The Birth of Love

The Moon

Monday August 15th, 1865, Vienna

*

Dear Professor Wilson,

I am sorry to disturb you from your work; however, I must ask your advice about a most distressing series of meetings I had today at the asylum. As you know, I have been visiting the asylum in Lazarettgasse for some years now, examining the inmates of this accursed place, better to understand the conditions which cause the individual to discard the faculty of reason. Today I met an inmate in such a terrible and perplexing condition, as to question every notion of lunacy I have thus far elaborated. I have — with reference to the many visits I make to ‘lunatics’ — been developing a theory that what we call madness is often simply a rearrangement of the human personality, or an arrangement which in some way offends more ordinary sensibilities. If we were to abandon the notion of sanity as strictly distinct from madness we would save many from suffering. We would perceive that madness is a lunar condition, a condition of revelation and vision and thereby we who have allowed our perceptions to be veiled by conventional observance can sometimes learn from those we refer to as lunatics. There are many forces within the human soul which we refuse to acknowledge, many ancient presences we have turned away from, and I suspect that these often command those we call lunatic, and cause them to behave in a way we cannot understand. This is my unpopular theory; yet I discovered today a case as resistant to my theorising as to more popular theories of madness. The man is in dire need of help.

*

I arrived at the asylum this morning at 9.00 a.m., and rang the bell. The door was opened, as usual, by one of the burly orderlies, who ushered me into the anteroom. The room is intended to appear homely; there are some armchairs and bookshelves with innocuous books of the hour upon them, and at the centre of the room, above the fireplace, is a mediocre painting of the Alps. Everything is superficially nondescript; yet, I always think as I stand there, it is the room in which so many of the inmates are committed by their families, and are taken away wailing and pleading, in horrible fear. Herr Meyer soon arrived, who is in charge of the asylum. He is always very smart and efficient, yet over the years I have come to regard him as an unpleasant man, quite brutalised by his work, or perhaps drawn to it precisely because of the vicious elements of his nature. He smells of cruelty, and his eyes are sharp and vigilant. His manner is sly, and I generally acknowledge him with a cursory good day and proceed to my business. This morning however he was rather excited — licking his lips, even, with a thick pink tongue — and he said, ‘A very interesting case, the case of Herr S. Came here two weeks ago. Consigned to our care by some friends. A violent and incontinent man.’

‘What manner of lunatic is he?’ I asked.

‘Well spoken. Clearly once an educated man. Accuses himself of murder. And others too. He cannot give you precise names however; he finds it hard to recall specific details. This is an aspect of his madness. You should see him for yourself,’ he said, nodding in his insidious conspiratorial manner.

‘I should be glad to. Do you have any more information about him?’

Herr Meyer adopted his most self-important tone. ‘Oh I cannot reveal the further details to you, my good man. The family has asked me to maintain the strictest secrecy around Herr S. His identity must remain obscure to outsiders such as you. You surely understand, that my first concern is the protection of my patients and their families?’

*

I responded with the briefest of nods, and he, smirking a little, led me through the asylum, where there were rooms furnished with the damned, and then dark corridors lined with cells. There may be worse places on earth than Vienna’s public asylum but at present I cannot imagine what corner of the globe might hold them. Its corridors echo with a ragged chorus — each madman finding his own discord, some of them little more than whoops and cackles, others strident and jangling. They rail, oh how they rail against those who sent them here, and those who have not come for them, and they know — at one level I believe they know — that they have been abandoned. The ones who do not talk, they turn expressions of such despair upon you, it is hard to think that they are beyond all comprehension. As we entered the communal rooms I was briefly held back by the smell of faeces and decay — but I have long been visiting these madhouses, and have sadly grown accustomed to this noxious atmosphere and all the suffering to which it attests. (Indeed I believe these poor individuals are hastened to their ends by the severity of the atmosphere in which they exist, that it is quite impossible for any human to be cured in these conditions, and the asylums in their present state must only ever be a prison for the lunatic. I have been campaigning along these lines for a few years, but my efforts have so far been in vain). As we walked I recognised a number of the long-term residents — an ageing man in a grimy black suit, a tattered handkerchief in his pocket, one boot off and one boot on. He would meander around, saying very little, and then he would stop on one leg, or he would take ten skipping steps and then two broad strides, like a child playing a game. He was hesitating in the middle of the room, until Herr Meyer pushed him roughly aside. We passed another fellow I had seen many times before, a prematurely aged man with matted blond hair, who talked incessantly, mostly of colours, as if he were the author of a meticulous system — ‘And there is the red. And there is the black and the blue. And there is the purple. And now the red once more …’ and so on. I have talked several times to this man, hoping to discern his system, if one exists, but I have not yet understood it. He sounded as if he came from Salzburg, and I had been told that no one came to visit him. He, too, received the rough edge of Herr Meyer’s shoulder, because he presumed to approach us, and, thus rebuffed, he turned away. ‘Now the black, and then the blue …’

*

Herr Meyer kept giving me odious smiles, as if we were sharing a marvellous joke. ‘I demand a hearing, I demand a hearing,’ said one of them as I passed, while Meyer snorted as if this was a sublime quip and ushered me on. His absolute and abiding assumption was that these people were worthless, subhuman, simply because their reason had failed. Men such as Meyer perceive their asylums as private kingdoms, governed by their own brutal laws, and they treat the inmates like animals for the most part, as if madness has deprived them of all humanity. Despite all the reforms in our legislation this continues to be the orthodoxy in many such places. I sometimes suspect that were Herr Meyer deprived of his fiefdom, he would fall out of the realm of the ‘sane’ and be instantly confined himself. Indeed one must observe that it is a very debased civilisation, which allows Herr Meyer to be grand arbiter over such fragile human souls!

*

Water trickled down the walls, a steady drip, and I thought of those lunatics with this constant noise in their ears, and all the remorseless ways in which they were stripped of dignity and deprived of any hope of recovery. We entered an area in which the inmates were confined to cells, and everything was cast into shadow, the sounds indistinct, though no less miserable. Now Herr Meyer stopped at a cell, and, with a sardonic flourish, opened the door. A man was sitting in the corner, in chains. The cell was so dark, I could hardly distinguish his features. He seemed from what little I could discern to be blunt-featured and stocky, and he was sitting very quietly, staring into space. Herr Meyer rattled his keys, and said in his leering way, ‘Herr S, there’s someone to see you.’ He addressed the patient as if he had no claim to any form of kindness, and Herr S refused to respond. I wondered if he could not endure the nature of his confinement, and thereby refused to acknowledge his keeper. Or if his madness took him in the catatonic way, and made him mute. ‘Oh Herr S,’ said Meyer, in a taunting tone, and I said, ‘That is enough, I will speak to this man alone, thank you.’

‘He’s chained up and cannot trouble you,’ said Herr Meyer, unabashed and still presuming to be conspiratorial. Then he removed himself, and I turned to consider the man before me.

*

For the first few minutes Herr S did not look up. He seemed to be deep in thought and I hesitated to disturb him. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I perceived his hair had fallen out in clumps, and his skin was drawn tight, like that of a reptile. His hands were covered in scratches, and there was a livid bruise on his forehead, a swelling on his mouth; testifying — I imagined — to the rough treatment he had already received from Herr Meyer’s attendants.

*

After a time I said, ‘Herr S,’ again, and he lifted his head. Even then he stared into space, as if he did not see me.

*

‘Herr S, as it seems I must call you, my name is Robert von Lucius,’ I said. ‘From time to time I visit the occupants of this asylum, the better to understand their conditions. I do not believe that the mad are beyond redemption and must be sequestered and ruined. I believe that many of those described as mad have greater access than I to the most profound mysteries of the human spirit, if only I could understand them better. For this reason, I am regarded with suspicion by some of my contemporaries. I do not care for their good opinion, except where their censure prevents me from doing my work. I would like to talk to you, if that is acceptable.’ Once more he said nothing, and I was unsure if he had heard me or understood my words.

I said, ‘Is there anything you need?’

*

At that, his eyes fixed on me. I must confess that I was briefly unnerved by his gaze. It expressed such hopelessness, such a terrible absence of joy. It was horribly eloquent, though all it invoked was macabre and vile. There was a chaos to his limbs which dismayed me too. It was as if his bones had been broken and had mended strangely. Everything about his posture was ugly and awkward; everything about his gaze was desperate and beseeching. He opened his mouth to speak but no sound came. He sat in this way for some time, opening and shutting his mouth, and then he grabbed his hair — I now saw one of the causes of his mottled baldness — and began pulling frantically at a clump. I was obliged to look away, feeling that he should be permitted to pass through this fit without being observed. For some time, I examined the dank wall, with its patterns of mould and grime, and when I turned towards Herr S again I saw he had slipped into his former stupor.

*

I said, ‘I would like to ask you how you came here, if I may. Herr Meyer told me you have been here for two weeks now.’ At the name of his keeper, Herr S experienced another spasm. His body convulsed, he gripped the chains and opened his mouth as if to howl. There was fear in his face, and urgent entreaty.

‘Is he here?’ he said, in a whisper.

‘No, he is not here. He will not return while I am with you,’ I said.

‘How long will you be here?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Please stay as long as you can,’ he said.

‘Are you afraid of Herr Meyer?’

‘I am very afraid,’ he said to me, still in this almost inaudible tone, so I had to lean forward to understand him.

‘Of what are you afraid?’

‘He will kill me. Perhaps he has already. The injuries I have sustained are in themselves life-threatening. I do not think I have much time left.’

‘What are the injuries you have sustained?’

‘I fear I must have internal bleeding of some fatal sort,’ he said. ‘They beat me very badly and though I was barely conscious by the end I believe they stamped on my chest. I felt something crack and puncture, and since then I have experienced acute abdominal pain and I fear haematemesis may develop.’

‘You are certain they beat you in this way?’ I said.

‘I am quite certain they beat me though as I said I was confused by the end and so perhaps there are omissions in my account.’

*

His speech surprised me. He was wretched indeed, but the rancid Herr Meyer had assessed him correctly in one matter; he was clearly a man of education and former rank. This further piqued my curiosity, and I said, ‘I should discuss this with Herr Meyer, demand an explanation.’

‘Oh please do not. Do not tell him I said anything,’ said Herr S. He really was in fear of his life. Even in his damaged state, even with his mind hanging in tatters, he wanted to live. This has always interested me about those we define as mad, this residual life urge most of them possess. They do not regard their lives as finished. If you were to offer them a pistol they would generally refuse the opportunity to take arms against their sea of troubles. Once more, this suggests to me that these confident distinctions we forge are fundamentally useless, and that if we are ever to advance we must pay more attention to the revelations of those we currently ignore. In this instance, Herr S was evidently afraid, and had no desire to end his suffering, or to have it ended by the ministrations of Herr Meyer.

I said, ‘I will say nothing to him, I solemnly swear.’

At that he became a little calmer.

*

‘I am told you arrived here two weeks ago,’ I said. He nodded faintly. ‘Where did you come from?’

‘I am not sure,’ he said. ‘Where are we now?’

‘We are in Vienna.’

‘Vienna? I think I know that city well. I am not sure. When they beat me I perhaps sustained an injury to the brain. Something is wrong with my memory.’

‘Do you think you might have been living in Vienna?’

‘I believe I was on a train. I left my home …’ He stopped, shaking his head.

‘And where is your home?’ I tried again.

‘I have such headaches, as if a weight is clamped to my skull. There are great gaps in my memories. I think I was on a train — I remember the noise of a station. Trains hooting, smoke rising towards a great arched roof. There were many people there; I remember I was upset by the crowds. I think I shouted at a man, “Get away from me!” He had approached too close, and I feared contagion. Then there was someone I remembered from the past, a good friend. I was so pleased to see him. I stretched out my hand to greet him. But you are here! How marvellous! How have you been? I think I was wearing a suit. I was well dressed, not like this’ — and he gestured to his soiled and ripped clothes. ‘I was not ashamed of myself at all, as I should be now, if this friend came to see me here. I cannot remember what happened after that. There are many things I cannot remember. You say I have been here two weeks, but I have few memories of recent days. Just a grave sense of coursing regret. A feeling as if I am descending into thick black night and shall never see the dawn again.’

‘You are not Viennese by birth, I assume.’ I said this because the man’s German, though impeccable, was Magyar in inflection and emphasis. I meant it to be a benign enquiry, yet the question seemed to anger him, because he stared suddenly towards me, and clenched his fists.

‘Forgive me, but I believe you come from the Hungarian Lands?’ I persisted.

‘I do not know. If you say so, perhaps it is true.’

‘You do not remember this either?’

‘I think I do not. It is as if … there is a barrier standing between me and the past. A wall. A forbidding wall — grown over with ivy. I see the wall, and I note that it is high and I cannot scale it. Beyond that, I am confined.’ He stopped and rubbed his forehead, frenetically. He continued this action for some minutes, until I thought I must distract him. So I said, ‘Do you have any idea why you were brought here?’

‘I believe I am an inconvenience to someone,’ he said. ‘Someone has finally tired of me. I am not sure who that is. There are many who might have grown tired of me by now.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because of what I have said. Because of the charges I bring against them.’

‘Against whom?’

‘Oh, countless numbers of them. Murderers, all of them,’ he said. And he leaned towards me and said, ‘Because of this I have my suspicions they are trying to destroy me. They are watching me and trying to destroy me.’

*

In my years of studying the mad, or this category of humans we refer to thus, I have become quite accustomed to such expressions, and indeed there is a constant pattern in the pronouncements of certain sorts of more intelligent lunatics, a tendency to fashion repeated accusations against a general ‘they’, a gang of conspirators, assumed to be plotting against the insane individual. Frequently these accusations lack any foundation in reality; they are more symbolically representative of a sense of being cast out, or of feeling oneself beleaguered by events and powerless to control them. Naturally, were we all to dwell on the inscrutable workings of the universe, we might easily slip into this state — we are here, in an uncertain realm of death and destruction, and there is no possible way we can predict our futures, and at any moment everything we love may be taken from us, by disease, or war, or calamity of some other sort. Might we not quite reasonably propose that there is someone plotting our demise? Indeed is this not the central tenet of many of our religions, when they proclaim that there is a deity observing our every movement, listening in to our every thought, and constantly assessing us, for glory or punishment? Are not such religious men as Job repeatedly cast down by their creator, precisely to test their endurance? By the teachings of the Old Testament, Job would have been perfectly sensible in believing that a ‘someone’ was conspiring against him; God was indeed doing this, for His own great and all-knowing purpose, no doubt, but it was conspiracy all the same. Many such parables do not even offer glory — they entreat the believer to aim at nothing higher than the avoidance of punishment, to petition only for mercy. As our religions derive from the deepest yearnings of the human spirit, such beliefs must express an innate hope that our actions matter to someone, that some meaningful process of judgement is being applied to our lives. In childhood, we resist our parents, while needing them to observe us all the same, praise us for our good works and censure us for our bad. And once we have passed beyond the sight of our parents, we summon our divinities, to observe and assess us once more. For life without a committed observer is aimless indeed: we are alone, and no one minds what actions we take.

*

This is merely a theory of mine, Professor Wilson; I expect you will disagree. Nonetheless Herr S evinced a firm and — I thought at the time — generic sense that somebody was plotting his downfall, and he looked antic indeed as he informed me of his suspicions, widening his eyes and wringing his hands, as if he must cleanse them.

‘These people you describe, whom have they murdered?’ I said.

There was a long pause, which I allowed to develop. He sat there, hanging his head, and finally, after some minutes, he said, ‘We are murderers, all of us. I am the worst of all. But they are steeped in blood too. I have murdered thousands. And they also. The difference is I admit it. I accuse myself,’ and now he became a little excited, and raised his voice. ‘I accuse myself of murder. Thousands of souls. I have killed thousands. Mothers and wives, laid waste.’

‘The victims were all women?’

‘Oh yes, the massacre was only of women. I have dreams in which I — well, it is best not to speak of them.’

‘I would be most interested to hear of your dreams, if you are able to relay them,’ I said. ‘I believe that dreams may offer an oblique portrait of our fears and desires, because when we dream we enter a realm of ambiguity and ellipsis, and thereby much that is lost in everyday speech may be regained.’

‘My dreams are all of blood.’

*

Herr Meyer had warned me that self-accusation formed the main theme of Herr S’s conversation, and I perceived that it was inappropriate to dismiss his concerns. I find it is best in these circumstances to treat such pronouncements as fundamentally symbolic, suggestive of a state of being rather than revelatory of criminal actions, and so I felt the best course would be to allow Herr S to talk, to rail, rather, and to write down his words. With this in mind, I drew out my notebook, and this action made him all the more excited. He pointed at it and said, ‘Oh yes, mark it down. Mark it down and set it all before the judge. I deserve judgement, and I will be judged if not in this life then in the next, if there is such a place.’

‘I am not writing it down so that you may be judged,’ I said. ‘I merely want to hear what you have to say.’

‘Who has sent you?’ he said, suddenly, his mood changing again. He flashed a furtive glance towards me, as if I too posed a threat to his safety. ‘Why do you want to know these things?’

‘I am a scholar, of sorts. That is, without an attachment to a university, I make researches into those we regard as insane. This has been my interest for many years. I have published various books on the subject, and though my opinions are not at all fashionable there are some who are kind enough to consider them of importance.’

‘You are a doctor?’ he said. Something in his face changed. The light was so precarious, it was tantalisingly difficult to read his expressions, but I thought I discerned something more focused in his aspect. He was sporadically animated, as I said, but this was a more intent and questioning focus, as if he were truly attending to my words.

I said that I was not a doctor, merely a man of independent means who liked to conduct researches. But he was not listening at this point.

‘Do you work at the hospital?’ he said.

‘Which hospital are you thinking of?’

‘I do not know. Where is it? Nearby I think.’

‘The General Hospital, here in Vienna?’

‘Yes, I think so. I think that is what I mean.’

‘I do not work there. I am not a doctor, as I explained before. I work mostly from home. I read and write in my study, and then I visit asylums and avail myself of any opportunity to speak with the patients. I visit this asylum roughly every two weeks. I must have made my last visit shortly before your arrival.’

‘My arrival?’

‘Yes, you came here two weeks ago.’

‘I have been in this cell for two weeks?’

I reaffirmed that he had.

‘Did you bring me here?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘Why am I here?’ Now he was inflamed, seeking to rise from his chair, though it seemed he was too weak to move, and, though he was perhaps unaware of them at that moment, his hands and feet were anyway in chains.

‘I am not certain,’ I said, when he had calmed himself a little. ‘We were recently discussing it and you could not remember. You said you came on a train. There was a friend of yours there.’

‘A friend? I did not think I had any friends left.’

‘You said he was an old friend. You were pleased to see him.’

‘Why are you telling me these things?’

I explained again who I was.

‘Why do you keep talking about the insane? I am in prison, am I not? Surely I have been convicted, finally, of murder?’ he said.

‘You are not in prison,’ I said. ‘You have been brought to a place where you will be treated for what is perceived as your condition. I fear this treatment will do you no good at all.’

‘I do not need treatment,’ he said, angrily. ‘I need to be punished.’

‘Sadly this is indeed a punishment, nonetheless.’

‘What do they propose to do to me?’

‘I do not know the precise nature of your treatment. I am not an insider here. I am permitted access simply because of various friendships I have developed. I have no medical status at all.’

‘But where, where did I come from? I cannot remember. My mind is full of darkness,’ he said.

*

As we fell silent I heard — I imagine he did too — the cries of a man in a neighbouring cell. ‘God God God,’ the man was crying, over and over again, so it pained me to hear his incessant delivery of this word. ‘GOD GOD GOD.’ This poor man, entreating a deity who had either forsaken him or had allocated him a life of suffering. For it was certain this neighbour was suffering, mired in despair and begging his God to help him to comprehend it, to endure it. In the silence of the cell, this word echoed around us, and I thought that even had Herr S been entirely lucid when he arrived in this place then merely a day of this would have delivered him into another state of being. When I looked again, he was staring into space, having assumed once more an expression of dull defeat.

*

‘You were interested in the General Hospital. Why is that, I wonder?’ I said.

‘I am not sure. The thought of it frightens me. I see it as a place of suffering and death.’

‘It is common to feel like this about hospitals.’

‘Perhaps I was there once. Perhaps I was ill.’

‘Herr S, you are an educated man. Earlier you discussed internal bleeding with confidence. Perhaps you have worked at the hospital?’

‘I am not sure.’ Now he began rubbing his forehead again. I could not tell what the man might have looked like in a happier era. Perhaps in his youth he was stout and fair, though he would even then, I imagine, have been balding and with a tendency to corpulence. I could see he might once have responded passionately to elements around him — his work, or a beloved girl, or his friends. His moods shifted constantly, and this might in youth have made him restless, precocious perhaps. I was uncertain how old he might be now. He was bent and wrinkled, and his remaining hair was white. But his voice was firm; his movements unencumbered by decrepitude. I suspected he was a prematurely grizzled man of fifty or so; that he had perhaps suffered from a traumatic experience which had etched lines upon his face.

*

‘I think perhaps I have been ill for some time,’ he was saying, as he rubbed his forehead in his desperate way. ‘I am not sure. I have such scenes in my brain … I cannot …’

‘What sort of scenes?’

‘It is as if everything happened a very long time ago. Something dreadful occurred. I have a sense of a terrible crime. I think I committed it, but there were many accomplices. I wonder if I have committed it and hidden the evidence, and this is why I am here. They will interrogate me, will they not? They seek to unearth my secret, I trust?’

At that, his dull eyes turned towards me.

‘You are in an asylum,’ I said, again. ‘There are many inmates here who do not deserve the epithet “mad”. Indeed perhaps all of you. Yet your keepers are woefully uninterested in your inner thoughts. They seek merely to suppress you.’

‘You are not being honest,’ he said. ‘I know I am to be tortured, and you are lying to me.’ He was preparing to rage but then I said very quietly and calmly, ‘I assure you, I will not lie to you. Essentially I do not know anything about you. I am merely telling you what I think is the case. If you disagree with me that is perfectly understandable, but I am not lying. Because I am not an insider, they will not tell me anything about you. Herr Meyer is a corrupt man, but he does not like me. So he has not told me your name, and he will not inform me of any of the particulars of your case.’

At this, he stopped rubbing his forehead and placed his hands on his lap. Then he looked down at his hands.

‘All you are saying in your … pretty words … is that you have no power and they will torture me anyway.’

‘With respect, I am not saying that at all. I am saying that I should like to talk to you, that I seek to understand you, if you will permit me to stay here a little while.’

‘You will understand me!’ he said, scornfully. ‘I do not think you would like that very much. There is something within me — I have a dim recollection of it, and it makes me shudder with fear … I am not sure I want to remember the rest … I long to sleep, but it is so uncomfortable. I long to sleep and be oblivious … But it seems I am always awake, and always there is this sense … of something …’

‘Do you think you have fallen into your present condition as a response to a particular event, to something dreadful that has occurred?’

That seemed to irritate him once more. He snapped back at me, ‘I do not know, how should I know? I am in darkness, and you ask me what I think?’

‘I am sorry if my questions seem inappropriate to you. I do not want to upset you.’

‘You have no power to upset me at all. Your voice is very faint, very distant. There is a roaring in my head, I can barely hear you beneath the roaring. I am adrift on a … poisonous … boiling ocean. I cannot see the shore. I have been cast off, sent to drift until I drown …’

*

Professor Wilson, do you not think this conversation was relatively cogent, if you will permit a qualified use of the word? I have had many a discussion with the inmates of asylums, and it is rare that they speak in this manner. By this I mean that they are usually far less self-aware, far more deeply ensconced in the private or other world to which they have gained access. They have nearly forgotten the language of their former lives, the cadences of conventional speech. But Herr S was still quite fluent in such everyday modes. He was aware of his condition, to a notable degree. Naturally, he railed and lapsed into symbolical utterance at times, when the moon was working its mischief within him; he was moving constantly between worlds, the lunar and the solar: he was neither of one nor the other. I wrote down some notes, trying to express some of this and also to record my immediate impressions of the man, and all the while Herr S was sitting thoughtfully in his chains. The only consistent sign of distress was the repetitive movement he made with his hands. This was a horrible motion, as if all his suppressed energies were finding an outlet through his hands. Yet in many ways he was surpris- ingly measured. When I asked him a question, he often thought about his answer before he spoke. He was struggling to use his addled brain, though it was clear that organ had indeed suffered a form of injury — whether before or after his arrival in the asylum I could not ascertain — that it was not functioning correctly. I suspect that he knew his so-called reason had deserted him, or been terribly compromised. Most inmates of these institutions have no more notion of reason, and what it is to be in a ‘reasonable’ state, than you or I have of what it means to have fallen into unreason. If one accepts that it is in dreams that we encounter our inner madness, these ordinarily fettered forces of misrule, then the inmates I meet are living in the world of dreams, and cannot return to the daytime realm. Nonetheless Herr S was in a lucid dream, aware that he was dreaming, and sometimes, briefly, he woke altogether. He woke and stared around, recognised familiar objects, then he slipped into his dream state again. This must have been most distressing for him, and I think this was the cause of his sudden rages. Yet I am not sure.

*

I said, ‘Why do you believe that you have done something awful, in the past? On what do you base this assertion?’

‘I dream of blood,’ he said. ‘I dream of torrents of blood. A sea of blood. I am swimming in a sea of blood. I am wholly encased in blood. Yet I am not drowning. I can breathe in the blood. Blood is my natural métier, in my dream. I imbibe the blood and am nourished by blood. I am very peaceful and happy. Perhaps I am smiling as I drink down blood. When I wake from these dreams I am sweating and crying. I wake in my cell to the sounds of others screaming and though I try to summon the memory of this blood — to understand its import and also because something deep within me craves it — I cannot.’

‘You say that you are glad of the blood. What do you think this means?’

‘I am not sure.’

‘What other dreams do you have? Are there any others of significance?’

‘There is one, in which I am searching for something in the blood. In this dream I am not in the blood, I am outside it. But I am reaching my hands into it. When I take out my hands they are coated in blood. There is something in the blood that I must find. I feel it is very important that I find this thing quickly. If I do not, I feel something terrible will occur. It is of the utmost importance that I find this thing.’

‘Do you ever find it?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think I am about to, that soon it will become clear what it is and yet … I cannot see it. It is lost in the blood. I fear I have lost it myself, that I am responsible for the loss of this thing. In my dream I feel a dreadful sense of grief and as if I must die of guilt.’ Then he fell silent. He was still wringing his hands, and with each of these movements his chains rattled. The rattling was persistent and annoying, but I could not ask him to desist. He seemed to find the hand-wringing somehow comforting; certainly I rarely saw him stop it. As I made my notes, I wondered if it was not the case that these dreams of blood suggested a fear of life, of the conditions of living. I was thinking of the classical notion of the contamination of the soul by birth: the suggestion of Origen, for example, that everyone who enters the world is afflicted with a kind of contamination — because they reside in their mother’s womb, and because the source from which they take their body is the father’s seed, and thereby they are contaminated in respect of the father and the mother. I thought perhaps Herr S perceived life as a form of contamination, that this dream represented the striving of his confused soul for something higher than the life around him, and that this striving had severed him from ordinary human congress.

*

I have seen such self-loathing before; indeed such sentiments are often regarded as perfectly necessary and even devout by many of those who follow our major creeds. I have seen these beliefs become rigid in the asylums, drawing many into terrible visions of damnation. It begins with mere conventional piety, and descends into individual mayhem. Thereby believers come to despise the blood which flows through their bodies, and which sustains them. They come to despise it and to hope for a time when it will cease to move in their veins and they will be purged and resur-rected clean. For does it not say in the teachings of Ben Sira, ‘Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die’ — through birth we all die into life, torn from the side of our father God? The mother betrays us, drags us away from our spiritual parent, the invisible Father. So millions of humans have been persuaded that the questing soul must deny the mother and the earth; that the divine is not present among us but lies far beyond us. I wondered if Herr S had simply allowed his heart to be commanded by such teachings; and thus he feared this blood he imagined, believed his yearning for it was treacherous and must condemn him.

*

My good Professor Wilson, these are rather vague musings, and I hope you will forgive me. I have often been criticised for the diffusion and inconsequentiality of my thought, and I am quite aware that my opinions are not widely held. And indeed even to those who may agree, such proposals might well seem superfluous to the sad case of Herr S. I am only recording them, indeed, that you may perceive how I have tried to understand him, how many theories I have fashioned. This was how my thoughts ran at this time, and I allowed myself a few moments to note them down.

*

When I lifted my head, and stopped my pen, Herr S had fallen once more into silence. Hoping to rouse him again, I said, ‘Do you have other recurring thoughts?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Many thoughts.’

Then he shuddered, horribly, so violently that I thought he must be falling into a fit. He rattled the chains and his whole body convulsed, and he said, ‘Oh I cannot speak about them, they are too … They are …’

‘Can you disclose any of them at all?’

‘There is a name. A name which hammers in my thoughts. It is the name of a woman — I dread to tell it.’

‘If you can, then perhaps we can shed some more light on your condition.’

‘My “condition”? That is a fine word for it!’

‘Why are you afraid of telling me the name of this woman?’

‘She is a woman with bright blue eyes. Flaxen hair, I think. She is very angry with me. I fear I shall anger her further. She is furious and I believe she is tormenting me. I am being punished for the death of this woman.’

‘You know she is dead?’

‘I know it because I killed her.’

‘Why do you believe this to be the case?’

‘She appears to me — she was here just the other day, and she accused me with her eyes. They were piercing my flesh. My body burned when she looked upon me. And there was a pain at my core — here’ — and he pounded on his chest — ‘as her eyes burned into me.’

‘You think you knew this woman?’

‘I did not know her. I met her somewhere, I cannot remember where. I met her and then shortly afterwards — a few days perhaps — she was dead.’

‘Herr S, I would be most interested to know what you call this woman.’

‘I cannot tell you,’ he said. He was shuddering; the man was shaking in the depths of his dread.

*

So I said, ‘Are there any other names you remember?’

arks on them, around the hollows of the eyes and on the gaunt cheeks. They are women’s faces and they are stricken with pain. They appear to me on the wall. I wake and I see them arrayed on the wall before me. Thousands and thousands, perhaps, I am not sure, and I think they are all this woman …’

‘All of them are the same woman?’

‘No they do not look the same. They are not physically the same. But somehow they are all her, I believe them to be her. When these women appear before me they are not like her though they are somehow her but these women have their eyes screwed up in agony and I am fearful, so very fearful, lest they open their eyes. I am writhing in torment, waiting for them to open their eyes and burn me. If they all open their eyes, I am quite sure I must die. So I watch them, and always so far their eyes have been closed. But soon, soon they must open. Then I will burn. Do you understand me?’

‘I am not sure that I do. But I am determined to help you, if I can.’

‘You?’ he said, staring at me suddenly. ‘Why?’

As I began to speak he remembered once more, and said, ‘Yes, yes, of course. It is this cloud. The cloud disperses my recollections. So then I must speak to you alone?’

‘You are under no obligation to talk to me.’

‘You are preparing a document against me?’

‘No, I am not.’

‘My words have always been twisted and used to testify against me. I have a sense that it is very dangerous to speak, to explain, because my words will be misconstrued.’

‘You feel you have been traduced?’

‘I feel I am guilty indeed, mired in blood. But somehow I have been unfairly judged nonetheless.’

‘Do you want to become well again?’ I said.

‘But what is well?’

‘That is a very pertinent question, Herr S. You are right to query my idle expression. I mean do you want to leave this place?’

‘How will I leave? They have confined me here. To be rid of me. I am quite sure they want to be rid of me.’

‘Who are they, to your mind?’

‘I do not know. I know they have acted decisively. I am aware I am ill, and I think I have done many dreadful things. Aside from the crimes of which I am rightly accused — oh somewhere I am accused, I know — I have done dreadful things to other people, and — oh my wife!’ And now his features were mangled by longing and grief, and he twisted in his chair.

‘You remember your wife?’

‘I am not sure. I think I … I think perhaps I dealt foully with my wife. I have — I think I was, oh I remember another woman, someone I fled to. But I was not fleeing from my wife, I was trying to hide myself.’

‘But it is not your wife you see in these dreams?’

‘No no, it is not her face.’

‘Perhaps it is an aspect of your wife you see. Or an aspect of this other woman you speak of.’

‘No! No, that is quite wrong.’ And now he was terse, as if I was being obtuse and must be castigated. ‘This woman who visits me here has nothing to do with my wife! And why do you presume to mention her?’

‘You were telling me just now about her. That you see her frequently, and that you could not tell me her name.’ He paused for a moment, and passed a hand across his eyes, as if trying to clear his vision. I said, ‘Do you remember if you have a family?’

‘Children?’

‘Yes, do you think you have children?’

‘I think I have many beautiful children but I am not sure.’

‘When did you last see your family?’

‘I do not know. I cannot remember.’

‘Do you have any idea where they might be?’

‘No, I do not. And must I die without seeing them again?’

And now the man suffered a substantial collapse, and for a while he sobbed wildly, and I said nothing. I sat in his gloomy vicious cell, the darkness seeping from the corners, and waited. When his sobs appeared to be diminishing, I said quietly, ‘Herr S, you are not dying.’ I said this, though I knew nothing of his condition. My intention by such a remark was simply to calm him, so I might continue to speak with him. But I am afraid my words gave him hope, and he lifted his ravaged face and said, ‘You are sure?’

‘I am not sure, but I do not think you are dying,’ I said. ‘But please do not take me as any sort of an authority. I am not, as I said before, a medical man.’

‘No, I think you are not, after all,’ he said, looking at me carefully, as if he was seeing me clearly for the first time. I submitted myself to his gaze — I was there, assessing and observing him; it seemed only fair to permit him to do the same in return. He stared at me in silence for a time, and then he said, slowly, still in a contemplative mood, ‘It is as if I have lost a portion of my brain. My thoughts run into holes. Do you understand?’

‘I do understand.’

‘They are very far away, I know that. My wife is a good and virtuous woman.’

‘Do you think she knows you are here?’

‘I hope she does not.’

*

There was a pause, and then he said, still quite calmly, as if he were expounding a scientific theory, ‘When I dream of blood I think because I crave blood and love blood in the dream then I must have in the past been a bloodthirsty man. In the dream I am drinking blood. So I must have thirsted after blood and this is why — or one of the reasons — I think I committed a crime. I think I have spent years in a deep reverie, a criminal reverie and in this deranged state I have committed acts of violence and now I have fallen out of that reverie and yet I cannot remember my former actions. As if I have experienced two lives in one body.’

‘But you say that you are also looking for something in the blood?’

‘I am delving into the blood,’ he said, and he briefly stopped wringing his hands and instead made a horrible grasping gesture, as if he were probing deep within something, his hands opening and shutting and finding only empty air. ‘I must find it … I must … I must drag it out …’

*

Now he stopped this delving and fell silent again. His hands for one brief unnerving moment were entirely still, and the clanking of the chains stopped, and the dank cell was silent. Then he began to wring his hands again, and the jangling resumed.

*

‘You remember elements of your past but it seems there are significant gaps in your recall,’ I said. ‘The one place you remembered was the General Hospital. Perhaps they will know you there. I would be glad to make enquiries, if you did not mind me doing so.’

‘I am not sure that is a good idea. If they do know me then you too would be their enemy.’

‘I do not think I would. Besides, it does not matter.’

‘You do not know how powerful they are, how they will unite to destroy you.’

*

We had reached something of an impasse. He was deep in the domain of the symbolic, and though I was content to observe him in this domain — it is always a privilege and a matter for awe to witness the human mind unmasked, disgorging mysteries — I also felt a great sense of curiosity about his true identity. I wondered what he had done, and if there had truly been a campaign of any sort to dismantle his reputation. I wondered about the real or symbolic nature of his Great Reversal, the moment when all he had worked to achieve was undone. I wondered if he must have experienced a particular shock, the final catalyst, which had thrust him from the lucid realm into twilight and dream. I did not know. I was torn, indeed, between a suspicion that it might be most comfortable for him to remain in this twilight state, in the ‘wolf-light’ as Homer so beautifully describes it, and my own urge to draw him into the daylight. I was not sure if he wanted to return to the harsh glare of day. It had made him dreadfully unhappy to stand there, I imagined. Illuminated by the glances of other men, until they had turned away from him. I must confess that I did not know what to do, and was deep in thought when he turned to me and said, ‘What did they tell you my name was?’

‘Herr S, that is all Herr Meyer would say to me.’

‘Do not speak of that man,’ he entreated, with all the trembling desperation of before. In the wolf-light, Herr Meyer loomed large, like a monster conjured from the darkest reaches of the human soul, and I apologised for my thoughtlessness. I had no desire to torment this poor man. Yet he had quickly recovered, and was saying, in a neutral tone, ‘My surname then begins with S, perhaps. I wonder what it could be?’

‘You really do not remember?’

‘I am afraid I do not.’

*

He had lost himself. The man had lost his very name, and a man without a name — well, he is indeed in limbo. The nameless man has symbolically reverted to the time before we are named, when we are residing in the womb or perhaps drifting in the spirit world, waiting to be summoned to earth. You are a scientific man, Professor Wilson, and will think all this nonsense, I suspect. It is just my way of alluding to mysteries which might otherwise be inexpressible. Herr S had his own theory, and he was saying, ‘I have no name because I am a malefactor. I should have a number, not a name. Because of the crimes I have committed. We should all be stripped of our names.’

I was preparing another question, when he suddenly said, ‘Klein.’

Thinking he was merely using the adjective, I said, ‘What do you mean by this word?’

‘I mean it is a name,’ he said. And he had begun rubbing his forehead, his motions once more frenzied. ‘It is not mine. It is the name of a man. An enemy. I cannot remember my own name, but I remember his. Johann, that is it. Johann Klein.’

‘You believe he is your enemy?’

‘I believe he is my darkest foe. And I believe he visited me last night, and gloated over my ruin.’

‘I do not think he visited you in body, but perhaps you dreamed of him,’ I said.

‘He has been here. He spoke of the quality of the air, and how that had caused it all, and how unfortunate it was that I had not accepted his theory, and then he left.’

‘And you remember nothing more of him?’

‘I do not. It is only because he was here yesterday that I remember him at all.’

While speaking of this man, Herr S’s appearance changed altogether. Before, he had been slumped in his chair, wringing his hands in his habitual way and staring at the floor. Now he straightened his back and looked directly at me. His face darkened. For a moment I thought he would try to rise, and certainly he writhed in his chair. Yet he did not rise, though as he spoke it became clear he was furious; he spat out his words.

‘It makes me very — that man — you must tell me who he is.’

‘I am afraid I do not know. I can make enquiries, how-ever.’

‘I am sure — it is he who has killed them all.’

*

We stared at each other for a moment. Something was beginning to clear. Herr S was still rattling his chains and grimacing towards me but now it seemed as if there was content to his rage, a tangible argument we might draw out. Before I had been merely trying to understand the particulars of his state and I had considered it largely a matter of the intimate and mysterious workings of the mind, but now I had a further sense there might be facts involved and, perhaps, even individuals. I said, ‘You are accusing this man Klein of murder?’

‘Yes. I believe he is among the worst of them.’

‘The worst of whom?’

‘Of the murderers. He presided over the greatest massacre of all. It is — in my deadened brain, something is sparking — if I can only — if you will help me. You must tell me something else about this man — anything, his appearance, the details of his dress, how he spoke, any detail which may … help my memory …’

‘I am afraid I do not know anything about him.’

‘Ah, I could gouge a hole in my skull, if it would release the truth …’ And he was tearing at the skin on his forehead, so frantically that he scratched himself and released a thin trickle of blood. I said, ‘Herr S, you must calm yourself. I am trying to help you but …’

‘I cannot be calm. There has been a massacre, you must understand. And every day it continues …’

I was about to explain to him that this massacre he perceived might well be suggestive of something else, that the question might not be whether to ‘prove’ it but rather to understand the significance this concept held for him, but I must confess that I was now uncertain of my own theory, and I feared suddenly that Herr S might hold the key to a genuine crime, a real series of murders. Before I could speak again he slammed his fists together, and he struggled to break out of his chains. He hammered on the chair, screaming, ‘You must help me you must help me to stop it.’ And then he seemed to entertain a vision, an awful, dark vision, because he began wailing in terror, and he stretched out an arm and said, ‘But you must forgive me, you must! I beg forgiveness.’ He whispered something which sounded like ‘Mea culpa’, and then slumped down in exhaustion.

*

To my consternation, the sound of raging had caused Herr Meyer to return, and once he arrived Herr S retreated into his earlier catatonic state and would not look at me, and certainly not at Herr Meyer, though the vile man addressed him in his sneering way, demanding to know what he had ‘been doing’ and whether he had been ‘behaving himself ’. As if Herr S was a wicked child, to be punished with the rod! And poor Herr S was hunched over, surrendered to his impotence, occasionally muttering or wringing his hands. Sometimes he pressed his hands to his head, as if to protect himself from blows. It was sad indeed to see him there, cowering like a dog, and I turned in my anger to Herr Meyer and said, ‘Herr S is — to my mind — poised between the worlds of reason and lunacy. It is imperative that you are gentle with him. His condition is most precarious. If he degenerates further, you will be responsible.’

*

Naturally, Herr Meyer did not like that at all, and glared at me in his vicious way, as if he was sizing me up for a straitjacket, and then he said, ‘I do not require your opinions on how to treat my patients.’

‘You do not, if you perceive them as such. However I fear they are prisoners to your mind, malefactors, not patients at all.’

And Herr Meyer snorted and turned away from me.

*

It was futile to continue the interview, that much was plain, and so I informed Herr Meyer that I would return in the afternoon. I wondered if I should endeavour before my return to find out more about the man Klein, simply because his name had caused Herr S such agitation, and had indeed precipitated his decline. I was curious, naturally, though I was not sure if I should indulge my curiosity, because Herr S seemed so fearful of being returned to the world of names, of categories and limitations. Yet how was he to be released, how could he escape this horrible prison, if he lacked any recollection of the real nature of his circumstances? Grappling with these notions — Herr S’s fear of knowing himself, my sense that it was wrong for him to remain in this squalid cell, my loathing of the viciousness of the asylum and my conviction that no man could live long in such a place and not degenerate entirely — I returned to my house. I was pensive throughout luncheon. I had various pieces of work to finish, and though I sat at my desk with my papers in front of me, I found I could not consider them. My thoughts turned constantly to that man trapped in his cell, his hands chained, and I wondered just what treatment Herr Meyer was administering to him now. I was thinking of Herr S’s patchy recall, his oscillations between ordinary lucidity and something more revelatory and perilous, something which might bring forth everything or nothing at all, and I recalled again the devastating effect upon him of the name ‘Klein’. My moral sense was confused. If the man genuinely wanted to remain undisturbed, then perhaps his wishes should be respected. If the man were a murderer, as he claimed, then he should be brought to trial. If his thoughts of blood and murder were — as I strongly suspected — symbolical, then it would surely assist his recovery to supply him with the means to dismiss these darker elements of his being. Besides, at one point, before he was afflicted by his terrors, he had clearly asked me to find out who Johann Klein was.

*

I folded up my papers and placed them in a pile on my desk. It was early afternoon when I left my house again and walked through the crowded streets towards the hospital. I did not know precisely what I was doing. I merely remembered that Herr S had been agitated by the thought of the hospital, and that, along with the name Johann Klein, it was the only tangible clue I had unearthed from our conversation. I know of a man there — you know him too, perhaps — called Professor Zurbruck, and I wondered if he might be able to help me to ascertain the real identity of Herr S. It was a random hope, and I imagined it would prove fruitless. Yet I had no real idea of how else I might proceed, and so I went to the registrar’s office on the first floor, and asked if he had seen Professor Zurbruck that day.

*

Vienna General Hospital is a vast edifice, the sort of place you might vanish into and never emerge from; a labyrinth, and I trod carefully, clutching my tenuous thread. The hospital was founded as a benevolent enterprise and I am sure a great deal of good work is performed within its confines. Yet there is something about it that nonetheless disturbs me, and, because of this, I have never spent much time there, except when there has been an interesting case on one of the wards, and I have sought an interview. I have a few acquaintances among the doctors there, but my connections are not strong. Professor Zurbruck I know simply because his brother was a friend of my brother when they studied at the university here in Vienna. We have met a few times, at gatherings and suppers, though I had never previously sought him out at the hospital. A young doctor directed me towards Professor Zurbruck’s quarters, and I walked swiftly along the corridors, thinking that this really was the sort of place in which one might need a ball of twine yet all the while trying to keep my thoughts firmly on the matter in hand.

*

At Professor Zurbruck’s door, I knocked and waited for a response, but my knock sounded hollow and as if I summoned no one, and I perceived that I must wait. Indeed I was obliged to pace the corridors, avoiding the milling hordes of students, for a good hour before Professor Zurbruck returned. I had almost given up hope, when he emerged abruptly around a corner. Even then he was hurried and rather gruesome — he is like his brother a man of great height and unusual thinness, and yet while his brother is rather jovial and thereby reassuring, Professor Zurbruck lacks his sibling’s warmth. He extended a fleshless hand to me and suggested I explain my cause as succinctly as I could. He was polite but he emphasised — in his slow monotone — that he could only offer me a few minutes of his time, as he had an appointment very shortly.

*

In his room, as he busied himself finding materials for his next lecture, I laid out what I knew of the case of Herr S. I explained that he had been disturbed and transfixed by the notion of the General Hospital, and that he had also produced a single name, Johann Klein. I explained myself as precisely as I could yet it seemed to me that Professor Zurbruck was scarcely attending to my words. He was about to stand up, indeed, and announce that he must depart, when I mentioned that Herr S had accused himself and others of murder and had claimed there was a conspiracy to silence him.

*

‘Ah,’ said Professor Zurbruck, with a slow nod of his head, as if something had just fallen into place.

‘You recognise something in this case?’

‘I may do. He talks of a massacre?’

‘Yes, oceans of blood, he says. The massacre of women.’

‘He accuses specific professionals of murder?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

*

His manner was curious, as if he knew the answers to his questions already, and was rather contemplating how much to reveal to me than seeking enlightenment. I began to grow most eager, and I said, ‘My dear professor, if there is anything you know of this case, I entreat you to inform me. Herr S is in a very grave position, and if you were to see how dreadful are the conditions of his confinement, you would pity him.’

‘I have no doubt I would pity him. I am simply wondering if he might be — there is a chance he might be Professor Semmelweis. You might ask him if he is. Perhaps this would prompt his memory.’

‘Who is Professor Semmelweis?’

‘I must emphasise that I do not want to slander a former colleague, by suggesting he must be this poor lunatic you describe. Yet it is possible. Certainly Professor Semmelweis had become eccentric in recent years, and there were fears for his health.’

‘On what were these fears based?’

‘He had written a very rambling book, justifying himself, explaining to everyone that he had been right when they had all been contemptible fools, essentially. Or so I heard, I never read it. It is not my area of expertise. And when that was not received with the acclaim he thought it deserved, he took to haranguing his colleagues through personal letters, strewn with vicious accusations.’

‘What sort of accusations?’

‘This is why your remarks conjured the name Semmelweis. Because Professor Semmelweis has acquired a reputation for accusing his colleagues of murder, individually, in these letters, and in general in his book and other published works. And he claims, I believe, that there has been a massacre.’

‘Why does he claim this?’

‘He takes upon himself — and expects others to do the same — the burden of guilt for those women who die each year in our hospitals of childbed fever, or puerperal sepsis as it is known within the medical profession.’

‘He thinks he has killed them?’

‘Yes, I believe he claims that their deaths were caused by his actions, and by the actions of his colleagues. He calls childbed fever a global epidemic, spread by doctors. He suggests doctors are unclean, and the bearers of contagion, and this assertion has irritated many of his colleagues. Also, I believe he is not rigorous and therefore his theories have been queried. He does not enter into reasoned argument, he does not prove his case by amassing evidence through experimentation. He merely insults his opponents and slanders their reputations. In this way, he has lost his few supporters.’

‘What were they supporting?’

‘His theory about how puerperal sepsis is spread by the hands of doctors. It has been generally refuted, and anyway, it does not much concern me, as I am a surgeon. Professor Semmelweis’s focus is the woman in labour and after labour.’

‘What is his theory?’

‘A colleague once suggested it is rather like the example of Columbus’s egg. It is not a work of grave complexity. Perhaps he might have persuaded his colleagues to adopt it, purely as a cautionary measure, had he not been so bombastic. Yet his manner angered Johann Klein, Professor Johann Klein, who was the head of the lying-in department of the hospital. Yes, the theory, you are anxiously waiting, and I really must attend to my business, concerns the washing of hands in chlorinated lime solution. Professor Semmelweis talks of, now what was the expression — ah yes, “cadaverous particles” — festering particles derived from the bodies of those who have recently died of puerperal sepsis. Infection, he claimed, could be carried from a dead body to a living body through these particles. You know it is still quite usual for students and doctors to perform autopsies of women who have died in childbirth shortly before they go to examine the lying-in patients in the First Division. And Professor Semmelweis proposed that these doctors and students must wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution after they had dealt with corpses and before they conducted an internal examination of a living woman. He claimed this would prevent puerperal sepsis.’

‘And did it?’

‘The theory has never been proven by experiment or systematic investigation. Professor Semmelweis however is adamant that it is the solution. He is adamant that those who refuse to adopt his preventative measures are wilfully slaying their patients.’

‘So this is why he was cast out?’

*

Professor Zurbruck was pacing the room, in a long-limbed, leisurely manner, and now he came to rest — staring at me with his sunken eyes, and placing a long hand upon his desk. ‘He was not cast out, my good fellow. He has behaved very strangely. He fled from Vienna many years ago. It was something about debts, I think; I cannot remember the details. I think he went back to his native Budapest. That is perhaps right. You must remember I have never known the man well. Yes, I heard he reigned supreme over a lying-in ward somewhere in the Hungarian Lands, though his techniques infuriated many of his colleagues. He is a hectoring angry man, you may have noticed.’

‘He is much reduced.’

‘I am sorry to hear that.’

‘So his wife and children are in Budapest now?’

‘I do not know where they are, I am afraid. This is all I know of the man. Now I really must go. Perhaps it would be useful for your further enquiries if I refer you to my colleague — Professor Hebra. I think he knew Professor Semmelweis well. Professor Hebra can be found at this address …’

*

He wrote it down for me on a piece of paper. I thanked him, and he nodded and waved me away. When I hurried to make enquiries of Professor Hebra, I was disappointed to discover that he had gone to Paris for a conference, and would be absent for a week. The lying-in ward, which I went to immediately I had failed to locate Professor Hebra, was equally unhelpful. I pushed open the heavy doors. It was an unusually hot day, and there were hardly any medical students in the wards. There were rows of women lying in beds — the blankets moulded around the swollen forms of those who had not yet delivered, and their faces taut with pain. Row upon row of them, about to cross the threshold, not knowing if they would survive. In suspense they lay there, and they had looked up fearfully when I opened the door. I had little time to gaze upon them before a midwife hurried up to inform me I could not stay there. She held up her hands, as if to shield the modesty of these women. So I bowed and turned away. I was pursued along the corridor by a strange volley of sounds, some like war cries, and some like the lowing of cattle. Then I found some terse doctors, who told me they knew nothing of any Semmelweis and hadn’t time to consider the nature of his accusations. When I asked them about chlorinated lime solution, and cadaverous particles, one of them — a stern man of forty or so, who had just come, he said, from delivering a healthy boy, and who had to hurry to advise a midwife on a troublesome birth — said he had heard mention of something of that nature, but it was blatantly apparent — as Professor Klein had always argued — that puerperal sepsis was spread by a foul atmosphere, and all that was required was an extensive ventilation system, such as Professor Klein had installed. ‘Chlorinated lime is simply superfluous, though any man should feel entitled to use it if he wishes,’ he added, and then hurried away to his duties.

*

Feeling hot and rather tired, I went to take a glass of lemonade in a café nearby. As I reviewed my recent enquiries, I wondered if the best course of action would be to inform Herr S of what I had found and thus — perhaps — prompt him to further recollections. I suspected I held the key to his human identity, his social existence and the nature of his profession. I was confident further details of his life could be gathered: I had only spoken to one man, and he was no expert on childbirth, and he had already told me a great deal about Professor Semmelweis. Once Professor Hebra returned, he would clarify matters further. Had I the time, I thought, I could make a decent study of this man Semmelweis, and discover something of the controversy over his assertions, the battles he had fought, those colleagues who had supported and later deserted him, and no doubt, in the end, precisely who had committed him to the asylum. I was quite convinced I could hunt much of this information out, if I devoted some time to the case.

*

Yet I am not a detective, naturally given to harvesting facts, craving resolution simply for the neatness and purity it affords. I was mindful, furthermore, of Herr S’s own reluctance to regain himself, his fear of the harshness of the solar realm. While some might say this was a symptom of his distress, I do maintain that, for some unfortunate individuals, the ‘lunatic’ condition is a respite from reality, and it is plain cruelty to force them to return to the world of absolutes. There had been some moral imperative upon me to ascertain that Herr S was not a murderer — in a sense which would interest the law. This achieved, there was no clear justification for further enquiries, unless they were to the benefit of Herr S himself. More practically, I perceived that for the sake of his reputation, and his family, I must not wander around Vienna proclaiming that he had been placed in an asylum. While I perceive no shame in this epithet ‘mad’, I am aware that for most it carries a terrible stigma, and if Herr S’s family subscribed to this opinion, I did not want to distress them. Professor Zurbruck I knew to be a man of discretion, for all his ghoulishness, but others might not be so careful.

*

After much thought, I decided I should refer the dilemma to the man himself, Herr S or Professor Semmelweis. I would inform him of his name and lay the case before him — that I had garnered some other details about him, or rather about his non-lunar existence, and that they could be revealed to him as he chose. I would be directed by his desires, unreasoning though they might be. I hastened back to the asylum, weighted down by the many implications of what I had discovered, uncertain as to the effect my words might have on this desperate man.

*

I am cursing as I write this last sentence, as there is someone below who I simply must see. I will continue with this letter as soon as possible …

The Empress

15 August 2009 and London was clad in heat and dust. The day hung still and close; there was no breeze. The tarmac was burning to the touch; everything was harsh and overlit. People were moving, but listlessly; the heat had gradually sapped them. They were walking with their hands at their eyes, trying to block out the sun. From time to time it rained, in violent bursts which made everyone run for cover, though the dampness was a relief all the same. After the rainstorms the city gleamed, as if someone had polished the buildings.

*

It was barely mid-morning and Brigid Hayes felt already as if she had been awake for a dozen hours. She was smiling at her son, trying to please him, struggling against a latent sense of failure. She was not certain, but she feared this was failure, that she was failing her son. There was a gulf between them: on one side his dynamism, brightness, his vivid urges to do, to consume, to understand; on the other her basic attempts to subsist, to endure the day. He was ambitious, incessantly curious; she was faded, fading before his eyes, though still she was smiling and holding out her hands to him. She had left childbearing late, and so at thirty-nine she set about it zealously, but fearing the worst. Twenty months later, she had Calumn. Seventeen months after his birth, she was expecting another baby, as yet unnamed. As yet invisible, trapped within her though due any day. This child would be the last, she was sure of that. She had hardly expected to have one child, when she began ‘trying’ three years ago. Two was more than enough. Two was extraordinary, if she took the time to think about it. But she rarely took the time. When she wasn’t dealing with her son and the physical demands of pregnancy she was working, dull copy-editing work but she did it because they needed the money. She had given up her teaching job but now she pored over manuscripts and wrote symbols in the margins. She was precise and disciplined in her work, chaotic and self-critical with her child. It didn’t make any sense.

*

She was tired and not quite well. At night she could not sleep; she would lie for hours in the dark, waiting for exhaustion to drag her under. She could scarcely breathe or find a comfortable way to lie. So she listened to the nocturnal whispers of the radio, watched the sky change; often it was dawn before she slept. That had ruined her well enough, and then during the days Patrick went out to work and she stumbled around the house. He was worried about her, she knew; he told her she must stay inside, rest whenever she could. Still, the other day she had aimed at defiance, she had grown so bored at home. She had forced Calumn into his pushchair and walked to the local park. After that, she coughed her throat raw; she had scarcely slept at all.

*

Worst of all, Patrick kept praising her; he said he didn’t know how she managed it all. He was trying to encourage her, though it made her feel alone, too, that her experience was untranslatable, obscure to him. He did not perceive that she was half-mad with fatigue, and yet she rose each day and knew she must play her part, she must be a mother to her son, she must be measured with him, never raise her voice to him, even when her blood was curdling with frustration. Yet often she felt so happy, so overwhelmed with love — everything was incoherent and ragged and she could not explain it to Patrick; she mostly blamed him when things were hard. She wanted him to experience it too — the relentlessness, how it did not end, and you could never rest, how it was beautiful and it smashed you to pieces at the same time — but he usually came home after Calumn was in bed, found her collapsed and monosyllabic on the sofa. She told herself each day, she must remember, he was a wonderful father, a wonderful husband, this would soon be over — then everything got clouded, this chemical exhaustion took hold of her, and she slipped again.

*

She felt a low pain in her belly, the sort of grinding cramps she had been experiencing for a day or so. In her complaining body, she was desperate for her pregnancy to end, so she hesitated to question this augury, fearful of misdiagnosing it as labour. She didn’t want to attract any attention from vengeful gods or in any way leave herself open to charges of hubris. She rubbed her belly, felt the baby kick, a palpable swelling which was a foot, a tiny vengeful foot, she thought, because the kick was so hard and probing. A reproach, perhaps. Impatience or apprehension, if a foetus could feel either. The pain was surging within her, and she tried to remember how it had been last time, how it had felt. Then, she had been optimistic; in the final weeks of her pregnancy she had phoned the hospital at the first sign of a contraction. They had rushed off, she and Patrick, like eager neophytes. They arrived and were sent away again. Braxton Hicks, the midwives told them patiently. The body practising for real labour. Nothing to worry about. Do call if you’re concerned about anything. Three times they tried to scale the ramparts and found the hospital fortified against them. The entrance was barred; she was not ready. When she finally gained access to her sterilised room, things moved efficiently, to a timetable. A nice quick birth, the doctor said.

*

Another pain, and Brigid breathed more deeply, her instincts beginning to help her. She was planetary in her girth, an ancient breeding cow. She was whole with child, swollen beyond any size that seemed proportionate or reasonable. She was entirely child, she felt; her body had been colonised. It was not herself, as she had been, she had become someone else; it made her uncertain if she really had a self at all. She was surely half-mad, her brain stewed in hormones, yet now she took Calumn in her arms, tickling him under the chin. He turned to her, smiled toothily, said ‘Mamma,’ and she said, ‘Hello baby. Hello, hello lovely baby baby,’ and he said, ‘Ahdoorschnefatibumaha,’ some proto-talk she couldn’t interpret. She kissed his warm soft skin, breathed in the wafting beautiful smell of him, baby shampoo and milk. She kissed him and held him to her, whispering in his ear, telling him how precious he was and how much she loved him. Though she felt spiky and savage within, she never doubted that she loved her son. Her love was infinite; she sensed there was a deep infinite core of love, and then a lesser love, her surface emotion, where everything got sullied by quotidian demands, and mingled with guilt.

*

‘… The Moon, a novel by Michael Stone … its central subject the … epidemic of childbed fever …,’ she heard the radio say, and that made her shake her head. If Patrick had been here, he would have acted swiftly, banished the voice. Instead the phone was ringing, so she said to Calumn, ‘Come on sweetie, let’s go and see who this is.’ He beamed up at her, made a sound like a siren, his current favourite noise. ‘Nee-nar nee-nar nee-nar,’ said Calumn, as Brigid led him slowly along the corridor, knowing she had twelve rings to get the phone. She caught it on the final ring, heard her mother saying, ‘Hello Brigid,’ as she lifted the handset. Calumn dropped to the floor and began picking at a piece of fluff. Brigid smiled at him. ‘Hi Mum, yes, fluff, Calumn,’ she said. ‘It’s called fluff.’

‘Feeff,’ he said, glancing up at her, seeking her approval.

‘That’s exactly right. How are you, Mum?’

‘Fwuff,’ said Calumn, taking the phone book from a shelf and opening it, glancing down the pages as if in search of something.

‘How are you feeling dear? Any signs?’ her mother was saying. Yes, there was a star above the house last night, Brigid wanted to say, and an old crone shook her stick at me this morning. But she said, ‘No, no signs. I feel as usual.’

‘Oh, it must be awful to be so overdue,’ her mother said. ‘So terribly boring.’

‘It’s not that overdue,’ said Brigid. She had been saying this to everyone for two weeks, ever since her baby had been diagnosed as late. As if there was a deadline, as if they were falling behind. Below her, Calumn was meditatively tearing at the pages of the phone book, while Brigid watched and couldn’t face bending down to salvage it.

‘You can’t have heard about Dorothy, about poor Dorothy’s baby,’ said her mother.

‘Yes, I did hear. I must send her a card.’

‘You know, she thought like you. And she was much younger. At your age Brigid, you have to take care. You sound terribly tired.’

‘I’m not too bad. I could last another week or two, if necessary.’ She didn’t believe that at all. She had plainly established that it was bad, that she could barely suffer another hour of it. Yet there was something within her, some instinct she couldn’t entirely command, which made her disagree nonetheless. She said, ‘I’ll write Dorothy a card today …’

‘You do understand that it’s another person’s life, don’t you? I always think there are points to make and points to waive, Brigid. Battles to fight and battles to cede.’

‘How are you, Mum?’

‘I’m not the subject under debate, Brigid.’

‘Nee. Nar,’ said Calumn. ‘Aidahadabok.’

‘Look, it’s all fine. I’m fine. That’s right, sweetie, it’s a book,’ said Brigid. Now Calumn dropped the phone book, having torn it to his satisfaction, found a ten-pence piece on the floor and stuffed it into his mouth. There began a mighty struggle between mother and baby for possession of the coin, mother with her fingers in the baby’s mouth, baby throwing back his head, trying to clamp his lips shut. Prising open his mouth she seized the object. He began a screaming protest so she gave him a pen to chew. He sat on the floor, instantly mollified, busy with the wonder and strangeness of a pen.

‘There’s absolutely no need to play the martyr. At your age they would induce you like a shot. Nobody in their right mind would deny you an induction.’

Calumn had dropped the pen and was trying to drag the phone away from her, accompanying his endeavours with insistent little yelps and squeals.

‘What on earth is up with Calumn this morning? Is he ill?’

‘No, no, he’s all right,’ Brigid said, trying to smile at Calumn. ‘He just needs his morning snack. And a friend is coming soon. I’d better go.’

‘Oh, OK. Well, I was phoning to say I’m just at the hairdresser’s. So I can drop round after I finish here.’

‘Really Mum, there’s no need to put yourself out.’

‘Oh no, I’ll just drop round with a couple of things.’

It was improbable; her mother was coming to assess her. Now she took the phone back from Calumn again, tried him with the pen but he shook his head, knocked it out of her hand.

‘What about later, later today? It’s just, I have a friend coming this morning,’ said Brigid, as Calumn’s wails rose in pitch, and he lunged for the phone again.

‘Oh, I won’t stay long,’ said her mother.

*

Defeated, Brigid put the phone down and turned to her son. She smiled down at him, though he twisted in her arms, kicked against her. ‘Come on sweetie, come on,’ she said. She took his hand and danced him along, ‘Bouncy bouncy bouncy. Bouncy bouncy bouncy boy, look how we’re bouncing along.’ He began to chuckle. He lifted his head and looked delighted again. His energy amazed her, especially now she had slumped so consummately. It made her glad, that he was so enchanted by everything, so eager to know it, feel it, eat it — his appetites were robust and she admired that. She watched him, from far away — as if he was a beacon on a hill, and she was in the shadows, far below. He was radiant; he really burned with life — and she wondered if this unborn child — kicking now within her, pushing against the prison walls — would be as radiant as her son.

*

‘Shall we go and have some grub grub?’ she said to Calumn, kissing his ear, and he recognised the words and smiled back. ‘Dah,’ he said, nodding.

‘Let’s bounce into the kitchen,’ she said. Bouncy, bouncy, gub gub, they said — Calumn with his awkward little stomping movements, pausing from time to time to examine some fleck of dust. Gub gub, they said as they passed into the kitchen. The baby world of Calumn required her to communicate in monosyllables, to submit herself to these simplified versions of her own language. ‘Bek bek,’ she said to Calumn though her mother always told her — and would tell her again, no doubt, when she arrived later — that this would stunt his development. ‘I never baby-talked to you,’ her mother would say. ‘That must be why I was such a prodigy,’ Brigid would reply, laughing. Her whole being was tempered for Calumn, maintained at a level he could understand — though sometimes she felt he understood far more than she thought, was even in touch with something primal and significant. She didn’t really know why she thought that but sometimes when he became pensive or when he looked at her as if he could see her more clearly than anyone else, she wondered just what he knew, what he saw. In the kitchen she grabbed the protesting form of her son, bundled him quickly into his high chair and when he began to kick and flail his arms around she said, ‘Bek bek, gub gub,’ in a loud jovial voice, kissing him. When she gave him a book he flicked through the pages, smashed it on the table then dropped it on the floor. ‘Bek bek, gub gub,’ she and Calumn said to each other, as she put some fruit on a plate and directed it towards his scrabbling hands, and he began to paw at it and drop it and sometimes eat it. Now she had a few minutes, perhaps even ten minutes, while he sat there, playing with his food, so she put water in the kettle, found some chocolate in the fridge and ate it quickly, as her son chewed on a piece of apple. She made some tea, and now she heard the radio again. Brigid listened but only in a distracted way, making encouraging faces at her son and handing him chunks of apple. Occasionally she said, ‘Yum yum,’ pointing at her food, at his food, exaggerating the movements of her mouth so he would think it was fun to eat. And on the radio she heard people talking and didn’t entirely understand them, or she absorbed a few sentences then lost the thread while she said, ‘Yummy scrummy yum,’ to Calumn.

‘ … debut novel by Michael Stone …’ one of the radio voices was saying.

‘A sort of historical novel …’

‘Very loosely defined …’

*

Brigid put bread in the toaster, drank more tea, said, ‘Yes, sweetie, that’s right, that’s absolutely right. Would you like a piece of toast? Toast and honey, yes? You like a nice piece of toast and honey don’t you?’ she said, as she waited for the toast to pop up and on the radio another voice said, ‘… yes, a doctor …’

‘This man … Semmelweis …’

‘ … rise of modern obstetrics …’

‘Nee-nar gub gub,’ said Calumn.

‘Yum, yum, delicious. Mummy has some. Mmmm, delicious. Calumn has some … Mmmm delicious …’

‘Dah,’ said Calumn. ‘Dah.’

‘The imposition of technology on ancient process …’

‘Hardly fair … hospitals founded with benevolent intentions … Often the women were birthing illegitimate children … nowhere else to go …’

‘… but the midwives fared better …’

‘Well, they weren’t doing the autopsies …’

*

Brigid shook her head, spread honey on the toast, presented it to her son. His face was smeared with food and his hands were sticky, but he was babbling happily, enjoying the small rituals of the morning. She thought it was poignant, how much he enjoyed simply being with her, having her to himself. So she felt one more stab of guilt, even though she was having this child partly for Calumn, to give him a sibling, a life companion. She had a sentimental idea that one day he would thank her. But now, he didn’t understand and simply wanted her. He smiled at her, waving his fingers towards her, trying to grab her as she leaned over him. She kissed his hot face, smoothed his hair. ‘Lovely little boy. So beautiful.’ Then she sat down beside him at the table, holding her tea. She thought of Patrick in his office, typing emails, fielding calls from strangers. Leaning over his desk, a photograph of Calumn among the books and clutter. Living through time, elsewhere, apart from her. Perhaps he would be looking at the photograph of Calumn, in an idle moment he would glance towards it … and then the phone would ring.

*

‘… Budapest. Moved to Vienna as a young doctor. Failed in every other department, so had to go into obstetrics …’

‘Facts have been changed …’

‘Became obsessed with saving the lives of mothers …’

‘… like a plague …’

*

‘Ahhh ahhh ahhh …’ said Calumn, banging his spoon on the table.

‘Ssh, sweetie,’ said Brigid. She wondered if this was a message, if the radio was telling her something — if she must beware. She was superstitious and not reasonable at all. When the voices said, ‘A massacre of mothers …’ she trembled and didn’t want to listen any more. She was scaring herself, trying to hold back her fears, and sometimes saying ‘sweetie’ and sometimes ‘bek bek bek’. Still she couldn’t flick the switch, in case it was important, in case there was something she should understand. Then she wanted Patrick to be with her. She remembered now that he had an important lunch today. It was dreadful timing, he had said this morning, but they wouldn’t move it. This morning he had rushed out of the house, in his smartest suit, bearing a folder thick with papers. He carried this off towards the Tube, looking determined and as if his preoccupations mattered to the world, while she stood in the doorway, heavy and becalmed. Now Calumn put a finger to his lips, tried to ‘shush’ her back. She smiled back at him, even as she heard the warning from the radio –

‘… swathes of orphans …’

‘… called the hospital a charnel house …’

*

Calumn dropped his cup on the floor. That stopped him from eating, while he peered into the depths beneath him, searching for the cup. Instead of leaning down to pick it up, Brigid went to the cupboard and took out another, filled it with water. Swathes of orphans, she thought, and shook her head again. Then she missed what they were saying, as she splashed water at the dishes, stacked them on the draining board. It was clear that her brain had been rearranged by months of baby care and then the fatigue of pregnancy. Two rounds of pregnancy and all the sleepless nights with Calumn had made her kinder, more altruistic perhaps, and yet more easily unnerved. Often she took refuge on the surface: she considered the business of baby mush, she considered that carefully many times a day, and she pondered the complex question of whether her son needed more protein, or whether protein pained his stomach, and sometimes she thought, ‘Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle the cow jumped over the moon …’ Despite all that, she sensed something else, she had not been aware of it before, some ancient force that kindled life within her. All her enterprises, her tangled hopes, were nothing, against this force. It made everything so very strange, and these phrases on the radio — these sanguine, clever voices — seemed to come from a world she had once inhabited, spoken in a language she had once mistaken for her own.

*

‘Here you are, sweetie,’ she said, placing the cup in Calumn’s urgent outstretched hands. ‘More water.’

‘Wahatar.’

‘Yes, very good. Water.’

*

‘… ever more distant from original events …’ said the radio, but Brigid had lost track of the debate. She breathed out slowly. Briefly she had been absurd, she had been frightened, and now she had returned to the morning, her son, the water she was pouring into his cup. It was just this fatigue; it made her nearly hysterical. She was forty-two and there wasn’t much to be done if you were tired at forty-two and about to birth another child. How much more exhausted would she become? She couldn’t quite imagine it, the period after the birth. There would be the baby, a tiny thing, with its simple needs — milk, love, a warm place to sleep. After a few months she would no longer be able to imagine that she had grown the child within her; it would seem so vital and present, as if it had always been in the world. When she thought like that, she thrilled to a sense of anticipation. She was simply glad, at those moments, but that was before her thoughts strayed into plain logistics: how would she carry her babies, feed them, clothe them, wash them? How would she tend to their basic needs, when she found the needs of one so entirely engrossing? She could fill a day with Calumn’s needs; where would she fit those of another child? She could oscillate from apprehension to excitement in a minute. Now, she was thinking, she would manage. There was no alternative, and besides there were people who managed with four children, five children. They didn’t die of exhaustion. No one ever died of sleepless nights. They might lose themselves for a time, enter a shadow world of bewilderment, but they didn’t die. So with a bright smile she said to Calumn, ‘Are we finished? Have we finished second brek? All done with your second brek? Good good. Can I take your bowl and spoon away?’

‘Dah.’

‘That’s right, sweetie. I’m taking your bowl and spoon. And now I’m putting them in the sink. There’s the sink, that’s right’ — as Calumn pointed at the sink.

*

She cleared up some of the mess though not much of it, just enough to keep things reasonable and not entirely sordid, and then she wiped Calumn’s mouth, though he bucked against her.

‘There we are,’ she said, stroking his hair. ‘All clean. Good boy.’

And Calumn turned to her and with his arms outstretched, kissed her wetly on the chin.

‘Thank you, sweetie,’ she said, kissing him back. ‘How lovely, a kiss for Mummy.’

*

‘… let’s turn to the next …’ said the radio, and then Brigid felt a deep pain within her, harsh now, quite searching, asking her if she was ready to go through the whole thing again. The pain stabbed at her, severely and in this questioning way, and then it receded. A contraction, if ever I felt one, thought Brigid, but still she was superstitious and tried to dismiss the thought. But it must be. She was contemplating the real possibility that this was labour when she heard the doorbell. She said to Calumn, ‘Come on sweetie, let’s go and see who’s at the door.’ She wondered if it was Stephanie, arriving early; Stephanie who had gone through five years of IVF before she conceived. A walking miracle, she called herself. More likely, it was her mother already. Hastening to her, with something to say. So Brigid lifted her son down from his chair and set him on the floor. He grabbed at her trousers, wanting to come up again, but she kissed him and tousled his hair. ‘Come on sweetie, have to hurry. It’s the doorbell.’ He raised a hand and put it into hers.

*

Brigid opened the door and greeted her mother, who was looking particularly small and determined, her hair newly dyed, her skin creamed with some expensive unguent, her jewellery sparkling and everything about her expressing a firm resolve that try as the universe might to upset her she would prevail. She was carrying a lot of plates and bowls, in plastic bags, each of them neatly capped with a piece of tinfoil. These she thrust into Brigid’s hands.

‘Several meals,’ she said. ‘I thought you would need them.’

‘Thanks Mum, that’s really amazingly brilliant of you,’ said Brigid, brightly, taking care to smile. She took them into the kitchen and stacked everything carefully in the fridge. A procession followed along, her mother and her son. ‘Hello darling,’ her mother was saying to Calumn, kissing him and rubbing his fat hands. ‘Darling boy, aren’t you looking nice in your red trousers. What lovely red trousers! Come and kiss your old grandma …’ Calumn burbled back, flung his arms around her neck. No idea at all, thought Brigid. He has no idea at all. Assumes adults are consistent, uniformly kind. One day he would realise — or would he? — that there were certain ambiguities, that his grandmother was a complicated woman, giving with one hand, taking with the other, that his mother was herself a wary daughter, and that Calumn was a battleground. Across the battleground of this small boy they mounted their respective campaigns, attacked and retreated, or suffered an uneasy truce. Calumn never noticed. He only saw a smiling woman who plainly loved him. It was his simplicity perhaps, it helped others to become simple too.

*

‘I made you and your mummy lunch, yes I did … I made you and your mummy a lovely yummy lunch,’ her mother was saying to Calumn. ‘A delicious lunch, oh we’ll have a lovely lunch.’

Brigid made more tea, while her mother settled herself into a chair and said, ‘Oh, what a funny little boy you are!’ and Calumn clapped his hands and said, ‘Gan gang gan gan.’

‘Gran, gran,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘That’s what I am yes! I’m your gran, yes I am.’

‘Hilabsnroortshammablapa,’ said Calumn, turning circles.

‘What’s all that? What on earth is all that?’ laughed Brigid’s mother. ‘Good Lord. What an amazing word, not a pause for breath at all.’

‘Mewirddeeteo.’

‘Absolutely, dear little boy. Absolutely, I agree entirely. Thank you dear,’ said Brigid’s mother, as Brigid put the tea on the table. ‘Dreadful weather isn’t it, all this rain? They say it’s global warming on the news. Hotter and wetter summers. It’s like a rainy season, really. I find it so sad. So sad that poor Calumn will be growing up with these horrible wet summers. Poor little boy. When I was a child the summers were so beautiful and ceaselessly hot. Bright blue skies, little wisps of cloud. It was the same for you too. I remember spending every day with you in the garden, John too after he was born. Endless blue days. And the evenings were balmy and long. Then you had a proper cold autumn. Even in October you were cold, and you knew that winter was really on its way. But it was a proper year with seasons. I like seasons. Don’t we like seasons, Calumn? We like a nice hot summer, don’t we? Yes we do!’

‘Dah,’ said Calumn, smiling. Then he grabbed a saucepan — left on the floor for his entertainment — and smashed it on the tiles.

‘Oh, that’s a bit loud,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘Really too loud, Calumn.’

‘Rowd rowd,’ said Calumn, and then he wailed when the pan was taken away from him. ‘Have some more apple,’ said Brigid, trying to bribe him. ‘Yummy apple, would you like some, sweetie?’

‘Nnnnnear,’ said Calumn, with his eyes shut.

‘OK, sweetie, don’t have any apple. But let’s be a bit quieter. Hush hush, a bit quieter, please.’

‘AHHHHGANNNGANNNNNGANNN,’ said Calumn, in his loudest voice.

‘It is bad,’ said Brigid, trying to speak over him, while her mother smiled as if to say that she understood, that it was impossible to be a perfect parent, she understood that Brigid was doomed to fail. ‘It is bad about global warming. Calumn, do you want a banana instead?’

‘Neeeearrr.’

‘I don’t think he wants it, Brigid. Now, have you been speaking to your midwife? What’s her name?’

‘Jenny.’

‘Yes, her.’

‘I have regular appointments with her, yes.’

‘Why don’t you call her up today? See if she can’t speed things up for you?’

‘Thanks Mum, but really Tuesday’s not so long away,’ Brigid said loudly, confidently, even though she didn’t believe it. Just then the pain surged within her and she gritted her teeth. She turned away and fumbled in a cupboard. Breathe, she thought. Remember to breathe. Oblivious anyway her mother was continuing, determined to convince her.

‘I think you’ve been very heroic and so on, yes Mummy has been a heroine hasn’t she Calumn, but I think we should let her have her new baby now, shouldn’t we? So we can all meet it, so Calumn you can see your new friend, yes you can … Mummy hasn’t wanted to let the baby out yet because she likes having it in there so much. But perhaps now she might let it out. Perhaps she’ll let the doctors help her soon. Won’t that be exciting?’

‘Shall I pour you some tea, Mum?’ said Brigid.

‘Oh let me do it, dear. Really, you should go and lie down. Come on Calumn, you and I will pour Mummy a cup of tea, yes? Shall we? And would Mummy like some pineapple with it? Is Mummy having her pineapple?’

‘Mummy has eaten quite enough pineapple, thank you,’ said Brigid. ‘Not that it helps.’ Her mother was busy with the teapot, smiling periodically at Calumn, who was holding onto her trouser legs.

‘It’s true, isn’t it Calumn, that pineapple seems not to have helped your mummy. So now she needs the nice doctors, that’s what Grandma thinks. That’s what Grandma thinks, though Mummy doesn’t believe Grandma. Poor Grandma!’

*

So Brigid bridled, even in her weakened state. Even as another pain threatened to evolve, she bridled. She was exhausted and irritable; certainly she felt she could neither surrender fully to her mother nor could she stand firm against her. Anyway her mother had innumerable strategies and was clearly in a better state to marshal her victories. She was staring blankly at her mother, thinking about what she would say, how she would neutralise the latest line of enquiry, she was phrasing something when she felt the pain again, deep, rising to a peak and then breaking and receding. She remembered this, this rhythm of pain; she had once lived a day to this rhythmic rise and fall.

*

‘More juice?’ her mother was saying to Calumn, holding up his cup while he shook his head. And Brigid was trying to grasp the pain she had felt, hold it close. She longed for pain, more pain, a still more direct and inescapable pain. That was just one of the small perversities of her state. And now her mother was talking about the floor in her kitchen, how she needed it re-tiled, how the tiles she wanted were so expensive, while Brigid thought about how she craved pain, a pain which would drag this pregnancy to an end. This was how you became glad about labour. It was the only possible release from this discomfort, this enslavement to the overgrown body. You longed so urgently for release that you accepted agony, welcomed physical distress. She smiled, as she thought how absurd it was, that she was nursing this pain to herself, feeling friendly towards it.

*

‘I have various things I should do, sorting out the house and making sure I’ve sent away all my copy-editing,’ she said. ‘And a friend of mine is coming round for coffee quite soon. But of course you’re very welcome to stay. You might like to play with Calumn.’

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Stephanie.’

‘Stephanie?’ said her mother, imperiously. A stranger! And she the gatekeeper, the guardian of the front door! It was that sort of expression, thought Brigid.

‘Yes, a former colleague, from school.’

Her mother was peering into the fridge, rustling through the bags of mouldy vegetables. ‘Your fridge is rather empty,’ she said. Calumn was behind her saying, ‘Rid-rid-ridd-rid.’

‘Well, I haven’t been to the shops for a while. Calumn, come over here, sweetie, let’s have some milk. A cup of milk?’ He put out a hand, took the milk.

‘I remember when I was pregnant with you, I was so busy in the final days,’ said her mother. ‘I made two months’ worth of meals and put them all in the freezer. Labelled them all. Lasagne. Shepherd’s Pie. Fish Pie. Rhubarb Crumble. All in labelled containers. I was determined not to be caught short after the birth. I cooked for days and days, hour upon hour. I wasn’t quite as big as you, but still, it was a major undertaking. I dragged myself around our kitchen, without all these labour-saving devices everyone relies on these days, and morning to dusk I cooked. And when I’d put the last container in the freezer, I felt the beginnings of labour.’

‘Very precise timing,’ said Brigid, though she had heard the story before.

‘So precise. My body knew it could let itself go. I had finished the cooking. And we ate so well after the birth. Not too well, naturally, because I wanted to lose my baby weight as soon as possible. But your father, God rest his soul, ate well. And I had enough. I always think when I look at photos from that time, how slim I was, even just after the birth,’ said her mother, who was far from fat now but had perhaps sagged a little in recent years. Age had dragged her skin down, though there wasn’t much flesh on her bones. She was a handsome elderly woman, Brigid supposed. Carefully set hair, dyed a blonder shade of white. High cheekbones, tastefully applied make-up. She wore pastel shades which suited her well enough. Well-cut trousers, low shoes. She was small but she held herself well. She had shrunk in recent years, but she wasn’t bent-backed. She was cleaning the surfaces with a regal air, as if she rarely had to stoop to such work but was doing it for her daughter.

‘Don’t do that, Melissa will clean tomorrow,’ said Brigid.

‘Nee-nar nee-nar,’ said Calumn, racing out of the room, and Brigid’s mother went to fetch him. There was a cry as he was retrieved and the kitchen door was shut behind him.

‘Thanks Mum,’ said Brigid.

‘You shouldn’t be carrying him around in your state. Not a big boy like you, Calumn. Such a big strong boy! Can’t Patrick take some time off work?’

‘It’s very busy at the moment. Besides, he’s saving it up for when the baby’s born. He’ll only get a couple of weeks.’

‘What does he do all day in that office anyway?’ said her mother.

‘Well, somehow he passes the time,’ said Brigid. ‘The hours pass and then he comes home again.’ The doorbell rang again, and Brigid waddled off to answer it. Stephanie was on the doorstep, with a baby in a pram, a tiny grub-like creature, its eyes shut, occasionally making little grumbling noises and sucking its fingers. The grub was called Aurora, but really it was a pre-human, with its furry body, its asymmetrical skull. It was still foetal, with its jerky little movements, its utter dependence on the mother, everything involuntary, unmeditated. It hardly needed a name, it was still so clearly an extension of its mother.

‘Oh, how beautiful she is,’ said Brigid, kissing Stephanie, adoring the baby for the requisite amount of time, picking up a little finger and holding it, careful not to wake her.

Calumn was trying to peer into the pram.

‘Gently, gently, Calumn,’ Brigid said. ‘Don’t wake the baby.’

‘Bah bah bah,’ said Calumn, loudly. The baby stirred but didn’t wake.

‘Ssssh, Calumn, very gently. Speak quietly, ssshhh,’ said Brigid.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Stephanie. ‘But can we bring the pram into the kitchen? Just so I can push it backwards and forwards, make sure she stays asleep as long as possible?’

‘Of course,’ said Brigid. ‘Just wheel it along.’

‘Aren’t the wheels wet?’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘Shouldn’t you dry the wheels?’

‘Don’t worry about the wheels,’ said Brigid, before Stephanie could bend down. ‘Don’t worry at all. I don’t care about them.’ And she started pulling the pram through the door, while Calumn bounced along beside it, saying, ‘Bah bah,’ and making the baby twitch and stir. Stephanie sat down in the kitchen, the pram beside her, moving it backwards and forwards, the wet wheels making a swooshing sound on the kitchen floor. ‘Is she sleeping well?’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘Calumn, darling, don’t grab the side of the pram.’

‘No, not really,’ said Stephanie. ‘Up every two hours to feed, then feeds for an hour, that sort of thing. But I hear that’s pretty usual.’

‘Oh yes, absolutely normal,’ said Brigid’s mother.

‘Breastfeeding is a nightmare of course,’ said Stephanie. ‘I hadn’t realised what a complete nightmare it was. Brigid you were so good, you never told me how ghastly it is, how painful, how desperately you think, “God, why not just give the poor little brute a bottle,” but then the health visitors treat you as if you are Satan for even suggesting it, and so for some reason you carry on.’ She laughed, vividly, showing her teeth.

‘I’m sure I told you many times how tough it was. I must have, I moaned bitterly to Patrick,’ said Brigid.

‘How long do I have to do it to earn my little gold badge, “Good Mummy”? How long, please tell?’ said Stephanie. She was looking pretty good, thought Brigid. Flushed cheeks, from pushing the pram along, and her hair was still glossy and thick from pregnancy. Auburn, streaked with grey, curling over her shoulders. She was striking certainly. At school she had a reputation for saying outrageous things. She sometimes swore in front of the pupils. Teaching Romeo and Juliet, she said things like, ‘Romeo and Juliet simply fancy the bloody pants off each other,’ while her pubescent class tittered and blushed.

‘I breastfed both my children for a year,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘Twelve months each. Then I stopped. I was happy to stop when I did. I felt I’d done the best I could for them.’

‘A year, Mrs Morgan. That’s amazing,’ said Stephanie. ‘That’s so amazing. God, I’ll think I deserve a bloody medal if I get to three months. I told Jack that the World Health Organization recommends three months. He never reads anything so he doesn’t know any better. Also men never discuss these things with their friends, do they? They don’t sit around having earnest conversations about whether breast is best, or do they?’

‘I don’t think Patrick does,’ said Brigid. ‘But he definitely thought breastfeeding was important.’

‘Oh yes, Jack says that. But where has he got that from? I just don’t understand,’ said Stephanie, kicking off her heels, causing Calumn to wander over to look at her feet. But he was shy and wouldn’t touch them. And they were strange, thought Brigid, trying to imagine — as she often did — what Calumn saw, how things appeared to him. Gnarled bent toes with glistening nails at the end. Soft skin and hard nail. He stood over them, pointing at the shining nail polish.

‘Yes, my toes,’ said Stephanie. ‘Where are your toes, Calumn?’

Calumn looked up at Stephanie’s face, smiling coyly, then gazed down at her feet again.

‘How are you feeling in yourself?’ said Brigid to Stephanie.

‘Oh, pretty trashed. Big weeping Caesarean scar, that sort of loveliness. Can’t imagine I’ll ever get back to normal. I’m just trying not to think about it.’ Stephanie was wearing a loose orange dress, still in her maternity clothes, so you couldn’t really see what she looked like. Underneath, Brigid imagined she was bloated, still carrying piles of weight. That was how she had been. And her face had been so full and fat, like a girl’s. It made her look improbably well on all the post-birth photographs. She was wallowing in agonised surprise but she looked like her teenage self, puppy fat on her cheeks. Stephanie took a sip of tea. ‘Anyway Brigid you’re looking great. How are you feeling?’

‘Fine,’ said Brigid. ‘A bit bored. A bit impatient, but then apprehensive at the same time. You know, you’ll remember it so well.’ And in pain she thought, trying to shrug off a rising surge, moving so she was facing away from them, crossing to the sink and running the tap. As the water ran she breathed. The pain rose. It was nothing, she knew. This pain was nothing compared with the pain to come. Later she wouldn’t be standing around thinking about the varieties of pain. She would have her head down like a dying animal, simply trying to endure. But now, she stood by the sink, pretending to wash her hands, wondering how long it was lasting and whether she should start to time the contractions.

Breathe and breathe, and now the pain peaked and began to ebb away.

*

‘No, my brain has already been wiped. I’ve forgotten pregnancy already,’ Stephanie was saying.

‘It’s nerve-racking for Brigid, because she’s so overdue,’ said Brigid’s mother.

‘Not nerve-racking because of that,’ said Brigid, grimly. ‘Anyway, I’m not necessarily overdue.’

‘You can always get the little swine induced anyway,’ said Stephanie in her matter-of-fact way. ‘I went for an induction. But then I had my gross Caesarean, so don’t do anything I did.’

‘A friend of mine’s daughter had a very successful induction the other week,’ said Brigid’s mother, looking irritated. ‘It was over in a few hours, and she hardly needed any pain relief.’

‘Lucky her,’ said Stephanie, wrinkling her nose. ‘There’s always one, isn’t there?’

‘More than one,’ said Brigid’s mother.

‘How’s Jack adapting to fatherhood?’ said Brigid, with Calumn tugging at her trousers. ‘Hello sweetie,’ she added. ‘How are you? How are you sweetie? Do you want a drink?’

‘Neaaarrr,’ said Calumn. He was restless and she knew he really wanted to go outside. But she stroked his hair, tried to calm him.

‘He’s very proud. Keeps emailing photographs of Aurora to everyone. Very doting. Not so keen on the sleepless nights of course — who is? But you know, he’s pretty smitten. Rocks her to sleep, puts her in the bath; the man even sings to her. And he rushes home from work and cooks dinner — can you believe it, he actually cooks dinner every night?’

‘Well that’s very nice of him,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘Lots of men wouldn’t do that.’

‘I think he was so amazed by labour. He tried to get down and dirty, help me to push, that sort of stuff. But often he stood there watching, as if he just couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Not wanting to stress you out, Brigid,’ said Stephanie, flexing her toes and laughing. The baby stirred again, briefly opened its eyes, then settled back to sleep.

‘Mum, do you want to take Calumn for a walk?’ Brigid said, thinking how much she wanted to talk to Stephanie on her own. ‘You could take an umbrella? Or maybe he’d like to hear a story?’ She wanted to confide in her friend, tell her how weary she was feeling, how she thought she was in labour, how there was a weight upon her, crushing her so she could hardly breathe and then she felt as if her mother had come to observe her, to spectate at her annihilation, she wanted to say all these things and listen to Stephanie laughing them off. ‘Can’t be that bad! Just let her make Calumn’s lunch and ignore her!’ She wanted Stephanie to be outrageous, ‘Oh mothers, I never see my mother. Callous witch that I am!’ She wished she could just ask her mother to leave them for a while. Come back in an hour, she wanted to say. Or in a day. Come back later, much later.

*

‘Oh no,’ said her mother. ‘I think he’s fine here, with his mummy. Aren’t you, Calumn?’ Calumn nodded back, and so Brigid’s mother settled in, watching Brigid and Stephanie as if they were enacting a bad play, which she had bought her ticket for and might as well see to the end. And Brigid was too polite and didn’t insist. Useless, she thought to herself. You are useless.

‘How’s Patrick?’ asked Stephanie.

‘Oh, fine. Busy at work. Wants to change his job.’

‘It’s a good job, he’s very lucky,’ said her mother.

‘Of course, Mum,’ said Brigid. ‘We’re all very lucky. But he still feels like a change.’

‘I always thought Patrick’s life was rather glamorous,’ said her mother. ‘Always forging contacts, making deals or whatever it is he does.’

‘I think that’s fine for a few years, and then it palls a bit,’ said Brigid.

‘It’s a perfectly good job,’ said her mother.

Now Brigid looked down and saw that Calumn was curled at her feet, playing half-heartedly with a stuffed toy. He looked listless and she felt a surge of love and pity for him. Poor Calumn, conjured into existence only to be ignored, that was how she felt when she saw him at her feet, uncertain and somehow sad. ‘Calumn, sweetie, how are you?’ she said. ‘Do you want to play a game?’ It was still raining outside, or she would have suggested they all went into the garden. ‘Do you want to play with tins?’ He lifted his head and smiled at her a little. Always he forgave her. He smiled and stood up, bashed her knee in an affectionate way. ‘Let me,’ said her mother, and took some tins from the cupboard. Now, at least, she went to work immediately. A pile of tins appeared on the floor. Calumn sat down by it. Even though he had done this a thousand times, perhaps even more, he applied himself to the business of knocking down and reassembling the tins.

‘Good boy,’ said Brigid, kissing him on the top of his head. ‘What a very good little boy you are.’ She imagined him feeling ambivalence, but she was sure no such emotion had ever troubled her as a child. She had felt joy then sadness, bold and certain states, fleeting in their effects. She didn’t feel diffident, or troubled by something she couldn’t quite express, or any of these confusing relative states of the adult brain. In childhood she regarded her mother with awe and dependent love, with desperate need. ‘You were always crying for me, all day, all night,’ her mother later told her. ‘You were such a furious little baby, always fuming about something or other.’ Brigid had accepted this for years, had told her friends what a difficult baby she was, how her mother had perhaps never entirely forgiven her. She joked about it, though she felt it, too, as a rebuke, something she could never atone for. Having a child had made her reassess the story, or aspects of it now resonated differently. After a few months, she began to think that babies raged not because they were inherently furious, or inherently anything at all; they cried because they wanted to tell you something, and when you didn’t hear them, didn’t respond or comprehend, they simply cried more loudly. She wondered if her mother really meant something else, if really she was saying that she had been overwhelmed. That she had felt her baby was displeased with her, because she was so uncertain of herself. ‘In the end I gave up,’ her mother said. ‘I couldn’t stop your shrieking, so at night I put you in a cot at the end of a corridor, and shut the door. At least then I could sleep.’ This had once shocked Brigid, but now she thought there might be something else her mother wanted to tell her — something about losing your grip on things, becoming detached from events you could no longer control. Calumn had never slept through a night, and this had made her more tired than she had ever been before. Yet she understood that his needs were simple; he only wanted her, or Patrick. He was lonely in the darkness. She had always loathed sleeping alone, and if Patrick went away she found it hard to sleep. So how could she blame her son for being lonely at night? For the first year, he slept in a cot by the side of the bed. If he cried she simply lifted him out and took him into bed with her. She stroked his hair and kissed his soft face. Even when she could barely open her eyes, when she moved as if drugged, she felt compelled to kiss him, to hold him as he fell asleep again. She wasn’t sure she could have done things differently, and anyway it was too late. Now she had become so huge, they had moved him into his own room. He still cried in the night, but now it was Patrick who consoled him. If it had still been her — if, like her mother, she had never asked her husband to help, or he had never offered — what would she have done?

*

Whatever she thought, however her thoughts swirled and would not settle, her mother was here. She was here and she was trying to help. This was worth noting, thought Brigid. Perhaps she had always worried that her mother didn’t love her much. She had certainly been an unpredictable woman. But now, here was the evidence. She loved Brigid and she loved her grandson, Calumn. She was brimming over with love, some of it revealed clumsily, in these forays and in her determination to advise her daughter, but it was love all the same … Now Calumn was grumbling, so she handed him a carrot, said, ‘Would you like this, Calumn?’

‘Gub,’ he said, as he took it.

‘A carrot! How lovely,’ said her mother. ‘A delicious carrot!’

‘Awott,’ said Calumn.

‘Very good,’ said Brigid and her mother, together.

*

‘I suppose I’d better go in a minute,’ Stephanie was saying, though she had only just arrived. ‘I suppose I’d better go before Aurora wakes and we have to embark on the terrible business of breastfeeding once more. You don’t want to witness it, I’m afraid. At the moment I have about forty-five minutes from one breastfeed to another. Blissful breast-free minutes, and then it’s back to work again. Basically I might as well just put her on my breast and lie in bed all day. It would probably be less hassle.’

‘It’ll get better,’ said Brigid. ‘It’ll get much much easier.’

Stephanie smiled as if she didn’t believe her. ‘That’s what they say. They say that about everything, really, don’t they? The first six weeks are hell, they say. Well, that’s certainly true. The breastfeeding is hell at first but it gets better. The first five years are hell but they get better. The whole thing is hell but it gets better. Well, I sure hope it does.’ She laughed again, her big round laugh, though it sounded hollow this time.

‘Are you enjoying it a bit?’ said Brigid. She looked at her more carefully. Stephanie seemed so indestructible, you assumed she would always be OK. But looking more closely, well perhaps after all she looked chastened, as if she hadn’t been prepared for this. It was hard to be certain. Her eyes were puffy, but that was just fatigue. She was holding herself carefully, as if she was very delicate, but that was the Caesarean and all her post-natal pain. Then she was bleeding, of course, and she had her heavy breasts, and her nipples all cracked and sore and she was only slowly understanding what had happened to her. The body understood but somehow the brain took a while to catch up.

‘I love her very much,’ said Stephanie, looking down at her baby, smiling at the sleeping little form. ‘I do love her. I just wish these weeks would rush on by. They seem to go so slowly. I wish we could all wake up in a few months’ time, with everything established and running more smoothly.’

‘The ironic thing is, later you’ll feel really nostalgic about these early days, when she was so small and completely dependent on you, and all she wanted was to be with you,’ said Brigid. ‘You really will feel nostalgic when she gets more and more autonomous.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Stephanie. ‘I don’t want her to depend on me for everything. I’d quite like her to depend on someone else.’ Now she was smiling but Brigid knew she was completely serious. She had been serious throughout, but she had been dressing it up, pretending it was all a joke. ‘I just wonder when things get sane again. But perhaps they never do get back to sanity.’

‘No, they don’t,’ said Brigid’s mother, firmly, from the floor, where she was showing Calumn how to balance a colander on top of a pile of tins. ‘They never do.’

‘Oh, that’s not true,’ said Brigid. ‘They get back to a different form of sanity. In some ways it’s a richer sort of sanity. I’m not saying it’s simple. It’s not at all. But the beginning is by far the hardest part. Aside from the bodily stuff, you’re struggling to process what has happened to you. You’re in a sort of existential crisis, as well as the rest. But it gets better and better, until you decide things are clearly running along too smoothly and you had better cast everything into chaos again by having another one …’

‘Brigid has had a wonderfully easy baby,’ said her mother to Stephanie.

‘I don’t know if I have or not,’ said Brigid. ‘I’ve always thought that people must enjoy it in the end, mustn’t they? On balance they must think it’s all worth it? Or people wouldn’t have more kids, two, three, four kids? They wouldn’t keep producing children, if there wasn’t something about it they enjoyed.’

‘Perhaps it’s just that they lose any sense that they once did other things,’ said Stephanie. She looked uncertainly at her baby, still sleeping, eyes tightly shut, pink mouth open. The baby looked serene, even confident, and yet Stephanie looked uncertain nonetheless, as if the sight even of its serenity was troubling to her.

‘I just worried all the time,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘All the hours of the day I was worrying.’

‘Well, you didn’t need to,’ said Brigid.

‘Perhaps I did. Perhaps if I hadn’t worried then you wouldn’t be here now,’ said her mother, defiantly. ‘Colander, Calumn, it’s a colander. We put salads in it and pasta. To dry them off. CO-LAN-DER.’

‘Oblambar,’ said Calumn.

‘Very good darling,’ said Brigid.

‘I don’t worry about Aurora,’ said Stephanie. ‘I feel somehow she’ll be OK.’

‘Oblambar coblandar oblandar.’

‘Well of course she will be,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘She’s a sweet little thing.’

‘She’s gorgeous,’ said Brigid, quickly, because her mother sounded so tepid.

*

Always she was trying to force her mother back, or counteract her perceived effects. And Brigid thought how much she wanted to love her mother simply and virtuously, because she was afraid otherwise her children would grow up feeling varieties of ambivalence towards her. They would learn from her poor example, experience the same confusion of emotions as she did. And perhaps this was her mother’s fear too, that despite all her work she had only received this imperfect love from her daughter. Perhaps this was why she came round and couldn’t quite leave, couldn’t stop coming round and staying too long, because she was still trying to earn something better.

‘Would you like another cup of tea?’ she said to Stephanie.

‘Oh no, I really have to go. I really do have to feed Aurora. Thanks anyway,’ said Stephanie, struggling to get up. Calumn turned and watched her, a tin in his hand. Then he stood on tiptoe to look at the baby again, still sleeping in the pram.

‘Well, thanks for dropping by,’ said Brigid.

‘Nice to see you, Mrs Morgan.’

‘You too dear,’ said her mother.

‘Bye bye Calumn boy,’ said Stephanie, bending towards him, ruffling his hair. Calumn looked up, didn’t smile, and then went back to his tins. Under-stimulated, thought Brigid, and Stephanie thought how little she understood babies, how she couldn’t understand her own and certainly not Brigid’s. For a moment Stephanie felt appalled and longed to beg for help, but then she was kissing Brigid, saying, ‘Best of luck darling,’ and pushing the pram back along the hall.

‘Send greetings to Patrick,’ Stephanie said, as she waved goodbye on the step.

*

Brigid turned back towards the kitchen and now she felt the pain so harshly that she almost cried out. Involuntarily, she stiffened. Her mother was doing something in the kitchen and couldn’t see her. Calumn was there, picking through the vegetables. Lacking any sense of what was to come, or perhaps he was somehow attuned to her, sensitive to her shifting moods. She wasn’t sure. At that moment the only thing she could be certain about was this pain. A very rising pain, shrill at its heights, really making her nerves scream and then just when she thought the note would go on forever, this jangling shrillness, it began to diminish, slowly it faded, and then there was silence.

*

In the silence of the hall Brigid knew — there was no longer any doubt — that she was in labour. The battle had begun and now her body would rip itself in two.

*

She heard the radio in the background; her mother must have switched it on again. The pips of the hour. It was one o’clock. Through London, ordinary people were eating lunch, oblivious to the trials that awaited her. Then there were women, countless women she didn’t know, experiencing something similar, the earliest beginnings or the climactic agony or the final relief. Throughout London, and that consoled her a little even as she dreaded the hours to come. Her body was trying to douse her fear, dilute it with consoling hormones. Yet she felt it all the same. And she heard the newsreader saying, ‘And today’ — today the prime minister travels to Washington. Some sportsmen have won glory on the pitch. Some wars are raging and an earthquake has taken thousands of lives. In his office, Patrick Hayes checks his watch, and now he is taking his jacket and setting off for his important lunch — and now she heard her mother calling, ‘Brigid darling, do let me make us both another cup of tea.’

The Hermit

For years he had failed and failed again; he had been disappointed a hundred times and then he had the book in his hand. They told him this was the one; Sally told him. So Michael Stone put on an unfamiliar suit, and in the sweating interior of his small flat his hands trembled as he pulled a tie around his neck. He was nervous and his sense of vindication — even triumph! — had ebbed away. His nerves were bad and threatened to spoil it all, but he drew his tie into a knot, tried to smooth his lapels. He took his hat and settled it upon his head. The night before, he had sewn up a tear in his shirt. He had even clipped his beard. Yet when he glanced in the mirror he saw a grey-faced unkempt man, ravaged by anxiety and something else he couldn’t quite understand. An incongruous pink tie slung around his neck. He saw it all, in the glass before him, then he wiped his hands on his trousers, and turned away.

*

He had been waiting a long time — it was terrible to contemplate — but really he had been waiting all his life for this day.

*

In the upper dining room of an expensive London club, a gathering of literary men and women. Four of them, and Sally. They pulled out a chair for him. ‘How nice to meet you,’ they said, their hands outstretched. Sally said their names and he nodded. Yet his nerves made everything twist and shift around him. It was as if a chasm had opened up; he was stranded on the edge, and before him was deep empty space. They were on the other side, far beyond him. They sent words across, they smiled towards him. ‘How nice to meet you, come and join us! You only have to jump!’ He was stranded on the other side, though he had longed for years to be rescued. He had written his books; again and again he hoped that one of them would find an audience. It was a ritual he performed, a devout observance. He finished something, something of which he was proud, then laboured in the photocopying shop, bound it all proudly, addressed envelopes and waited. Urgently, later in despair. He lifted his head, they shot him into his hole again. It had been like that for years. His universe was predictable, the rules seemed firm and fast — he tried, then he failed. Again he lifted his head — but this time they had seized him; Sally had drawn him upwards, into the light. And he should have been glad, but everything had moved so quickly, his consoling realities had been shattered, and this chasm had opened up before him.

‘Some wine, sir?’ said the waiter.

‘Thank you,’ said Michael Stone, and watched as wine was poured into his glass. Then the waiter twisted the bottle, and moved away.

‘Michael,’ Sally was saying. ‘This is Roger Annais, who was speaking about your book this morning on Radio 4. Roger, I haven’t yet been able to hear the programme but I’ve been told you were excellent.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Roger Annais, a man with black hair, a sunken face, as if his features had been carved from wax, and were melting slowly. ‘I was just trying to voice my genuine admiration. It’s often easier to demolish something than praise it, I find. One can at least be wry when something is bad. Admiration can start to sound a little … dull …’

‘Thank you for doing that,’ said Michael Stone, in his very soft, dry voice, which, though he cleared his throat, would not resonate, sounded merely like dead leaves crackling. ‘I really am … most grateful.’

‘No need for gratitude. You wrote it, it’s my job to comment on it,’ said Roger, firmly. He took a sip of wine. Michael noticed his veins bulged on his arms, as if he was malnourished. But he was more likely a driven, energetic man. He imagined him, rushing from the studio to his office, his day portioned into meaningful segments. Always he must have an eye on the clock; he must move swiftly, purposefully; a radio interview and then a lunch, and then — Michael wondered what this man would do later. But he was looking back at Michael as he put down his glass, so Michael said, ‘I have been … in recent days I have been a little nervous. I keep wondering if … perhaps … I should not have published this book at all …’ as Sally shook her head.

‘Ah, the misgivings. The opening-night jitters,’ said a man Sally had introduced as ‘Arthur Grey, reviewer and friend …’ And Arthur Grey continued — resting his stocky arms on the table and speaking slowly, careful in his phrasing, as if he was dictating a letter — ‘With my first published book, a novel, I woke at dawn on the morning the first reviews were due. I pulled on my clothes, dashed out, bought all the papers. Dashed back, heart pounding, ha ha! Read through them, couldn’t find a word about it, finally found the briefest imaginable review in The Times. “Not so much a promising beginning as a horrible threat that further carnage may be yet to come …” Ha, ha …!’

And the table laughed. Michael joined in, a false laugh because the story only made him more afraid. If that could happen to Arthur Grey, if this compelling man could be so emphatically dismissed, then what did he think he was doing? But they were lifting up their throats and laughing together, and he didn’t want to show them how he had lost his nerve. So he laughed and tried to swallow some wine.

‘The best review I ever wrote, the most honest, began: “By Mary and the blessed saints, this is a dreadful book”,’ said Roger Annais, and they laughed again.

*

On his right-hand side was Sally Blanchefleur, his agent, co-director of Blanchefleur and Scott, wearing a deep-green dress, gaunt and beautiful, striking at fifty or so, more striking than anyone else in the room. She drew attention away from Michael, with her beauty and her deep-green dress. Just some of the glare, directed towards her elegance; that was a relief. On his left, his editor Peter Kennedy, who had taken up his book, rescued it — he was meant to call him his saviour, he knew. And then an order of the just around him, like a secret society. In recent days he had been ushered around, people gripping his arm, directing him. Shielding him from something — he was not sure what it could be. One moment he felt revived, better than he had in years, and then he simply wanted to run. He didn’t want to be at the centre of anything, felt it might even have been a bad idea, to write books, only tenable when your works were never read. If they printed them up, distributed your efforts — that was a different matter altogether. And then he wondered what it had been for, all those years of suspense and futile endeavour, and being knocked back a hundred times; he wondered why he had bothered with it all. Why had he persisted, and raged against his detractors? He had been so urgent and angry about it all. For years he could hardly read a book, because he was not published. He could not really take pleasure in anything, and then he had grown so angry with his family — really his mother — because she was so foul about it all, told him he was wasting his time, that he would never achieve anything worth the years he had taken over it all. And his father and the callow rest of them backed her up, stood firm against him, as if he was an enemy they must vanquish. A few years ago he wrote a novel in the depths of his rage, hurled everything he could at their piety and hypocrisy, and — even though that novel sank without a trace, like all the others — they never spoke to him again.

*

He had almost stopped thinking about his mother, until that phone call from James. That had been unexpected, a little disturbing, because James had sounded upset, and he was usually so quiet and cold. He had talked about dementia, how their mother had been diagnosed with it, ‘a bad case of it,’ James added, as if there might be another, better sort of dementia. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Michael had said. But he was surprised to discover he felt nothing at all. It was as if they were discussing a distant relative. A month later, James had called again, saying that it would be ‘nice’ if Michael went to see her. ‘She won’t be at home much longer. She has a nurse but soon she’ll have to go into a home.’

‘She’ll hate that,’ Michael had said.

‘She barely knows where she is. She may not notice.’

*

He thought it was odd, that his mother was finally passive, an invalid, to be shunted from one place to another, on the advice of doctors. It was hard to imagine. The only time he felt truly sad about it all was when he received the first copies of his book. Beautiful in their dust jackets, his name on each spine in bold letters. It was an extraordinary moment, and there was no one apart from him who cared. So he sent a copy to his mother, one to his brother. He bound them up, spent a long time writing his mother a little note. Then he took the note out. He put a press release in with each copy, so they might think a functionary had sent them, some hard-working publicity person, not him at all. He hesitated in the post office, then he handed the parcels over.

He had received no response.

*

Yet this morning he was rushing to the door when the phone rang. He grabbed it, thinking it might be Sally, but then he heard James saying, ‘Ah Michael, I thought you might not be at home.’

‘I’m just about to leave …’

‘I was just sent a copy of your book,’ said James. ‘For which, my thanks. I see that today is the date of its official publication. You must be busy …’

‘Yes,’ said Michael, wondering why his brother was always so formal, but then he supposed he was too. ‘How is our mother?’

‘She is being moved into a home in a few weeks’ time.

I’ll send you the details of her address when she has settled in.’

‘All right.’

‘Then if you want to visit …’

‘I don’t think she would …’

‘She’s very different now. You’d see if you came.’

*

The call made him late, so then he had been forced to hurry to the Underground, sweating and certain he would offend them all, but everyone was late, apologising to each other, and it hadn’t mattered. They had drawn him into a private room in an expensive restaurant, where there was a waiter at his elbow, asking would he like the fish or the lamb.

Lamb, he said.

For the question must be answered.

Sally was saying something to him, and he turned to listen. ‘The first reviews,’ she said. ‘I have them in my bag. I must warn you …’ and she leaned closer to him, dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘They are not marvellous. Not quite what we hoped for. But there are many more yet to come.’

‘What did they say?’

She shook her head at him. ‘I’ll show them to you later. Dismiss them from your mind. Now, Michael …’

‘Yes?’

‘Drink up. We’ve a long day ahead.’ And she clinked her glass on his.

*

Briefly he panicked, felt his heart fluttering in his breast, thought how difficult it was even to breathe, to lift the chest, fill the lungs and empty them again — he sat there, looking at his hands, paying careful attention to the rising and falling of his chest, and after a few minutes he was able to lift his head. Someone was speaking, but not to him. ‘I liked your programme about George Lamott,’ a woman was saying. Alice Mortimer, he remembered now, a woman with auburn hair, tiny arms wrapped in silver. She was speaking to Roger Annais, who was nodding back at her as she said, ‘One element which has become apparent during this episode is that we are losing any sense of values worth fighting for. Because we have no sense of these values, we are constantly buffeted by the values of others, or by our perceptions of these values. We are over-conciliatory, imagining these values to be more and more absolute the more confused we become.’

‘I agree,’ said Roger Annais, nodding still. ‘When the religious tell us that their “beliefs” must be respected, we acquiesce carefully. We don’t dare to ask “Why?”’

‘The funny thing is, that even on your programme, Roger, they were so reluctant really to discuss the heart of the matter. I was amused to see how nervous they were, how they censored themselves even as they debated the issue of self-censorship,’ said Alice Mortimer.

‘George Lamott’s point is very simple, as I understand it,’ said Arthur Grey. ‘He argues that it has become usual to fudge the whole thing. Instead of being prepared to say, “No, this is wrong, it is simply wrong-headed to find any of this offensive,” we say, “Well, there may be those who misinterpret these words, and thereby, we cannot proceed.”’

‘It’s not entirely their fault,’ said Roger Annais. ‘Things sometimes do get blown out of proportion. Suddenly, the thing becomes a cause célèbre. Perhaps someone says something misguided in an interview, irritates someone or a group of people.’

‘Nonetheless we are losing our grip,’ said Alice Mortimer, with a wave of her arm, so her bracelets chimed and sparkled. ‘So many ideas are mediated for people. So you can have a small enclave — a highly intelligent enclave — deliberately misrepresenting something, in order to get people fired up. They know that these people won’t ever read the original. They will just respond to the call to anger, in essence.’

‘It’s the way of elites everywhere. The ordinary people never know what’s really going on,’ said Arthur Grey.

*

Michael listened, though he wasn’t sure what they meant. He had a sense of drama, something they all regarded as significant. They leaned towards each other; they had forgotten him. It was right, too, that he should be so easily forgotten. He had sequestered himself for too many years, he had never heard of George Lamott. They had opened the door to him — just a crack — he had squeezed himself through. He had crawled into this elegant lunch, because the door was slightly open, and he had been hammering on it for years.

*

‘It will be interesting to see whether this type of affair becomes quite common, whether publishers will continue in this vein,’ Arthur Grey said.

‘And then you will have authors censoring themselves before anyone else does,’ said Roger Annais. ‘Perhaps this is already happening.’

‘All you need is fear. You don’t even need legislation. You just need everyone a bit worried, glancing over his or her shoulder. It’s a marvellous way to change a society, without having to go through the boring process of campaigning for legislative change,’ said Alice Mortimer.

‘It will be interesting to see what the response of the reading public is. Whether they buy this book, simply to see what the problem was.’

‘I hope they do,’ said Alice Mortimer. ‘That would annoy a few people.’

‘I don’t think it’s fair to blame the religious in this. Not one of them has voiced any objections to Lamott’s book. This is not a question of religious extremists versus liberal democracy,’ said Sally.

‘… It is the suicide of liberal democracy. It’s self-annihilation by degrees …’

‘Like lemmings, we jump,’ said Arthur Grey. ‘We jump before we are pushed. There is no one around, even, but just in case someone appears, someone who might — or might not — push us — we jump.’

‘They are not liberal, in the true sense,’ said Alice Mortimer. ‘They are double agents, working to smash the edifice from within.’

‘Well, you don’t hear swathes of the religious denouncing the whole thing.’

‘That’s not true, some of them have.’

‘Not enough of them,’ said Roger Annais.

*

Their voices merged, as Michael sweated and twisted his fork in his hand. They said, ‘Naturally … One need hardly say … Of course …’ All that he did not understand was clear to them. They nodded at each other, ate with gusto, splashed wine into their glasses. They clashed vividly, or concurred suddenly — everything was emphatic, determined. Then it was as if they suddenly remembered they must include him, and so they issued a general murmur, ‘… but however … Let us not … We oughtn’t …’ Alice Mortimer nodded her auburn curls towards him. ‘… Now, The Moon …’ she began to say.

And he nodded back at her.

‘Yes, I wanted to ask you about your title,’ she said, with a wave of her silver arms. ‘Odd title, I thought, considering the subject of your story. And then I wondered, is it la lune ne garde aucune rancune, the all-forgiving moon? Or Diana and the hunt? What did you mean by it, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ said Michael. In the silence that settled around him, he fumbled with his words. ‘I meant … well, something about madness of course, and then … something about … unknown mystery, something which is intuited but not … precisely … something which can’t show itself …’

‘Who intuits it?’ said Roger Annais.

‘I hoped that might remain … a little ambiguous …’ said Michael. They paused and nodded, as if to encourage him. Then Arthur Grey was saying, ‘I thought it was a most interesting book, but there was something I wanted to ask you about. This poor man Semmelweis — who I confess I had never heard of before — is opposed to one sort of dogmatism — the adamant beliefs of the doctors around him, their particular theories about childbed fever. This dogmatism is ruinous, we are made to see. But then he develops his own opinions, and though they are right, it turns out later, he is relentless in his arguments, dogmatic himself, one might say. He insults his opponents, bombards them with invective, and won’t submit to the rules of scientific experiment. Essentially he is as dogmatic as his foes, is he not?’

*

Michael lifted his head. They were waiting, expecting him to answer. Yes, he wanted to say. It is not coherent. Naturally when I began, I hoped my book would be lucid and true, and yet as I wrote it — even as I wrote it — I sensed it was spiralling out of my control. And then I thought perhaps it did not matter, that — like everything else I wrote — it would not be read, nothing would come of it. He wanted to say this; he wondered briefly about saying it, but then he wasn’t sure how it would sound to them, so he wiped his hands and said, ‘It is true that Semmelweis is very angry … Perhaps this anger loses him the argument … But somehow, to me, I think … Well, I think there is — surely there must be — a difference between the lone figure … and the many. The one and the confident many. Perhaps the many are so confident — dogmatic — only because they are among the many. Not because they have thought really — truly thought — about what they say. The solitary man must either say nothing … or shout to be heard …’

*

Michael took a gulp of wine, pushed his greying hair from his temple. There was a lingering pause, while they hesitated, not wanting to curtail him. And he tried to fill it, but something — his shyness, native anxiety, or Sally would have told him it was stress — he didn’t know what it was, but something mangled his words. They waited, while he said, ‘Really … that was … I think that was what I meant …,’ and then they resumed.

*

‘I felt Semmelweis was an anti-hero,’ said Alice Mortimer, briskly, as if trying to show him how easy it was, just to talk, to speak and be understood. ‘There is a distance between us and him. I felt he was essentially unknowable, as a man.’ That set Michael trembling again, because he thought they might want him to answer, and he wiped his palms together, but Roger Annais was saying something about a fatal flaw. ‘… Something quite classical about his downfall. Perhaps that’s what you mean, Alice; he isn’t a modern character, as we now understand characterisation. He’s too archetypal. But, I should really let Michael reply …’

*

He was sweating though the room was cool, full of manufactured cold air. Like the other men, he had taken off his jacket, and undone his tie. As if they were saying, now we are among friends, that was what he thought it meant, all their loosened collars, their jackets slung over the backs of their chairs. With the trousers of his suit wrinkled, a smart suit he had been forced to borrow, never having had much need for one before, Michael saw their faces blurring and re-forming, and he tried to say, ‘I rather enjoy … hearing all of your opinions … For a long time I lacked readers …’ He wiped his temple again, and because he was floundering, Sally stepped in.

‘Michael is very tired. He has been working on this book for many years. He is a little overwhelmed, I believe.’

They nodded and murmured back at her. And Michael breathed more easily, because Sally had granted him a respite. So he slouched a little in his seat, and took another slug of wine.

*

He only had tenuous impressions, warped by his nerves. Peter Kennedy, head of Giraffe Books, the imprint which had finally published him, was leaning towards him — they were all leaning towards him. He was embarrassed to discover that they were trying to encourage him. So he leaned forward politely because Peter Kennedy was saying, ‘I’d like to propose a toast anyway. To The Moon.’

*

Michael tried to smile, and while Peter added a few more words of praise he pushed his grey hair back, and fiddled with his cuffs, and there was a general murmur as they all lifted their glasses. And Sally said, ‘I am just so glad you decided to publish it, Peter.’

*

Under the table, Michael wiped his palms together. The talk continued; he was glad when the debate surged around him. And while they talked, he saw the room was filled with soft afternoon light; furtively he watched Roger Annais marking his words with a beat beat of his hands and Arthur Grey nodding twice in return, and there was someone else saying, ‘I’m writing to The Times about Lamott today; anyone want to sign it?’

Yes, they said. ‘Email me the letter when you’ve drafted it,’ said one, and another said, ‘Don’t you want to wait, to see if there is any more fuss?’

‘No, I think I’d like to speak now. I know my opinion already.’

‘One can only hope it will strike a general chord.’ Roger Annais marked his words with a beat beat of his hands and Michael caught Arthur Grey staring towards him — their eyes met, and Arthur Grey half-smiled, half-nodded, then looked away.

*

One can only hope, thought Michael. For them, there was an intellectual point to be made, a debate for the letters pages. Beyond him, a controversy raged, something he did not understand. More important than his book, something which reverberated widely. For him, there was the business of the reviews-this sense of judgement, of a public reckoning — perhaps this was why his hand kept trembling when he lifted his glass, why he was drinking such a steady stream of wine. And Sally was pressing his arm, to let him know she was there. ‘It’s hard, the first book,’ he had heard her saying earlier, to a friend of hers. Into her mobile, she had said, ‘Especially at his age.’

*

There were reasons why you became a writer. Diffidence, a fear of social events. An affinity for solitude. Perhaps even misanthropy. You had to like sitting alone in a room. You had to be able to conjure your best thoughts and phrases alone. It seemed to Michael that some people were writers because they wrote better than they talked. He talked very badly, and had never — until now — been asked about his books. He had hardly been called upon to justify or explain them. He had not minded this much; he thought such explanations would be redundant anyway. How could you express something more plainly in a hasty phrase than in a meticulously worked sentence? Surely you were more likely to traduce yourself, to expose all the inner contradictions of your crafted prose? Yet recently they had been asking him to parse his phrases. They had been saying, ‘When you wrote … what did you mean?’ ‘When you said this … what did this mean?’ Sometimes he tried to explain that it was not him, it was a narrator. ‘But you wrote the narrator,’ they said, which was true enough. ‘But I am not the narrator.’ ‘But what did you mean when you made him say …?’ ‘Can you be more plain?’ they asked, but he wasn’t sure he could. He had become a writer so he could avoid his kind, so he could evade the false intimacy of the office and days spent in the company of others. He had been a solitary child; his own mother had told him so. ‘People need you more than you need them,’ she once said. In youth he suffered through a few office jobs; he shuffled papers and was ignored by his colleagues — he had been too quiet to interest them, so they left him alone. He dragged himself through these jobs and then he spent years as a language teacher. I am, you are, he is. We are, they are. John likes to go to the cinema. Do you like to go to the cinema? Then he got a job teaching creative writing at Hendon College of Further Education, when he simply wanted to be alone with the thoughts in his head. He wanted to live within these thoughts; they were compelling enough to him. If he could have made a living from writing, he would perhaps have never left his room. He might have been a true recluse, his desk turned away from the window, oblivious to everything except the page. His pen moving through space. The hours moving onwards.

*

‘Sally tells me you have spent years writing?’ Arthur Grey was asking, as if he had read Michael’s mind. It was a benevolent enquiry, he heard the kindness in the man’s voice, and so he said, ‘Yes, most of my life …’

‘You were struggling? I mean … to earn money?’

‘I did odd jobs … But it was not … very elegant …’

‘Michael has been rather ill,’ said Sally, protectively. ‘He wore himself down writing and — now — worrying.’

‘It is the uncertainty,’ said Michael. ‘The sense that one’s words … are not one’s own; that they might mean in ways one … didn’t expect … It was not my intention … all of this …’

‘Of course it wasn’t. Art was your intention,’ said Arthur Grey. ‘But I interrupted you, you were saying …’

‘I was trying to write about conviction …’ — and the table nodded — ‘… about those who propose something that is not generally thought, and how they are dealt with. About those who are convinced of what they say, to the point that they continue to speak, even when everyone has turned away. And I felt that … all things being unknowable, all real things, all real mysteries, then … well, who can stand, really, and say, “I know; I understand”? I wanted to write … something about this … impulse … to tell others what is true …’

*

Their polite silence made things worse, kept surging into the cracks in his sentences.

‘I wanted to ask why some people are raised … aloft, and others cast down … into darkness,’ he said.

They nodded back at him.

*

He wanted to tell them that he couldn’t remember precisely what he had been thinking of at the time. That it was a long time ago, a few years, that he started thinking about this book. He could not quite remember what it was, the original spark, the kernel he had begun with. He had been interested, for a long time before he even began his book, in the history of medicine, and then he read about Ignaz Semmelweis, this man who had driven himself mad. He was gripped by the story of Semmelweis, that was sure enough. So he started writing about Semmelweis, perhaps he intended to write only about him, but then other strands emerged. The whole thing took months, then years. His narrator rattled on — he supposed it was himself, some aspect of himself — so he set this man rattling on, and the whole story became — or to him it seemed this way — a metaphor, for any system of belief. It might be Christianity or it might be evolution, or the idea that humours governed the body. While he was writing, it occurred to him that there had been a time when medicine was founded on entirely different principles, then accepted as persuasive — the beneficial properties of leeches, or the uses of phrenology. And people had been convinced of these ideas. And there had been a time when mainstream science assumed that continental drift was impossible, and Wegener was branded eccentric. History was littered with such characters, proposing theories that offended the norms of their profession, finding themselves ostracised. And he thought the same was true of religions, in the end, that each new religion set itself up against others that had gone before, that the history of mankind was littered with discarded gods and goddesses. Something about Semmelweis’s frantic talk of mothers, his obsessive devotions, made him think of all the crones and goddesses who had been worshipped for thousands of years and then shoved aside. Artemis, Isis, Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Brigid, Cybele: their temples burned, left in ruins, their powers spent. And there was something else he didn’t even manage to formulate entirely, something which lurked beneath, but he wrote because it was a habit and he couldn’t stop himself, and he wanted to be published because he was vain — perhaps that was it, he simply wanted to be able to look at his published books, feel the glossy covers. He wanted to tell them all — Arthur Grey and Alice Mortimer and Roger Annais — that he only meant — his narrator only meant — that much had been forgotten, much remained obscure and perhaps unknowable. That it was madness to presume to know. Even to speak — to write — was perhaps madness, and he hardly expected anyone to agree with anything he wrote. Even as he drove words onto the page, he assumed his opinions were his own small maniacal perceptions, and he didn’t think they would necessarily chime with anyone else’s. Because of this, he felt quite alone.

*

He wrote his novel, and sent it to his agent, Sally Blanchefleur, who was impatient with him at the time and thought he would never do well. She had been his agent for years and it was clear her patience was wearing thin. The previous novel he sent her, she had not liked at all. She had taken months to respond, and finally she wrote, ‘Michael, I am sorry, but frankly I am not convinced.’ Nothing more than that, a terse note, after all his years of writing and the months she had taken to reply. He wanted never to speak to her again, after that, but she was the only agent who had ever replied to him, and he knew no others. So instead he badgered her on the phone, begged her for answers. ‘You are an intelligent man but you have to decide what you want,’ she told him, a trace of boredom in her voice. ‘Either accept your circumstances, or try to write something more … palatable to the general reader.’

*

Palatable, he had thought, sitting in his little room, in his flat in South London. To become palatable. That was the challenge she had set him. At fifty-five, to live in a small flat in South London pursuing unwanted projects; it was foolish to resist. But he found he was intractable, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to masquerade as someone else, and anyway he lacked the necessary daring. He simply couldn’t do it. ‘It wouldn’t hurt if you became a little more digestible’ — that was another phrase Sally used. The public appetite, the general palate, had no taste for him. Sally had been loyal, but now her loyalty was laced with fatigue and perhaps an element of pity. Poor old Michael Stone, better ring him. ‘Never mind, sometimes you can create your own audience,’ she would say. ‘Perhaps you’ll be the exception.’ But he felt she didn’t really believe it.

*

He had been writing for himself, that was the thing. He had been alone in a silent room and he had forgotten there was any chance of being overheard. Like being schizophrenic. You spoke to yourself and then you answered. You did not need to clarify your words; you were content with suggestions, half-fashioned thoughts. And then someone else invaded your cosy talk, this conversation you were having with yourself. Someone eavesdropped, heard half of what you were saying, or even less perhaps, and then they began to talk over you. They said, ‘So this is what you mean.’ Not even ‘what I think you mean’. Simply ‘this is’. First one, then a group of them, saying loudly and firmly, ‘This is the meaning of your rambling indecisive prose. We will explain.’ They got more loquacious. They talked and then they condemned you.

*

With The Moon everything had been different. ‘Well, Michael,’ Sally said. ‘Perhaps we might finally find you a publisher.’ He wanted to sob with relief. ‘There are many problems,’ she added. He listened, gripping the phone. ‘Men are unlikely to read a book about childbirth. It’s unfortunate, but there’s not much to be done. Women might just, but they’ll get put off by your obscure doctor. And the title too — the title is rather awkward.’ But he didn’t want to change the title. ‘It sounds like a dreary symbolist novel,’ said Sally. ‘And this rambling narrator, who seems mad himself. It’s as if you want to talk about everything, in one book. You can’t talk about everything in one book. It’s boring and it bores the reader.’

*

But he did want to talk about everything, the universe as he found it, not that he was much of an interpreter. He wanted to cry out how beautiful he found it, but how he was mired in darkness and knew nothing at all. Perhaps he wanted to find a way to express his ignorance. Sally explained to him — rather sternly — that he should take her advice, she was trying her best — she had been ringing around everyone she could think of, and finally — she could hardly believe it herself — she had found him a publisher. That sent him into nervous joy for a few days, and then they backed out. The editor was sorry. ‘Terribly sorry. Not my decision,’ he wrote. On second thoughts, they had decided it was not right for their list. They had thought carefully — ‘agonised long and hard’, wrote the editor — and they simply didn’t want the book. ‘They don’t think it’s worth it,’ said Sally, and now she lined up beside him. She phoned him regularly to give him progress reports. Finally she found Peter Kennedy who told him he loved the book and paid him almost nothing, but no one else would consider it at all, and so — Sally explained — he really had no choice.

Sally was brisk and unsentimental. ‘It’s a good novel, I’m not saying it isn’t a good novel, but it will be tough to find it a large readership,’ she said to him on the phone. ‘I’ve been talking to Peter, we were discussing the vogue for historical dramas, perhaps there’s something in that — but still, there’s only so far they can go.’ Michael tried to explain — once again he tried, though of course he was never persuasive — that wasn’t the point, but she was already talking over him. ‘Look, you have to relax a bit,’ she said. ‘I’ll get some friends to throw a launch party for you. And we’ll have a nice lunch on the day. Then you just have to hope the reviews are kind.’ And now she had them, hidden in her bag. She would not show them to him, she did not want to spoil their nice lunch.

*

‘Would you like some more wine, sir?’ the waiter was saying in his ear. He nodded and held out his glass.

‘How is the lamb?’ said Sally.

‘Very good,’ he said.

They were speaking quietly, and the talk continued around them. She put her hand on his arm again. ‘You do look pale, Michael. Is there anything else you would like?’

‘I wish I had done everything much better,’ he said. ‘I wish I had …’

‘It’s important to sustain a sense of humour about all of this,’ said Sally. ‘It’s a sort of game. Not the work, the work is very important. But the launch, this, the business surrounding you. That’s a sort of game. It can be fun, even.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you are too worried about what people think of your work, you will only be disappointed,’ she said.

‘I am not disappointed,’ he said. ‘I am …’

She waited politely, with her fork raised.

‘ … in shock,’ he said.

*

Then the waiters came and began to clear the plates away.

*

‘Michael, what will you do after this?’ said Alice Mortimer.

‘Perhaps … I would like to go on holiday,’ said Michael.

They smiled at him, laughed a little.

‘Are you working on another book?’ said Roger Annais.

‘I don’t have any ideas at present. I have been … well, it has been hard to focus on my work …’

‘Of course it has,’ said Alice Mortimer. ‘I remember that, you feel you have to test the water, before you start again.’

‘We need more wine,’ said Sally, holding up her hand. ‘We really should have another drink.’

*

Michael looked down. They had taken his plate away. He had hardly touched the food, he had merely drunk the wine. So now his head was thick with wine and if anyone wanted to speak to him this afternoon, he would be drunk.

*

He would pass the rest of the day stewed in wine, and tomorrow — perhaps tomorrow — things would be different. It was an irony that after all these years of hoping for an audience, of imagining that was what he needed, he found these people so bemusing. He longed for the privacy of his room, where he sat for years without anyone noticing. Unsullied, immaculate in his obscurity and failure. The river coursed along beneath him, dragging everyone else along. He saw them dragged along each morning, surging towards the Underground, and he thought of them being poured into London, into their offices. And then they flooded home at five and six and seven o’clock, short and fat and tall and broad, conveyed by the current, subject to its force. He surveyed everything from his tower and thought he had escaped it. He surveyed them from the safety of the shore. He had been voluntarily beached for years. And now, somehow, he had been dragged in. Here they all were, these people who swam with the current and he was there too, but they were swimming along, buoyant and accustomed to their state, and he was drowning even as they spoke to him.

*

The waiter was putting something down in front of him. A crème brûlée, perfectly glazed on top.

*

‘How delicious,’ said Sally. ‘Dessert wine, anyone?’

‘Down the hatch,’ said Peter Kennedy.

So Michael Stone lifted his glass and received another splash of wine.

*

Everything had been soured by that phone call. It was the peculiar tone in his brother’s voice, something almost police, when for years James had treated him as if he was pathetic, unspeakable. Polite and yet cold all the same, as if hostilities were off for the time being, while their mother declined, out of some sort of warped notion of decorum — yet he did not want to have to think about James, or his mother. They always made him feel anxious about things he had previously enjoyed. Even his childhood had been nervous, because of his mother’s godliness and determination, because she always had so much to say about even the smallest things. She ordered the world so convincingly, classified everything as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. He couldn’t believe she had really changed. Things were better when he ignored them, but then the chilly voice of his brother had intruded, making him uneasy again. It made him think of an ancient patriarch, some ogre of his childhood, standing in judgement, far above him. He saw himself clambering towards this venerable prophet — perhaps he was on a mountain, by a stone temple. Michael saw himself struggling up to the peak, approaching with his head bowed, and there was the old sage, swinging his hoary locks towards him, saying, ‘You have done wrong. You have done everything wrong and for this wrong you must be punished.’

*

As he had always done, in childhood and even in adult life, Michael felt uncertain, guilty even, found himself saying, ‘But what is it? Just what is it I have done?’

The Tower

Transcripts of interviews with members of the anti-species conspiracy of Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424

Part 1, 10.00–11.55 a.m. 15 August 2153 Interview with Prisoner 730004

At time of commencement the prisoner will not disclose her real name.

I do not understand. Just what is it I have done?

Prisoner 730004 you are aware that your crimes against the species are very grave and you stand under a charge of conspiring against the Genetix and thereby against the survival of humanity?

I am aware of the charges but I do not understand what I have done to merit them.

The Protectors are very disappointed with you. They perceive that you have behaved in a reckless manner, dangerous to all. What do you say to this?

I am sorry the Protectors are disappointed. Yet I remain confused about the nature of my offence.

They regret to inform you that while they seek to assess all matters reasonably and dispassionately, your case and that of your co-conspirators must be considered a crime. We are appointed to discuss with you the precise nature of this crime and to relay information to the Protectors on your behalf. Do you understand?

I do not really understand, no.

Could you firstly explain how you came to be living in Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424, in the Restricted Area?

You mean on the island?

Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424, yes. Can you explain how you came to be living there?

We were living in the land of our mothers and fathers …

Correction, for ‘mothers and fathers’ the record will read egg and sperm donors.

… Generations were born and lived their lives there. We merely wanted to be at home.

You were not happy with your accommodation in Darwin C?

Naturally I should have felt fortunate. In our perilous times, Darwin C supplied me with everything I should need. I had my allocated role in the struggle for the survival of the species. I had my own small room which is called a space. A regulated lamp which functioned from nightfall for a regulation hour, during which time I could arrange my clothes for the following day, pull my bed down from the wall. I had a thin window with a view of all the other towers. I took my meals in the collective dining centre, like everyone else. I washed in the collective hygiene centre, and I received my daily allocation of drinking water. On Sunday mornings, I was granted three hours of relaxation time. I liked to read in the collective data hall. Despite all this, I became aware that Darwin C was not my home.

But you had lived there all your life, is that correct?

Yes, my parents were taken there before I was born. They were removed forcibly from their home and taken to a space on the twenty-eighth floor, sector 1125, Darwin C. My mother was harvested and then sterilised and I was the product of her Genetix treatment. As you know in those days it was the custom for Genetix children to live with their parents.

Correction, for ‘mother’ the record will read egg donor. And for ‘children’ the record will read progeny of the species. And for ‘parents’ the record will read sperm and egg donors.

Now of course this is no longer the case.

How did it come to pass that you left Darwin C, Prisoner 730004?

I had a dream. I dreamed of torrents of blood. I was swimming in a sea of blood. In my dream I was encased in blood. Yet I was not drowning. It was astonishing but I could breathe in the blood. I was drinking the blood and I liked the taste of it. In my dream I understood that the blood held all the nourishment I needed. I felt very peaceful and happy. Perhaps I was even smiling as I drank down blood. When I woke from this dream I was sweating and crying. I woke in my space in sector 1125 Darwin C and I thought of all the millions of souls waking in their small spaces too and I cried out in anguish for something I had never known.

And you attached significance to this random twitching of neurons?

I was profoundly affected by it. My life changed utterly. I could no longer perform my job — my allocated role, I mean.

Please explain what your allocated role was.

I worked at the nurture grounds, in sector 1126.

Your area of specialisation?

I cared for babies of six months to a year. I loved what I did though I felt deeply sad that I could not have a child myself.

Correction, for ‘child’ and ‘babies’ record progeny of the species. Your eggs were classified as deficient, Prisoner 730004?

No, I believe they passed the test.

So they have generated many progeny of the species.

I do not mean children that I will never meet and who were generated in a laboratory using sperm from men I will never know. I mean children of my own womb, grown and nurtured by my own body.

On behalf of the Protectors we are obliged to advise you that the expression of such statements will not help your case at all, as they constitute a grave threat to the survival of the species and cannot, for the common good, despite the generosity and forbearance of the Protectors, be sanctioned.

I am sorry. I was trying to answer your question.

These dangerous anti-species opinions were shared by all of your group?

It was not something we spoke about. It is a private matter, the yearning of the sterilised body to procreate … I do not know how other women endure it.

We assume that other egg donors understand that it is necessary for the survival of the species that we regulate procreation. That we select from a crop of harvested eggs and only place the most superior in the Genetix, fertilised only by the most superior sperm. That we filter out genetic deficiencies. Such deficiencies and your egomaniacal fixations are luxuries the species can no longer allow itself, if it is to survive.

I am aware of the arguments for the Genetix. I am merely explaining my own emotions.

I am afraid this is where you and your group have been in error. You have glutted yourselves on emotions, without a single thought for the Collective. Did you consider what would happen if everyone behaved as you have?

I am afraid we did not. We were compelled … I was compelled, I cannot speak for the others, by an overwhelming desire to leave Darwin C.

And if everyone left the Protection Zone and set up farms in the Restricted Area what would happen?

I do not know. I am no prophet.

You don’t need to be a prophet to understand the basic laws of supply and demand. I assume you attended Species Survival Courses A, B and C?

Yes, I did. They were compulsory.

And you were taught there that given current climatic instability and the grave perils of overpopulation and shortage of resources, we must make various personal sacrifices for the species to survive the current crisis?

Yes, I was taught this.

Were the arguments persuasive?

I lacked the knowledge to disagree with them. I have no idea what is really happening to the planet, even now.

But you acknowledge that the climate has changed violently.

Yes, I think it has since I was young. But I do not know what this means.

What it means, Prisoner 730004, is that the Collective and the Protectorate and the proposals established for species protection must prevail. It means that to defy these proposals is to aim at the annihilation of the species. Under Proposal 113 of the Darwinian Protectorate auto-genocide is forbidden, you realise?

Yes, I have been told this.

You were taught it in Species Survival B part 7, were you not?

I can’t remember exactly when it was that I was taught it but yes I know I have been told it.

And do you understand that the reason we are all accommodated in cities such as Darwin C is to conserve as much land as possible for mass-scale farming to support our species?

I have no real knowledge of anything but yes this is something I have heard.

You were taught it in Species Survival B part 2, were you not?

I can’t remember the details. I was a poor scholar. But I have a recollection that something like this was explained to me, yes.

So, when you left the city to set up your own farm you knew you and your group were disobeying the most serious proposals of our Collective? Proposals which have been established to protect the species as a whole?

As I said, we knew that it was not what we had been told to do, or rather I knew, I cannot speak for the others, but such was our — my — craving … I was guided by desire, by my yearning for the island …

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

… and for the countryside and besides it was becoming too great a torment to work at the nurture grounds any more.

Because of your egomaniacal fixations?

Because of my sense of profound grief that I would never birth my own baby …

Correction, progeny of the species. Had you been taking the advised doses of hormone readjustment, Prisoner 730004?

I had.

So you are arguing that you felt this craving despite taking the advised daily dose?

Yes, my yearning transcended these suppressants. My yearning burst out and made me wretched.

So this was when your group was formed?

I had remained in contact with friends from my homeland.

From Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424. And who was it that devised the plan to abandon your posts and desert to the Restricted Area?

I don’t think there was a single person. I think gradually we came to understand each other. We had so many ancient ties in common. Our understanding was very profound. I am not sure we ever really spoke about our deepest yearnings, to depart. But we understood each other anyway.

You are proposing that you never planned to leave? That it just happened spontaneously?

It was not spontaneous. It happened slowly. But yes, it happened amongst us, without anyone really saying anything. For a long time no one dared to speak. But then there came a time when everything was clear to us, when we knew — we knew everything about each other, without having spoken much at all.

Prisoner 730004, you are making no sense. Why don’t you tell us — in plain speak — who the woman known as Birgitta is?

I am not sure I can.

The Protectors value truth and it pains them to hear lies.

Please do not insult them by lying in this way. Your lies are wasted anyway as we are searching for this woman known as Birgitta throughout sector 111243. So we ask you to explain exactly who she is, before we take her and ask her ourselves.

She is many things.

Such as?

Well, she is entwined with many forces. There is an old idea we found out … someone knew of this phrase — the Magna Mater. Somehow Birgitta is entwined with this phrase.

You will explain yourself in plain speak, Prisoner 730004.

She is an ordinary woman, a terrified girl. But there is something else about her. I am not sure what it is. We have been deprived of tradition and ritual and therefore we are not entirely sure who Birgitta is, and what she might mean.

Once more we must ask you to explain yourself in plain speak, Prisoner 730004. And turn your face towards the screen.

When I was working at the nurture grounds, each day I would hold these beautiful little babies — ‘progeny’ you would say — in my arms and feel how monstrous it was that my living body had been rendered barren, that the eggs had been ripped out of my womb when I was merely eighteen and taken to a laboratory somewhere, where I didn’t even know, and fertilised without love or passion. And if not fertilised then thrown away, discarded. When I thought about this I felt a terrible ache, the mourning of my body, and I always consoled myself — or tried to — with the thought that something might go wrong. The Genetix might fail. Society might collapse. And afterwards, from the ruins, women might regain our former power, to create life within our bodies.

You actively wished for the ruination of our civilisation?

I thought it might be the only way to escape from this … this … I do not know what it is …

It has been clearly explained to you. In Species Survival C. That this is the only option for the species. That all available land must be converted to intensive farming. That city population density must be 13,500 persons per square kilometre. That for farming requirements and also for the most efficient implementation of the Procreation Regulation Programme individuals must live in their allocated accommodation in the cities. Prisoner 730004, you were aware of all these proposals, were you not?

Yes, in truth I was. But somehow I couldn’t accept that this is the only option left to humanity.

So you admit that you have desired the ruination of the species and that you have favourably contemplated societal collapse?

Only because I could see no other way that humanity might return to a more natural way of … being. Only because I had come to feel that if this denial of nature was required for species survival then perhaps … I am speaking only for myself … but perhaps it wasn’t worth it.

Worth what?

Worth surviving. But I don’t know, naturally.

Prisoner 730004, we must warn you that such statements constitute a grave threat to the survival of the species and will only harm your case further. Let us return to the question of Birgitta. Explain what you mean by your talk about her.

I mean that a girl who originally also came from my island … Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

… became pregnant.

Be very careful what you say, Prisoner 730004. We have already warned you about the harm you are doing to your case.

It is the plain truth. She was harvested at eighteen and had her womb ‘closed up’ in the so-called ordinary way, and yet twenty years later she had become pregnant.

Who is Birgitta?

She worked in the Sexual Release Centre. Once upon a time she might have been called a whore.

There are no such people in Darwin C.

No, by the terms of the day she was not a ‘whore’ it is true, she was an ‘expert in the administration of sexual release’ — and she specialised in the loveless sex that is now encouraged. Not merely encouraged, that is not what I mean. I mean that lifelong coupling is now frowned upon as … you would say it is one of those egomaniacal fixations we can no longer afford. Also children are no longer raised at home but in the nurture grounds by strangers …

You are digressing and your words are meaningless. Who is Birgitta?

She had been supplying ‘sexual release’ for many years, and then she became pregnant. At first she had no idea what was happening. No woman of my generation has ever become pregnant. We are of course the first complete generation of ‘egg donors’ — with us the process has been completely successful, you would say.

We would. You have not yet told us who Birgitta is.

She wasn’t sure what was happening to her body. She was experiencing awful nausea, nausea so she could barely function as a supplier of sexual release, and her belly appeared to be bloated which some of those she sexually released found unsightly anyway. She thought she must have a problem with her digestive organs, and she took various remedies and hoped that would cure it. She didn’t want to lose her position at the Sexual Release Centre; after all she had never worked anywhere else and didn’t know quite how else she would be able to serve the Collective and the Protectorate. She was even afraid she might be regarded as extraneous and sent to the mass-scale farms and no one ever comes back from there.

They do not return because they are happy there.

They do not return because they are worked to death, that’s what I have heard.

You heard a myth, an irrational fable told by simple people. Please do not digress.

Birgitta grew still more nauseous and still more bloated. No one she knew had ever experienced these symptoms and she was too afraid to go to a Corporeal Scientist. She was mystified and feared she was dying, until she went to her mother.

Correction, egg donor.

Well, actually Birgitta was conceived just before her mother was taken for harvesting and sterilisation. Things were a little more lenient in those days and so the pregnancy was permitted to continue. For many years Birgitta felt that it would have been better had she never been born. Because of her beauty, her long limbs and her flowing blonde curls, she was taken from her family at the age of eighteen and consigned to a life of whoredom.

She was allocated her role in the struggle for the survival of the species. Though the Protectors wish in their virtue to give you a reasoned hearing, we cannot permit these rambling digressions. Correct for the record instances of ‘children’ and ‘mothers’ in the appropriate way. Prisoner 730004, you were telling us of a supplier of sexual release, Birgitta, who believed she was pregnant.

At the time she did not believe it. She was very frightened and didn’t know what was wrong. Then she went to her mother and she lifted Birgitta’s top garment and saw the swollen belly, and she said, ‘My daughter, this is no disease, no sickness of the body, you are pregnant.’

Correct for the record ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ as before. How very unfortunate that this poor woman should be so deluded.

That is what everyone said. When Birgitta finally — reluctantly and in great fear — went to the Corporeal Scientists they said she was having a phantom pregnancy, that she was sick in her mind, that she must cure her mind and the body would follow, because as the Protectors tell us the body is mere matter, to be controlled by the faculty of reason, with a little help from our technologies …

You are digressing again. Please explain clearly what happened to this woman Birgitta and why her delusions are linked to the selfish anti-species activities of your group.

Even when she could feel the movements within her, the little flutters and tentative kicks which were once called quickening, even when it was clear that there was something alive, they told Birgitta it was just her imagination, that her mind was — they told her — confused by the unbridled urges of her body. Not a single Corporeal Scientist thought it was even worth scanning her: they knew from her records that she had been harvested and purged and closed and so they were entirely convinced that it was a mental deficiency, taking over the body. Indeed they explained to her that for her own good — for her protection — she must be committed to an Institution for the Improvement of the Reason. Which in the old days we would have called a lunatic asylum.

Prisoner 730004, you are once more mistaken in your reasoning. You must not simplify everything and draw it into your mythical and non-scientific worldview. The Institutions for the Improvement of the Reason are a necessary element in the protection of the species. The Protectors are wise and just. Now continue with your account.

It was then that we acted.

At this point you were already in a state of delusion about the nature of Birgitta’s illness?

I already knew that she was pregnant, yes.

So how did you ‘act’?

A group of us decided to leave Darwin C and take Birgitta with us. At the time she had not realised her power. She was just a very distressed person. She was still in a state — induced by her upbringing — of self-fear. She feared the bulging of her body. She feared being cast out from the confines of the Collective, from the world she had known all her life. She felt freakish and wanted to hide or to be cured. Indeed she basically accepted that she should go to an Institution for the Improvement of the Reason and it was only because of us that she did not. It is in a sense fortunate that none of the Corporeal Scientists would believe that she was really pregnant, otherwise she would — I think — have been easily convinced to have a termination. If you have been constantly told that something is true, that a particular reality is true, if you have grown up in a society which has disposed of the natural function of the female body, then it is quite understandable that you would regard pregnancy as a sickness. And Birgitta also felt that whether her illness was a sickness of the mind as the Corporeal Scientists told her or the ordinary symptoms of pregnancy, she was alone. Either she was mad or she was the only pregnant woman in Darwin C. And Birgitta was in such a state of self-fear that she thought either state was undesirable and terrifying.

You are digressing again, Prisoner 730004. Please explain precisely what happened. Though the Protectors seek to understand you, they are in truth less concerned with your vague musings about reality as you see it than they are with the plain facts of the case.

I am sorry. Lacking the analytical brilliance of the Protectors I find it hard to disentangle actions and thoughts.

We are talking of the circumstances of your departure from Darwin C.

Yes I understand, though in my weakness I can only perceive the circumstances of my departure as bound up with my gradual disaffection with the mores of our civilisation and my mounting sense of unease at the prospect of further years spent in the nurture grounds of Darwin C. In a sense I could not have physically departed from Darwin C had I not already become detached in my mind from the place. I came to realise that I could no longer accept my allotted role in the so-called war against nature and I therefore had to desert.

You accept then that your actions constitute a dereliction of your duties?

By the terms of our civilisation, as you call it, by the standards of the life in Darwin C, by the standards of the Protectors, then yes, I see I shall be punished.

You will be allocated a new role in the struggle for the survival of the species. Now Prisoner 730004, please return to the circumstances of your desertion of Darwin C.

It was very sudden. We never planned it, we just realised we had to leave.

Can you clarify at this point who ‘we’ is?

No, I’m afraid I can’t.

Why not?

Because I made a promise not to reveal the identities of my friends.

Prisoner, the Protectors, through us, assure you that it is categorically in your interest to co-operate fully with this process. Indeed a failure to do so will make things even more difficult for you and your co-conspirators.

I am grateful to the Protectors for their kind reminder. However, we swore an oath of secrecy and allegiance and I am afraid I cannot break it. In case some of my friends are still out there.

Out in the Restricted Area?

Yes.

You do not know where they are?

I have had no contact with anyone since the army came to our village.

Correction, Protection Agents. So you made no arrangements for reconvening if your camp was dispersed?

No such arrangements at all. Things weren’t like that. We felt free. We were among mountains and the sea. Infinite rocks and water. We felt as if our lives were peaceful and blessed. We certainly never imagined our village would be set upon and destroyed, that our huts would be burned, that they would beat and coerce us and that I would be sitting here in prison, being interrogated.

You are not being interrogated. The Protectors merely seek to understand your actions so they can better protect our Collective. The actions of the Protection Agents are always proportionate to the magnitude of the threat represented by the activities against which they are deployed. We cannot afford to be sentimental in our dealings with exceptional cases such as yours, lest we imperil the majority. This is a question of billions of lives.

I understand that humanity has destroyed the planet.

Nature has declared war on humanity and we must evolve and use all the technology at our disposal, or be vanquished.

You are more knowledgeable than I am.

Prisoner 730004, you are claiming that you have no idea of the whereabouts of your co-conspirators?

I do not know where my friends have gone, those that are still living.

You are aware, Prisoner 730004, that while the Protectors seek to understand you, the better to protect the Collective, they also insist on honesty as a central value of our civilisation. They cannot protect us unless we confide in them. So why will you not tell us, and thereby the Protectors, precisely who else was living in the Restricted Area?

I would like to be as honest as possible, and have no desire to hide our activities where my explanations can harm no one. Yet in this instance I have made a promise. You can torture me or threaten me with the mass-scale farms but I will not break it.

Prisoner 730004, your remarks have been noted. They will sadden the Protectors. Can we now return to the precise nature of your departure from Darwin C?

It was very exciting. I had never gone beyond the two sectors — the one in which I lived and the one in which I worked. In Darwin C I had the view from my space and that was as I said nothing but towers and by night there were red lights flashing from the tops of the highest towers. As far as I could see, there were towers. And the small figures passing beneath, all in their little dark smocks. And always the whirr of the air processing, I had never been anywhere without this constant whirr. I went from this constant mechanised whirr to the sound of waves. The cries of birds. The wind in the trees.

Can you tell us the precise chronology of your departure?

We met at the base of a tower. We had discovered there were supply trains running to and from the Arctic. Birgitta’s brother …

Correction, DNA relative …

… worked on one of them. He is gone now, as is Birgitta’s mother, so I can tell you that they helped us. Birgitta’s mother came with us, though she perished later. But the joy she felt at returning was so immense, so wonderful to behold, so I think it was a good thing she came, even though it killed her. I am certain it hastened her death. Conditions at first were very hard.

Correct ‘mother’ for the record as before. Prisoner 730004, we ask you to apply yourself only to the question of how you departed from Darwin C.

Yes, of course. Birgitta’s brother told us we must be at the loading bay at 3 a.m. He said he would load us into his section of the train. He was the porter for that section and so he could put us in a crate and say the crate contained special equipment going up to the mass-scale farms. He told us the passengers on that train were a desperate horde: those judged mentally unwell, former workers in the Centres for Sexual Release who were too old to attract people any more, or others who had exceeded their usefulness and could no longer be housed in Darwin C. They were all going to the mass-scale farms of course. We couldn’t see them but the worst thing was that we couldn’t hear them either. They were silent and I thought of them the whole journey, lined up in rows and knowing where they were going and that they would die there. They had been discarded. They were the discarded rubbish of our so-called civilisation. Stripped of any sense of individuality, or worth. They were merely being thrown away.

Such remarks cannot be permitted, constituting as they do a grave threat to our species. Correct ‘brother’ for the record as before. Please continue with the basic facts of your story, Prisoner 730004.

Then there were the so-called Protection Agents and we were very frightened of them. Every time their footsteps thumped towards our crate we expected to be discovered. We were in there for three days. We had some water and a little food and we couldn’t sleep at all. Birgitta was halfway through her pregnancy then, and the claustrophobia and the stale air made her sick. It was a terrible journey. In some ways I can’t remember much of it, because I was so stricken by fear and horror. For myself and Birgitta but also for all those doomed souls beyond our crate.

Prisoner 730004, must we remind you again?

I am sorry, I keep forgetting about the restrictions upon me.

They are for your protection and for the protection of the species. What happened when you arrived at your destination?

By the time we arrived our limbs were locked, our bones aching. The crate stank of vomit and urine. It was a descent into the body, being stewed in fluids for two days like that. The Protectors would doubtless have judged us mad or in need of mental readjustment.

The Protectors do not judge, they only protect.

Yet there was something cathartic about the process. We who had been bred in sterilised sparkling machines, in the pristine technocratic sanctuary of the Genetix, we who had lived our days in perfect towers coated in shining solar shields, so everything was always glittering in the dangerous sunshine, suddenly we were dirtied, reborn into viscera and filth.

Once more on behalf of the Protectors we must emphasise that such digressions are not relevant to your case or suitable in your circumstances.

I am sorry.

Please continue with your account, taking care to adhere to the facts.

I will try. Let me think. The facts of our arrival. I am not sure. I think that we were all afraid. And uncertain. Perhaps this is not a fact. We were unsure about what we had done. Birgitta’s brother dragged us out. I think he was also afraid. Again I am not entirely sure of this. I was disoriented by fatigue and nerves. I do not remember who was there, beyond the members of our group and Birgitta’s brother. Others were there, though: I felt hands on my shoulder, on my arm, guiding me along what I think was a dark passageway but could equally have been a tunnel. Perhaps someone wept. Perhaps we all did. But this is not a fact, or not one I believe would be useful. Birgitta’s brother disappeared before we could thank him — I never saw him again and now I strongly believe he is dead. Though I do not know this for a fact I am almost certain it is the case.

Correct all instances of ‘brother’ for the record. Prisoner 730004, why do you believe that Birgitta’s DNA relative is dead?

We were told later that they discovered our urine and vomit in the crate. Only traces but it was enough to condemn him. I believe, though I am not sure, that it is considered a grave threat to the species to assist fugitives, so he was sent to the mass-scale farms. There the average survival span is six months, I have heard, though I am aware this would not qualify as a fact.

It is a myth, a foolish unscientific myth.

Of course. I am sorry. I have no clear understanding of our world. Just impressions, emotions. I believe, intuitively, that he is dead. And if not dead, then his condition cannot be worsened and I imagine death might even be a blessing to him. I have heard — again you will not regard this as a fact — that life on the mass-scale farms is so dreadful that some there stop eating even their scanty portions of food, to die more swiftly.

This is another irrelevant digression and a blatant untruth.

Of course, I understand.

Please continue with your account, Prisoner 730004.

We went along the tunnel which may not have been a tunnel for what seemed like hours. I had no clear notion of time as it was dark and I was also unsure if we were outside or inside. There was a heated wind gusting at my body. My arms and back were doused in sweat. I think I felt very hopeless then, as if I had made a mistake. We didn’t speak, I am sure of that. Our unknown guides led us at a relentless pace, and we needed all our energy to control our stiffened limbs. Birgitta was very hungry, though we had given her most of our food. In thrall as we are to the demands of the body, it is a fact that we were ravenously hungry. We walked and walked and I thought I was too weak and weary to continue, but always the guides encouraged us along, and finally when my mood had sunk close to despair, we came to a boat. To the water. The sea. I had never seen the sea before and it was such a beautiful sight, such a vision of infinite vastness and natural power — though I knew the waters were polluted beyond redemption — that for a moment I was mesmerised and forgot everything else. It was dawn. The sea reflected the orange morning sun. The waves surged and rose, became full and white at their crests, foamed brilliantly and then crashed against the rocks. The water bubbled and churned. There was a deep roar, a sound I never thought I would hear on this planet. The air was full of the smell of salt and the wind made me breathless, as if my lungs could not hold much of this unprocessed air. And under the sound of the waves I could hear Birgitta’s mother weeping. Our guides were moving quickly, leading us onto a boat which rocked on the swell. I had naturally never been in a boat before and I remember feeling an acute sense — as we moved away from the shore — of the fragility of our vessel and the relentless force of the waves surging around us. The boat was just a small wooden fishing boat and one of our guides told us the summer was stormy and the seas unpredictable. ‘Ill-tempered,’ he called the ocean, I remember. Birgitta was very sick. A few of us were also leaning over the side to spill bile into the water. I do not know how long the journey took. I remember Birgitta’s mother holding her daughter, cradling Birgitta’s head and saying, ‘Peace my beautiful girl, peace my love,’ and I felt a great tearing pain and grief for the parents I had lost and the child I would never comfort in this way and I felt …

Prisoner 730004 on behalf of the Protectors I must remind you that such remarks are not required and you must confine your account to the basic details. Correct ‘parents’, ‘mother’, ‘daughter’ and ‘child’ as usual for the record. Continue, Prisoner 730004.

After a stormy crossing we arrived. The boat was dragged onto a sandy stony beach with mountains rising all above. There was grass on the lower slopes, and trees. Then the upper slopes were purplish, ancient rock, like something I had seen only in dreams. Our guides turned back as soon as they had unloaded our supplies. We had some basic food resources and some guns and ammunition. We had some fishing rods and some seed. It looked to me as if we would die quite quickly. I had no sense of how we could possibly survive.

How long ago was it that you came to this place?

I think it was some years ago. I measure it only by the passing of the seasons. And as you know the seasons are less clear now than in former days.

Prisoner 730004, the Protectors are curious about how precisely you built your community?

Through grave hardship and loss. The island was much changed. We had hoped we might live by fishing as our predecessors had done but the few fish remaining in the sea were gravely polluted and made us ill. Birgitta we thought must not eat them.

The myth of her pregnancy had continued among you?

Birgitta was burgeoning by the day. Her belly was an object of wonder for us, even devotion. She was always tired, because there was so little food at first. We were about to starve when we learned how to take eggs from nests. That was a great advance. At least then Birgitta could get nourishment. That was how we thought during the summer. We thought if Birgitta and a couple of others survived then that would be an achievement. We ate the poisoned fish simply to quell hunger pains, but then we were sick — it was like fighting an addiction, ignoring the desperate promptings of our stomachs. We found abandoned houses and tried to repair them. We were fortunate in that respect — the houses had been fashioned to withstand the old Arctic winters, and though these severe temperatures have become a thing of the past, perhaps never to return, the houses were sturdy and we were comfortable in them. It was just the food. We were not short of water — the summers had become very warm and wet and we gathered rainwater and drank our fill. We were not thirsty. But hunger sapped our strength and nearly broke our morale. It ate our flesh until we were gaunt and ill. A diet of eggs and grasses, poisoned fish and rainwater is not enough to sustain the body. Gradually we learned to shoot and then sometimes we killed birds. On a few glorious occasions we shot a fox or two. But our fortunes only really changed once we had developed our farm.

And how did this happen?

As I mentioned before, our guides had left us with some sacks of seeds. At first we did not understand. Then we realised what we must do. The process was arduous and full of errors. A storm washed half our crops away. The birds took some of our seed. But gradually our vegetables grew.

That was a wonderful thing, to see how the earth could grow food. How it nourished us in the end, once we understood its workings a little better. In the season before the army came …

Correction, Protection Agents.

… we had grown enough food to be comfortable. We knew then that we would be able to stay there for the natural course of our lives. We knew these lives would be shorter than the span we might have expected in Darwin C. We would have no cell therapy, no gene readjustment. Our bodies would age naturally and sicken and die. But we were content with this. If I die tomorrow, then I am content. I would trade decades of life in Darwin C for a year of this life among the rocks. I think, though I cannot speak with any certainty, that the others would have agreed. Before Birgitta’s mother died she said as much.

Correct ‘mother’ for the record. How did this egg donor die?

She had been ill in Darwin C. She had been on cell therapy and so in deciding to go with Birgitta she had effectively sacrificed her life. We did not know this until the last days of her life. Finally she told us, and she said that she was so glad she had come. She wept, with Birgitta holding her and kissing her and crying onto her face. She died slowly and in pain. In Darwin C she would of course have had every medicine available and the Corporeal Scientists would have judiciously shortened her life at the point at which they deemed her no longer functional or worthy of resource use. We were more profligate and we fed her to the last and kept a fire burning in her house. By then it was winter and though the climate shift meant that this winter was not cold at all,

Birgitta’s poor dying mother …

Correction, egg donor.

… was convinced that she had returned to the winter fastness of her childhood and kept saying, ‘Keep the fires burning, don’t let the fires go out.’ Everyone who sat with her sweated and grew parched, but she believed the snows were driving against the windows, that the sea was frozen solid and that the roof was being rattled by icy blasts. She told us stories of trolls and berserks, the old mythical characters of her …

Prisoner 730004, do not insult the Protectors with these nonsensical digressions.

I am sorry. There is so much I remember. I remember Birgitta’s mother saying goodbye to her daughter, knowing that they would never meet again, and I felt such a sense of the depths of love passing between them and the beauty and sadness of this bond between parent and child, and how we have betrayed ourselves.

It is tedious to have to remind you again, on behalf of the Protectors, that such digressions are inappropriate. Correct ‘mother’, ‘daughter’, ‘parent’ and ‘child’ as usual for the record. How many of you deserted Darwin C?

I am afraid I cannot tell you.

You cannot or you will not?

I cannot because of the promise I made.

We are obliged to remind you for your own protection how very important it is that you co-operate with us.

I understand. But I am afraid I cannot tell you.

We hope you will see reason before it is too late. When did Birgitta’s egg donor die?

She died in the winter after we arrived. She never saw the birth of her grandchild.

Correction, progeny of the species. And, Prisoner, do not digress into these absurd fantasies.

I am sorry but I do not regard them as …

How many of your camp died?

Several in the early months. From starvation. We all denied ourselves food in order to feed Birgitta. We all went without. So some of us could not survive. The sacrifice was necessary.

Please do not call your species-threatening actions a sacrifice. That is a very grave offence and trivialises the efforts of all those working for species survival. Will you explain who the guides were?

I am afraid I do not know.

How can you not know?

We never knew their identities. We never saw their faces. I do not know where they came from and where they have gone.

Yet they supplied you with seed and guns?

Yes, they did.

How did they procure these things?

I do not know.

You did not ask?

No, I did not.

But did you not think it strange, that in a civilisation in which access to all resources is necessarily restricted, for the protection of the species, these guides of yours had acquired guns? And bullets? And seeds?

Everything was strange. It all seemed like a dream. The crate, sweaty and vile. The passageway or tunnel and my confusion about whether it was day or night. The incessant beating of the waves and the vision of a landscape I had never seen before but somehow recognised, and all the suspense of our crossing and the shock of our arrival. And so when our guides, who we knew only as our guides, unloaded the boxes I barely noticed what they contained and definitely didn’t consider the meaning of the objects. I was transfixed by the mountains and the vastness of the sky. I didn’t ask any questions.

Did anyone in your camp know anything about the guides?

I don’t think so.

But someone made contact with them?

Yes, perhaps someone did.

Is there anything else you can share with the Protectors about the identity of these guides?

I am afraid not. I know nothing else about them.

What did you do in this camp?

After the initial months when we were merely trying to survive, we settled into a rhythm, a very ancient rhythm I believe, of rising with the sun and going to sleep with the dusk, of passing the days collecting food and tending our crops and the evenings singing songs and telling stories. And in general we were preparing for the birth.

How were you preparing for this imaginary event?

We were trying to make Birgitta as strong as we could, so her body would withstand the trials of childbirth. Only one among us knew the true nature of these trials — Birgitta’s mother.

Correction, egg donor.

But she told us the body was grievously tested and Birgitta must be as strong and nourished as possible. So in the evenings we brought Birgitta presents — things we had found or made for her, extra foodstuffs, treats, and in turn she would show us the great roundness of her belly, the skin taut across the mound, the navel stretched and almost inverted, and we would take it in turns to place our hands upon it, and to feel the movements within. The sudden thrust of a foot. The probing exploration of a hand. Sometimes, a great ripple of the flesh as the miraculous cargo turned. Of course once these things had been commonplace but now they were to us a matter for great awe.

And you thought she was the ‘Magna Mater’, as you called it?

No, we didn’t think Birgitta was the Magna Mater. We were not sure of anything. But we observed something — some creative power — within her. And this force, or presence, whatever it was — made Birgitta stronger and more serene by the day. She was no longer cowardly and reluctant. She no longer found her body revolting. In Darwin C she had only wanted to rid herself of the signs of her improbable state, but on the island, among rocks and trees and water, she somehow understood the force that was within her. Among these natural forms, in the natural flow of life, perhaps she came to accept what was happening to her. It was something like that. Birgitta is not the Magna Mater. The Magna Mater — or whatever life force is suggested by this term — is something that I believe exists within her and within all humans. But it is just a phrase somebody heard, or remembered. Its deeper meaning is lost to us at this time. We have our instincts but we have been encouraged to suppress them and it is hard for us to name such ancient forces.

You believe this Birgitta is alive?

Yes I think so. I do not know however. Her existence is not to me a fact, or not something you would perceive to be a fact. But I have a sense she is still in the world. And so is her son.

What do you mean?

The son she bore. The son she held up to the winter light and wept to see. The son who screamed and whose newborn cries were so piercing and wonderful. The son who was a tiny packed mass of life and energy, reddish purple and covered in gore, but the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The son she fed with her own body.

For ‘son’, in all instances, record progeny of the species. You are mentally ill, Prisoner. There is no progeny in this instance. This woman’s so-called pregnancy was nothing but a collective delusion. Your group should all have been in an Institution for the Improvement of the Reason.

I am sure without the evidence of the son this is a perfectly rational argument. But I have seen the son.

Correct ‘son’ as before. It is impossible for a woman whose womb has been harvested and closed to bear a progeny of the species. It simply cannot happen.

And yet it did.

You are gravely insulting the Protectors with these lies.

I am sorry you feel like that.

You must concede instantly that there was no progeny.

I am afraid I cannot. I held him in my own arms. I wiped gore from his eyes and mouth and I kissed him. I saw him. I wept to see him. His hair was richly perfumed with uterine blood. He was beautiful.

You are lying.

I am not. He was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen. I long to hold him.

Prisoner 730004 will be taken back to her Protection Cell. There is no point continuing at this time. She needs the attention of a Corporeal Scientist.

I don’t want their drugs.

It is for your own protection, Prisoner 730004.