Clement’s night was a restless one. Often he imagined Sheila, lying somewhere in a hotel bed in London, must also be restless. He slept in fits and starts, waking late after a vivid dream.
After showering, he dressed and went down to eat a piece of toast in the kitchen. Memory of the dream returned. He had been in Australia, an hour before dawn, waiting for the sun to rise. Already it was hot. Other people jostled by him. He could not see their faces. In the tall, dead, brittle, elephant grass, a creature like a dog roamed. He had looked towards the west, where a great black rock loomed between him and the sky. The dawn, because this was Australia, was postponed several times, but he knew it would come, and this knowledge filled him with happiness.
The question he asked himself was, why did this fragment make him happy, and how did he connect it with Sheila?
He set the question aside for a time, while he sorted out the mail. Most of it was for Sheila, as usual, many letters in familiar American air mail envelopes. There was a bill for him and a letter addressed in writing he recognized as Michelin’s. He slit it open with a buttery knife.
Dear Clement and Sheila,
It is necessary that you think badly of me to leave in my hurry without informing you both. I deeply beg forgiveness. But I cannot bear your questions.
You know my age. Time goes by. I have fallen in love with a man of a year less than me. He is rich, in fact a lawyer, and from my region of France. We know each other only since a week, but it is the REAL THING! This I need so desperately. But I could not stand your eyes upon me when I tell these things.
We will fly to Nice in only a few hours. Then I will write to you again. Now, my thoughts are in a tempest!
Sincerely,
Michelin
‘Poor dear Michelin!’ he said aloud. ‘There seems to have been an outbreak of love here. Perhaps I should have the house fumigated before I catch it …’
He stood there, thinking, absently making himself a cup of coffee as he worried about this uncharacteristic impulse of Michelin’s. If only she had confided in Sheila earlier in the week, perhaps after comparing notes neither of them would have left, and he would not now be alone …
The doorbell rang. As he went to answer it, he thought, ‘She’s back.’ But on the doorstep stood Mrs Flowerbury, neat, ample, smiling her rather fixed smile and clutching the handbag she always carried.
‘You look startled, Dr Winter. It’s Wednesday and it’s ten o’clock, or am I a bit early?’ She smiled with her head on one side, as if this was her patent way of smiling, to which she stuck through thick and thin.
‘Oh, Mrs Flowerbury, I’m afraid Sheila isn’t here this morning. She has had to go up to London.’
‘It would be about the film business, I expect. Never mind, I can get on with my work.’ She made to enter.
‘Well, I’d rather you didn’t, Mrs Flowerbury. I’m going to have her study cleaned professionally while she’s away. See you next week.’
‘Oooh, everything will be turned upside-down.’ She backed away, as though an offer had been made to clean her professionally, and turn her upside-down into the bargain. She retained enough self-possession to wave to Clement as he shut the door.
‘Of course,’ he thought. ‘Sheila is also down-under slang for “woman”. That’s why the dream was set in Australia. It was all about her, and she is the sun about to return to my life.’
Perhaps the doglike thing in the dry undergrowth had been a vague memory of the pet Sheila had owned in Berlin. He went back to his coffee, thinking of an occasion when they had encountered each other in a park in West Berlin. It was spring. Sheila wore a neat fawn coat and a hat. She was slender in those days, even thin. She had been walking her little dog on a lead.
She was reserved; he was shy. But he had induced her to sit on a bench with him. She had nursed the dog while they talked, running her long fingers through his fur, and once or twice kissing him on the head, with a gesture of unconscious coquetry.
The doorbell rang again. He thought, ‘She’s back’ but, when he opened the door, Arthur and Cheri Stranks stood there, Arthur looking business-like and standing on his toes. Cheri back in her stone-washed jeans and clutching her husband’s arm proprietorially, as if to demonstrate who had brought whom. Behind them in the road the Zastava Caribbean was parked.
‘Er – I just had to come round and say how sorry I am,’ Arthur said, stealing a march on his wife – stealing such a march that he had moved forward and was entering the house before either Cheri or Clement could forestall him. ‘Cheri and I have been talking about it all night. If there’s anything we can do – for instance, if you want to go somewhere and don’t want to drive yourself …’
He was inside now, adjusting his spectacles and nodding, with Cheri following nimbly behind.
‘Please don’t mind us intruding,’ Cheri said, ‘but we had the notion that we might just nip in and be of use. That’s what friends are for. You have only to say the word.’
‘Creative people are known to be sensitive,’ Arthur said, looking as if impressed by his own insight. ‘Er – creative people in particular. They’re more dependent on the old bio-clock. More dependent than is comfortable, sometimes. It would be a hell of a world if men menstruated as well, wouldn’t it? No, no, it’s easy to quarrel at such times.’
‘We didn’t quarrel.’
‘Oh, er, I don’t imagine you did. Cheri and I think of you as far too gentle – well, too wise, really – too mature – for that. Still, the male psyche’s under threat these days, isn’t it? When the social order is disrupted and the NHS is having to cope with AIDS victims and is breaking down under so many people demanding heart operations.’
‘He’s maddening,’ said Cheri, placidly, interrupting her husband’s demonstration of understanding. ‘He never went on like this till I got pregnant. What about the vulnerability of the modern woman, under threat from all sides, her role questioned? Listen to Arthur or read the papers and you would think the modern woman was off her rocker. There’s passion, you know, and that’s what decides what happens, not just feminism.’
‘You may be right there,’ Clement agreed.
‘It’s generous of you to say so,’ Arthur said, ‘but to my mind, er, financial independence comes into it. That’s what’s caused the breakdown of family life. Women out to jobs, women earning more money than men …’ He paused dramatically, to let the relevance of this remark sink in.
‘Arthur talks like something out of the Old Testament sometimes,’ Cheri said, excusing him. ‘Don’t listen to him, Clem.’
Thinking this was excellent advice, Clement said hastily, ‘There is one thing you might do for me, Arthur. Sheila and I were going to have a party here tomorrow evening. I’ve got a list of the people invited in my study. If you could phone them and say the party is off, owing to unforeseen circumstances, I’d be grateful. Don’t say more than that. Say I’m not too well, or something, if you must.’
‘I’ll do the washing-up,’ Cheri said. ‘There’s a liberated woman for you.’ She struck out in the direction of the kitchen as Clement proceeded upstairs with Arthur.
‘It’s funny how women behave,’ Arthur said, in a low voice, inviting man-to-man confidences.
‘Men have been known to run off from their wives.’
‘Yes, but – er—’ Perhaps Arthur sensed he was treading on delicate ground. ‘You and Sheila seemed so stable. Cheri and I admired you for that.’
‘I’m sorry to let you down.’
‘But what do you make of it?’
‘I don’t make anything of it, Arthur. I simply hope that she will come back.’
Arthur halted in the doorway of Clement’s study, his solid form blocking the entrance. He turned back, the expression on his face obscured by the dimness on the landing. ‘Er – but I mean, you being an analyst, doesn’t this rather upset your ideas, if you didn’t see it coming?’ A hesitation in the way he phrased the question removed some of the impertinence from it.
Clement saw the force of it. If an analyst, whose business it was to understand others, got into such messes, what hope was there for research assistants?
‘I didn’t see it coming.’
‘Does that make you question – well, I’m no judge, but Jung’s ideas always struck me as rather airy-fairy … I thought you perhaps … No, I shouldn’t be saying this. But what price the archetypes now?’
‘Arthur, I don’t really think you want a lecture, but archetypes aren’t just airy-fairy ideas. They’re modes of functioning. The chick pecking its way out of the egg obeys an archetype. A woman loving her newborn child is probably obeying an archetype. Ethology shows us how every species has a whole range of suitable behaviours. Archetypes have evolved through natural selection and are no more airy-fairy than biological entities. Sheila at the moment is trying to escape a wrong archetype, an archetype of dominance, embodied for her in the figure of a threatening step-father. I’m convinced this is more a question of dominance-avoidance than of Eros. If so, she may come to that realization soon, and return. If I’m wrong, I may not see her again.’
‘Gordon Bennett,’ Arthur said. ‘What a mind you have, Clem.’ And he gripped the older man’s arm in a spasm of admiration.
Clement managed to settle Arthur in front of the phone with the invitation list for the party. He went slowly from his study into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed, head bent, reflecting.
It was lax of him to have mentioned Sheila’s overbearing step-father to Arthur. He had an unspoken agreement with Sheila, which had grown up over the years, to edit that man from her life. When talking to others – even when talking to him on occasions – Sheila pretended that she had enjoyed a happy childhood. He always listened with sympathy; the pretence might be regarded as her protective entitlement. He knew all too well the terrors of her early adolescence, and feared only that she might come to take the lie for the truth, unpalatable as the truth might be.
She had slowly reconstructed her own biography to suit her needs as a successful writer of romances. He had seen it in print, in articles about her: ‘Green Mouth enjoyed a radiantly happy childhood in Somerset, on her father’s estates.’
Sheila’s father had been killed in the Ardennes, in the closing stages of the war. Her mother had married again, after the war, to one William Harstow, a friend of her late husband’s and a regular soldier. When he was posted to West Berlin, Harstow’s new wife and her daughter went with him. It was an ill-advised match. Harstow was a rigid disciplinarian, and ruled over their uncomfortable home with a heavy military hand. He frequently beat Sheila and her mother, starved them, and humiliated them in front of others. On occasions, when drunk, he sexually assaulted his ten-year-old step-daughter.
One dark night, Harstow came to the bad end his army friends had long been predicting. He was set upon in a dark Berlin alley and battered to death. The incident reached the papers. Had some German vented his anti-British feelings? The matter was never cleared up. No one was charged with the murder. Sheila and her mother returned to England under a mystery, a cloud, and some debts.
But Harstow left behind a sister, Sheila’s adopted Aunt Anna. Anna Harstow had also gone out to Germany, and secured a job in army welfare, which she left after a while in order to work for a German civilian firm. Anna was a different kind from her brother, as gentle as he was rough. Moreover, she took a liking to Sheila, and visited her whenever she was in England.
It was Aunt Anna who brought Sheila to Clement Winter, at the clinic in Berlin where he had just started out as an analytical psychologist, under the aegis of T. F. Schulz.
That was in the autumn of 1969. Sheila was twenty-nine. She was fair and slender, with blonde hair hanging straight to her shoulders. The style of her clothes was dated, but she had an innate elegance. Her manner was polite and reserved. There was little animation about her, a trait that was to persist, as though she had been born to an indoor, sedentary life.
She fixed the impressionable young analyst with a radiant smile, showing irregular teeth – which would be properly fixed in the Kerinth days which lay ahead. The smile was maintained even when the aunt handed her over to Clement’s care and retired to a waiting room – although he observed her increased rigidity and the tighter grip she took of her handbag.
Yes, she told Clement, smiling apologetically, there had been some trouble with her step-father, but the poor man was dead, so it was all over. She had a flat of her own in England. Well, a room, really. She was on fairly good terms with her mother. Well, better terms. And she loved staying with Aunt Anna in West Berlin.
But Clement had been slow to perceive how much the girl suffered. This pretty young woman, with her sweet expression and gentle air, concealed her sorrow well. While she admitted that she had mentioned suicide to her aunt, that of course was all past. Last year, when she was ill. A misunderstanding when she happened to be feeling lonely.
It was the aunt, Anna Harstow, who had understood that her niece’s loneliness went deep, and still continued, to the point of anomia. In some ways, the caring Anna saw Sheila more clearly even than Clement did – for he had fallen in love with her. It took him many months, and another of her suicide attempts, to see how obsessively Sheila tried to conceal the depth of anguish she was experiencing. He had not encountered a smiling depressive type before.
Years later, in the early eighties – he and Sheila had been married for over ten years by then – when he saw photographs of Chinese smiling blankly into the cameras of foreign journalists, shortly after the death of Chairman Mao, he could comprehend something of the tragedy which had overwhelmed China and its population.
The Berlin analysis had proved seminal for Clement as well as Sheila. Week by week, sometimes day by day, he had been in his room with her, gaining her confidence. Once she had begun to talk, it was easier.
At last she had been able to speak of the times when, as a child, alone and frightened in the dark, she had heard her step-father stagger home, the quarrels, the cries of her mother, sometimes the sound of china being broken. She lay upstairs in her bed, ten years old, clutching the friendly little felt lizard her real father had given her before he went off to the war, the lizard she called Green Mouth. Sometimes her step-father would come to her bed. And in her fear, all she could do was to lie there and let him behave as he wished.
Gradually, she talked the terror and shame away. Life again became possible for her.
After she ceased to attend the clinic, Clement sought her out and proposed to her. And was accepted.
He felt, he hoped, that Sheila and he had forged such a bond between them that they could not be happy with other partners. But of course financial independence had come her way. She might want to exercise it. She had exercised it.
Feeling a headache coming on, he took an aspirin. He was going slowly downstairs when the front door bell rang.
‘She’s back,’ he thought, and a shaft of daylight seemed to play through his being.
Outside, however, stood three figures, none of them remotely resembling his wife. All belonged to the armies of the jean-clad. A heavily built man with his shirt open to his navel and his sleeves rolled up to reveal tattoos on his arms was trying to anchor a struggling child whom he held by one hand. Smiling at Clement, he gave a mock salute with his free hand. The child, running fast backwards without moving, trying to drag its anchor, was red in the face and resembled a small version of the man as to rig-out, except for the tattoos. In front of these heroic figures was a woman of decided features, sharp looks, and blue eyes. Her hair was in interesting disarray, while something in her alert stance suggested that she was equally prepared for flight or attack, as the occasion might require.
‘Here I am, bang on time. You’ll have to excuse me bringing along Ron and the bairn, but we fancied a look round the colleges while we were this way, didn’t we, Ron? Okay if we come in? Stop that, Pat.’
A few seconds late, Clement recognized Lucy Traill. It had been some while since he last saw her when, as far as he could recollect, she had been wearing the same clothes as now, and sporting the same CND badge on her faded jacket.
‘Come in, all of you,’ he said. He could not for a moment think of anything else to say. He had phoned Lucy only yesterday, before Sheila had taken it into her head to disappear, since when the appointment had gone completely out of his mind. ‘Sheila’s not here at present,’ he added.
He thought that Lucy gave a slight sniff. She and Sheila had not become friends.
The man addressed as Ron made a great show of dragging the child into the hall, while the child made a great show of going insane as it entered. Getting a closer look at the creature as it swung in an orbit about Ron’s body, Clement saw that it was female, though its hair was cut as short as a boy’s. It was protesting its lot in a high, unmusical monotone.
Apparently unaware that his arm was being torn off, Ron said, grinning, ‘You sorted your brother’s gear out yet?’
‘Not quite.’ Belatedly, Clement realized that this was the man claiming to be Joseph’s friend, whom he had found inside the Acton flat, on his visit at the weekend. Ron Mallock.
‘I expect you’d like some coffee.’
‘Yes, coffee’d be okay, great, cheers,’ Ron said. ‘Give over, Pat, will you, for crying out loud?’
‘I don’t want to be here I told you I keep telling you I’m not meant to be here why did you drag me here why did you make me come why can’t you let me go why can’t you lay off I’m not meant to be here I’m meant to be somewhere else I don’t want to be here I’m going to spew up if you don’t look out I’m supposed to play with Daphne why don’t you leave me alone why did you make me come,’ said the child, in a kind of unpunctuated shriek, evidently feeling that at least she could kill off grammar while biding her time on Ron.
‘She wanted to stay home,’ Lucy said, by way of elucidation. She was not tall, and stood looking up into Clement’s face as if watching for his next move.
He was in the presence of the woman who had found Joseph dead. The vitality in her, in the way of walking and in her stance, seemed to negate death. The movement of her clearly defined lips and the positioning of her head when she spoke, as if a question lurked behind her every statement, was immediately familiar to him, as if it had not been a couple of years since they had last met – apart from Joe’s cremation, when she had come and gone without speaking to anyone, standing alone at the rear of the crematorium, wrapped in a black plastic raincoat.
Sheila and Clement had just returned from a dinner in Thame when the phone had rung. Lucy was on the line. He knew immediately that something was wrong.
‘I’m ringing from a call box,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s going to be rotten news. Are you ready? Joe’s dead. I’ve just found him up in his kitchen. I mean, he’s still up there, just lying by the sink. I can’t go back, sorry. I blame myself for not being with him. I can’t say how long he’s been there. He’s quite cold.’
He interrupted her flow. ‘Stay there. I’ll be right over.’
‘The point is – well, I’ve got to get back to my kid. You know how it is. It’s a bit of a journey by tube … Should I ring for a doctor?’
‘Leave it to me. How did you get in the flat?’
‘Oh, Joe often didn’t lock the door. If only someone had been with him, someone to comfort him. Me.’
‘Don’t fret. It’s a shock, of course. Go home, have a drink of tea – maybe something stronger. I’ll take care of everything. Thanks – thanks for phoning.’
‘I didn’t realize he was that bad. He was okay last week when I was with him … Poor Joe.’ And then she had allowed herself a few sobs.
Now she looked fine. He took it she had been sunbathing, making the best of the good weather. He did not believe that weeping formed part of her ordinary repertoire. Although the child was still howling, Lucy appeared calm and alert, her clear gaze fixed on Clement as if she was coming to some decision about him, a decision which might or might not be favourable. The thought made him nervous.
He led the way through the rear hall into the kitchen. Although the child fought Ron every inch of the way, he still found the chance to observe his surroundings, saying, in the genial voice which seemed to be habitual to him, ‘You done better in life than your brother by the looks of things.’
Such remarks embarrassed Clement but, before he could express that embarrassment, the child began to kick Ron and anything else within reach, including the table.
‘You’ll break a leg, Pat,’ Lucy said, without making it clear whose leg she was referring to. At which point, Cheri emerged from the walk-in larder and was introduced in a sort of way, the proceedings drowned out by the child’s rapid stream of protests.
‘Do you think Pat would like a swim?’ Cheri asked Clement. This was such a sensible suggestion that even the child could not resist it, and took up a great cry of, ‘Wannerswim, wannerswim.’
‘It’s in the back garden. Cheri will show you,’ Clement said curtly, dividing the remark equally between Lucy and Ron, since he was not yet certain to whom the child belonged. ‘There are towels in the changing hut.’
‘I’ll take care of her,’ Ron said, with a nod at Lucy. The child was now dragging him after Cheri, who smiled and made playful scurries at her, perhaps getting into practice for when her own child was born. ‘I’ll have that coffee in a bit, cheers.’
As he switched the kettle on, Clement asked Lucy, ‘Is Pat your child? I mean, not Ron’s?’
‘Yes, I’m living with Ron now, since your brother died.’
He recalled that a silent and sulky Pat had been with Lucy on her first visit to the house with Joseph. It was difficult to concentrate on anything but Sheila’s absence.
He was silent. Perhaps sensing unspoken criticism, she said, ‘Ron’s a caring guy.’ After another silence, she added, ‘He’s good with Patricia. She’s been quite upset since her dad left us. She didn’t get on with Joe.’
Clement did not intend to show approval or disapproval of this revelation. Instead, he passed her over a mug of instant coffee. He pushed the demerara sugar towards her but she shook her head. He put more coffee and boiling water in the mug he had used earlier and sipped at it appreciatively.
‘I thought a lot of your brother,’ Lucy said. ‘But Ron’s been good to me, there’s no denying. Things aren’t easy for those who don’t fit in with Mrs T’s notions of progress.’
He construed these remarks as mainly defensive, and grunted sympathetically. He assumed she was still doing physiotherapy, but did not enquire.
‘Anyhow, it was good of you to come over.’
‘I told you on the phone I would. I’ve brought along the notebook you might like to see. You’ve been talking to that Captain Parr.’ Lucy perched close to him on the edge of the kitchen table.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a bit of a lad. How ever old is he?’ She laughed with amused pleasure, and for a moment he saw something open and delightful in her rather anxious face.
‘Lucy, Captain Parr was telling me that Joseph had a revelation of some sort. A spiritual revelation. I’m afraid I saw very little of Joseph after our mother died, which I regret. I’ve been trying to finish a book, and goodness knows why we should set books above people—’
‘Sometimes books are more accessible to us,’ she said.
He was surprised by the remark. ‘That’s so. Can you tell me what exactly Joe’s revelation was? Parr said that it changed his life. Is that so?’
Since she took some while to respond to this direct question, he had time to study her face and lips. He remembered his wife, angry when Lucy, uninvited, had laid hands on her, had described Lucy as ‘thin-lipped’. He saw that those narrow lips were perfectly shaped and turned very prettily at the corners, and were of an attractive light pink, without make-up.
‘I had a couple of holidays on the Costa Brava, before Pat arrived. I didn’t like it much. It was too full of English nutcases. Once I went to Paris with my sister. That was all right. But I’m not a great one for going abroad. One thing I liked about Joe was that he knew abroad so well. Really foreign places, I mean, not like the Costa Brava. He could tell you about China and make it really interesting. I hope to go there one day, if I can ever get the cash together. But I’d have loved to have gone with him.’
She was silent again. Clement sipped his coffee and waited.
‘Tell you another thing I liked. It was part of his love of foreign things. I liked all his awful family history. He used to laugh about it. I mean, that school he went to by the seaside. Did you get sent there too?’
‘No.’
‘You were lucky, I should think. But Joe could be so funny about it. He’d so developed his personal history – all the hardships and everything, the way no one at home loved him, the way his whole life was blighted by a dead baby sister – it had become a sort of mythology, you know, which he let me share. It was really like a wonderful story, and his triumph over misery. I liked that.’
He reached out and touched her hand.
‘People feel guilt about such early miseries. Joseph did. He was able to share it with you because you were sympathetic.’
‘It’s true he didn’t open up much when we first knew each other. We got to trust each other, although we often had rows – over political issues and that. Anyhow, I suppose you know he found out that this little dead sister had been buried in an unconsecrated grave?’
‘In Nettlesham cemetery, yes. He found out on the day of mother’s funeral.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I remember. He said it was more than a coincidence. Your mum had been able to keep her secret until her funeral but no longer. Not a day longer. That discovery, the discovery that the baby had been buried and finished with, I mean, set him to examining his early life all over again. He took to studying up psychological literature and so on – I don’t know what. I had no patience with those tomes.’
‘He should have come to me.’
She looked him in the eye, and the shapely lips curled into what was not quite a smile. ‘Ah, but there was that long-standing difference between you. Besides, brothers aren’t like sisters, are they?’
‘Not quite.’ He laughed.
‘Sometimes he was very down, reading the books. Other times, he’d be happy, and lark about, and say he was beginning to understand.’
‘Understand what exactly? Can you say?’
‘He used to have a recurrent dream.’ As she spoke, screams broke out from the direction of the garden. Clement jumped up and ran to the kitchen window.
Outside, in the sunless garden, a small naked girl had just plunged into the swimming pool. A lumbering hairy man stood naked on its edge. As Clement reached the window, he jumped. A great splash. More screams.
‘They’re enjoying themselves,’ he said.
Lucy gave no sign of having heard. She looked down at the gingham tablecloth and traced one of the lines with a nail, as if finding a path through life for some absent person.
‘This recurrent dream of his. It was about walking through a wilderness towards a circular gate. It doesn’t sound much but it used to give Joe encouragement in bad times.’
‘Yes, I know the details. It was a Chinese dream. Joe wrote an account of it.’
‘He wrote accounts of everything,’ she said with slight sarcasm. ‘He was always writing, rather than watch the television.’
Screams and shouts came from the direction of the pool. The Farrers would not like that if they were at home. Lucy took no notice. Cheri came into the kitchen with a look of surprise on her face, hand over mouth, possibly because she had been confronted by Ron Mallock in the nude. Tactfully, she did no more than nod to Clement and pass through into the front of the house. Lucy continued her account uninterruptedly.
‘The dream was all part of Joe’s mythology. I can’t help thinking of him – even now he’s dead – as a kind of mythological character, though you’d probably know a better word. The prodigal son who refused to go home. It was November of last year that he got a cheque from some learned society or other and decided we should go off to the south coast for a break. I parked Pat on Ron and Ron’s mum – her and my mum used to be neighbours a long time back. We ended up in Dorset and put up at a little pub smack on the coast. It was cold but we went for walks on the cliffs. I love Dorset.
‘It was there Joe suddenly hit on a new interpretation of his old dream. You know the circular gate with the white screen behind it? At the top of the steps?’ She spoke as if she and Clement had personally visited the site. ‘He suddenly thought that he had got the idea the wrong way round, and that it wasn’t a circle or white screen. It was the moon. The gate led direct to the moon. The circle of perfection, he called it. The dream had always made him happy because it represented an escape to another world, to a higher sphere. That was what he said.’
‘The moon can also represent a great many other things. As you know, in classical mythology—’
‘Yes, Joe knew all that stuff. He used to quote “Diana, huntress, chaste and fair …” However it went. Joe was fond of poetry. But what he said was that the moon represented his anima. I still don’t quite grasp what an anima is, but it’s the female component of a man’s mind, is that it?’
‘In the female mind it’s the animus. Animus and anima are contra-sexual archetypes. When a man falls passionately in love, it is because the woman embodies the qualities of his anima, or appears to do so. The anima acts as mediator between conscious and unconscious, which was also the function of Joe’s recurrent dream. Go on.’
Lucy said, folding her arms, ‘These things frighten me. I can’t see how such ideas got into our heads in the first place … Anyhow, Joe interpreted his dream as meaning he had to make an approach to his anima. The message, he said, had finally got through to him. Throughout all the years previously, he said, he had been mad.’
‘“His soul had been in China …” Sorry, that’s another quotation. Go on, Lucy, I’m extremely interested.’
‘Well, that’s what he said. He’d gone – I forget what word he used – bonkers – the day his mother ran off and left him. Yet always at the back of his mind had been this dream, a communication from the anima, the sane bit of his brain, trying to get through to him. Is that possible?’
‘Yes, though the words may not be exactly right; he suffered from an anxiety state rather than insanity.’
Lucy hardly seemed to be listening as she concentrated on the next stage of her story.
‘That night, it happened there was a full moon. Joe said it was no coincidence, but that was the way he thought. Crazy in a way, but it related to his view of the natural world, and if it got somewhere it couldn’t be crazy … So he was all kind of elevated. Our little pub was on the coast road, and our bedroom looked out over the cliffs to sea. We knocked back a drink or two after supper but then he was eager to get to bed. He didn’t want sex that night.
‘When we put the light out, there was the full moon, shining over the water. Really beautiful. He made me keep quiet. What he did was quite sort of daft, or so I thought at the time. He got down on his knees and prostrated himself – like a Muslim or something, and asked his anima to visit him.’ She laughed at the memory of it, a short laugh, rather rueful, without looking directly at Clement.
‘I couldn’t sleep that night. The bed was lumpy. Joe slept like the dead. He never moved. When he woke up in the morning, his face was youthful and full of – I don’t know, joy, certainly, and he said, “Luce, the anima visited me. Jesus, I never expected her to, but she really and truly visited me.”
‘He wouldn’t or couldn’t say anything else then. He was like a man stunned. I didn’t press him. I was – oh, it sounds corny now, but I was sort of excited and frightened, all at once. There was a feeling, you know, that something really strange had taken place. Certainly there was a difference in him. Only when we got outside after breakfast and were up on the cliffs – no, we climbed down to the beach that morning – did he say to me – I warn you, you may not think this sounds like much. He told me at the time it wouldn’t sound like much.’
‘Go ahead, Lucy. What did Joe say?’
She took a sip of her coffee. ‘He explained that he had seen nothing in his dream, so it hadn’t been a dream. Or if it was, it was strictly non-visual. But he had heard the anima’s voice as clear as he heard mine, and what she said was simple and unmistakable. His anima said to him, “Your mother did love you.” That was what the anima said. “Your mother did love you.”’
She looked challengingly at Clement.
Arthur entered the kitchen, with Cheri close behind him. He adjusted his glasses as he spoke.
‘Most of your guests are not at home and haven’t got answer-phones. Er, I’ll come round this evening and have another go. I take it you won’t be at College today? You don’t want me to phone the police?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘We’ll see you later, then,’ Cheri called. ‘Come on, Arthur! I’ve got to go round to the clinic.’
Clement saw them out to their waiting vehicle. Then he and Lucy were alone in the house.