Angelica's Grotto Read online

  Professor Slope looked again at Klein’s frontal lobes. Coloured lights twinkled here and there, as on a model railway. ‘Elation?’ he said.

  ‘No, she was a total stranger.’

  Professor Slope raised his voice. ‘“Elation,” I said.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Did you perhaps enjoy getting this woman’s attention with what you said?’

  Klein smiled. ‘Well, she certainly got my attention when she bent over.’

  ‘Did you feel any sort of relief or release when you said what you said?’

  ‘I was shocked, and I was even more shocked when she hit me with the pickles. The queue behind me were very impatient and they were making angry crowd noises. I had to put back half my groceries because I only had the one usable arm, then I slunk home like some sort of pariah, unloaded the shopping, and headed for Casualty again.’

  Professor Slope took off his spectacles, wiped them with his handkerchief, and imagined the scene in Safeway. ‘Couldn’t have been very pleasant for you,’ he said.

  ‘She had curlers in her hair,’ said Klein, shaking his head.

  ‘Apart from that, how’ve you been feeling lately? Any big ups or downs?’

  ‘No big ones. I had a medium up a while back when I made potato pancakes and they didn’t fall apart.’

  ‘Downs?’

  ‘Well, I always feel a little low when I haven’t got a book going and right now I’m between books.’

  ‘Any plans for the next one?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Klimt, just the nudes. Do you know his work?’

  ‘No.’ Professor Slope contemplated the Escher. ‘Can you remember, perhaps when you were young, any sort of incapacity – not an injury but a loss of function?’

  ‘Loss of function! Catriona Moriarty, when I was fourteen – O God! she was like an Irish Aphrodite, and I …’

  ‘Not that kind of function – that’s autonomic nervous system. I’m looking for something ordinarily under your control.’

  ‘That’s a laugh. How much in life is under our control?’

  ‘Let’s not stray from the matter at hand. Try to remember some loss of function other than sexual.’

  ‘When I was nine I had to take piano lessons. My teacher, Mr Schulz, always smelled of bananas. I never practised but his pupils were giving a recital and I was to play Für Elise, which I’d never once got through successfully. On the afternoon of the recital all the strength went out of my wrists – they just went all floppy and my mother had to take me to the doctor.’

  ‘And what did the doctor say?’

  ‘He said it was nervousness and he gave me a tranquilliser.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I became tranquil.’

  ‘And your wrists?’

  ‘Stayed floppy till evening; when the recital was over they were all right again.’

  ‘That sounds to me like what we call a dissociative disorder.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s when there’s nothing physically wrong but the body isn’t taking orders from the brain.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the loss of my inner voice? That is the brain talking, isn’t it?’

  ‘The boundaries in this sort of thing aren’t as clear-cut as one might like. Before we can help you with your problem we need to have a better idea of what it is. I’m going to arrange for you to have some tests, then we’ll proceed from there.’

  ‘What kind of tests?’

  ‘Psychological ones.’

  ‘Just what I need,’ Klein whispered into his hand – ‘something I can fail at.’ To Professor Slope he said, ‘Who’s going to do the tests?’

  ‘One of our psychologists – I don’t yet know which one.’

  ‘And after that I come back to you?’

  ‘No, my job is to make the first assessment, then I pass you along to whomever is the best person to get you sorted.’

  ‘Whoever.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Professor Slope. ‘I’ll put the wheels in motion and you’ll be hearing from us shortly.’

  ‘From whomever?’

  ‘I’m sure your grammar is impeccable, Mr Klein, but more importantly we need to address deeper issues. Good luck.’ He picked up a microcorder and began to murmur into it, meanwhile extending his hand which Klein shook.

  ‘Why do ungrammatical people love to say “more importantly”?’ said Klein. ‘Thank you.’

  3

  The Meissen Girl, The Paxos Stone

  When Klein got home he poured himself a Glenfiddich, sat down at his desk, and looked across it to the mantelpiece and the Meissen figure of a girl about to bowl a golden ball. Leaning forward with her knees bent and her right arm extended she stood thirteen and a half inches high on a round gilt-bordered base one and three-quarter inches high. Her feet were bare and she wore a classical pale-green gown that was tied with a pink ribbon below the breasts and left her right breast and shoulder bare. She was made in 1890 and the sculptor, Schott, had signed the base.

  Every part of her was beautiful and shapely: her body and her limbs, her hands and feet, each individual finger and toe. Her long blonde hair framed the exquisite oval of her face. Full of sweetness, her face was, her rose-petal mouth all virginal, her eyes entranced and dreamy.

  Her face was the face of the beloved who takes no notice, the beloved who passes by, chatting with her friends, with never a glance, never a thought for the one whose heart lies at her feet. Had Schott intended that face or was it that the very clay under his hands had refused him the response he craved?

  Klein had bought that figure in Hannelore’s home town, Celle in Lower Saxony. ‘She looks like you,’ he said to her.

  ‘No, she doesn’t,’ said Hannelore. ‘I was never that young, never that pretty.’

  ‘Yes, you were, and the youth and prettiness are still there.’

  ‘You wish.’

  ‘I wish,’ said Klein twenty years later as the girl, intent on her bowling, passed him by with never a glance.

  The objects in his workroom, apart from their relationship with him, had relationships with one another: some harmless, some not. From a long-ago trip to Paxos with Hannelore, Klein, an inveterate collector of beach pebbles, had brought home one that he thought big enough to be called a stone. It appeared to be some kind of conglomerate, a pale warm grey, smoothly rounded, ovoid, weighed eighteen ounces, and felt good in the hand. On it Klein had written in black ink, in Greek letters, KINESIS/ANAPAUSIS: MOTION/REST.

  Holding this stone in his hand, he saw the beach and the large mystical rocks shaped by the sea, heard the lapping of the tide and saw, magnified by the clear water, a polychaete worm, black and many-legged, like a warning to the curious. He saw the road to the villa and the olive trees on either side that flashed silver in the warm wind. There was a particular olive tree, ancient and wrinkled and still bearing fruit: in its hollow trunk was an opening that looked as if a naked goddess, Persephone perhaps, had emerged from it into the green-lit grove. Klein tried to remember the moment of balance when he had written those words on the stone, caught only the scent of Hannelore’s sun-warm hair.

  Sated with ANAPAUSIS, the Paxos stone longed for KINESIS. Klein had once placed it on the mantelpiece near the Meissen girl, then quickly removed it before it could jump up and smash her to bits. From then on he kept it on his desk, handling it as he would a dangerous pet.

  4

  Fountain of Youth

  It was ten days before Klein received a letter giving him an appointment with a clinical psychologist, Mrs Lichtheim. In the interval he began to make notes for a study of the nudes of Gustav Klimt and he attended diabetic, eye, cardiology, vascular, and foot-health clinics at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital.

  On these visits he passed and repassed the fish in the lobby. They lived in a long, narrow, green and bubbling world and had been listed, Klein assumed, in the builders’ manifest:

  So many thousand bags cement
/>   So many thousand cement blocks

  1 No. 12 assortment XL Matissoid Mobile Atrium Shapes

  1 world (long, narrow, green, bubbling)

  16 lobbyfish (assorted)

  While appearing to take no notice of Klein and the rest of humanity the fish explained to their children, ‘What you see on the other side of the glass is an ichthyocentric world: it is as it is only because we are here to observe it.’ Klein sensed this and avoided eye contact.

  There were not very many young people queuing up for the clinics Klein visited; mostly they were others of his age group in wheelchairs and on sticks, many of them limping and halting in sandals, slippers, trainers, and divers bandages and offbeat bespoke surgical-appliance footgear. He spent half-days waiting to see registrars and consultants while nurses of many ages, weights, and shapes marched, ambled, and frisked past him. He mentally undressed the good-looking ones down to their lissome and beautifully articulated skeletons as, like a greyhound in a walking-frame, he followed with his eyes the nimble rabbits of his desire.

  When his name was called he popped as required. He popped himself on to and off tables; he popped on and off his tops and his bottoms, his shoes and his socks, always ‘for me’. ‘Just pop yourself on or off for me,’ said registrars and consultants. Nurses and house officers also required him to pop in one way and another for them. Eventually he popped into the street and made his way home to the word machine that silently asked what he had popped for it lately.

  During that time he also reported to Charing Cross Hospital for his monthly visit in a drug trial for the use of bezafibrate in arterial disease of the lower extremities. The nursing sister counted the number of tablets remaining, took his blood pressure, and asked him whether he had experienced headaches, nausea, impotence, or ennui since taking the tablets which were either placebo or active. When she finished with him he was bled a little by the turbanned phlebotomist while they talked about world and local news and weather.

  He had a thallium scan at Royal Brompton Hospital and a femoral angiogram at Chelsea & Westminster. He wrote a prescription request to his GP for more insulin, diltiazem, Imdur, captopril, frusemide, omeprazole, and aspirin. He bought a new bottle of glyceryl trinitrate tablets for angina and a new bottle of trisilicate of magnesium for oesophageal reflux. He stocked up on pine bark extract for his lower vascularities, green-lipped mussel extract for his knees, extract of gingko biloba for circulation in the brain and other extremities, and multivits just in case.

  ‘I have no inner voice and must speak my thoughts aloud,’ he said, ‘but I feel pretty good actually. I represent a triumph of the medical arts and the never-say-die spirit of the NHS. In clinical circles all the receptionists have a smile for me and I am known to consultants and other golfers as “he who declines to hop the twig”. In operating theatres I have more than once topped the bill; I am accomplished in nil by mouth and there is talk of getting me a permanent locker for my dentures. Life isn’t what it was but it’s a lot better than it’s going to be.

  ‘Now there comes to me a memory and I can smell the trees, feel the hot sun through the leaves. It was on the Appalachian Trail or it might have been somewhere else: my best friend Jim and I, hot and sweaty, pushing our bikes up a woodland road over a little mountain. At the top of the slope was a spring. I remember a stone trough and the clear cold water. There were leaves in the bottom of the trough and tiny crayfish. The water gushed from the pipe and it was a foreverness of itself, the endless quenching of all thirst. We drank it like an elixir and stuck our heads in the trough among the leaves and the crayfish and became new and strong and untired, for ever refreshed by the magic of that clear cold water that sparkled in the sunlight and the shadows on the mountain.’

  5

  Worth Writing Up?

  ‘Actually,’ said Professor Slope to Nathalie Lichtheim, ‘I haven’t come across anything like this inner-voice loss before – it might even be worth writing up.’ They were having coffee in Slope’s office where Escher’s carp lurked dimly on the wall.

  ‘You’re telling me this poor man has completely lost his mental privacy, his Selbstgesprach?’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

  ‘He whispers into his hand when he wants to be private. He presented like he was about to blow all his fuses and my first thought was hypomania and the usual bipolar thing. Then I began to wonder about his frontal lobes but I doubt that there’s anything organically wrong – his general irritability makes me think that his mental drains are blocked and he’s got a lot of sewage backing up on him.’

  Mrs Lichtheim shook her head and sighed a little. ‘I’m surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. Year after year we don’t say all kinds of things that could get us into trouble, we keep an internal watch on the words about to come out of our mouths: we monitor the prearticulatory speech output code during speech production by means of an internal loop to the speech comprehension system. So here’s this guy of yours who’s been not saying things for about seventy years which is quite a long time, really. He hears these unsaid things in his head but they never come out of his mouth. Finally the monitor, the voice in his head, says, “The hell with this, I quit. You want to say something, say it out loud.” You think it could be something like that?’

  ‘I hope he survives long enough for us to find out,’ said Slope.

  6

  A Person, Another Person, A Tree

  Nathalie Lichtheim M.Sc. AFBPsS. C. Psychol. was in her mid-forties, tall, with black hair, a luminous bespectacled face, and an abstractly motherly air. There was nothing in her office to lie down on but Klein whispered into his hand, ‘It would be nice to fall asleep with her sitting nearby.’

  ‘Can you tell me something about yourself,’ she said, ‘maybe something about how things are with you now?’ She spoke softly and with a slight accent, perhaps Viennese.

  Klein told her about the loss of his inner voice.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but apart from that?’

  ‘I’m not in very good shape. I live about a mile away and I walked here. I had to stop four times and rest because of angina. Life seems more of a struggle than it used to be; often people coming towards me don’t give me room to pass, as if I’m invisible. When I take a bus the people who should be queuing behind me shove past me to get on – that sort of thing …’ He trailed off into whispers.

  She asked him what medications he was on and he told her. ‘Now we’ll begin with the Bender Gestalt Test,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you nine cards and I’ll ask you to look at them and copy them.’

  ‘How does that bear on my inner-voice loss?’

  ‘This problem doesn’t come out of nowhere; we need to look at what’s underneath it.’ She showed him the cards and one by one he copied the various arrangements of lines, dots, and geometric shapes, whispering, muttering and singing into his left hand while his right hand was drawing. He sang ‘Stormy Weather’ and ‘Nobody’s Sweetheart Now’. ‘“Oh no,”’ he said, “‘it wasn’t the airplanes, it was Beauty killed the Beast.”’

  ‘“… Beauty killed the Beast”’, wrote Mrs Lichtheim. ‘Is that a quote?’

  ‘From the film King Kong,’ said Klein as he continued his copying, ‘when Kong’s lying dead in the street. I notice that I shorten everything. I wonder if tall men elongate.’

  “‘… if tall men…?”’

  ‘Elongate.’ When he had copied the nine cards Mrs Lichtheim removed them, asked him to sign the sheet with his drawings, gave him a new sheet of paper, and asked him to draw the cards from memory. ‘“Far and few, far and few, are the lands where the Jumblies live …”’ he said as he set to work. ‘“The very thought of you makes my heart sing, like an April breeze on the wings of spring …”’ he sang, no longer hiding his mouth with his hand. He was able to recall seven of the cards more or less but not in the correct order; his attempts at the eighth and ninth were only guesswork. Again he signed his name and she collected that sheet and gave him a fresh one.

&nbs
p; ‘That was the Bender Recall,’ she said. ‘Now I would like you to draw a person, any kind of person.’

  Klein drew a young woman seen from the rear.

  ‘Sign it, please,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘and now a person of the opposite sex.’

  Klein drew himself seen from the rear.

  Mrs Lichtheim took the drawing and placed the first one in front of him. ‘Could you tell me a bit about this one?’

  ‘She’s a young woman I saw in the Underground a couple of summers ago; I don’t believe I ever saw her face. She had long fair hair, was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, straw or maybe canvas, black cotton vest, tight white denim trousers, tennis shoes I think. She was very attractive, very appealing; her figure was shapely and girlish, she was graceful in the way she moved. She looked the very essence of youth and beauty. Walking away from me.’

  Mrs Lichtheim wrote down his words. ‘Anything about her state of mind? What she could be feeling, what she could be thinking about?’

  ‘She looked as if she might be going to meet someone she liked. She seemed well-pleased with life.’

  ‘Anything about her future?’

  ‘Years and years ahead of her, full of good things.’

  ‘How old would you say she was?’

  ‘Twenty-two or so.’

  ‘And this other person you’ve drawn?’

  ‘Well, that’s me. I’m seventy-two years old. I’ve drawn this man from the rear in pretty much the same pose as the young woman. His posture – he looks hesitant, as if he’s been brought to a halt, come to a pause. He’s wearing a rucksack because I don’t feel right unless I’m burdened to some extent. I think somewhere in Sholem Aleichem somebody says something like, “God doesn’t ask how far you can carry your burden, He just says to put it on your back.”’

  When Mrs Lichtheim finished taking down his words she offered him another sheet of paper. ‘Now I’d like you to draw a tree, please.’