Küsnacht, Zurich
“Why do you think Giorgio was your mother’s favourite?” Doctor Jung pushes clumps of tobacco into his pipe. “Do you mind if I smoke, Miss Joyce?”
“He was an easy baby and I was always crying. Aunt Eileen told me that. She said Mama didn’t know what to do with me. Everyone knew Mama preferred Giorgio. She even told me herself.” I give an empty laugh and rub my hands up and down the sleeves of my fur coat. Coming across Lake Zurich on the ferry has made me cold, all those squalls of wind whisking over the lake, buffeting the ferry so that it rocked and see-sawed
“His departure from Robiac Square meant you had the full attention of your parents then?” The doctor sucks at his pipe and a small cloud of tobacco smoke rises and hovers above his head like a halo.
“I couldn’t sleep for nights after that.” I motion at my manuscript, spread out like a fan on the doctor’s desk. “Giorgio and I had been through so much together. When we arrived in Paris – I was thirteen and he was fifteen – we stayed in a filthy flea-ridden hotel in the Latin Quarter. We thought we were passing through on our way to a new life in London, but that never happened.” I pause and look at my hands. How old and gnarled they look, the nails ragged and bitten, the skin beginning to wrinkle. I catch sight of the red shiny scar on my thumb with its treacherous little puckers but then my eye’s drawn to the age spots on my wrists. “How old am I now, Doctor?”
“You are twenty-seven, Miss Joyce. What happened when you arrived in Paris?”
“We couldn’t speak any French and, for three months, Giorgio and I spoke to no one except each other. We had no friends, no acquaintances of any sort. I had no room of my own. If I wanted privacy I went to Giorgio’s room. I had no school to attend, no-one to visit. Babbo demanded silence and darkness while he finished Ulysses and so Giorgio and I spent hours in his bedroom doing Charlie Chaplin impressions.” I lapse into silence. I can feel tears pooling in my eyes, even now, even after everything that has come between us. How did it come to pass that such friendship, such intimacy, could turn so quickly?
I swallow loudly and continue. “He got a job as a clerk through one of Babbo’s flattering friends, but he loathed it, said it was menial and dull, and beneath him. His next job was at the American Trust Agency where he was promised two hundred francs a month, after a trial without pay. Babbo said it might lead to bigger things but Giorgio didn’t pass his trial. He found it boring and humiliating, pushing papers round a desk for no money.” I pause and look up at the doctor. He’s still puffing on his pipe and watching me, always watching me with his coin-bright eyes.
He pushes back his chair and stands up. The bones in his feet crack as he walks towards the window. “Carry on, Miss Joyce. I need to understand what caused the breach between you and your brother.”
“I often knew what Giorgio was thinking. Sometimes I’d foresee his exact words.” I gnaw distractedly at a torn cuticle and wonder if those were Cassandra moments or merely the result of a deep familiarity. As I ponder this, something floats up from a dark cobwebby corner of my mind. I reach for it but it slips away and I have a sudden sensation of insects crawling up my spine, tiny black ants moving in formation. I want to scratch my back but the doctor is pressing me to continue and I don’t want to think about insects scuttling over my skin any more. “When Babbo’s Flatterers came to visit, they always hurried past us as if … as if we were invisible. We’d be called in to pour the tea. Giorgio would wink at me. That was our signal. We’d made up our own language – Italian and German and English and the odd bit of French. And after he winked, we’d talk very loudly in our hotch-potch language. It always disarmed Babbo’s Flatterers – not being able to understand us.” The memory makes me smile and I forget the ants marching up my spine.
“So your bond was very deep, very close?” Doctor Jung stands at the window, looking out on to the hills and woods beyond the lake. Spatters of rain hit the glass. Over his shoulder I see black clouds swollen with rain.
“It was Mrs Fleischman’s money that gave him the strength and the …” I pause, searching for the right word. “The determination to escape Robiac Square. He never married for love.”
“You think he married to escape your parents?”
“I know so.” I drop my head into my hands. How can I explain what I now know to be true – that my parent’s grip on me began to tighten, slowly and subtly, when Giorgio first met Mrs Fleischman. They fought, of course, to keep Giorgio. But Mrs Fleischman had been persistent. And rich. She fought back, using her charm and money to inveigle her return into Babbo’s circle of Flatterers.
“I am very pleased with your progress, Miss Joyce. Miss Baynes tells me you have been calm and there are clearly no significant problems with your memory.”
“So when can I go, Doctor?” I lift my head from my hands. “I’m feeling much better.”
“When we have uncovered the memories you have blocked, repressed. I am putting together my theory, which begins with your emotional abandonment as a baby. The way your family life revolved around a dominant father figure –”
“Babbo wasn’t dominant! It was Mama who bossed me around and told me what to wear. You’ve got it all wrong!” I glare at Doctor Jung. The stupid man understands nothing.
“You are right, Miss Joyce. Your father is not authoritarian. But he controlled everything, did he not? You said that you worried about Mr Beckett falling under his spell.”
“So is that all you’ve come up with? I’ve been coming here for two months and that is all you’ve come up with!” I stand up and snatch my gloves and bag from the side table. I have to get back to the hotel. Babbo will be worried. All this rain, this wind. Doctor Jung is gesturing to the chair, asking me to sit down again. Now he’s shouting at me, pushing me back into the chair. I swing my handbag, aim it at him, at his ruddy selfsatisfied cheeks. He ducks and I feel his thick arms on mine, pinioning me. My breath is coming in sharp little bursts, like the wind slapping at the window panes. My handbag falls to the floor and its contents spew out: a tin of shoe wax, a silver cake fork, a tea strainer, old tram tickets, a pink flamingo feather from Zurich Zoo, a lipstick, a bird’s claw, a box of matches. And the great doctor is on his knees, scrabbling for my things, putting them carefully back into my bag.
“Miss Joyce.” He looks up at me from the floor and for the first time I catch a glimpse of … of what? Is it tenderness?
“This is just the beginning.” His eyes glide over the tea strainer as he returns it to my bag. “I believe you have a repressed complex, the result of something that happened to you as a child. A memory so hideous, so unacceptable, that you’ve buried it very, very deeply.”
And when he says that I feel everything inside me closing up, like a sea anemone jabbed with a stick. My insides rolling in, shutting down. And the air around me turns green and cold.
“The repression of such a memory results in the splitting of the personality and, sometimes, the development of a robust fantasy life. It is my hypothesis that you sublimated this memory into your dancing. When you stopped dancing the memory started to resurface in your unconscious.” He lets out a long sigh and stands up. “I am only telling you this because I believe you are intelligent enough to understand it.”
Doctor Jung passes me my handbag and I stand up. “I need to go now,” I say stiffly. “It’s too chilly here. But there’s something you should know, Doctor.” I pause and chew my lips for a few long seconds. There is something I want to tell him, but I can’t think what it is. I search for words – any words – but my mind feels blank and woolly and the ants have started moving up and down my spine again.
He looks expectantly at me.
“Next time,” he says gently. “I think you’ve had enough for today.” And as he ushers me to the door, he passes me a handkerchief. “Your lips, Miss Joyce. They are bleeding.”