Küsnacht, Zurich
“This may be the last day of the year when I can get out in my little sail boat, Miss Joyce.” Doctor Jung has watched me walk down the long tree-lined path to the door of his house and is now ushering me through the garden towards the small boat house on the edge of the lake. “I only take out my favourite patients.” He pauses and smiles at me. “The ones I can trust not to throw themselves overboard.”
“What makes you think I won’t do that?” I take his hand and step into the sail boat, relieved I’m not wearing evening dress today.
“We will sail out onto the lake and then continue our conversation. I have your memoir right here.” He taps the pocket of his jacket.
“How different everything looks from the water.” I look back at the green shutters and the iron trellis work on the windows of his large square house. The trees on the bank are in full autumn colour now – copper and bronze and gold. On the lake boats and ferries cut white foaming furrows through the water while black-headed gulls wheel and turn above us.
“Yes, you see things quite differently from here.” The doctor pulls out my manuscript and puts it on the bench beside him where I watch the wind lick at it. “Don’t worry, Miss Joyce, it won’t blow away.” He fiddles with the sails and then puts a large stone on my memoir.
“Where would you like to start today? Doctor Naegeli perhaps?” He pulls a rope towards him and then loosens it as the boat starts to turn. I look up towards Zurich, lying like a scab at the end of the lake.
“I told Babbo any syphilis was my fault – only my fault. For things I’d done. Bad things.”
“And what did your father say?”
“He said it was all his fault. But I don’t believe him. He’s so good, so pure.”
Doctor Jung frowned. “Tell me about all the illnesses your father’s had. And about his eyes. He’s almost blind you say?”
“He gets recurrent attacks of iritis. His irises swell up. Doctors wanted him to take arsenic, but that can kill you and he knew someone who went into a coma after taking it. But he also gets conjunctivitus and glaucoma and something called episcleritus and something else called blep … blep.” I put my hand to my temple. Why can’t I remember the name?
“Blepharitis?”
“Yes. And fatigue and nervous exhaustion. Babbo says he deserves it all on account of his many iniquities but I think it’s my fault.” I look up, past the doctor, at the hills rising up in waves behind Zurich.
“No, Miss Joyce. It’s not your fault.” Doctor Jung lowers his voice, as if he’s talking to himself. “Arsenic. Boils … does he get boils? Loss of appetite?”
“Yes, sometimes. But the good news, Doctor, is that Professor Naegeli found no sign of syphilis in my blood.”
“Ah, so now it’s down to psychoanalysis to cure you. We need to uncover your pathogenic secrets.”
“Pathogenic?”
“Deeply repressed secrets. Things that have happened to you and been locked away and are now making you ill. Things you must face up to.” Even out here on the water, his eyes probe me mercilessly.
“But if they’re locked away, how can I face up to them?”
“Keep writing down your dreams. The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost secret recess of the psyche. Better still, paint them or draw them. Can you do that?” He strokes his moustache, watches me.
“What did you think of my memoir, Doctor?”
“Why did you turn down the job as dance teacher?”
“Babbo needed me. Not to accompany him like a blind man’s dog, but to provide substance and inspiration for his book. My dancing was a source of revelation to him.”
“You stayed to continue as his muse?”
“I never spoke of being a muse. I knew my mother wouldn’t like it. But all the time I was growing up Babbo’s eyes were on me, watching me, examining me. That was why I slept in my clothes.” I hesitate. Shiver. Coldness is spreading slowly through my chest as though the temperature of my blood has suddenly fallen.
“Pray continue, Miss Joyce.”
Beyond the white sail a heron dives and surfaces with a small fish flailing in its beak.
“Sometimes I thought his eyes were covetous. His head would perch sideways, like a bird, and I knew he wasn’t just watching but listening and recording.” I see the heron fly to the bank, disappear in the trees.
“No doubt, he was interested in what you had to say, like any good parent.” Doctor Jung leans out of the boat, scoops up a handful of water and drinks noisily from his cupped palm.
“Oh no! I was never under any illusion about that. He thought my words, or the rhythm of them, might be useful. He thought my dreams could help him too, especially when he started writing about the dark night of the soul. Work in Progress is a dream, you see. He uses everything around him, everything that inspires him.”
Doctor Jung dries his hand on his handkerchief. “When did you first know you were your father’s muse?”
I look over the edge of the boat at the water, so green and clear I can see tiny fish meandering round us, their scales glimmering as they catch the light. When did I discover I was Babbo’s muse? Yes, that was it. The evening at Robiac Square when Babbo gave his first reading from Work in Progress. I was seventeen. He invited several of his Flatterers to come and hear the few pages it had taken him a thousand hours to write. Everyone had sat at Babbo’s feet while he read, their faces uplifted as if in supplication. I flitted in and out serving drinks and helping my mother prepare the food we were to eat afterwards. She stayed out of earshot, saying she ‘had heard it all before’. I remember the melodious quality of his words and his thin high voice rising and falling. But then, with a jolt of awareness, I realised he was talking about me, he had written about me and I was part of what was surely to be the greatest novel ever written. My gut twisted. I had to stop myself crying out “But that’s me! That’s mine!” I’d felt a peculiar and inexplicable sense of violation, as though he had taken something from me.
I don’t tell Doctor Jung this. Instead I say, “He used my words. Kitten said I was lucky to be a muse.” I run my fingers through the cool green water. I’m starting to feel tired and weary. All this talk of muses. What has being Babbo’s muse done for me? It has imprisoned me, manacled me to him. And yet it’s all I have left now. Everything else has fallen away.
“It’s true. Many artists have muses and it’s generally considered a great honour.” He pushes his wire-framed glasses up onto his forehead and watches me.
“My father is a genius, as great as Rabelais or Dante.” I push back my shoulders, letting the lake air wrap itself around me. “He’s fêted wherever he goes.”
“Do you envy that?”
I say nothing. Sometimes I remember the swell of pride and the glow of success, the prolonged applause and the cries of appreciation that followed so many of my performances – at the Bal Bullier, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. And yes, it felt good.
“So why did you give up ballet, Miss Joyce?”
“It was too hard. Kitten had been right all along. I was too old for ballet.” I pause and look over the edge of the boat where I catch sight of my reflection in the water. My face looks back at me, shimmying and undulating. And for a confused second I wonder if I’m dancing again. “I discovered a new form of dance, one that didn’t involve going on stage. One that helped people. Have you heard of the Margaret Morris Movement? It was my vocation really, my dancing destiny. Kitten and I had done a few of her weekend classes but then Babbo found out she was setting up a school in Paris.” I look pointedly at the shore. The boat is starting to rock and sway, jumbling my memories, throwing them against each other until they blur and distort. “Take me back to the jetty,” I say imperiously. “You’ll have to wait for the next chapter.”
“Have you had any more clairvoyant experiences, Miss Joyce?” The doctor moves across the boat and his shifting weight causes it to change direction, so that we’re now heading back towards the bank.
I hesitate, and for a few seconds the bottom of the boat seems to suck at my feet as if the boat itself is anchoring me, protecting me from its own pitching and rolling. And I remember last night’s dream in which I and Mrs Fitzgerald and Mrs Fleischman and Nijinsky sat in a circle wearing straitjackets and weaving baskets from boughs of willow that glowed like jewels. “No,” I say, closing my fingers tightly round the side of the boat. “Nothing.”
“We are making excellent progress. Now your father has left Zurich there is no obstacle to your cure.” Doctor Jung pulls a rope towards him and the white sail swings violently to one side. “Duck, Miss Joyce.”
And as I duck, I decide not to tell him Babbo is still in Zurich, secretly ensconced in the Carlton-Elite Hotel at the huge expense of his patron. No – that is our secret and I will not tell Doctor Jung.