Babinski reflex after a French neurologist of more distinction than myself.”

“Babinski – isn't that perfect? – can't go wrong with a name like that. Well now – I'm perfectly serious – I invite you for a little game of squash. Not Tuesday – how about Thursday? You'll beat me easily. Do your toes curl?”

It was, I think, your irritating smile that provoked me. You were watching me, I saw, closely, for signs of hesitation or irritation.

“Why not?” I said agreeably. “And now I will ask you to excuse me; I see by my little light that I have a patient waiting.”

I have thought, quite a good deal, about you since that last scrap of conversation. I am thinking, to be exact, about a science as inexact, to be sure, and as distorted by popular prejudice in the public mind, as psychiatry. You are not a pretentious person, and you would disclaim, I think, any scientific basis in criminology. There are theories, I gather, which are probably taught to aspirant policemen at the training school. I suspect that you would agree that these are as outdated as the measuring of bumps on men's heads.

As a neurologist I have a slight prejudice against psychiatry, because of the popular confusion. People are constantly coming to me and asking gravely whether psycho-analysis would help them. I notice that the courts, in criminal cases, tend to rely more and more upon psychiatric opinions. I myself would not care to be the consultant expected to give a serious opinion upon an old woman who has poisoned both her husbands with weed-killer at twenty years' interval – I take this as an example since there have lately been two or three remarkably similar examples of this reported in the press. Parathion has become a bogy-man: there is now no man, woman or child in Holland that does not know how to buy it, how to administer it, and that the Minister is ‘studying' ways of restricting the open unimpeded sale of this disagreeable chemical. One does not need to be a psychiatrist to know that there will be several more cases.

I do not believe that any serious psychiatric practitioner will really have the insolent vanity to pretend that he can reach into these old women, and say with certainty, ‘This is the monster that the prosecutor claims, and it is your duty, gentlemen, to apply rigorous methods.' Equally, he would be very rash to say, ‘Give her to me in the clinic for a year, and I will restore you a balanced and useful member of society. He knows that both answers are nonsense. He cannot do that old woman the faintest good.

Even the physiological aspects of human pain and misery are dreadfully obscure. I am a skilful and sensitive diagnostician, but I am singularly helpless in an alarming number of instances. There are men, certainly, who have trained themselves by rigorous disciplines to a sensitivity even greater than that of the complex and delicate machinery we rely upon. An example made familiar by the publicity he was forced to yield to is that of Felix Kersten. But Kersten himself, able to reach and relieve the stomach-aches of Heinrich Himmler, could not put an end to them.

You, van der Valk, will agree with me that in a given set of circumstances any man will commit a crime. Because of a disturbed nervous system. When fears and anxieties begin to press upon a man, an endless series of permutations produces a criminal. The causes of this nervous stress…my poor friend. Snobbery, for instance, and the spirit of competition. The fear of age that is the result of our newly learned exaggerated deference towards youth. What are the effects – the physiological effects – of the human conscience, that abominable invention – upon the human body? You will certainly tell me that for every man I show you who is ill you could show me a criminal.

Are we all criminals? Has every exaggerated-seeming manifestation of the human spirit a nervous origin? Was Jeanne d'Arc simply a witch? Are all saints neurotics, deranged, dangerous persons because their neurosis has become disabling, psychotic? Was the Protestant religion, for example, caused by nothing more than Martin Luther's chronic constipation or John Calvin's earaches? You see at once that the theory is ridiculous. We cannot
over-simplify. There is much more to it than a physiological explanation.

I do not use the word religion in its narrow, sectarian sense. In all the doings and thoughts of humanity there is a moral problem. All drama moves upon a moral pivot – a truism. This moral sense – if infected, will a criminal inevitably appear? What is a criminal?

You are, my dear van der Valk, let us suppose in deference to your often-indulged fantasy, a neurologist. To be concrete, you are Felix Kersten, called upon to treat Heinrich Himmler for excruciating and disabling pains – the famous SS stomach-ache. You observe this patient at length, over a period of years. You find a moral person. Himmler had antique military virtues that have become, in our society, derisory. Loyal, honest, incorruptible, patriotic. Poor in money despite his position. Generous, kind to the poor, devoted to the family. His ideals were simplicity, self-sacrifice, integrity. Nobody denies all this.