2

‘. . . BUT the child in us never dies,’ Paul said. ‘It is indestructible. Our tragedy consists in our attempt to kill it. The result at best – or at worst – is of course repression. We succeed in burying the child – alive.’

‘Goodness!’ Mrs Carter exclaimed with an aghast look. She had a vision of a child awake and breathing in its coffin, interred under six feet of earth. ‘– Each of us, then, is his own murderer. We are all infanticidal! – did you know that?’– and she now looked at Mildred, trying to draw that morose child into the conversation. The girl had been silent and depressed for hours – and the mood had persisted all week. Even her knitting held no interest, though she carried it with her, keeping it in a tangled heap by her side.

‘I do suppose I must have read it somewhere,’ Mildred replied meanly. She smoothed her bathing suit across the stomach. The gesture was slow, rather lingering, and it was a gesture that Mrs Carter had observed often within the last day or two, and one that startled her each time because it seemed so very much like the unconscious gesture of a pregnant woman.

‘Well,’ she said, since Mildred obviously wasn’t to be cheered, ‘at least the universality of it is comforting. I do rather like the idea of mankind’s general neurosis – I mean, our all being in the same boat, so to speak. The private neurosis can be embarrassing, and so often lonely. But to have one – that everyone else has . . . well, at least it’s cosy.’

Paul laughed in his winsome but irritating way. He never took what she said with the proper degree of sobriety.

She added defensively: ‘Well, one doesn’t have to lock oneself in one’s room, does one? One can be neurotic and very well in things. – I am certainly glad I am not privately neurotic. It is difficult enough to work on the general neurosis without having to bother about that.’

Gia, as usual, had been straining to follow the intricacies of the conversation, her forehead a relief map of concentration.

‘About what?’ she demanded with a baffled look.

‘The private neurosis, of course,’ Mrs Carter replied. She scolded good-naturedly: ‘Now do pay attention; it isn’t often that we can induce Paul to talk shop.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Gia persisted. She removed her reading glasses from her beach bag and placed them on her nose, as if clearer vision would improve her capacity to understand. ‘– Why do we suppress the child at all; why’

‘Re-press,’ Mrs Carter hissed helpfully.

It was obvious Gia didn’t know the difference.

‘It is done to us,’ Mrs Carter explained. ‘It happens in us but we don’t know it’s happening. It’s like – well, a toothache; we make our own tooth ache – certainly no one else does, but we aren’t responsible, so to speak. It does it; in the case of the repression, the unconscious.’

‘Ah, I see,’ Gia said, though it was doubtful that she did. ‘Then let me ask this: why does it happen? Why does the unconscious do this thing? Must our children be buried? I say they should live!’

‘And I agree!’ Mrs Carter exclaimed with éclat. ‘Let the child live! – Endlessly, totally– all our lives. I vote for a veritable Garden of Eden – the perpetual innocence and delight of infancy! Why not?’

‘The theory,’ Paul replied, ‘and I paraphrase Freud’ he inclined his head slightly in Mildred’s direction ‘– is that opposed to pleasure is reality: the world is real, the world is hard; there is survival, there is work, necessity – a culture that demands the sacrifice and exists only because that sacrifice is made. What would a world of physically mature polymorphous perverse adults be like? Could such a world exist at all? Wouldn’t we play away time in infantile pleasures? Civilisation would be a sand castle, a mud pie on the beach. . . .’

‘Unless,’ Mrs Carter interrupted, ‘work itself became play.’

Paul smiled at her warmly but a bit teasingly. ‘If you have the secret, you must tell me. And everyone else. The world is waiting to hear.’

‘Well, I don’t imagine there’s any real secret,’ Mrs Carter replied. ‘It’s simply a matter of doing what you enjoy, and enjoying what you do.’ She was suddenly sad. ‘I enjoy most everything I do – and yet I do nothing. Nothing important, that is. But this winter I intend to change things. Truly. What I have in mind . . .’ She stopped herself. ‘But I will tell you that later. Some other time. We were discussing play – and children. Mildred’s forte, I might add,’ and she waited hopefully. This time she was rewarded.

‘Have you ever watched children play?’ the girl asked with at least a semblance of life. ‘Their play is senseless and disorganised. It is only when they are instructed or begin to emulate their adults that their play acquires any meaning or purpose.’

‘But play has no “purpose”,’ Mrs Carter replied, happy that Mildred had joined the fracas, ‘unless you want to call it organic, or visceral. What is the meaning of enjoyment? It is meaning itself. What you are proposing, apparently, is that children’s play without mature guidance is entropic.’

‘I certainly am,’ Mildred replied, ‘though I would hardly choose that word. – Leave a classroom of children to itself and in ten seconds flat there’s bedlam – a roomful of screaming, dancing idiots. There’s nothing closer to a madhouse. I sometimes think that all children are mad, and that the task of education is simply to rear them to sanity.’

‘Sanity,’ Mrs Carter questioned archly, ‘being the general neurosis we were speaking of? Oh – it is a problem I do admit. But you are being just a bit unfair. In school, the atmosphere, even in so-called play, is one of restriction and suppression; no wonder children exhibit a few wild excesses once you leave them to themselves. Goodness!’ her eyes rolled heavenward ‘– when I think of all those nervous games we called “play” – spelling bees, and musical chairs. Can you think of anything more fraught with anxiety than musical chairs? – everyone rushing around in a dizzy circle, and then the horror of not finding a chair of your own – of being cast out, rejected! It’s no wonder we’re all neurotic! Even the games we teach our children are based on the severest kind of aggression and competition. – But take free play – the play of the very little child, or made-up play away from school . . . the co-operative, imaginative kind: spontaneous, relaxed and, heaven knows, not organised . . . this I do maintain is negatively entropic – in a deep, perhaps biological sense.’ She paused reflectively. ‘I have heard, you know, that evolution-wise we are all descended from a gibbon-type animal, a small, lively creature, understand – not at all aggressive or competitive, but characterised by its gentleness, intense curiosity and above all its desire to prank and play. . . .’

Mildred was depressed again and stopped listening. These endless ‘intellectual’ conversations which used to amuse and, in a way, instruct her, now seemed in themselves ‘play’ – the play of adults, as pointless, disorganised and meaningless as the play of children. She found herself wanting to join the conversation only when she was angry and had something sharp and bitter to say. The others had grown sensitive to this and no longer asked for her opinions – with the exception of Marion. And Marion asked anyone’s opinion – even Nicky’s. ‘The young are closer to God. . . .’ It began that way.

She was still talking, and now gesturing so energetically that there seemed no part of her ample anatomy that wasn’t part of her flowing verbiage.

‘. . . Nor do I quite believe,’ she was saying, ‘in all this strange business about culture – its being “nothing but” a sublimation of our repressed infantile longings. There is something wrong somewhere, and all these clever people with their “nothing but” philosophies had better think things through again. Why there isn’t a field of endeavour – no art, not another science, that the psychoanalysts aren’t poking their fingers into, and sniffing and mouthing so about it that one might well inquire into the anality and orality of that! To read the current literature, one would think that a telescope is “nothing but” a tremendous phallus penetrating the heavenly “bodies” in sublimated incestuous intercourse. But who has psychoanalysed psychoanalysis, may I ask? – and yet it is one of our supreme cultural achievements, the supreme one I dare say. Consequently, it must be “nothing but” a sublimation of our repressed infantile polymorphous perversity. – Yet it proposes to save us from the very thing to which it owes its own existence. Now I call that biting the hand that feeds you – indeed, a veritable serpent’s tooth. . . .’