The Dog Who Came in from the Cold (20 page)

She stared at him. “You like girls then …”

He shook his head. “Not in that way.”

“So …”

“Oh, Caroline, how can I explain it? I like neither. Can’t you understand? I just want to be your friend. I just want us to be like this, well, indefinitely, and I know that it’s terribly unfair on you because you’re going to want a lover and all the rest. And then there won’t be any room for me in your life—how could there be?”

She released him from her embrace. “I want us to be friends too, you know. I want that as well.”

“Yes, I know. But you’re going to want more. You’re going to want more than that, and Caroline, oh, it’s so hard to know how to say this. But I suppose I should just come right out with it.” He hesitated. “I’m just not into the physical side of things. I’m just not.”

T
ERENCE
M
OONGROVE
—mystic, dreamer, Porsche-owner—led his sister to her bedroom on the first floor of his Queen Anne house outside Cheltenham. “I’ve put you in Uncle Eric’s room,” he said. “I know you like the view from that window. And I’ve asked Mrs. Rivers to put some flowers in the vase that Uncle Eric once threw at that man who came to ask if we would vote for him. Do you remember? The man said something political to Uncle Eric, and he threw the vase. Just like that. Bang. It was a jolly dangerous thing to do, and Daddy was furious, really furious.”

Berthea did remember, and smiled at the recollection. “Uncle Eric wasn’t quite right. I think the man realised, and was very good about it. They get an awful lot of rudeness on the doorstep when they go canvassing.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Terence. “You’re eating your soup and some silly politician comes and rings the bell and asks if you’ll give him your vote. Really! Do they seriously think that anything they
can say in a few minutes on the doorstep is going to change the way you were going to vote?” They were now at the top of the stairs, and he paused. “Do you think Oedipus does much canvassing?”

“I doubt it,” said Berthea. “Oedipus doesn’t exactly exert himself, as we well know.”

“I know he’s your son,” said Terence. “And I know he’s my nephew. And I also know I shouldn’t say things like this, but I’d hate to answer the door and find Oedipus standing there asking for my vote. I really would.”

“Yes,” said Berthea. “Not an attractive thought. What would you do?”

Terence gave it a moment’s consideration. “I’d give him a jolly good push,” he said. “I’d push him off the step and say, ‘I’m not voting for you, you Sam!’ ”

Berthea frowned. “What’s a Sam?”

“I’m not at all sure,” said Terence. “But it fits Oedipus. And a lot of other politicians.”

“Maybe.”

They made their way to the end of the corridor, where an open door led into an airy, square room. The curtains were pulled back and the late afternoon sun was streaming in. “Lovely,” said Berthea. “And Mrs. Rivers has done those nice flowers there. I must thank her.”

“She likes you,” said Terence. “She always has. And here, I’ve put out some magazines for you to read. This one is really interesting. There’s an article in it about morphic resonance. Do you know what that is?”

Berthea glanced at the cover of the magazine. “No, I don’t, I’m afraid. I’m a bit hazy about these things, Terence. It’s not really my—”

Her brother interrupted her. “That’s because you haven’t bothered to find out. If you did, you’d learn an awful lot, Berthy, you really would.”

She sighed. “Time, you know …”

“Well, I can tell you all about morphic resonance, as it happens,” said Terence. “It’s the idea that living things have a morphic field around them that determines how they will develop.”

Berthea rolled her eyes. Terence was always looking for something, and as a result seized upon any theory he encountered. Morphic fields. “Have I got one?” she asked. “Have I got a morphic field?”

Terence smiled. “Of course you have, Berthy. Your morphic field is part of the human morphic field. All the experiences of mankind are …” He waved a hand in the air, in the direction of Cheltenham. “All our experiences are out there in the vast morphic field made up of all our memories. You’re part of that.”

“Sounds somewhat Jungian to me.”

Terence’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. “But of course it is! That’s exactly what it is. Jung talked about the collective unconscious. That’s the same thing, really, as what Rupert Sheldrake talks about.”

“Rupert Sheldrake?”

Terence paged through the magazine. Coming to a photograph, he showed it to Berthea. “That’s him. That’s Rupert Sheldrake. He wrote a jolly clever book, you know.
A New Science of Life
. He says that each species has a collective memory, and this collective memory influences how we behave.”

Berthea stared at her brother. She had often wondered at how little he was able to remember other than this sort of thing. “Can you give me an example?” she asked.

“Yes, I can,” said Terence. “And it’s a really exciting example. You know that during the war—”

“Which war?” interrupted Berthea. “We’ve had so many.”

“The big one,” said Terence. “The Second World War. During the war, there was no aluminium for the tops of milk bottles. So they had to use a different system, and that was jolly bad news for the sparrows,
who had got used to pecking off the tops of the bottles and having a sip at the cream on the milk.”

“Can’t have made themselves very popular,” said Berthea.

Terence ignored this. “Well, for six years or however long it was there were no foil caps like that. So all sparrows forgot how to do it because the sparrows that would have remembered those foil bottle tops were dead. There was a whole new generation of sparrows that knew nothing about how to get cream by pecking at the tops.”

Berthea’s eyes glazed over.

“And then,” Terence continued, “when the war was over, they brought back those foil bottle tops. And you know what, Berthy? You know what?”

She forced herself to concentrate. “No. What?”

Terence paused for dramatic effect. Then, with the air of one revealing a resounding truth, he said, “The sparrows immediately knew what to do! They pecked at the bottle tops straight away!”

“Their collective memory?”

“Of course,” said Terence. “What else could it have been?”

“Smell,” suggested Berthea. “They smelled the cream.”

“No,” said Terence abruptly. “Impossible. It was morphic resonance. They picked it up from their collective morphic field. It’s in Rupert Sheldrake’s book. You read it for yourself.”

Berthea stared up at the ceiling. “But if it’s part of our collective memory,” she said, “why would I have to look it up? I’d know it.”

Terence frowned. “You’re being very unhelpful, Berthy. You’re just trying to wind me up. You’re a naughty old psychologist!”

“Psychiatrist,” said Berthea.

“Same difference,” said Terence, pouting.

“No,” said Berthea, “it isn’t. The difference is MB, ChB, MRCPsych. That’s the difference.”

T
ERENCE LEFT
B
ERTHEA
with a strict instruction to be in the drawing room by a quarter to seven at the latest, when he would serve pre-prandial martinis. The mention of martinis gave rise to an exchange of warning glances, but nothing was said; both remembered the last time Terence had mixed the cocktails, when the conversation had gone perhaps a little further than was wise, with fantasies on the theme of how best to dispose of Oedipus Snark. That would not recur, or at least not in the company of others, who might not understand the length and depth and breadth of the provocation offered by Oedipus over the years.

At about twenty to seven, Berthea was ready to go downstairs. She wanted to be punctual because she knew that Terence, who was otherwise vague in the extreme, nonetheless took punctuality very seriously, just as Auden had. Martinis, in Auden’s household, were served on the dot of six, and woe betide any guests who were late. Berthea had often wondered about this: Auden was messy—his study filled with piles of paper, unwashed glasses, cigarette stubs—and yet out of such chaos came order, of thought, of metre and of cocktails. Perhaps it was something to do with notions of outer and inner cleanliness; Berthea had read that some travelling people—gypsies, as they used fondly to be known—liked the inside of their caravans to be spotless while the surrounds, the grass upon which they camped, would often be … well, less than spotless, bless them. And it was frequently the case, she knew from professional experience, that people whose lives were disordered in some respect had one or two areas of their existence where they were punctilious and highly observant. Such people might expect high standards from others and were capable of flying into a rage over some petty lapse by
an official or a friend. Yet they could not see that they themselves were guilty of exactly the same lapses, and much worse.

Terence was not like that. As far as Berthea could tell, he had no passive-aggressive traits at all: he was not afraid of intimacy, he never lied, he was not given to sulking. Terence was a bit of an enigma for Berthea; he was certainly not
normal
, in the way in which most of us were normal—a very fuzzy concept, of course—but he was not
abnormal
, in the way Oedipus was. Oedipus was psychopathic
simpliciter
, or, in plain English, bad, and it was indicative of his condition that he had no insight at all into how bad he was. Which should not surprise us, thought Berthea—those most in need of help simply cannot see that need.

Plain English was useful, and she defended it, but had to accept that when it came to the human personality in all its complexity one had to resort to technical terms. Plain English terms did not allow for nuance: talk of “madness” was very unhelpful, not because it disparaged those unfortunates who were afflicted by it, but because its brush was far too broad. One could not lump the psychotic together with the mildly neurotic; one could not put the mildly depressed alongside those suffering from vivid delusions. And yet Berthea sometimes felt that the ordinary, vulgar terms for mental disorder expressed an essential truth, and were cathartic, too, for those who worked in the field. She had heard a colleague refer quite affectionately to a patient as “completely bananas.” One would not find the term “bananas” in that diagnostic
vade mecum
, the
DSM-IV
, but the psychiatrist who used it felt momentarily less oppressed by his calling simply because the word defused the tension and the sadness. Similarly, the term “doolally,” which people used for those who
lost their place
, seemed less clinical, less frightening than the conventional diagnostic sentence.

That same colleague, irreverent as he was—and therefore levelheaded and popular—had once remarked, as he and Berthea drove
together past a psychiatric clinic, “I think I should put a sign outside the place saying
May contain nuts.
” Berthea had laughed, and had woken up that night and laughed again at the recollection of his wonderful remark. Laughter, so rarely prescribed by any clinician, was surely the most therapeutic thing in the world. And now, she had read, there were studies to prove it—something the drug companies would not be happy about, since laughter was free, could be administered by anybody, and had no negative side effects.

May contain nuts
 … The same might be said of Terence’s house, with these odd friends of his. The last time she visited, there had been the sacred dance people and their Beings of Light; now there were these two resident gurus, Roger and Claire, who had insinuated themselves for the purpose of writing their magnum opus. And for the purpose of eating too, no doubt, and drinking Terence’s martinis. Unless, of course, they did not indulge—shortly she would see whether it was carrot juice or gin they drank, and that would tell her a lot about whether they were genuine.

She left her room, and then, on impulse, went back in to collect her handbag. It contained her purse and her credit cards, and for some reason she felt uneasy about leaving them in her room. If Roger and Claire were capable of leeching off poor Terence then might they not be equally capable of removing a few banknotes or a card from a guest? The thought came to her quite powerfully, but she immediately felt guilty; how could she think such a thing about fellow guests whom she had not yet even met—apart from a brief sighting of Roger in the garden. I must not allow myself to be distrustful, she told herself firmly, but nevertheless she kept hold of her bag. It would not do to tempt Providence, at least not once Providence had been alerted to a possibility.

She made her way down the corridor. There was a door off to the left, to a room that she knew to be another spare bedroom; Uncle Edgar had stayed there when his wife had found it all too much to bear. She paused. The door was slightly ajar, just a tad, but enough
for her to hear voices within—a man’s voice and then a woman’s. She was not one to eavesdrop, and the old adage that those who did heard ill of themselves was very true, as so many of those irritating old adages were. But she could not resist; she crept closer to the door.

A squeaky floorboard protested loudly. Berthea froze. The murmur of voices ceased, but then resumed. She breathed a sigh of relief, and strained to hear what was being said.

P
OLONIUS HAD AN ARRAS
behind which to hide—not that it did him much good. Berthea Snark had no such cover as she stood on the first-floor landing of her brother Terence Moongrove’s Queen Anne house. The unfortunate Polonius brought Hamlet’s wrath upon him through an ill-timed call for help; Berthea would make no such mistake. She stood motionless, and unless she were to sneeze—which she had no plans to do—the only threat lay in the squeaky floorboard she had just trodden upon. That was silent now, and if the owners of the voices murmuring within the room off the landing had been momentarily disturbed, they were no longer on the alert as their conversation had resumed.

If there is one thing which one can always make out in an otherwise indistinctly heard conversation it is one’s name. Being professionally interested in such phenomena, Berthea had been fascinated to read in the psychological literature of how people in certain stages of sleep may not react to stimulus but upon hearing their name being called may wake up quite quickly. She had experienced this herself while sleeping through a meeting of a committee of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; she had awoken at precisely the moment the chairman mentioned her name, and fortunately had
been able to respond to his question quite satisfactorily. Sleeping in meetings, of course, was nothing to reproach oneself for, even though it could be occasionally embarrassing; many meetings were unnecessarily long, or indeed completely uncalled for, and if they provided an opportunity to catch up on much-needed sleep, that at least gave them some purpose. Berthea had once been at a meeting where everybody was asleep except her and the chairman, and the two of them alone had dispatched a great deal of business in a very efficient and appropriate manner. That same chairman, one of the great chairmen of his generation, was himself an accomplished napper, famous for being able to sleep through an entire meeting, only waking at the end, whereupon he would provide an excellent summary of everything that had happened during the meeting. Various explanations had been suggested, one being that he had a rare and useful ability to hear while he was asleep; another, more plausible explanation, was that he knew the members of the many committees very well, and knew that they were unlikely to come up with any novel remarks, and therefore he had no difficulty at all in imagining what they had said.