The Manticore

1

"When did you decide you should come to Zurich, Mr. Staunton?"

"When I heard myself shouting in the theatre."

"You decided at that moment?"

"I think so. Of course I put myself through the usual examination afterward to be quite sure. But I could say that the decision was made as soon as I heard my own voice shouting."

"The usual examination? Could you tell me a little more about that, please."

"Certainly. I mean the sort of examination one always makes to determine the nature of anyone's conduct, his degree of responsibility, and all that. It was perfectly clear. I was no longer in command of my actions. Something had to be done, and I must do it before others had to do it on my behalf."

"Please tell me again about this incident when you shouted. With a little more detail, please."

"It was the day before yesterday, that is to say November ninth, at about ten forty five p.m. in the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, which is my home. I was sitting in a bad seat in the top gallery. That in itself was unusual. The performance was something rather grandiosely called The Soiree of Illusions – a magic show, given by a conjuror called Magnus Eisengrim. He is well known, I understand, to people who like that kind of thing. He had an act which he called The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon. A large head that looked like brass, but was made of some almost transparent material, seemed to float in the middle of the stage; you couldn't see how it was done – wires of some sort, I suppose. The Head gave what purported to be advice to people in the audience. That was what infuriated me. It was imprudent, silly stuff hinting at scandal – adulteries, little bits of gossip, silly, spicy rubbish – and I felt irritation growing in me that people should be concerned about such trash. It was an unwarranted invasion of privacy, you understand, by this conjuror fellow whose confident assumption of superiority – just a charlatan, you know, seeming to patronize serious people! I knew I was fidgeting in my seat, but it wasn't until I heard my own voice that I realized I was standing up, shouting at the stage."

"And you shouted –?"

"Well, what would you expect me to shout? I shouted, as loud as I could – and that's very loud, because I have some experience of shouting – I shouted, 'Who killed Boy Staunton?' And then all hell broke loose!"

"There was a furore in the theatre?"

"Yes. A man standing in a box gave a cry and fell down. A lot of people were murmuring and some stood up to see who had shouted. But they quieted down immediately when the Brazen Head began to speak."

"What did it say?"

"There are several opinions. The broadcast news reported that the Head suggested he had been killed by a gang. All I heard was something about 'the woman he knew – the woman he did not know,' which, of course, could only mean my stepmother. But I was getting away as fast as I could. It is a very steep climb up to the doors in that balcony, and I was in a state of excitement and shame at what I had done, so I didn't really hear well. I wanted to get out before I was recognized."

"Because you are Boy Staunton?"

"No, no, no; Boy Staunton was my father."

"And was he killed?"

"Of course he was killed! Didn't you read about it? It wasn't just some local murder where a miser in a slum is killed for a few hundred dollars. My father was a very important man. It's no exaggeration to say it was international news."

"I see. I am very sorry not to have known. Now, shall we go over some of your story again?"

And we did. It was long, and often painful for me, but he was an intelligent examiner, and at times I was conscious of being an unsatisfactory witness, assuming he knew things I hadn't told him, or that he couldn't know. I was ashamed of saying 'of course' so often, as if I were offering direct evidence instead of stuff that was at best presumptive – something I would never tolerate in a witness myself. I was embarrassed to be such a fool in a situation that I had told myself and other people countless times I would never submit to – talking to a psychiatrist, ostensibly seeking help, but without any confidence that he could give it. I have never believed these people can do anything for an intelligent man he can't do for himself. I have known many people who leaned on psychiatrists, and every one of them was a leaner by nature, who would have leaned on a priest if he had lived in an age of faith, or leaned on a teacup-reader or an astrologer if he had not had enough money to afford the higher hokum. But here I was, and there was nothing to do now but go through with it.

It had its amusing side. I had not known what to expect, but I rather thought I would be put on a couch and asked about sex, which would have been a waste of time, as I have no sex to tell about. But here, in the office of the Director of the Jung Institute, 27 Gemeindestrasse, Zurich, there was no couch – nothing but a desk and two chairs and a lamp or two and some pictures of a generally Oriental appearance. And Dr. Tschudi. And Dr. Tschudi's big Alsatian, whose stare of polite, watchful curiosity was uncannily like the doctor's own.

"Your bodyguard?" I had said when I entered the room.

"Ha ha," laughed Dr. Tschudi in a manner I came to be well acquainted with in Switzerland; it is the manner which acknowledges politely that a joke has been made, without in any way encouraging further jokiness. But I received the impression – I am rather good at receiving impressions – that the doctor met some queer customers in that very Swiss little room, and the dog might be useful as more than a companion.

The atmosphere of the whole Jung Institute, so far as I saw it, puzzled me. It was one of those tall Zurich houses with a look that is neither domestic nor professional, but has a smack of both. I had had to ring the bell several times to be admitted through the door, the leaded glass of which made it impossible to see if anyone was coming; the secretary who let me in looked like a doctor herself, and had no eager public-relations grin; to reach Dr. Tschudi I had to climb a tall flight of stairs, which echoed and suggested my sister's old school. I was not prepared for any of this; I think I expected something that would combine the feeling of a clinic with the spookiness of a madhouse in a bad film. But this was – well, it was Swiss. Very Swiss, for though there was nothing of the cuckoo-clock, or the bank, or milk chocolate about it, it had a sort of domesticity shorn of coziness, a matter-of-factness within which one could not be quite sure of its facts, that put me at a disadvantage. And though when visiting a psychiatrist I had expected to lose something of my professional privilege of always being at an advantage, I could not be expected to like it when I encountered it.

I was an hour with the Director, and a few important things emerged. First, that he thought I might benefit by some exploratory sessions with an analyst. Second, that the analyst would not be himself, but someone he would recommend who was free to accept another patient at this time and to whom he would send a report; third, that before that I must undergo a thorough physical examination to make sure that analysis, rather than some physical treatment, was appropriate for me. Dr. Tschudi rose and shook me by the hand. I offered also to shake the paw of the alsatian, but it scorned my jocosity, and the Director's smile was wintry.

I found myself once again in Gemeindestrasse, feeling a fool. Next morning, at my hotel, I received a note giving directions as to where my medical examination would take place. I was also instructed to call at ten o'clock in the morning, three days hence, on Dr. J. von Haller, who would be expecting me.

2

The clinic was thorough beyond anything I had ever experienced. As well as the familiar humiliations – hanging about half-naked in the company of half-naked strangers, urinating in bottles and handing them warm and steamy to very young nurses, coughing at the behest of a physician who was prodding at the back of my scrotum, answering intimate questions while the same physician thrust a long finger up my rectum and tried to catch my prostate in some irregularity, trudging up and down a set of steps while the physician counted; gasping, puffing, gagging, sticking out my tongue, rolling my eyes, and doing all the other silly tricks which reveal so much to the doctor while making the patient feel a fool – I underwent a few things that were new to me. Quite a lot of blood was taken from me at various points – much more than the usual tiny bit removed from the ear lobe. I drank a glass of a chocolate-flavoured mixture and was then, every hour for six hours, stood on my head on a movable X-ray table to which I had been strapped, as pictures were taken to see how the mess was getting through my tripes. A variety of wires was attached to me whose purpose I could only guess, but as my chair was whirled and tilted I suppose it had something to do with my nervous system, sense of balance, hearing, and all that. Countless questions, too, about how long my grandparents and parents had lived, and of what they had died. When I gave the cause of my father's death as "Murder" the clinician blinked slightly, and I was glad to have disturbed his Swiss phlegm, even for an instant.

I had not been feeling well when I came to Zurich, and after two days of medical rough-house I was tired and dispirited and in a mood to go – not home, most certainly not – somewhere else. But I thought I ought to see Dr. J. von Haller at least once, if only for the pleasure of a good row with him.

Why was I so hostile toward a course of action I had undertaken of my own will? There was no single answer to that. As I told the Director, I made the decision on a basis of reason, and I would stick with it. Netty had always told me that when something unpleasant must be done – medicine taken, an apology made for bad behaviour, owning up to something that would bring a beating from my father – I had to be "a little soldier." Little soldiers, I understood, never hesitated; they did what was right without question. So I must be a little soldier and visit Dr. J. von Haller at least once.

Ah, but did little soldiers ever have to go to the psychiatrist? They visited the dentist often, and many a time I had shouldered my little invisible musket and marched off in that direction. Was this so very different? Yes, it was.

I could understand the use of a dentist. He could grind and dig and refill, and now and then he could yank. But what could psychiatrists do? Those I had seen in court contradicted each other, threw up clouds of dust, talked a jargon which, in cross-examination, I could usually discredit. I never used them as witnesses if I could avoid it. Still, there was a widespread belief in their usefulness in cases like mine. I had to do whatever seemed best, whether I personally approved or not. To stay in Toronto and go mad simply would not do.

Why had I come to Zurich? The Director accepted it as perfectly in order for me to do so, but what did he know about my situation? Nothing would have got me to a psychiatrist in Toronto; such treatment is always supposed to be confidential, but everybody seems to know who is going regularly to certain doctors, and everybody is ready to give a guess at the reason. It is generally assumed to be homosexuality. I could have gone to New York, but everyone who did so seemed to be with a Freudian, and I was not impressed by what happened to them. Of course, it need not have been the Freudians' fault, for as I said, these people were leaners, and I don't suppose Freud himself could have done much with them. Nothing will make an empty bag stand up, as my grandfather often said. Of the Jungians I knew nothing, except that the Freudians disliked them, and one of my acquaintances who was in a Freudian analysis had once said something snide about people who went to Zurich to –

But with a perversity that often overtakes me when I have a personal decision to make, I had decided to give it a try. The Jungians had two negative recommendations: the Freudans hated them, and Zurich was a long way from Toronto.

3

It was a sharp jolt to find that Dr. J. von Haller was a woman. I have nothing against women; it had simply never occurred to me that I might talk about the very intimate things that had brought me to Zurich with one of them. During the physical examination two of the physicians I encountered were women and I felt no qualm. They were as welcome to peep into my inside as any man that ever lived. My mind, however, was a different matter. Would a woman – could a woman – understand what was wrong? There used to be a widespread idea that women are very sensitive. My experience of them as clients, witnesses, and professional opponents had dispelled any illusions I might have had of that kind. Some women are sensitive, doubtless, but I have met with nothing to persuade me that they are, on the whole, more likely to be sensitive than men. I thought I needed delicate handling. Was Dr. J. von Haller up to the work? I had never heard of a woman psychiatrist except as someone dealing with children. My troubles were decidedly not those of a child.

Here I was, however, and there was she in a situation that seemed more social than professional. I was in what appeared to be her sitting-room, and the arrangement of chairs was so unprofessional that it was I who sat in the shadow, while the full light from the window fell on her face. There was no couch.

Dr. von Haller looked younger than I; about thirty-eight, I judged, for though her expression was youthful there was a little gray in her hair. Fine face; rather big features but not coarse. Excellent nose, aquiline if one wished to be complimentary but verging on the hooky if not. Large mouth and nice teeth, white but not American-white. Beautiful eyes, brown to go with her hair. Pleasant, low voice and a not quite perfect command of colloquial English. Slight accent. Clothes unremarkable, neither fashionable nor dowdy, in the manner Caroline calls "classic." Altogether a person to inspire confidence. But then, so am I, and I know all the professional tricks of how that is done. Keep quiet and let the client do all the talking; don't make suggestions – let the client unburden himself; watch him for revealing fidgets. She was doing all these things, but so was I. The result was a very stilted conversation, for a while.

"And it was the murder of your father that decided you to come here for treatment?"

"Doesn"t it seem enough?"

"The death of his father is always a critical moment in a man's life, but usually he has time to make psychological preparation for it. The father grows old, relinquishes his claims on life, is manifestly preparing for death. A violent death is certainly a severe shock. But then, you knew your father must die sometime, didn't you?"

"I suppose so. I don't remember ever thinking about it."

"How old was he?"

"Seventy."

"Hardly a premature death. The psalmist's span."

"But this was murder."

"Who murdered him?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows. He was driven, or drove himself, off a dock in Toronto harbour. When his car was raised he was found clutching the steering-wheel so tightly that they had to pry his hands from it. His eyes were wide open, and there was a stone in his mouth."

"A stone?"

"Yes. This stone."

I held it out to her, lying on the silk handkerchief in which I carried it. Exhibit A in the case of the murder of Boy Staunton: a piece of Canadian pink granite about the size and shape of a hen's egg.

She examined it carefully. Then, slowly, she pushed it into her own mouth, and looked solemnly at me. Or was it solemnly? Was there a glint in her eye? I don't know. I was far too startled by what she had done to tell. Then she took it out, wiped it very carefully on her handkerchief, and gave it back.

"Yes; it could be done," she said.

"You're a cool customer," said I.

"Yes. This is a very cool profession, Mr. Staunton. Tell me, did no one suggest that your father might have committed suicide?"

"Certainly not. Utterly unlike him. Anyhow, why does your mind turn immediately to that? I told you he was murdered."

"But no evidence of murder was found."

"How do you know?"

"I had Dr. Tschudi's report about you, and I asked the librarian at our Neue Zurcher Zeitung to check their archive. They did report your father's death, you know; he had connections with several Swiss banks. The report was necessarily discreet and brief, but it seemed that suicide was the generally accepted explanation."

"He was murdered."

"Tschudi's report suggests you think your stepmother had something to do with it."

"Yes, yes; but not directly. She destroyed him. She made him unhappy and unlike himself. I never suggested she drove him off the dock. She murdered him psychologically –"

"Really? I had the impression you didn't think much of psychology, Mr. Staunton."

"Psychology plays a great part in my profession. I am rather a well-known criminal lawyer – or have you checked that, too? I have to know something about the way people function. Without a pretty shrewd psychological sense I couldn't do what I do, which is to worm things out of people they don't want to tell. That's your job, too, isn't it?"

"No. My job is to listen to people say things they very badly want to tell but are afraid nobody else will understand. You use psychology as an offensive weapon in the interest of justice. I use it as a cure. So keen a lawyer as yourself will appreciate the difference. You have shown you do. You think your stepmother murdered your father psychologically, but you don't think that would be enough to drive him to suicide. Well – I have known of such things. But if she was not the real murderer, who do you think it might have been?"

"Whoever put the stone in his mouth."

"Oh, come, Mr. Staunton, nobody could put that stone in a man's mouth against his will without breaking his teeth and creating great evidence of violence. I have tried it. Have you? No, I thought you hadn't. Your father must have put it there himself."

"Why?"

"Perhaps somebody told him to do it. Somebody he could not or did not wish to disobey."

"Ridiculous. Nobody could make Father do anything he didn't want to do."

"Perhaps he wanted to do this. Perhaps he wanted to die. People do, you know."

"He loved life. He was the most vital person I have ever known."

"Even after your stepmother had murdered him psychologically?"

I was losing ground. This was humiliating. I am a fine cross-examiner and yet here I was, caught off balance time and again by this woman doctor. Well, the remedy lay in my own hands.

"I don't think this line of discussion profitable, or likely to lead to anything that could help me," I said. "If you will be good enough to tell me your fee for the consultation, we shall close it now."

"As you wish," said Dr. von Haller. "But I should tell you that many people do not like the first consultation and want to run away. But they come back. You are a man of more than ordinary intelligence. Wouldn't it simplify things if you skipped the preliminary flight and continued? I am sure you are much too reasonable to have expected this kind of treatment to be painless. It is always difficult in the beginning for everyone, and especially people of your general type."

"So you have typed me already?"

"I beg your pardon; it would be impertinent to pretend anything of the kind. I meant only that intelligent people of wealth, who are used to having their own way, are often hostile and prickly at the beginning of analytical treatment."

"So you suggest that I bite the bullet and go on."

"Go on, certainly. But let us have no bullet-biting. I think you have bitten too many bullets recently. Suppose we proceed a little more gently."

"Do you consider it gentle to imply that my father killed himself when I tell you he was murdered?"

"I was telling you only what was most discreetly implied in the news report. I am sure you have heard the implication before. And I know how unwelcome such an implication usually is. But let us change our ground. Do you dream much?"

"Ah, so we have reached dreams already? No, I don't dream much. Or perhaps I should say that I don't pay much attention to the dreams I have."

"Have you had any dreams lately? Since you decided to come to Zurich? Since you arrived?"

Should I tell her? Well, this was costing me money. I might as well have the full show, whatever it might be.

"Yes. I had a dream last night."

"So?"

"Quite a vivid dream, for me. Usually my dreams are just scraps – fragmentary things that don't linger. This was of quite a different order."

"Was it in colour?"

"Yes. As a matter of fact, it was full of colour."

"And what was the general tone of the dream? I mean, did you enjoy it? Was it pleasant?"

"Pleasant. Yes, I would say it was pleasant."

"Tell me what you dreamed."

"I was in a building that was familiar, though it was nowhere known to me. But it was somehow associated with me, and I was somebody of importance there. Perhaps I should say I was surrounded by a building, because it was like a college – like some of the colleges at Oxford – and I was hurrying through the quadrangle because I was leaving by the back gate. As I went under the arch of the gate two men on duty there – porters, or policemen, functionaries and guardians of some kind – saluted me and smiled as if they knew me, and I waved to them. Then I was in a street. Not a Canadian street. Much more like a street in some pretty town in England or in Europe; you know, with trees on either side and very pleasant buildings like houses, though there seemed to be one or two shops, and a bus with people on it passed by me. But I was hurrying because I was going somewhere, and I turned quickly to the left and walked out into the country. I was on a road, with the town behind me, and I seemed to be walking beside a field in which I could see excavations going on, and I knew that some ruins were being turned up. I went through the field to the little makeshift hut that was the centre of the archaeological work – because I knew that was what it was – and went in the door. The hut was very different inside from what I had expected, because as I said it looked like a temporary shelter for tools and plans and things of that kind, but inside it was Gothic; the ceiling was low, but beautifully groined in stone, and the whole affair was a stone structure. There were a couple of young men in there, commonplace-looking fellows in their twenties, I would say, who were talking at the top of what I knew was a circular staircase that led down into the earth. I wanted to go down, and I asked these fellows to let me pass, but they wouldn't listen, and though they didn't speak to me and kept on talking to one another, I could tell that they thought I was simply a nosey intruder, and had no right to go down, and probably didn't want to go down in any serious way. So I left the hut, and walked to the road, and turned back towards the town, when I met a woman. She was a strange person, like a gypsy, but not a dressed-up showy gypsy; she wore old-fashioned, ragged clothes that seemed to have been faded by sun and rain, and she had on a wide-brimmed, battered black velvet hat with some gaudy feathers in it. She seemed to have something important to say to me, and kept pestering me, but I couldn't understand anything she said. She spoke in a foreign language; Romany, I presumed. She wasn't begging, but she wanted something, all the same. I thought, 'Well, well; every country gets the foreigners it deserves' – which is a stupid remark, when you analyse it. But I had a sense that time was running short, so I hurried back to town, turned sharp to the right, this time, and almost ran into the college gate. One of the guardians called to me, 'You can just make it, sir. You won't be fined this time.' And next thing I knew I was sitting at the head of a table in my barrister's robes, presiding over a meeting. And that was it."

"A very good dream. Perhaps you are a better dreamer than you think."

"Are you going to tell me that it means something?"

"All dreams mean something."

"For Joseph and Pharaoh, or Pilate's wife, perhaps. You will have to work very hard to convince me that they mean anything here and now."

"I am sure I shall have to work hard. But just for the moment, tell me without thinking too carefully about it if you recognized any of the people in your dream."

"Nobody."

"Do you think they might be people you have not yet seen? Or had not seen yesterday?"

"Doctor von Haller, you are the only person I have seen whom I did not know yesterday."

"I thought that might be so. Could I have been anybody in your dream?"

"You are going too fast for me. Are you suggesting that I could have dreamed of you before I knew you?"

"That would certainly seem absurd, wouldn't it? Still – I asked if I could have been anybody in your dream?"

"There was nobody in the dream who could possibly have been you. Unless you are hinting that you were the incomprehensible gypsy. And you won't get me to swallow that."

"I am sure nobody could get a very able lawyer like you to swallow anything that was ridiculous, Mr. Staunton. But it is odd, don't you think, that you should dream of meeting a female figure of a sort quite outside your experience, who was trying to tell you something important that you couldn't understand, and didn't want to understand, because you were so eager to get back to your enclosed, pleasant surroundings, and your barrister's robes, and presiding over something?"

"Doctor von Haller, I have no wish to be rude, but I think you are spinning an ingenious interpretation out of nothing. You must know that until I came here today I had no idea that J. von Haller was a woman. So even if I had dreamed of coming to an analyst in this very fanciful way, I couldn't have got that fact right, could I?"

"It is not a fact, except insofar as all coincidences are facts. You met a woman in your Dream, and I am a woman. But not necessarily that woman. I assure you it is nothing uncommon for a new patient to have an important and revealing dream before treatment begins – before he has met his doctor. We always ask, just in case. But an anticipatory dream containing an unknown fact is a rarity. Still, we need not pursue it now. There will be time for that later."

"Will there be any later? If I understand the dream, I cannot make head or tail of the gypsy woman with the incomprehensible conversation, and go back to my familiar world. What do you deduce from that?"

"Dreams do not foretell the future. They reveal states of mind in which the future may be implicit. Your state of mind at present is very much that of a man who wants no conversation with incomprehensible women. But your state of mind may change. Don't you think so?"

"I really don't know. Frankly, it seems to me that this meeting has been a dogfight, a grappling for advantage. Would the treatment go on like this?"

"For a time, perhaps. But it could not achieve anything on that level. Now – our hour is nearly over, so I must cut some corners and speak frankly. If I am to help you, you will have to speak to me from your best self, honestly and with trust; if you continue to speak always from your inferior, suspicious self, trying to catch me out in some charlatanism, I shall not be able to do anything for you, and in a few sessions you will break off your treatment. Perhaps that is what you want to do now. We have one minute, Mr. Staunton. Shall I see you at our next appointment, or not? Please do not think I shall be offended if you decide not to continue, for there are many patients who wish to see me, and if you knew them they would assure you that I am no charlatan, but a serious experienced doctor. Which is it to be?"

I have always hated being put on the spot. I was very angry. But as I reached for my hat, I saw that my hand was shaking, and she saw it, too. Something had to be done about that tremor.

"I shall come at the appointed time," I said.

"Good. Five minutes before your hour, if you please. I keep a very close schedule."

And there I was, out in the street, furious with myself, and Dr. von Haller. But in a quiet corner of my mind I was not displeased that I should be seeing her again.

4

Two days passed before my next appointment, during which I changed my mind several times, but when the hour came, I was there. I had chewed over everything that had been said and had thought of a number of good things that I would have said myself if I had thought of them at the proper time. The fact that the doctor was a woman had put me out more than I cared to admit. I have my own reasons for not liking to be instructed by a woman, and by no means all of them are associated with that intolerable old afreet Netty Quelch, who has ridden me with whip and spur for as long as I can remember. Nor did I like the dream-interpretation game, which contradicted every rule of evidence known to me; the discovery of truth is one of the principal functions of the law, to which I have given the best that is in me; is truth to be found in the vapours of dreams? Nor had I liked the doctor's brusque manner of telling me to make up my mind, not to waste her time, and to be punctual. I had been made to feel like a stupid witness, which is as ridiculous an estimate of my character as anybody could contrive. But I would not retreat before Dr. Johanna von Haller without at least one return engagement, and perhaps more than that.

A directory had told me her name was Johanna. Beyond that, and that she was a Prof. Dr. med. und spezialarzt fur Psychiatrie, I could find out nothing about her.

Ah well, there was the tremor of my hand. No sense in making a lot of that. Nerves, and no wonder. But was it not because of my nerves I had come to Zurich?

This time we did not meet in the sitting-room but in Dr. von Haller's study, which was rather dark and filled with books, and a few pieces of modern statuary that looked pretty good, though I could not examine them closely. Also, there was a piece of old stained glass suspended in the window, which was fine in itself, but displeased me because it seemed affected. Prominent on the desk was a signed photograph of Dr. Jung himself. Dr. von Haller did not sit behind the desk, but in a chair near my own; I knew this trick, which is supposed to inspire confidence because it sets aside the natural barrier – the desk of the professional person. I had my eye on the doctor this time, and did not mean to let her get away with anything.

She was all smiles.

"No dogfight this time, I hope, Mr. Staunton?"

"I hope not. But it is entirely up to you."

"Entirely? Very well. Before we go further, the report has come from the clinic. You seem to be in depleted general health and a little – nervous, shall we say? What used to be called neurasthenic. And some neuritic pain. Rather underweight. Occasional marked tremor of the hands."

"Recently, yes. I have been under great stress."

"Never before?"

"Now and then, when my professional work was heavy."

"How much have you had to drink this morning?"

"A good sharp snort for breakfast, and another before coming here."

"Is that usual?"

"It is what I usually take on a day when I am to appear in court."

"Do you regard this as appearing in court?"

"Certainly not. But as I have already told you several times, I have been under heavy stress, and that is my way of coping with stress. Doubtless you think it a bad way. I think otherwise."

"I am sure you know all the objections to excessive use of alcohol?"

"I could give you an excellent temperance lecture right now. Indeed, I am a firm believer in temperance for the kind of people who benefit from temperance. I am not one of them. Temperance is a middle-class virtue, and it is not my fate. On the contrary, I am rich and in our time wealth takes a man out of the middle class, unless he made all the money himself. I am the third generation of money in my family. To be rich is to be a special kind of person. Are you rich?"

"By no means."

"Quick to deny it, I observe. Yet you seem to live in a good professional style, which would be riches to most people in the world. Well – I am rich, though not so rich as people imagine. If you are rich you have to discover your own truths and make a great many of your own rules. The middle-class ethic will not serve you, and if you devote yourself to it, it will trip you up and make a fool of you."

"What do you mean by rich?"

"I mean good hard coin. Doctor. I don't mean the riches of the mind or the wealth of the spirit, or any of that pompous crap. I mean money. Specifically, I count a man rich if he has an annual income of over a hundred thousand dollars before taxes. If he has that he has plenty of other evidences of wealth, as well. I have considerably more than a hundred thousand a year, and I make much of it by being at the top of my profession, which is the law. I am what used to be called 'an eminent advocate.' And if being rich and being an eminent advocate also requires a drink before breakfast, I am prepared to pay the price. But to assure you that I am not wholly unmindful of my grandparents, who hated liquor as the prime work of the Devil, I always have my first Drink of the day with a raw egg in it. That is my breakfast."

"How much in a day?"

"Call it a bottle, more or less. More at present, because as I keep telling you, I have been under stress."

"What made you think you needed an analyst, instead of a cure for alcoholics?"

"Because I do not think of myself as an alcoholic. To be an alcoholic is a middle-class predicament. My reputation in the country where I live is such that I would cut an absurd figure in Alcoholics Anonymous; if a couple of the brethren came to minister to me, they would be afraid of me; anyhow I don't go on the rampage or pass out or make a notable jackass of myself – I just drink a good deal and talk rather frankly. If I were to go out with another A.A. to cope with some fellow who was on the bottle, the sight of me would terrify him; he would think he had done something dreadful in his cups, and that I was his lawyer and the police were coming with the wagon. Nor would I be any good in group therapy; I took a look at that, once; I am not an intellectual snob, Doctor – at least, that is my story at present – but group therapy is too chummy for me. I lack the confessional spirit; I prefer to encourage it in others, preferably when they are in the witness-box. No, I am not an alcoholic, for alcoholism is not my disease, but my symptom."

"Then what do you call your disease?"

"If I knew, I would tell you. Instead, I hope you can tell me."

"Such a definition might not help us much at present. Let us call it stress following your father's death. Shall we begin talking about that?"

"Don't we start with childhood? Don't you want to hear about my toilet-training?"

"I want to hear about your trouble now. Suppose we begin with the moment you heard of your father's death."

"It was about three o'clock in the morning on November 4 last. I was wakened by my housekeeper, who said the police wanted to talk to me on the telephone. It was an inspector I knew who said I should come to the dock area at once as there had been an accident involving my father's car. He didn't want to say much, and I didn't want to say anything that would arouse the interest of my housekeeper, who was hovering to hear whatever she could, so I called a taxi and went to the docks. Everything there seemed to be in confusion, but in fact it was all as orderly as the situation permitted. There was a diver in a frog-man outfit, who had been down to the car first; the Fire Department had brought a crane mounted on a truck, which was raising the car; there were police cars and a truck with floodlights. I found the inspector, and he said it was my father's car for a certainty and there was a body at the wheel. So far as they could determine, the car had been driven off the end of a pier at a speed of about forty miles an hour; it had carried on some distance after getting into the water. A watchman put in an alarm as soon as he heard the splash, but by the time the police arrived it was difficult to find exactly where it was, and then all the diving, and getting the crane, and putting a chain on the front part of the frame, had taken over two hours, so that they had seen the licence plate only a matter of minutes before I was called; it was a car the police knew well. My father had a low, distinctive licence number.

"It was one of those wretched situations when you hope that something isn't true which common sense tells you is a certainty. Nobody else drove that car except my father. At last they got it on the pier, filthy and dripping. A couple of firemen opened the doors as slowly as the weight of water inside would allow, because the police didn't want anything washed out that might be of evidence. But it was quickly emptied, and there he sat, at the wheel.

"I think what shocked me most was the terrible dishevelment of his body. He was always such an elegant man. He was covered with mud and oil and harbour filth, but his eyes were wide open, and he was gripping the wheel. The firemen tried to get him out, and it was then we found that his grip was so tight nothing ordinary would dislodge it. Probably you know what emergencies are like; things are done that nobody would think of under ordinary circumstances; finally they got him free of the wheel, but his hands had been terribly distorted and afterwards we found that most of the fingers had been broken in doing it. I didn't blame the firemen; they did what had to be done. They laid him on a tarpaulin and then everybody held back, and I knew they were waiting for me to do something. I knelt beside him and wiped his face with a handkerchief, and it was then we saw that there was something amiss about his mouth. The police surgeon came to help me, and when my father's jaws were pried open we found the stone I showed you. The stone you tried yourself because you doubted what I told you."

"I am sorry if I shocked you. But patients come with such strange stories. Go on, please."

"I know police procedure. They were as kind as possible, but they had to take the body to the morgue, make reports, and do all the routine things that follow the most bizarre accidents. They strained a point by letting me get away with the stone, though it was material evidence; they knew I would not withhold it if it should be necessary, I suppose. Even as it was, some reporter saw me do it, or tricked the doctor into an admission, and the stone played a big part in the news. But they all had work to do, and so had I, but I had nobody to help me with my work.

"So I did what had to be done. I went at once to my father's house and wakened Denyse (that's my stepmother) and told what had happened. I don't know what I expected. Hysterics, I suppose. But she took it with an icy self-control for which I was grateful, because if she had broken down I think I would have had some sort of collapse myself. But she was extremely wilful. 'I must go to him,' she said. I knew the police would be making their examination and tried to persuade her to wait till morning. Not a chance. Go she would, and at once. I didn't want her to drive, and it is years since I have driven a car myself, so that meant rousing the chauffeur and giving some sort of partial explanation to him. Oh, for the good old days – if there ever were such days – when you could tell servants to do something without offering a lot of reasons and explanations! But at last we were at the central police station, and in the morgue, and then we had another hold-up because the police, out of sheer decency, wouldn't let her see the body until the doctor had finished and some not very efficient cleaning-up had been done. As a result, when she saw him he looked like a drunk who has been dragged in out of the rain. Then she did break down, and that was appalling for me, because you might as well know now that I heartily dislike the woman, and having to hold her and soothe her and speak comfort to her was torture, and it was then I began to taste the full horror of what had happened. The police doctor and everybody else who might have given me a hand were too respectful to intrude; wealth again, Dr. von Haller – even your grief takes on a special quality, and nobody quite likes to dry your golden tears. After a while I took her home, and called Netty to come and look after her.

"Netty is my housekeeper. My old nurse, really, and she has kept my apartment for me since my father's second marriage. Netty doesn't like my stepmother either, but she seemed the logical person to call, because she has unshakable character and authority.

"Or rather, that is what I thought. But when Netty got over to my father's house and I told her what had happened, she flew right off the handle. That is her own expression for being utterly unstrung, 'flying right off the handle.' She whooped and bellowed and made awful feminine roaring noises until I was extremely frightened. But I had to hold her and comfort her. I still don't know what ailed her. Of course my father was a very big figure in her life – as he was in the life of anybody who knew him well – but she was no kin, you know. The upshot of it was that very soon my stepmother was attending to Netty, instead of the other way round, and as the chauffeur had roused all the other servants there was a spooky gathering of half-clad people in the drawing-room, staring and wondering as Netty made a holy show of herself. I got somebody to call my sister, Caroline, and quite soon afterward she and Beesty Bastable appeared, and I have never been so glad to see them in my life.

"Caroline was terribly shocked, but she behaved well. Rather a cold woman, but not a fool. And Beesty Bastable – her husband – is one of those puffing, goggle-eyed, fattish fellows who don't seem worth their keep, but who have sometimes a surprising touch with people. It was he, really, who got the servants busy making hot drinks – and got Netty to stop moaning, and kept Caroline and my stepmother from having a fight about nothing at all, or really because Caroline started in much too soon assuming that proprietorial attitude people take toward the recently bereaved, and my stepmother didn't like being told to go and lie down in her own house.

"I was grateful to Beesty because when things were sorted out he said, 'Now for one good drink, and then nothing until we've had some sleep, what?' Beesty says 'what?' a great deal, as a lot of Old Ontario people with money tend to do. I think it's an Edwardian affectation and they haven't found out yet that it's out of fashion. But Beesty kept me from drinking too much then, and he stuck to me like a burr for hours afterward, I suppose for the same reason. Anyhow, I went home at last to my apartment, which was blessedly free of Netty, and though I didn't sleep and Beesty very tactfully kept me away from the decanters, I did get a bath, and had two hours of quiet before Beesty stuck his head into my room at eight o'clock and said he'd fried some eggs. I didn't think I wanted fried eggs; I wanted an egg whipped up in brandy, but it was astonishing how good the fried eggs tasted. Don't you think it's rather humbling how hungry calamity makes one?

"As we ate, Beesty told me what had to be done. Odd, perhaps, because he's only a stockbroker and my father and I had always tended to write him off as a fool, though decent enough. But his family is prominent, and he'd managed quite a few funerals and knew the ropes. He even knew of a good undertaker. I wouldn't have known where to look for one. I mean, who's ever met an undertaker? It's like what people say about dead donkeys: who's ever seen one? He got on the telephone and arranged with his favourite undertaker to collect the body whenever the police were ready to release it. Then he said we must talk with Denyse to arrange details of the burial. He seemed to think she wouldn't want to see us until late in the morning, but when he called she was on the line at once and said she would see us at nine o'clock and not to be late because she had a lot to do.

"That was exactly like Denyse, whom as I told you I have never liked because of this very spirit she showed when Beesty called. Denyse is all business, and nobody can help her or do anything for her without being made a subordinate: she must always be the boss. Certainly she bossed my father far more than he knew, and he was not a man to subject himself to anybody. But women are like that. Aren't they?"

"Some women, certainly."

"In my experience, women are either bosses or leaners."

"Isn't that your experience of men, too?"

"Perhaps. But I can talk to men. I can't talk to my stepmother. From nine o'clock till ten, Denyse talked to us, and would probably have talked longer if the hairdresser had not been coming. She knew she would have to see a lot of people, and it was necessary for her hair to be dressed as she would have no opportunity later.

"And what she said! My hair almost stood on end. Denyse hadn't slept either: she had been planning. And I think this is the point, Doctor, when you will admit that I have cause to be nervous. I've told you my father was a very important man. Not just rich. Not just a philanthropist. He had been in politics, and during the greater part of the Second World War he had been our Minister of Food, and an extraordinarily able one. Then he had left active politics. It was the old story, not unlike Churchill's; the public hate a really capable man except when they can't get along without him. The decisive, red-tape-cutting qualities that made my father necessary in war got him into trouble with the little men as soon as the war was over and they hounded him out of public life. But he was too big to be ignored and his public service entitled him to recognition, and he was to be the next Lieutenant-Governor of our Province. Do you know what a Lieutenant-Governor is?"

"Some sort of ceremonial personage, I suppose."

"Yes: a representative of the Crown in a Canadian province."

"A high honour?"

"Yes, but there are ten of them. My father might suitably have been Governor-General, which is top of the heap."

"Ah yes; very grand, I see."

"Silly people smile at these ceremonial offices because they don't understand them. You can't have a parliamentary system without these official figures who represent the State, the Crown, the whole body of government, as well as the elected fellows who represent their voters.

"He had not taken office. But he had received the official notice of his appointment from the Secretary of State, and the Queen's charge would have come at the proper time, which would have been in about a month. But Denyse wanted him to be given a State funeral, as if he were already in office.

"Well! As a lawyer, I knew that was absurd. There was a perfectly valid Lieutenant-Governor at the time we were discussing this crazy scheme. There was no way in the world my father could be given an official funeral. But that was what she wanted – soldiers in dress uniform, a cushion with his D.S.O. and his C.B.E. on it, a firing-party, a flag on the coffin, as many officials and politicians as could be mustered. I was flabbergasted. But whatever I said, she simply replied, 'I know what was owing to Boy even if you don't.'

"We had a blazing row. Things were said that had poor Beesty white with misery, and he kept mumbling, 'Oh come on, Denyse, come on, Davey; let's try to get along' – which was idiotic, but poor Beesty has no vocabulary suitable to large situations. Denyse dropped any pretence of liking me and let it rip. I was a cheap mouthpiece for crooks of the worst kind, I was a known drunk, I had always resented my father's superiority and tried to thwart him whenever I could, I had said inexcusable things about her and spied on her, but on this one occasion, by the living God, I would toe the line or she would expose me to unimaginable humiliations and disgraces. I said she had made a fool of my father since first she met him, reduced his stature before the public with her ridiculous, ignorant pretensions and stupidities, and wanted to turn his funeral into a circus in which she would ride the biggest elephant. It was plain speaking for a while, I can tell you. It was only when Beesty was near to tears – and I don't mean that metaphorically; he was sucking air noisily and mopping his eyes – and when Caroline turned up that we became a little quieter. Caroline has a scornful manner that exacts good behaviour from the humbler creation, even Denyse.

"So in the end Beesty and I were given our orders to go to the undertaker and choose a splendid coffin. Bronze would be the thing, she thought, because it would be possible to engrave directly upon it.

"'Engrave what?' I asked. I will say for her that she had the grace to colour a little under her skilful make-up. 'The Staunton arms,' she said. 'But there aren't any –' I began, when Beesty pulled me away. 'Let her have it,' he whispered. 'But it's crooked,' I shouted. 'It's pretentious and absurd and crooked.' Caroline helped him to bustle me out of the room. 'Davey, you do it and shut up,' she said, and when I protested, 'Carol, you know as well as I do that it's illegal,' she said, 'Oh, legal!' with terrible feminine scorn."

5

At my next appointment, feeling rather like Scheherazade unfolding one of her never-ending, telescopic tales to King Schahriar, I took up where I had left off. Dr. von Haller had said nothing during my account of my father's death and what followed, except to check a point here and there, and she made no notes, which surprised me. Did she truly hold all the varied stories told by her patients in her head, and change from one to another every hour? Well, I did no less with the tales my clients told me.

We exchanged a few words of greeting, and I continued.

"After we had finished with the undertaker, Beesty and I had a great many details to attend to, some of them legal and some arising from the arrangement of funeral detail. I had to get in touch with Bishop Woodiwiss, who had known my father for over forty years, and listen to his well-meant condolences and go over the whole funeral routine. I went to the Diocesan House, and was a little surprised, I can't really say why, that it was so businesslike, with secretaries drinking coffee, and air-conditioning and all the atmosphere of business premises. I think I had expected crucifixes on the walls and heavy carpets. There was one door that said 'Diocesan Chancellery: Mortgages' that really astonished me. But the Bishop knew how to do funerals, and there wasn't really much to it. There were technicalities: our parish church was St. Simon's, but Denyse wanted a cathedral ceremony, as more in keeping with her notions of grandeur, and as well as the Bishop's, the Dean's consent had to be sought. Woodiwiss said he would take care of that. I still don't know why I was so touchy about the good man's words of comfort; after all, he had known my father before I was born, and had christened and confirmed me, and he had his rights both as a friend and a priest. But I felt very personally about the whole matter –"

"Possessively, would you say?"

"I suppose so. Certainly I was angry that Denyse was determined to take over and have everything her own way, especially when it was such a foolish, showy way. I was still furious about that matter of engraving the coffin with heraldic doodads that weren't ours, and couldn't ever be so, and which my father had rejected himself, after a lot of heart-searching. I want that to be perfectly clear to you; I have no quarrel with heraldry, and people who legitimately posess it can use it as they like, but the Staunton arms weren't ours. Do you want to know why?"

"Later, I think. We'll come to it. Go on now about the funeral."

"Very well. Beesty took over the job of seeing the people from the papers, but it was snatched from him by Denyse, who had prepared a handout with biographical details. Silly, of course, because the papers had that already. But she achieved one thing by it that made me furious: the only mention of my mother in the whole obituary was a reference to 'an earlier marriage to Leola Crookshanks, who died in 1942.' Her name was Cruikshank, not Crookshanks, and she had been my father's wife since 1924 and the mother of his children, and a dear, sad, unhappy woman. Denyse knew that perfectly well, and nothing will convince me that the mistake wasn't the result of spite. And of course she dragged in a reference to her own wretched daughter, Lorene, who has nothing to do with the Staunton family – nothing at all.

"When was the funeral to be? That was the great question. I was for getting it over as quickly as possible, but the police did not release the body until late on Monday – and that took some arranging, I can assure you. Denyse wanted as much time as possible to arrange her semi-State funeral and assemble all the grandees she could bully, so it was decided to have it on Thursday.

"Where was he to be buried? Certainly not in Deptford, where he was born, though his parents had providently bought a six-holer in the cemetery there years ago, and were themselves the only occupants. But Deptford wouldn't do for Denyse, so a grave had to be bought in Toronto.

"Have you ever bought a grave? It's not unlike buying a house. First of all they show you the poor part of the cemetery, and you look at all the foreign tombstones with photographs imbedded in them under plastic covers, and the inscriptions in strange languages and queer alphabets, and burnt-out candles lying on the grass, and your heart sinks. You wonder, can this be death? How sordid! Because you aren't your best self, you know; you're a stinking snob; funerals bring out that sort of thing dreadfully. You've told yourself for years that it doesn't matter what happens to a corpse, and when cocktail parties become drunken-serious you've said that the Jews have the right idea, and the quickest, cheapest funeral is the best and philosophically the most decent. But when you get into the cemetery, it's quite different. And the cemetery people know it. So you move out of the working-class and ethnic district into the area of suburban confines, but the gravestones are really rather close together and the inscriptions are in bad prose, and you almost expect to see jocular inscriptions like 'Take-It-Aisy' and 'Dunroamin' on the stones along with 'Till the Day Breaks' and 'In the Everlasting Arms.' Then things begin to brighten; bigger plots, no crowding, an altogether classier type of headstone and – best of all – the names of families you know. On the Resurrection Morn, after all, one doesn't want to jostle up to the Throne with a pack of strangers. And that's where the deal is settled.

"Did you know, by the way, that somebody has to own a grave? Somebody, that is, other than the occupant. I own my father's grave. A strange thought."

"Who owns your mother's grave? And why was your father not buried near her?"

"I own her grave, because I inherited it as part of my father's estate. The only bit of real estate he left me, as a matter of fact. And because she died during the war, when my father was abroad, the funeral had to be arranged by a family friend, and he just bought one grave. A good one, but single. She lies in the same desirable area as my father, but not near. As in life.

"By Tuesday night the undertakers had finished their work, and the coffin was back in his house, at the end of the drawing-room, and we were all invited in to take a look. Difficult business, of course, because an undertaker – or at any rate his embalmer – is an artist of a kind, and when someone has died by violence it's a challenge to see how well they can make him look. I must say in justice they had done well by Father, for though it would be stupid to say he looked like himself, he didn't look as though he had been drowned. But you know how it is; an extremely vital, mercurial man, who has always had a play of expression and even of colour, doesn't look like himself with a mat complexion and that inflexible calm they produce for these occasions. I have had to see a lot of people in their coffins, and they always look to me as if they were under a malign enchantment and could hear what was said and would speak if the enchantment could be broken. But there it was, and somebody had to say a kind word or two to the undertakers, and it was Beesty who did it. I was always being amazed at the things he could do in this situation, because my father and I had never thought he could do anything except manage his damned bond business. The rest of us looked with formal solemnity, just as a few years before we had gathered to look at Caroline's wedding cake with formal pleasure; on both occasions we were doing it chiefly to give satisfaction to the people who had created the exhibit.

"That night people began to call. Paying their respects is the old-fashioned phrase for it. Beesty and Caroline and I hung around in the drawing-room and chatted with the visitors in subdued voices. 'So good of you to come… Yes, a very great shock… It's extremely kind of you to say so…' Lots of that sort of thing. Top people from my father's business, the Alpha Corporation, doing the polite. Lesser people from the Alpha Corporation, seeing that everybody who came signed a book; a secretary specially detailed to keep track of telegrams and cables, and another to keep a list of the flowers.

"Oh, the flowers! Or, as just about everybody insisted on calling them, the 'floral tributes.' Being November, the florists were pretty well down to chrysanthemums, and there were forests of them. But of course the really rich had to express their regret with roses because they were particularly expensive at the time. The rich are always up against it, you see; they have to send the best, however much they may hate the costly flower of the moment, or somebody is sure to say they've been cheap. Denyse had heard somewhere of a coffin being covered with a blanket of roses, and she wanted one as her own special offering. It was Caroline who persuaded her to hold herself down to a decent bunch of white flowers. Or really, persuaded isn't the word; Caroline told me she was finally driven to saying, 'Are you trying to make us look like the Medici?' and that did it, because Denyse had never heard any good spoken of the Medici.

"This grisly business went on all day Wednesday. I was on duty in the morning, and received and made myself pleasant to the Mayor, the Chief of Police, the Fire Chief, a man from the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, and quite a crowd of dignitaries of one sort and another. There was a representative of the Bar Association, which called to mind the almost forgotten fact that my father's professional training had been as a lawyer; I knew this man quite well because he was a frequent associate of my own, but the others were people I knew only by name or from their pictures in the newspapers. There were bank presidents, naturally.

"Denyse, of course, did none of the receiving. It wouldn't have suited the role for which she had cast herself. Officially, she was too desolated to be on view, and only special people were taken to an upstairs room where she held state. I don't quarrel with that. Funerals are among the few ceremonial occasions left to us, and we assume our roles almost without thinking. I was the Only Son, who was bearing up splendidly, but who was also known not to be, and to have no expectation of ever being, the man his father was. Beesty was That Decent Fellow Bastable, who was doing everything he could under difficult circumstances. Caroline was the Only Daughter, stricken with grief, but of course not so catastrophically stricken as Denyse, who was the Widow and assumed to be prostrate under her affliction. Well – all right. That's the pattern, and we break patterns at our peril. After all, they become patterns because they conform to realities. I have been in favour of ceremonial and patterns all my life, and I have no desire to break the funeral pattern. But there was too much real feeling behind the pattern for me to be anything other than wretchedly overwrought, and the edicts Denyse issued from her chamber of affliction were the worst things I had to bear.

"Her edict that at all costs I was to be kept sober, for instance. Beesty was very good about that. Not hatefully tactful, you know, but he said plainly that I had to do a great many things that needed a level head and I'd better not drink much. He knew that for me not drinking much meant drinking what would be a good deal for him, but he gave me credit for some common sense. And Caroline was the same. 'Denyse is determined that you're going to get your paws in the sauce and disgrace us all. So for God's sake spite her and don't,' was the way she put it. Even Netty, after her first frightful outburst, behaved very well and didn't try to watch over me for my own good, though she lurked a good deal. Consequently, though I drank pretty steadily, I kept within my own appointed bounds. But I hated Denyse for her edict.

"Nor was that her only edict. On Wednesday, before lunch, she called Beesty to her and told him to get me to look over my father's will that afternoon, and see her after I had done so. This was unwarrantable interference. I knew I was my father's principal executor, and I knew, being a lawyer, what had to be done. But it isn't considered quite the thing to get down to business with the will before the funeral is over. There's nothing against it, particularly if there is suspicion of anything that might prove troublesome in the will, but in my father's case that was out of the question. I didn't know what was in the will, but I was certain it was all in perfect order. I thought Denyse was rushing things in an unseemly way.

"I suppose if you are to do anything for me, Doctor, I must be as frank as possible. I didn't want to look at the will until it became absolutely necessary. There have been difficulties about wills in our family. My father had a shock when he read his own father's will, and he had spoken to me about it more than once. And relations between my father and myself had been strained since his marriage to Denyse. I thought there might be a nasty surprise for me in the will. So I put my foot down and said nothing could be done until Thursday afternoon.

"I don't know why I went to my father's house so early on Thursday, except that I woke with an itching feeling that there was a great deal to be settled, and I would find out what it was when I was on the spot. And I wanted to take farewell of my father. You understand? During the last forty-eight hours it had been impossible to be alone in the room with his body, and I thought if I were early I could certainly manage it. So I went to the drawing-room as softly as possible, not to attract attention, and found the doors shut. It was half past seven, so there was nothing unusual about that.

"But from inside there were sounds of a man's voice and a woman's voice, apparently quarrelling, and I heard scuffling and thudding. I opened the door, and there was Denyse at the coffin, holding up my father's body by the shoulders, while a strange man appeared to be punching and slapping its face. You know what people say in books – 'I was thunderstruck… my senses reeled.' "

"Yes. It is a perfectly accurate description of the sensation. It is caused by a temporary failure of circulation to the head. Go on."

"I shouted something. Denyse dropped the body, and the man jumped backward as if he thought I might kill him. I knew him then. He was a friend of Denyse's, a dentist; I had met him once or twice and thought him a fool."

"The body had no face. It was entirely covered in some shiny pinkish material, so thickly that it was egglike in its featurelessness. It was this covering they were trying to remove.

"I didn't have to ask for an explanation. They were unnerved and altogether too anxious to talk. It was a story of unexampled idiocy.

"This dentist, like so many of Denyse's friends, was a dabbler in the arts. He had a tight, ill-developed little talent as a sculptor, and he had done a few heads of Chairmen of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University, and that sort of thing. Denyse had been visited by one of her dreadful inspirations, that this fellow should take a death-mask of my father, which could later be used as the basis for a bust or perhaps kept for itself. But he had never done a corpse before, and it is quite a different business from doing a living man. So, instead of using plaster, which is the proper thing if you know how to work it, he had the lunatic idea of trying some plastic mess used in his profession for taking moulds, because he thought he could get a greater amount of detail, and quicker. But the plastic wasn't for this sort of work, and he couldn't get it off!

"They were panic-stricken, as they had every right to be. The room was full of feeling. Do you know what I mean? The atmosphere was so alive with unusual currents that I swear I could feel them pressing on me, making my ears ring. Don't say it was all the whisky I had been drinking. I was far the most self-possessed of us three. I swear that all the tension seemed to emanate from the corpse, which was in an unseemly state of dishevelment, with coat and shirt off, hair awry, and half-tumbled out of that great expensive coffin.

"What should I have done? I have gone over that moment a thousand times since. Should I have seized the poker and killed the dentist, and forced Denyse's face down on that dreadful plastic head and throttled her, and then screamed for the world to come and look at the last scene of some sub-Shakespearean tragedy?What in fact I did was to order them both out of the room, lock it, telephone the undertakers to come at once, and then go into the downstairs men's room and vomit and gag and retch until I was on the floor with my head hanging into the toilet bowl, in a classic Skid Row mess.

"The undertakers came. They were angry, as they had every right to be, but they were fairly civil. If a mask was wanted, they asked, why had they not been told? They knew how to do it. But what did I expect of them now? I had pulled myself together, though I knew I looked like a drunken wreck, and I had to do whatever talking was done. Denyse was upstairs, having divorced herself in that wonderful feminine way from the consequences of her actions, and I am told the dentist left town for a week.

"It was a very bad situation. I heard one of the undertakers ask the butler if he could borrow a hammer, and I knew the worst. After a while I had my brief time beside my father's coffin; the undertakers did not spare me that. The face was very bad, some teeth had been broken; no eyebrows or lashes, and a good deal of the front hair was gone. Much worse than when he lay on the dock, covered in oil and filth, with that stone in his mouth.

"So of course we had what is called a closed-coffin funeral. I know they are common here, but in North America it is still usual to have the corpse on display until just before the burial service begins. I sometimes wonder if it is a hold-over from pioneer days, to assure everybody that there has been no foul play. That was certainly not the case this time. We had had foul play. I didn't explain to Caroline and Beesty; simply said Denyse had decided she wanted it that way. I know Caroline smelled a rat, but I told her nothing because she might have done something dreadful to Denyse.

"There we all were, in the cathedral, with Denyse in the seat of the chief mourner, of course, and looking so smooth a louse would have slipped off her, as Grandfather Staunton used to say. And he would certainly have said I looked like the Wreck of the Hesperus; it was one of his few literary allusions.

"There was the coffin, so rich, so bronzey, so obviously the sarcophagus of somebody of the first rank. Right above where that pitifully misused face lay hidden was the engraving of the Staunton arms: Argent two chevrons sable within a bordure engrailed of the same. Crest, a fox statant proper. Motto, En Dieu ma foy.

"Bishop Woodiwiss might have been in on the imposture, so richly did he embroider the En Dieu ma foy theme. I have to give it to the old boy; he can't have seen that engraving until the body arrived at the cathedral door, but he seized on the motto and squeezed it like a bartender squeezing a lemon. It was the measure of our dear brother gone, he said, that the motto of his ancient family should have been this simple assertion of faith in Divine Power and Divine Grace, and that never, in all the years he had known Boy Staunton, had he heard him mention it. No: deeds, not words, was Boy Staunton's mode of life. A man of action; a man of great affairs; a man loving and tender in his personal life, open-handed and perceptive in his multitudinous public benefactions, and the author of countless unknown acts of simple generosity. But no jewel of great price could be concealed forever, and here we saw, at last, the mainspring of Boy Staunton's great and – yes, he would say it, he would use the word, knowing that we would understand it in its true sense – his beautiful life. En Dieu ma foy. Let us all carry that last word from a great man away with us, and feel that truly, in this hour of mourning and desolation, we had found an imperishable truth. En Dieu ma foy.

"Without too much wriggling, I was able to look about me. The congregation was taking it with that stuporous receptivity which is common to Canadians awash in oratory. The man from the Prime Minister's department, sitting beside the almost identical man from the Secretary of State's department; the people from the provincial government; the civic officials; the Headmaster of Colborne School; the phalanx of rich business associates; not one of them looked as if he were about to leap up and shout. 'It's a God-damned lie; his lifelong motto wasn't En Dieu ma foy but En moi-meme ma foy and that was his tragedy.' I don't suppose they knew. I don't suppose that even if they knew, they cared. Few of them could have explained the difference between the two faiths.

"My eye fell on one man who could have done it. Old Dunstan Ramsay, my father's lifelong friend and my old schoolmaster, was there, not in one of the best seats – Denyse can't stand him – but near a stained-glass window through which a patch of ruby light fell on his handsome ravaged old mug, and he looked like a devil hot from hell. He didn't know I was looking, and at one point, when Woodiwiss was saying En Dieu ma foy for the sixth or seventh time, he grinned and made that snapping motion with his mouth that some people have who wear ill-fitting false teeth.

"Is this hour nearly finished, by the way? I feel wretched."

"I am sure you do. Have you told anyone else about the death-mask?"

"Nobody."

"That was very good of you."

"Did I hear you correctly? I thought you analysts never expressed opinions."

"You will hear me express many opinions as we get deeper in. It is the Freudians who are so reserved. You have your schedule of appointments? No doubts about coming next time?"

"None."

6

Back again, after two days' respite. No: respite is not the word. I did not dread my appointment with Dr. von Haller, as one might dread a painful or depleting treatment of the physical kind. But my nature is a retentive, secretive one, and all this revelation went against the grain. At the same time, it was an enormous relief. But after all, what was there in it? Was it anything more than Confession, as Father Knopwood had explained it when I was confirmed? Penitence, Pardon, and Peace? Was I paying Dr. von Haller thirty dollars an hour for something the Church gave away, with Salvation thrown in for good measure? I had tried Confession in my very young days. Father Knopwood had not insisted that I kneel in a little box, while he listened behind a screen; he had modern ways, and he sat behind me, just out of sight, while I strove to describe my boyish sins. Of course I knelt while he gave me Absolution. But I had always left the two or three sessions when I tried that feeling a fool. Nevertheless, despite our eventual quarrel, I wouldn't knock Knopwood now, even to myself; he had been a good friend to me at a difficult time in my life – one of the succession of difficult times in my life – and if I had not been able to continue in his way, others had. Dr. von Haller now – had it something to do with her being a woman? Whatever it was, I looked forward to my next hour with her in a state of mind I could not clarify, but which was not wholly disagreeable.

"Let me see; we had finished your father's funeral. Or had we finished? Does anything else occur to you that you think significant?"

"No. After the Bishop's sermon, or eulogy or whatever it was, everything seemed to be much what one might have expected. He had so irrevocably transposed the whole thing into a key of fantasy, with his rhapsodizing on that irrelevant motto, that I went through the business at the cemetery without any real feeling, except wonderment. Then perhaps of the funeral people a hundred and seventy trooped back to the house for a final drink – a lot of drinking seems to go on at funerals – and stayed for a fork lunch, and when that was over I knew that all my time of grace had run out and I must get on with the job of the will.

"Beesty would have been glad to help me, I know, and Denyse was aching to see it, but she wasn't in a position to bargain with me after the horrors of the morning. So I picked up copies for everybody concerned from my father's solicitors, who were well known to me, and took them to my own office for a careful inspection. I knew I would be cross-examined by several people, and I wanted to have all the facts at my finger-tips before any family discussion.

"It was almost an anti-climax. There was nothing in the will I had not foreseen, in outline if not in detail. There was a great deal about his business interests, which were extensive, but as they boiled down to shares in a single controlling firm called Alpha Corporation it was easy, and his lawyers and the Alpha lawyers would navigate their way through all of that. There were no extensive personal or charity bequests, because he left the greatest part of his Alpha holdings to the Castor Foundation.

"That's a family affair, a charitable foundation that makes grants to a variety of good, or apparently good, causes. Such things are extremely popular with rich families in North America. Ours had a peculiar history, but it isn't important just now. Briefly, Grandfather Staunton set it up as a fund to assist temperance movements. But he left some loose ends, and he couldn't resist some fancy wording about "assisting the public weal," so when father took it over he gently eased all the preachers off the board and put a lot more money into it. Consequence: we now support the arts and the social sciences, in all their lunatic profusion. The name is odd. Means 'beaver' of course, and so it has Canadian relevance; but it also means a special type of sugar – do you know the expression castor-sugar, the kind that goes in shakers? – and my father's money was made in part from sugar. He began in sugar. The name was suggested years ago as a joke by my father's friend Dunstan Ramsay; but Father liked it, and used it when he created the Foundation. Or, rather, when he changed it from the peculiar thing it was when Grandfather Staunton left it.

"This large bequest to Castor ensured the continuance of all his charities and patronages. I was pleased, but not surprised, that he had given a strong hint in the will that he expected me to succeed him as Chairman of Castor. I already had a place on its Board. It's a very small Board – as small as the law will permit. So by this single act he had made me a man of importance in the world of benefactions, which is one of the very few remaining worlds where the rich are allowed to say what shall be done with the bulk of their money.

"But there was a flick of the whip for me in the latter part of the will, where the personal bequests were detailed.

"I told you that I am a rich man. I should say that I have a good deal of money, caused, if not intended, by a bequest from my grandfather, and I make a large income as a lawyer. But compared with my father I am inconsiderable – just 'well-to-do', which was the phrase he used to dismiss people who were well above the poverty line but cut no figure in the important world of money. First-class surgeons and top lawyers and some architects were well-to-do, but they manipulated nothing and generated nothing in the world where my father trod like a king.

"So I wasn't looking for my bequest as something that would greatly change my way of life or deliver me from care. No, I wanted to know what my father had done about me in his will because I knew it would be the measure of what he thought of me as a man, and as his son. He obviously thought I could handle money, or he wouldn't have tipped me for the chairmanship of Castor. But what part of his money – and you must understand money meant his esteem and his love – did he think I was worth?

"Denyse was left very well off, but she got no capital – just a walloping good income for life or – this was Father speaking again – so long as she remained his widow. I am sure he thought he was protecting her against fortune-hunters; but he was also keeping fortune-hunters from getting their hands on anything that was, or had been, his.

"Then there was a bundle for 'my dear daughter, Caroline' which was to be hers outright and without conditions – because Beesty could have choked on a fishbone at his club any day and Caroline remarried at once and Father wouldn't have batted an eye.

"Then there was a really large capital sum in trust 'for my dear grandchildren, Caroline Elizabeth and Boyd Staunton Bastable, portions to be allotted per stirpes to any legitimate children of my son Edward David Staunton from the day of their birth.' There it was, you see."

"Your father was disappointed that you had no children?"

"Certainly that is how he would have expected it to be interpreted. But didn't you notice that I was simply his son, when all the others were his dear this and dear that? Very significant, in something carefully prepared by Father. It would be nearer the truth to say he was angry because I wouldn't marry – wouldn't have anything to do with women at all."

"I see. And why is that?"

"It's a very long and complicated story."

"Yes. It usually is."

"I'm not a homosexual, if that's what you are suggesting."

"I am not suggesting that. If there were easy and quick answers, psychiatry would not be very hard work."

"My father was extremely fond of women."

"Are you fond of women?"

"I have a very high regard for women."

"That is not what I asked."

"I like them well enough."

"Well enough for what?"

"To get along pleasantly with them. I know a lot of women."

"Have you any women friends?"

"Well – in a way. They aren't usually interested in the things I like to talk about."

"I see. Have you ever been in love?"

"In love? Oh, certainly."

"Deeply in love?"

"Yes."

"Have you had sexual intercourse with women?"

"With a woman."

"When last?"

"It would be – let me think for a moment – December 26, 1945."

"A very lawyer-like answer. But – nearly twenty-three years ago. How old were you?"

"Seventeen."

"Was it with the person with whom you were deeply in love?"

"No, no; certainly not!"

"With a prostitute?"

"Certainly not."

"We seem to be approaching a painful area. Your answers are very brief, and not up to your usual standard of phrasing."

"I am answering all your questions, I think."

"Yes, but your very full flow of explanation and detail has dried up. And our hour is drying up, as well. So there is just time to tell you that next day we should take another course. Until now we have been clearing the ground, so to speak. I have been trying to discover what kind of man you are, and I hope you have been discovering something of what I am, as well. We are not really launched on analysis, because I have said little and really have not helped you at all. If we are to go on – and the time is very close when you must make that decision – we shall have to go deeper, and if that works, we shall then go deeper still, but we shall not continue in this extemporaneous way. Just before you go, do you think that by leaving you nothing in his will except this possibility of money for your children, your father was punishing you – that in his own terms he was telling you he didn't love you?"

"Yes."

"And you care whether he loved you or not?"

"Must it be called love?"

"It was your own word."

"It's a very emotional term. I cared whether he thought I was a worthy person – a man – a proper person to be his son."

"Isn't that love?"

"Love between father and son isn't something that comes into society nowadays. I mean, the estimate a man makes of his son is in masculine terms. This business of love between father and son sounds like something in the Bible."

"The patterns of human feeling do not change as much as many people suppose. King David's estimate of his rebellious son Absalom was certainly in masculine terms. But I suppose you recall David's lament when Absalom was slain?"

"I have been called Absalom before, and it isn't a comparison I like."

"Very well. There is no point in straining an historical comparison. But do you think your father might have meant something more than scoring a final blow in the contest between you when he arranged his will as he did?"

"He was an extremely direct man in most things, but in personal relationships he was subtle. He knew the will would be studied by many people and that they would know he had left me obligations suitable to a lawyer but nothing that recognized me as his child. Many of these people would know also that he had had great hopes of me at one time, and had named me after his hero, who had been Prince of Wales when I was born, and that therefore something had gone wrong and I had been a disappointment. It was a way of driving a wedge between me and Caroline, and it was a way of giving Denyse a stick to beat me with. We had had some scenes about this marriage and woman business, and I would never give in and I would never say why. But he knew why. And this was his last word on the subject: spite me if you dare; live a barren man and a eunuch; but don't think of yourself as my son. That's what it meant."

"How much does it mean to you to think of yourself as his son?"

"The alternative doesn't greatly attract me."

"What alternative is that?"

"To think that I am Dunstan Ramsay's son."

"The friend? The man who was grinning at the funeral?"

"Yes. It has been hinted. By Netty. And Netty might just have known what she was talking about."

"I see. Well, we shall certainly have much to talk about when next we meet. But now I must ask you to give way to my next patient."

I never saw these next patients or the ones who had been with the doctor before me because her room had two doors, one from the waiting-room but the other giving directly into the corridor. I was glad of this arrangement, for as I left I must have looked very queer. What had I been saying?

7

"Let me see; we had reached Friday in your bad week, had we not? Tell me about Friday."

"At ten o'clock, the beginning of the banking day, George Inglebright and I had to meet two men from the Treasury Department in the vault of the bank to go through my father"s safety-deposit box. When somebody dies, you know, all his accounts are frozen and all his money goes into a kind of limbo until the tax people have had a full accounting of it. It's a queer situation because all of a sudden what has been secret becomes public business, and people you've never seen before outrank you in places where you have thought yourself important. Inglebright had warned me to be very quiet with the tax men. He's a senior man in my father's firm of lawyers, and of course he knows the ropes, but it was new to me.

"The tax men were unremarkable fellows, but I found it embarrassing to be locked up in one of the bank's little cubbyholes with them while we counted what was in the safety-deposit box. Not that I counted; I watched. They warned me not to touch anything, which annoyed me because it suggested I might snatch a bundle of brightly coloured stock certificates and make a run for it. What was in the box was purely personal, not related to Alpha or any of the companies my father controlled. It wasn't as personal as I feared, however; I've heard stories of safety-deposit boxes with locks of hair, and baby shoes, and women's garters, and God knows what in them. But there was nothing of that sort. Only shares and bonds amounting to a very large amount, which the tax men counted and inventoried carefully.

"One of the things that bothered me was that these men, obviously not paid much, were cataloguing what was in itself a considerable fortune: what did they think? Were they envious? Did they hate me? Were they glorying in their authority? Were they conscious of putting down the mighty from their seat and exalting the humble and meek? They looked crusty and non-committal, but what was going on in their heads?

"It took most of the morning and I had nothing whatever to do but watch, which I found exhausting because of the reflections it provoked. It was the kind of situation that leads one to trite philosophizing: here is what remains of a very large part of a life's effort – that kind of thing. Now and then I thought about the chairmanship of Castor, and a phrase I hadn't heard since my law-student days came into my head and wouldn't be driven out. Damnosa hereditas; a ruinous inheritance. It's a phrase from Roman Law; comes in Gaius's Institutes, and means exactly what it says. Castor could very well be that to me because it is big already, and with what will come into it from my father's estate it will be a very large charitable foundation even by American standards, and being the head of it will devour time and energy and could very well be the end of the kind of career I have tried to make for myself. Damnosa hereditas. Did he mean it that way? Probably not. One must assume the best. Still –

"I gave George lunch, then marched off like a little soldier to talk to Denyse and Caroline about the will. They had had a chance to go over their own copies, and Beesty had explained most of it, but he isn't a lawyer and they had a lot of points they wanted clarified. And of course there was a row, because I think Denyse had expected some capital, and in fairness I must say that she was within her rights to do so. What really burned her, I think, was that there was nothing for her daughter Lorene, though what she had been left for herself would have been more than enough to take care of all that. Lorene is soft in the head, you see, though Denyse pretends otherwise, and she will have to be looked after all her life. Although Lorene's name was never mentioned, I could sense her presence; she had called my father Daddy-Boy, and Daddy-Boy hadn't lived up to expectation.

"Caroline is above fussing about inheritances. She is really a very fine person, in her frosty way. But naturally she was pleased to have been taken care of so handsomely, and Beesty was openly delighted. After all, with the trust money and Caroline's personal fortune and what would come from himself and his side of the family, his kids were in the way of being rich even by my father's demanding standards. Both Caroline and Beesty saw how I had been dealt with, but they were too tactful to say anything about it in front of Denyse.

"Not so Denyse herself. 'This was Boy's last chance to get you back on the rails, David,' said she, 'and for his sake I hope it works.'

" 'What particular rails are you talking about?' I said. I knew well enough, but I wanted to hear what she would say. And I will admit I led her on to put her foot in it because I wanted a chance to dislike her even more than I did already.

" 'To be utterly frank, dear, he wanted you to be married, and to have a family, and to cut down on your drinking. He knew what a balancing effect a wife and children have on a man of great talents. And of course everybody knows that you have great talents – potentially.' Denyse was not one to shrink from a challenge.

" 'So he has left me the toughest job in the family bundle, and some money for children I haven't got,' I said. 'Do you happen to know if he had anybody in mind that he wanted me to marry? I'd like to be sure of everything that is expected of me.'

"Beesty was wearing his toad-under-the-harrow expression, and Caroline's eyes were fierce. 'If you two are going to fight, I'm going home,' she said.

" 'There will be no fighting,' said Denyse. 'This is not the time or the place. David asked a straight question and I gave him a straight answer – as I have always done. And straight answers are something David doesn't like except in court, where he can ask the questions that will give him the answers he wants. Boy was very proud of David's success, so far as it went. But he wanted something from his only son that goes beyond a somewhat notorious reputation in the criminal courts. He wanted the continuance of the Staunton name. He would have thought it pretentious to talk of such a thing, but you know as well as I do that he wanted to establish a line."

"Ah, that line. My father had not been nearly so reticent about mentioning it as Denyse pretended. She has never understood what real reticence is. But I was sick of the fight already. I quickly tire of quarrelling with Denyse. Perhaps, as she says, I only like quarrelling in court. In court there are rules. Denyse makes up her rules as she goes along. As I must say women tend to do. So the talk shifted, not very easily, to other things.

"Denyse had two fine new bees in her bonnet. The death-mask idea had failed, and she knew I would not tell the others, so as far as she was concerned it had perished as though it had never been. She does not dwell on her failures.

"What she wanted now was a monument for my father, and she had decided that a large piece of sculpture by Henry Moore would be just the thing. Not to be given to the Art Gallery or the City, of course. To be put up in the cemetery. I hope that gives you the measure of Denyse. No sense of congruity; no sense of humour; no modesty. Just ostentation and gall working under the governance of a fashionable, belligerent, unappeasable ambition.

"Her second great plan was for a monument of another kind; she announced with satisfaction that my father's biography was to be written by Dunstan Ramsay. She had wanted Eric Roop to do it – Roop was one of her proteges and as a poet he was comparable to her dentist friend as a sculptor – but Roop had promised himself a fallow year if he could get a grant to see him through it. I knew this already, because Roop's fallow years were as familiar to Castor as Pharaoh's seven lean kine, and his demand that we stake him to another had been circulated to the Board, and I had seen it. The Ramsay plan had merit. Dunstan Ramsay was not only a schoolmaster but an author who had enjoyed a substantial success in a queer field: he wrote about saints – popular books for tourists, and at least one heavy-weight work that had brought him a reputation in the places where such things count.

"Furthermore, he wrote well. I knew because he had been my history master at school; he insisted on essays in what he called the Plain Style; it was, he said, much harder to get away with nonsense in the Plain Style than in a looser manner. In my legal work I had found this to be true and useful. But – what would we look like if a life of Boy Staunton appeared over the name of a man notable as a student of the lives of saints? There would be jokes, and one or two of them occurred to me immediately.

"On the other hand, Ramsay had known my father from boyhood. Had he agreed? Denyse said he had wavered a little when she put it to him, but she would see that he made up his mind. After all, his own little estate – which was supposed to be far beyond what a teacher and author could aspire to – was built on the advice my father had given him over the years. Ramsay had a nice little block of Alpha. The time had come for him to pay up in his own coin. And Denyse would work with him and see that the job was properly done and Ramsay's ironies kept under control.

"Neither Caroline nor I was very fond of Ramsay, who had been a sharp-tongued nuisance in our lives, and we were amused to think of a collaboration between him and our stepmother. So we made no demur, but determined to spike the Henry Moore plan.

"Caroline and Beesty got away as soon as they could, but I had to wait and hear Denyse talk about the letters of condolence she had been receiving in bulk. She graded them; some were Official, from public figures, and subdivided into Warm and Formal; some were from personal friends, and these she classified as Moving and Just Ordinary; and there were many from Admirers, and the best of these were graded Touching. Denyse has an orderly mind.

"We did not talk about a dozen or so hateful letters of abuse that had come unsigned. Nor did we say much about the newspaper pieces, some of which had been grudging and covertly offensive. We were both habituated to the Canadian spirit, to which generous appreciation is so alien.

"It had been a wearing afternoon, and I had completed all my immediate tasks, so I thought I would permit myself a few drinks after dinner. I dined at my club and had the few drinks, but to my surprise they did nothing to dull my wretchedness. I am not a man who is cheered by drink. I don't sing or make jokes or chase girls, nor do I stagger and speak thickly; I become remote – possibly somewhat glassy-eyed. But I do manage to blunt the edge of that heavy axe that seems always to be chopping away at the roots of my being. That night it was not so. I went home and began to drink seriously. Still the axe went right on with its destructive work. At last I went to bed and slept wretchedly.

"It is foolish to call it sleep. It was a long, miserable reverie, relieved by short spells of unconsciousness. I had a weeping fit, which frightened me because I haven't cried for thirty years; Netty and my father had no use for boys who cried. It was frightening because it was part of the destruction of my mind that was going on; I was being broken down to a very primitive level, and absurd kinds of feeling and crude, inexplicable emotions had taken charge of me.

"Imagine a man of forty crying because his father hadn't loved him! Particularly when it wasn't true, because he obviously had loved me, and I know I worried him dreadfully. I even sank so low that I wanted my mother, though I knew that if that poor woman could have come to me at that very time, she wouldn't have known what to say or do. She never really knew what was going on, poor soul. But I wanted something, and my mother was the nearest identification I could find for it. And this blubbering booby was Mr. David Staunton, Q.C., who had a dark reputation because the criminal world thought so highly of him, and who played up to the role, and who secretly fancied himself as a magician of the courtroom. But in the interest of justice, mind you; always in the constant and perpetual wish that everyone shall have his due.

"Next morning the axe was making great headway, and I began with the bottle at breakfast, to Netty's indignation and dismay. She didn't say anything, because once before when she had interfered I had given her a few sharp cuffs, which she afterward exaggerated into 'beating her up.' Netty hasn't seen some of the beatings-up I have observed in court or she wouldn't talk so loosely. She has never mastered the Plain Style. Of course I had been regretful for having struck her, and apologized in the Plain Style, but she understood afterward that she was not to interfere.

"So she locked herself in her room that Saturday morning, taking care to do it when I was near enough to hear what she was doing; she even pushed the bed against the door. I knew what she was up to; she wanted to be able to say to Caroline, 'When he's like that I just have to barricade myself in, because if he flew off the handle like he did that time, the Dear knows what could happen to me.' Netty liked to tell Caroline and Beesty that nobody knew what she went through. They had a pretty shrewd notion that most of what she went through was in her own hot imagination.

"I went back to my club for luncheon on Saturday, and although the barman was as slow as he could be when I wanted him, and absent from the bar as much as he could manage, I got through quite a lot of Scotch before I settled down to having a few drinks before dinner. A member I knew called Femister came in and I heard the barman mutter something to him about 'tying on a bun' and I knew he meant me.

"A bun! These people know nothing. When I bend to the work it is no trivial bun, but a whole baking of double loaves I tie on. Only this time nothing much seemed to be happening, except for a generalized remoteness of things, and the axe was chopping away as resolutely as ever. Femister is a good fellow, and he sat down by me and chatted. I chatted right back, clearly and coherently, though perhaps a little fancifully. He suggested we have dinner together, and I agreed. He ate a substantial club dinner, and I messed my food around on my plate and tried to take my mind off its smell, which I found oppressive. Femister was kindly, but my courteous non sequiturs were just as discouraging as I meant them to be, and after dinner it was clear that he had had all the Good Samaritan business he could stand.

" 'I've got an appointment now,' he said. 'What are you going to do? You certainly don't want to spend the evening all alone here, do you? Why don't you go to the theatre? Have you seen this chap at the Royal Alee? Marvellous! Magnus Eisengrim his name is, though it sounds unlikely, doesn't it? The show is terrific! I've never seen such a conjuror. And all the fortune-telling and answering questions and all that. Terrific! It would take you right out of yourself.'

" 'I can't imagine anywhere I'd rather be,' I said slowly and deliberately. 'I'll go. Thank you very much for suggesting it. Now you run along, or you'll miss your appointment.'

"Off he went, grateful to have done something for me and to have escaped without trouble. He wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know. I had been to Eisengrim's Soiree of Illusions the week before, with my father and Denyse and Lorene, whose birthday it was. I was sucked into it at the last minute, and had not liked the show at all, though I could see that it was skilful. But I detested Magnus Eisengrim.

"Shall I tell you why? Because he was making fools of us all, and so cleverly that most of us liked it; he was a con man of a special kind, exploiting just that element in human credulity that most arouses me – I mean the desire to be deceived. You know that maddening situation that lies behind so many criminal cases, where somebody is so besotted by somebody else that he lays himself open to all kinds of cheating and ill-usage, and sometimes to murder? It isn't love, usually; it's a kind of abject surrender, an abdication of common sense. I am a victim of it, now and then, when feeble clients decide that I am a wonder-worker and can do miracles in court. I imagine you get it, as an analyst, when people think you can unweave the folly of a lifetime. It's a powerful force in life, yet so far as I know it hasn't even a name – "

"Excuse me – yes, it has a name. We call it projection."

"Oh. I've never heard that. Well, whatever it is, it was going full steam ahead in that theatre, where Eisengrim was fooling about twelve hundred people, and they were delighted to be fooled and begging for more. I was disgusted, and most of all with the nonsense of the Brazen Head.

"It was second to the last illusion on his program. I never saw the show to the end. I believe it was some sexy piece of nonsense vaguely involving Dr. Faustus. But The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon was what had caused the most talk. It began in darkness, and slowly the light came up inside a big human head that floated in the middle of the stage, so that it glowed. It spoke, in a rather foreign voice. 'Time is,' it said, and there was a tremble of violins; 'Time was,' it said, and there was a chord of horns; 'Time's past,' it said, and there was a very quiet ruffle of Drums, and the lights came up just enough for us to see Eisengrim – he wore evening clothes, but with knee-breeches, as if he were at Court – who told us the legend of the Head that could tell all things.

"He invited the audience to lend him objects, which his assistants sealed in envelopes and carried to the stage, where he mixed them up in a big glass bowl. He held up each envelope as he chose it by chance, and the Head identified the owner of the hidden object by the number of the seat in which he was sitting. Very clever, but it made me sick, because people were so delighted with what was, after all, just a very clever piece of co-operation by the magician's troupe.

"Then came the part the audience had been waiting for and that caused so much sensation through the city. Eisengrim said the Head would give personal advice to three people in the audience. This had always been sensational, and the night I was there with my father's theatre party the Head had said something that brought the house down, to a woman who was involved in a difficult legal case; it enraged me because it was virtually contempt of court – a naked interference in something that was private and under the most serious consideration our society provides. I had talked a great deal about it afterward, and Denyse had told me not to be a spoil-sport, and my father had suggested that I was ruining Lorene's party – because of course this sort of nonsense was just the kind of thing a fool like Lorene would think marvellous.

"So you see I wasn't in the best mood for the Soiree of Illusions, but some perversity compelled me to go, and I bought a seat in the top gallery, where I assumed nobody would know me. A lot of people had been going to this show two and even three times, and I didn't want anybody to say I had been among their number.

"The program was the same, but the flatness I had expected in a show I had seen before was notably missing, and that annoyed me. I didn't want Eisengrim to be as good as he was. I thought him dangerous and I grudged him the admiration the audience plainly felt for him. The show was very clever; I must admit that. It had real mystery, and beautiful girls very cleverly and tastefully displayed, and there was a quality of fantasy about it that I have never seen in any other magician's performance, and very rarely in the theatre.

"Have you ever seen the Habima Players do The Dybbuk? I did, long ago, and this had something of that quality about it, as if you were looking into a stranger and more splendid world than the one you know – almost a solemn joy. But I had not lost my grievance, and the better The Soiree of Illusions was, the more I wanted to wreck it.

"I suppose the drink was getting to me more than I knew, and I muttered two or three times until people shushed me. When The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon came, and the borrowed objects had been identified, and Eisengrim was promising his answers to secret questions, I suddenly heard myself shouting, 'Who killed Boy Staunton?' and I found I was on my feet, and there was a sensation in the theatre. People were staring at me. There was a crash in one of the boxes, and I had the impression that someone had fallen and knocked over some chairs. The Head began to glow, and I heard the foreign voice saying something that seemed to begin, 'He was killed by a gang…' then something about 'the woman he knew… the woman he did not know,' but really I can't be sure what I heard because I was dashing up the steps of the balcony as hard as I could go – they are very steep – and then pelting down two flights of stairs, though I don't think anybody was chasing me. I rushed into the street, jumped into one of the taxis that had begun to collect at the door, and got back to my apartment, very much shaken.

"But it was as I was leaving the theatre in such a sweat that the absolute certainty came over me that I had to do something about myself. That is why I am here."

"Yes, I see. I don't think there can be any doubt that it was a wise decision. But in the letter from Dr. Tschudi he said something about your having put yourself through what you called 'the usual examination.' What did you mean?"

"Ah – well. I'm a lawyer, as you know."

"Yes. Was it some sort of legal examination, then?"

"I am a thorough man. I think you might say a wholehearted man. I believe in the law."

"And so –?"

"You know what the law is, I suppose? The procedures of law are much discussed, and people know about lawyers and courts and prisons and punishment and all that sort of thing, but that is just the apparatus through which the law works. And it works in the cause of justice. Now, justice is the constant and perpetual wish to render to everyone his due. Every law student has to learn that. A surprising number of them seem to forget it, but I have not forgotten it."

"Yes, I see. But what is 'the usual examination'?"

"Oh, it's just a rather personal thing."

"Of course, but clearly it is an important personal thing. I should like to hear about it."

"It is hard to describe."

"Is it so complex, then?"

"I wouldn't say it was complex, but I find it rather embarrassing."

"Why?"

"To someone else it would probably seem to be a kind of game."

"A game you play by yourself?"

"You might call it that, but it misrepresents what I do and the consequences of what I do."

"Then you must be sure I do not misunderstand. Is this game a kind of fantasy?"

"No, no; it is very serious."

"All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children. I shall not laugh at your fantasy. I promise. Now – please tell me what 'the usual examination' is."

"Very well, then. It's a way I have of looking at what I have done, or might do, to see what it is worth. I imagine a court, you see, all perfectly real and correct in every detail. I am the Judge, on the Bench. And I am the prosecuting lawyer, who presents whatever it is in the worst possible light – but within the rules of pleading. That means I may not express a purely personal opinion about the rights or wrongs of the case. But I am also the defence lawyer, and I put the best case I can for whatever is under examination – but again I mayn't be personal and load the pleading. I can even call myself into the witness-box and examine and cross-examine myself. And in the end Mr. Justice Staunton must make up his mind and give a decision. And there is no appeal from that decision."

"I see. A very complete fantasy."

"I suppose you must call it that. But I assure you it is extremely serious to me. This case I am telling you about took several hours. I was charged with creating a disturbance in a public place while under the influence of liquor, and there were grave special circumstances – creating a scandal that would seriously embarrass the Staunton family, for one."

"Surely that is a moral rather than a legal matter?"

"Not entirely. And anyhow, the law is, among other things, a codification of a very large part of public morality. It expresses the moral opinion of society on a great number of subjects. And in Mr. Justice Staunton's court, morality carries great weight. It's obvious."

"Truly? What makes it obvious?"

"Oh, just a difference in the Royal Arms."

"The Royal Arms?"

"Yes. Over the judge's head, where they are always displayed."

"And what is the difference?… Another of your pauses, Mr. Staunton. This must mean a great deal to you. Please describe the difference."

"It"s nothing very much. Only that the animals are complete."

"The animals?"

"The supporters, they are called. The Lion and the Unicorn."

"And are they sometimes incomplete?"

"Almost always in Canada. They are shown without their privy parts. To be heraldically correct they should have distinct, rather saucy pizzles. But in Canada we geld everything, if we can, and dozens of times I have sat in court and looked at those pitifully deprived animals and thought how they exemplified our attitude toward justice. Everything that spoke of passion – and when you talk of passion you talk of morality in one way or another – was ruled out of order or disguised as something else. Only Reason was welcome. But in Mr. Justice Staunton's court the Lion and the Unicorn are complete, because morality and passion get their due there."

"I see. Well, how did the case go?"

"It hung, in the end, on the McNaghten Rule."

"You must tell me what that is."

"It is a formula for determining responsibility. It takes its name from a nineteenth-century murderer called McNaghten whose defence was insanity. He said he did it when he was not himself. This was the defence put forward for Staunton. The prosecution kept hammering away at Staunton to find out whether, when he shouted in the theatre, he fully understood the nature and quality of his act, and if he did, did he know it was wrong? The defence lawyer – Mr. David Staunton, a very eminent Q.C. – urged every possible extenuating circumstance: that the prisoner Staunton had been under severe stress for several days; that he had lost his father in a most grievous fashion, and that he had undergone severe psychological harassment because of that loss; that unusual responsibilities and burdens had been placed upon him; that his last hope of regaining the trust and approval of his late father had been crushed. But the prosecutor – Mr. David Staunton, Q.C., on behalf of the Crown – would not recognize any of that as exculpatory, and in the end he put the question that defence had been dreading all along. 'If a policeman had been standing at your elbow, would you have acted as you did? If a policeman had been in the seat next to you, would you have shouted your scandalous question at the stage?' And of course the prisoner Staunton broke down and wept and had to say, 'No,' and then, to all intents, the case was over. The Judge – Mr. Justice Staunton, known for his fairness but also for his sternness – didn't even leave the Bench. He found the prisoner Staunton guilty, and the sentence was that he should seek psychiatric help at once."

"Then what did you do?"

"It was seven o'clock on Sunday morning. I called the airport, booked a passage to Zurich, and twenty-four hours later I was here. Three hours after arrival I was sitting in Dr. Tschudi's office."

"Was the prisoner Staunton very much depressed by the outcome of the case?"

"It could hardly have been worse for him, because he has a very poor opinion of psychiatry."

"But he yielded?"

"Doctor von Haller, if a wounded soldier in the eighteenth century had been told he must have a battlefield amputation, he would know that his chances of recovery were slim, but he would have no choice. It would be: die of gangrene or die of the surgeon's knife. My choice in this instance was to go mad unattended or to go mad under the best obtainable auspices."

"Very frank. We are getting on much better already. You have begun to insult me. I think I may be able to do something for you. Prisoner Staunton."

"Do you thrive on insult?"

"No. I mean only that you have begun to feel enough about me to want to strike some fire out of me. That is not bad, that comparison between eighteenth-century battlefield surgery and modern psychiatry; this sort of curative work is still fairly young and in the way it is sometimes practised it can be brutal. But there were recoveries, even from eighteenth-century surgery, and as you point out, the alternative was an ugly one.

"Now let us get down to work. The decisions must be entirely yours. What do you expect of me? A cure for your drunkenness? You have told me that it is not your disease, but your symptom; symptoms cannot be cured – only alleviated. Illnesses can be cured when we know what they are and if circumstances are favourable. Then the symptoms abate. You have an illness. You have talked of nothing else. It seems very complicated, but all descriptions of symptoms are complicated. What did you expect when you came to Zurich?"

"I expected nothing at all. I have told you that I have seen many psychiatrists in court, and they are not impressive."

"That's nonsense. You wouldn't have come if you hadn't had some hope, however reluctant you were to admit it. If we are to achieve anything you must give up the luxury of easy despair. You are too old for that, though in certain ways you seem young for your age. You are forty. That is a critical age. Between thirty-five and forty-five everybody has to turn a corner in his life, or smash into a brick wall. If you are ever going to gain a measure of maturity, now is the time. And I must ask you not to judge psychiatrists on what you see in court. Legal evidence and psychological evidence are quite different things, and when you are on your native ground in court, with your gown on and everything going your way, you can make anybody look stupid, and you do –"

"And I suppose the converse is that when you have a lawyer in your consulting-room, and you are the doctor, you can make him look stupid and you do?"

"It is not my profession to make anyone look stupid. If we are to do any good here, we must be on terms that are much better than that; our relationship must go far beyond merely professional wrangling for trivial advantages."

"Do you mean that we must be friends?"

"Not at all. We must be on doctor-and-patient terms, with respect on both sides. You are free to dispute and argue anything I say if you must, but we shall not go far if you play the defence lawyer every minute of our time. If we go on, we shall be all kinds of things to each other, and I shall probably be your stepmother and your sister and your housekeeper and all sorts of people in the attitude you take toward me before we are through. But if your chief concern is to maintain your image of yourself as the brilliant, drunken counsel with a well-founded grudge against life, we shall take twice as long to do our work because that will have to be changed before anything else can be done. It will cost you much more money, and I don't think you like wasting money."

"True. But how did you know?"

"Call it a trade secret. No, that won't do. We must not deal with one another in that vein. Just recognize that I have had rich patients before, and some of them are great counters of their pennies… Would you like a few days to consider what you are going to do?"

"No. I've already decided. I want to go ahead with the treatment."

"Why?"

"But surely you know why."

"Yes, but I must find out if you know why."

"You agree with me that the drinking business is a symptom, and not my disease?"

"Let us not speak of disease. A disease in your case would be a psychosis, which is what you fear and what of course is always possible. Though the rich are rarely mad. Did you know that? They may be neurotic and frequently they are. Psychotic rarely. Let us say that you are in an unsatisfactory state of mind and you want to get out of it. Will that do?"

"It seems a little mild, for what has been happening to me."

"You mean, like your Netty, nobody knows what you are going through? I assure you that very large numbers of people go through much worse things."

"Aha, I see where we are going. This is to destroy my sense of uniqueness. I've had lots of that in life, I assure you."

"No, no. We do not work on the reductive plan, we of the Zurich School. Nobody wants to bring your life's troubles down to having been slapped because you did not do your business on the pot. Even though that might be quite important, it is not the mainspring of a life. You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before. But we are members of the human race, as well, and our unique quality has limits. Now – about treatment. There are a few simple things to begin with. You had better leave your hotel and take rooms somewhere. There are quite good pensions where you can be quiet, and that is important. You must have quiet and retirement, because you will have to do a good deal of work yourself between appointments with me, and you will find that tiring."

"I hate pensions. The food is usually awful."

"Yes, but they have no bars, and they are not pleased if guests drink very much in their rooms. It would be best if it were inconvenient, but not impossible, for you to drink very much. I think you should try to ration yourself. Don't stop. Just take it gently. Our Swiss wines are very nice."

"Oh God! Don't talk about nice wine."

"As you please. But be prudent. Much of your present attitude toward things comes from the exacerbations of heavy drinking. You say it doesn't affect you, but of course it does."

"I know people who drink just as much as I do and are none the worse."

"Yes. Everybody knows such people. But you are not one of them. After all, you would not be in that chair if you were."

"If we are not going to talk about my toilet-training, what is the process of your treatment? Bullying and lectures?"

"If necessary. But it isn't usually necessary, and when it is, that is only a small part of the treatment."

"Then what are you going to do?"

"I am not going to do anything to you. I am going to try to help you in the process of becoming yourself."

"My best self, I expected you to say. A good little boy."

"Your real self may not be a good little boy. It would be very fortunate if that were so. Your real self may be something very disagreeable and unpleasant. This is not a game we are playing, Mr. Staunton. It can be dangerous. Part of my work is to see the dangers as they come and help you to get through them. But if the dangers are inescapable and possibly destructive, don't think I can help you fly over them. There will be lions in the way. I cannot pull their teeth or tell them to make paddy-paws; I can only give you some useful tips about lion-taming."

"Now you're trying to scare me."

"I am warning you."

"What do we do to get to the lions?"

"We can start almost anywhere. But from what you have told me I think we would be best to stick to the usual course and begin at the beginning."

"Childhood recollections?"

"Yes, and recollections of your life up to now. Important things. Formative experiences. People who have meant much to you, whether good or bad."

"That sounds like the Freudians."

"We have no quarrel with the Freudians, but we do not put the same stress on sexual matters as they do. Sex is very important, but if it were the single most important thing in life it would all be much simpler, and I doubt if mankind would have worked so hard to live far beyond the age when sex is the greatest joy. It is a popular delusion, you know, that people who live very close to nature are great ones for sex. Not a bit. You live with primitives – I did it for three years, when I was younger and very interested in anthropology – and you find out the truth. People wander around naked and nobody cares – not even an erection or a wiggle of the hips. That is because their society does not give them the brandy of Romance, which is the great drug of our world. When sex is on the program they sometimes have to work themselves up with dances and ceremonies to get into the mood for it, and then of course they are very active. But their important daily concern is with food. You know, you can go for a lifetime without sex and come to no special harm. Hundreds of people do so. But you go for a day without food and the matter becomes imperative. In our society food is just a start for our craving. We want all kinds of things – money, a big place in the world, objects of beauty, learning, sainthood, oh, a very long list. So here in Zurich we try to give proper attention to these other things, as well.

"We generally begin with what we call anamnesis. Are you a classicist? Do you know any Greek? We look at your history, and meet some people there whom you may know or perhaps you don't, but who are portions of yourself. We take a look at what you remember, and at some things you thought you had forgotten. As that goes on we find we are going much deeper. And when that is satisfactorily explored, we decide whether to go deeper still, to that part of you which is beyond the unique, to the common heritage of mankind."

"How long does it take?"

"It varies. Sometimes long, sometimes surprisingly short, especially if you decide not to go beyond the personal realm. And though of course I give advice about that, the decision, like all the decisions in this sort of work, must be your own."

"So I should begin getting a few recollections together? I don't want to be North American about this, but I haven't unlimited time. I mean, three years or anything of that sort is out of the question. I'm the executor of my father's will. I can do quite a lot from here by telephone or by post but I can't be away forever. And there is the problem of Castor to be faced."

"I have always understood that it takes about three years to settle an estate. In civilized countries, that is; there are countries here in Europe where it can go on for ten if there is enough money to pay the costs. Does it impress you as interesting that to settle a dead man's affairs takes about the same length of time as settling a life's complications in a man of forty? Still, I see your difficulty. And that makes me wonder if a scheme I have been considering for you might not be worth a trial."

"What are you thinking of?"

"We do many things to start the stream of recollection flowing in a patient, and to bring forth and give clues to what is important for him. Some patients draw pictures, or paint, or model things in clay. There have even been patients who have danced and devised ceremonies that seemed relevant to their situation. It must be whatever is most congenial to the nature of the analysand."

"Analysand? Am I an analysand?"

"Horrid word, isn't it? I promise I shall never call you that. We shall stick to the Plain Style, shall we, in what we say to one another?"

"Ramsay always insisted that there was nothing that could not be expressed in the Plain Style if you knew what you were talking about. Everything else was Baroque style, which he said was not for most people, or Jargon, which was the Devil's work."

"Very good. Though you must be patient, because English is not my cradle-tongue, and my work creates a lot of Jargon. But about you, and what you may do; I think you might create something, but not pictures or models. You are a lawyer, and you seem to be a great man for words: what would you say to writing a brief of your case?"

"I've digested hundreds of briefs in my time."

"Yes, and some of them were for cases pleaded before Mr. Justice Staunton."

"This would be for the case pleaded in the court of Mr. Justice von Haller."

"No, no; Mr. Justice Staunton still. You cannot get away from him, you know."

"I haven't often pleaded very successfully for the defendant Staunton in that court. The victories have usually gone to the prosecution. Are you sure we need to do it this way?"

"I think there is good reason to try. It is the heroic way, and you have found it without help from anyone else. That suggests that heroic measures appeal to you, and that you are not really afraid of them."

"But that was just a game."

"You played it with great seriousness. And it is not such an uncommon game. Do you know Ibsen's poem –

I suggest that you make a beginning. Let it be a brief for the defence; you will inevitably prepare a brief for the prosecution as you do so, for that is the kind of court you are to appear in – the court of self-judgement. And Mr. Justice Staunton will hear all, and render judgement, perhaps more often than is usual."

"I see. And what are you in all this?"

"Oh, I am several things; an interested spectator, for one, and for another, I shall be a figure that appears only in military courts, called Prisoner's Friend. And I shall be an authority on precedents, and germane judgements, and I shall keep both the prosecutor and the defence counsel in check. I shall be custodian of that constant and perpetual wish to render to everyone his due. And if Mr. Justice Staunton should doze, as judges sometimes do – "

"Not Mr. Justice Staunton. He slumbers not, nor sleeps."

"We shall see if he is as implacable as you suppose. Even Mr. Justice Staunton might learn something. A judge is not supposed to be an enemy of the prisoner, and I think Mr. Justice Staunton sounds a little too eighteenth century in his outlook to be really good at his work. Perhaps we can lure him into modern times, and get him to see the law in a modern light… And now – until Monday, isn't it?"