Human Traces

  ‘It is too late,’ said Jacques. ‘It is a kind thought but I have no wish to own these places. What would we do with them? And we have no one to leave them to. They would be an encumbrance. It is better to let a family have them.’

  ‘Perhaps one of the cottages will be by the sea and would be a good place for holidays. We could leave it to Martha and Charlotte. Or Daisy.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Are you not intrigued even to look at them?’ said Sonia.

  ‘I swore that I would never return to Sainte Agnès. I broke my vow once, for my father’s funeral, and that was enough.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Sonia, ‘I shall go alone. I like Brittany. It is a lovely autumn and I shall walk along the beach and eat oysters in Vannes.’

  Jacques smiled. He thought it was an absurd idea, but these days he did everything he could to humour Sonia. ‘I shall go and book you a first-class train ticket this afternoon,’ he said. ‘You should buy a new coat. It can be very windy in October.’

  Four days later, after a long and uncomfortable train ride, the cab from the nearest station dropped Sonia at the foot of the main street in Sainte Agnès. The lawyer had arranged for the keys to the three properties to be deposited at the pharmacy, though the shop was closed when Sonia tried the door. It was lunchtime, she supposed. In the café opposite she ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine, braving the inspection of the old men playing cards inside. ‘Curious’ would have been a polite word for their gaze, she thought; ‘hostile’ was really closer to the mark; but after a life of dealing with lunatics, she was not daunted by a few half-drunk old men in a bar.

  ‘Does Abbé Henri still live here?’ she said.

  The barman grunted. ‘Top of the hill and down the track. But you won’t get much sense out of him.’

  Sonia rapidly calculated how old he must be by now. Perhaps eighty, she thought.

  ‘Do you know what time the pharmacy opens again?’

  ‘When old Roland wakes up,’ said the barman.

  ‘And when is that?’

  ‘Generally about three.’

  She might as well go and pay her respects to Abbé Henri; it would at least pass the time.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and set off up the street.

  From the blacksmith’s on the right she heard the sound of a hammer on the anvil.

  The next door gave on to a small area, not really a shop, more the front room of a house, that sold wood and tools for carpentry.

  At the top of the hill, Sonia paused and looked down. She was a little out of breath. The bright sky was darkening and clouds were gathering in the direction of the sea.

  She went down the track to Abbé Henri’s house and knocked on the door. It was opened by a housekeeper, who asked Sonia to wait while she went to see if the Curé was at home. She returned with good news: he would be pleased to see her. Sonia followed the woman down a dark corridor and into a pleasantly furnished sitting room with filled bookcases and double doors on to the garden.

  An old man sat by the fire and waved his hand in welcome. ‘Sonia. What a pleasure. Please forgive me if I—’

  ‘Please don’t stand up. I quite understand.’ She took his hand.

  ‘Make yourself at home. Why are you in Sainte Agnès? Are you moving back?’

  ‘No, no.’ Sonia laughed. ‘I have come to look at some properties that have been left to Jacques.’

  ‘How is he? He has not written for a little while.’

  ‘He is well. We live in Paris now.’

  ‘Yes, I know. He wrote to me a few months ago and sent me a very generous amount of money. My church has a mission in Africa, you see. He has always kept in touch.’ Abbé Henri laughed. ‘He was such a funny boy. So passionate. So argumentative. I worried what he would be like if he ever got to medical school.’

  ‘He was always grateful for what you did for him. He could not have done it without your help.’

  Abbé Henri waved a tired hand, dismissively. ‘I enjoyed it. It gave me pleasure.’

  ‘Though I suppose he has not achieved all that he wanted.’

  ‘Well, that is a different matter. No one ever does. No one who truly dares and hopes.’

  The housekeeper brought tea, but as she leaned over Sonia to put down the cup whispered to her not to stay too long. When they had drunk the tea and Sonia had told Abbé Henri a little of what had happened at the schloss, then at the Wilhelmskogel, which he had never visited, she noticed that he seemed to be finding it hard to concentrate.

  ‘I must leave you now,’ she said. ‘Jacques asks to be remembered to you.’

  ‘And I to him. Thank you for visiting me. I remember you both in my prayers. And the one you lost.’

  Sonia kissed his hand, then made her own way to the front door and back on to the track. By the time she reached the pharmacy, it had reopened and a red-faced man in a slightly soiled apron, presumably Roland, gave her the keys, accompanied by a letter telling her how to reach the cottages.

  It seemed that the first was indeed by the sea, and it took her twenty minutes’ hard walking from the village to find it. It was a fisherman’s dwelling, not much more than a hut, set back a little from the beach. The lock yielded and she found herself inside a room with stone walls and an earth floor. There were nets and pots scattered about inside, with an old bicycle propped against a stone sink. She had been in a room like this once before, but she struggled to remember when or where.

  She walked along the beach a little and heard what she thought must be a curlew’s harsh cry on the gathering wind. She looked at the letter of instruction and the small map attached; they flapped noisily in her hands as she breathed in the sea air. The second cottage appeared to be between the first one and Jacques’s old house, so that if she followed the map carefully, it was on her way.

  An early mist was gathering on the low hills, on the reed-spattered dunes that ran up from the rocks then back into the gorse. Sonia quickened her pace until she saw another small, dilapidated building, whitewashed and derelict at the edge of some woods. She took only a cursory look inside. It contained just two rooms and seemed to have belonged to a woodsman; the value of it lay presumably in the land that came with it, though that land itself was poor, so poor, she had once heard Jacques say, that the stones called out for God’s mercy.

  She was now skirting the edge of the village where strong gusts of wind made the shivering pine trees shed their needles on the dark, sanded earth. A badger rolled across the track and disappeared into the bank with a slow, self-important walk. She heard the first drops of rain explode against a windowpane of a grey stone cottage by the road.

  Now she could see Jacques’s house, which she remembered from the day of the funeral; she had to go down through a field to come round to the front of it. She crossed the cobbles of the yard, already glistening from rain, and went past the stable on the right with upper half-door open, turning in the wind. Inside, she could see rafters where a hen was roosting and some lengths of rusted chain lying against a wall.

  At the door, anxious to be out of the rain, she fumbled with the keys, forgetting which ones she had already used. Eventually, the lock turned and she pushed her way into the hall. It was light enough still to see the almost vertical stairs, unbanistered, that rose in front of her. Nothing seemed to have changed.

  The air was pressingly cold; it was restless with absence.

  In the parlour, with its smoke-stained wooden panelling, was the old white stone chimneypiece with the ineptly carved head of a wild boar. There was no furniture in the room, but on the end wall was a gilded mirror whose glass was cracked in silver-green shards, and on a side wall was an oil painting of a nobleman who gazed with timeless indifference at the uninhabited room.

  Something was not right, and Sonia stood quite still, sniffing the air, her ears straining to catch a sound. It was empty. They were dead. Old Rebière and Tante Mathilde and Grand-mère: all gone under the ground.

  She heard a squeali
ng from the unoiled half-door of the stable in the yard as the wind blew outside. It was just an old door that no one had looked after. The house needed people in it, that was all.

  Yet still she stood tensed, aware, and waiting, till at last she heard it, and she knew what she would hear.

  It was a voice, quite soft, and it was not calling her; it was engaged in conversation; it was talking to another. It was a woman’s voice, low and melodic, but somehow unsettled.

  Sonia began to move slowly towards the sound, which seemed to be coming from the next room – what had once been the scullery. She went silently to the doorway and looked in.

  The shutters were closed and it was hard to see at first, but then she was gradually able to make the outline of a figure: a young woman, slight, dark-haired, elegant in a white summer dress and with eyes full of laughter. She was speaking to someone who was not there. Then, aware, it seemed, of Sonia’s presence, she turned towards her. For a moment, in the half-light, the two women looked into one another’s eyes. Sonia thought the other woman smiled, a little. Still talking softly, she moved and walked away, through the door into what had been Grand-mère’s room. Sonia waited for a moment, not sure what to do, then followed quietly; though she knew, really, what she would find when she looked into the room. There were no doors from it but the one that she herself stood in; the windows were closed, the shutters barred, and there was no one there.

  She returned to the parlour and stood for a moment looking up at the stained stripes of ceiling between the grey-painted beams. When her heart had resumed a normal pulse, she found a feeling of peace beginning to spread through her limbs. There was no fear, and she was content not to understand what she had seen; she was more than content: she was reassured to know that there were things that could not be explained.

  One last time she looked about the room, then left and locked the front door behind her. Her watch told her she had half an hour in which to get back to the pharmacy, where she had engaged the cab to return for her, but she did not want to go back just yet: she wanted to be outside, in the rain, on the earth that Jacques and Olivier had trodden as boys. So she set off towards the headland, thinking of the two brothers and their brief time of innocence together.

  After a minute, it was the voice of her own brother that she seemed suddenly to hear. ‘We must turn our lives, so near as we can manage it, day by day, into an extended rapture . . .’ She remembered when he was a child of five or six, and if it was cold, how he would climb into bed with her: the pattern of the candle shadows on the wall, the fiery little boy who needed her arm round him to make him sleep. And now he too was gone: gone into a different world contained within this one, and she was left almost alone to carry on.

  The rain beat into her face, but she did not feel it; she was unaware of the wind that flattened her clothes against her.

  One day, when he was small, about three or four years old, she had given Daniel a bath with her; he sat at the other end of the tub describing the story that he wanted her to tell him, specifying how much of the fox and the rabbit, how much of the bear and the bird, he wanted in it, like someone ordering from a menu in a magnificent restaurant. When she had finished the prescribed story to his satisfaction, got out of the bath, dried and dressed herself, she plucked the small boy from the water and wrapped him in a towel, then carried him through to her bed. She put him gently down, then laid herself on top of him, so that her eyes were against his. She felt the thrumming of the laughter in his tiny ribcage against hers, and her soul moved within her as every cell in her body shuddered with her ravening love.

  And was it worth it? Was it worth the agony of loss? Was this the best that the random evolution of physical matter had thrown up?

  Her jaw hardened a little as she walked onward. It was enough. It was enough, because nothing in any other world that might by chance have existed could have surpassed in majesty what she had felt; and she was transfigured by that joy, always, and even beyond death.

  She turned to walk back towards the village, stiff with age. Beneath her clothes, her breasts hung flat against her ribs, the flesh of her upper arms was loose and the joint of her hip ached. She plodded on, an elderly Englishwoman in a foreign country, though still feeling in her mind a refusal to admit the years, aware of an appetite for whatever lay ahead, still hoping to go on.

  And as she walked, with the faint taste of Abbé Henri’s tea in her mouth, she could feel the ghosts of her dead boys, one unborn, one killed among the mountains: they lay along her nerves like dew on morning grass. She heard Daniel’s voice; she saw the flesh of his boy’s arm creased by the weight of his wicker basket full of toys. The bones of his beautiful hands lived in the cells of her mind, preserved, and open to remembering. The rain was pouring from her hair; and while her eyes were fixed on the path beneath her feet, she accidentally brushed her arm against the extended twig of a larch tree rooted in the earth, which, when it rebounded, sent drops of water over her hair and face.

  She flinched; she was alive, and so was he. In the rain, she kissed the skin of his neck and laid the back of her hand against his cheek. ‘My love,’ she said.

  With difficulty, she raised her head from the path in front, her neck and shoulders seized with damp, and through the drifting columns of rain, she lifted up her eyes to the uninhabited low hills. This is what it means to be alive, she thought again; this is what it feels like to be human. There were questions to which her husband and her brother had bent their minds – had sent themselves as good as mad in trying to answer; but it seemed to Sonia at that moment, drenched and tired as she was, that, perhaps for quite simple reasons connected to the limits of their ability to reason, human beings could live out their whole long life without ever knowing what sort of creatures they really were. Perhaps it did not matter; perhaps what was important was to find serenity in not knowing.

  Her footprints now were in the mud: left and right, the regular, shortish pace of an adult female – clear marks for a moment on the earth. She watched carefully where she placed her feet, not wishing to slip and damage her brittle bones; she saw the pools of water and the white stones that punctured the dark soil ahead of her.

  Then the long trail of her footprints, stretching back towards the sea, became slowly indistinct as each one filled with water and edged in upon itself; and in a matter of minutes, as darkness began to fall, the shape of the foot was lost at every pace until the last vestiges of her presence were washed away, the earth closing over as though no one had passed by.

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The main characters in this book are fictional, but readers might like to know that all the doctors whose work is either quoted or referred to were real people and did hold the views ascribed to them.

  The actual words of the lectures on hysteria and traumatic hysteria given by Professor Jean-Martin Charcot in chapters seven and eight have been invented, but they are intended to reflect accurately what Charcot taught and are based on the content of his published lectures. Professor Charcot’s renown, his style of lecturing and his audience were as described here. My depiction of the Salpêtrière at that time is as close to the reality as I can make it, and the various disciples of Charcot, including Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Marie and Joseph Babinski, existed as described, as did Mlle Cottard and Blanche Wittmann. Of the many books on Charcot, the one on which I drew most was Charcot: Constructing Neurology by Christopher G. Goetz, Michel Bonduelle and Toby Gelfand (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and I acknowledge this debt with thanks.

  Throughout the novel I have aimed for factual accuracy in matters of real people, dates and so on. To this end, I enlisted the help of several specialists in their field, all of whom, I hope, are thanked below.

  Dr Wilhelm Fliess held the views ascribed to him on see here and published the book whose title is there mentioned; he was a minor but significant figure in the early days of psychoanalysis. The letter quoted on see here was indeed received b
y him on the date mentioned.

  Jacques Rebière’s theory of psychophysical resolution, outlined in chapter ten, is intended to bear a close resemblance to that of its famous contemporary, psychoanalysis. I am indebted to The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry by Henri F. Ellenberger (Paris; New York: Basic Books, 1970) for its description of the published nineteenth-century French and German writing that could have enabled a pupil of Charcot’s with an appetite to read further to develop his own theory without reference to work inVienna. I should like to thank Richard Webster for his many stimulating thoughts, particularly on traumatic hysteria. I am also grateful to Dr Michael Neve at the Wellcome Trust Centre for History of Medicine at University College, London for directing me to the work of Pierre Janet as providing further historical precedent for this kind of procedure outside strictly psychoanalytic circles.

  Readers unfamiliar with early case studies in psychoanalysis may be surprised at the flexibility of some of the logical connections made in the course of the fictional history of Fräulein Katharina von A. Those who have read these gripping documents, on the other hand, will recognise that the use of paradox is central to their method – as is a willingness to move between conscious and unconscious, concealed or transparent motivation, or to invoke a mixture of the two, according to what the circumstances of the narrative appear to require. My rule of thumb in this chapter was that every leap of connection made by Jacques should have in the published literature of psychoanalysis a precedent (preferably several) that was more energetic or more fanciful.

  I do not think that novels should contain bibliographies, because making lists of books at the end of a work of fiction is usually an attempt to shore up a flimsy text – as though all art aspired to the condition of a student essay. However, I feel that, in this instance, because I have had to draw on expert opinion to an unusual extent, I must make an exception and acknowledge a few selected people on whose work I depended. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1977) is a controversial book, sometimes referred to, with due warning lights, as a ‘cult classic’. One does not have to accept all Professor Jaynes’s speculations in neuroscience, archaeology or anthropology to be stimulated by his main thesis: that the hearing of voices was once commonplace and that the loss of the ability to hear them coincided with the generation of modern human consciousness. What Thomas Midwinter tells Hannes Regensburger in Africa is inspired by Jaynes’s remarkable book as well as by Thomas’s education and personal experience.