Enduring Love (29 page)

“I hate you,” Rachael shouted. “Go away!”

Just then we were called to eat, but before we reached the shore, Rachael pinched my arm, to let me know we were not finished yet.

The food prompted talk of Italy and holidays. The children joined in with evidently confused memories of a beach where parrots lived, and fir trees growing by a volcano, and, from Rachael alone, a glass-bottomed boat. Leo disputed that such a thing could exist. Because the boat had been hired for a day, the volcano climbed by means of a six-hour hike, and Leo carried much of the way, we inferred the energetic presence of John Logan, though even the boy did not refer to him directly now.

By the time we had finished lunch, wine and sunshine were making the adults lazy. Bored with us, the children took pieces of apple to feed to the ponies. Jean began to explain how Rachael was missing her father but refused to talk about it. “I saw her talking to you in the river. She attaches herself to any man who comes into the house. She seems to feel there’s something she can get from them she can never have from me. She’s so trusting. I wish I knew what it is she’s looking for. Perhaps it’s just the sound of a man’s voice.”

We were watching the children as she spoke. They were wandering
further upriver. At a certain distance from his mother, Leo glanced back, then slipped his hand into his sister’s. Jean was starting to tell us how well the children looked out for each other when she suddenly broke off and said, “Oh God! There she is. That must be her.”

We sat up and turned to look. I got to my feet.

“I know I asked you to do this,” Jean said quickly. “But I don’t think I can meet her. It’s too soon for me. And she’s brought someone with her. Her father. Or perhaps he’s her lawyer. I don’t want to talk to her. I thought I did …”

Clarissa put her hand on Jean’s arm. “It’s all right,” she said.

The couple had stopped a dozen yards away and stood side by side, waiting for me. The girl looked away as I approached. I knew she was a student. She looked about twenty, and she was very pretty, the incarnation of Jean Logan’s worst fears. The man was James Reid, Euler Professor of Logic at the girl’s college. We shook hands and said our names. The professor was hardly older than me, fifty perhaps, and rather plump. He introduced the student as Bonnie Deedes, and as I took her hand I could imagine how an older man might risk everything. It was the kind of prettiness I would have dismissed as a cliché if I’d heard it described—that blond, blue-eyed peachiness that drew a line of descent from Marilyn Monroe. She wore cutoff jeans and a ragged pink shirt. The professor, by contrast, was in a linen suit and tie.

“Well,” he said through a sigh, “shall we get this over with?” He was looking at his student, who looked down at her sandaled feet (the nails were painted red) and nodded miserably.

I led them across to the picnic and made the introductions. Jean would not look at Bonnie, and she in turn kept her eyes on her professor. I invited them to sit. Bonnie diplomatically arranged herself cross-legged on the grass, just at the edge of the groundsheet.
Reid compromised between dignity and politeness by half kneeling. He looked at me and I nodded.

He placed his hands on his knee and stared at the ground a moment, focusing his thoughts, the habit of a lifetime’s lecturing. “We’ve come,” he said at last, “to explain and apologize.” He addressed his words to Jean, but she kept her gaze on the vivid remains of the pizza. “You’re living through this tragedy, this terrible loss, and heaven knows, the last thing you need is this extra pain. That scarf left behind in your husband’s car was Bonnie’s—there’s no doubt about that.”

Jean interrupted. Her ferocious gaze was suddenly on the girl. “Then perhaps I ought to hear it from her.”

But Bonnie simply wilted in the heat of that gaze. She could not speak, nor did she dare look up.

Reid continued. “She was there, all right. But I was too, you see. We were together.” He looked at Jean and let this sink in. Then he said, “I’ll put it at its simplest. Bonnie and I are in love. Thirty years between us, all very foolish, but there it is, we’re in love. We’ve kept it secret, and we know that soon we’re going to have to face all kinds of complication and upset. We never imagined that our clumsy attempts at concealment would cause such distress, and I hope that when I’ve explained what happened, you’ll find a way to forgive us.”

Far away along the riverbank we heard the children calling to each other. Jean sat quietly. Her left hand was across her mouth, as if to restrain herself from speech.

“My position at the college and with the university is about to become impossible. It’ll be a relief to resign. But that needn’t concern you.” He was looking at the girl, trying to catch her eye, but she wasn’t playing along.

“Until recently, Bonnie and I had a rule never to be seen together in Oxford. Now we’re throwing it all to the winds. On the day this
happened, we’d planned a picnic in the Chilterns. I picked Bonnie up from a bus stop on the edge of town. We’d gone less than a mile together when my car broke down. We pushed it into a lay-by, and that’s when she persuaded me that we shouldn’t give up on the day. The car could be sorted out later. We should try and hitch a lift. So I cowered behind Bonnie, feeling terribly self-conscious and wondering if someone would recognize me. After a couple of minutes a car stopped, and it was your husband, on his way to London. He was very friendly and kind. If he guessed about us, he didn’t show any disapproval. Quite the contrary. He offered to make a detour from the motorway and drop us up by Christmas Common. We were almost at the place when we saw the man and boy having trouble with their balloon in the strong wind. I didn’t really take it in fully—I was sitting in the back, you see. Your husband pulled over sharply and without a word went running over to help. We got out to watch. I’m not a very physically active person, and there seemed to be quite a few people going in to sort it out, so at first, at least, it seemed sensible to stay put. I don’t think I would have been much use. Then the whole ghastly thing started to get out of hand, and we realized that we should try and get over and help them hold the balloon down, and we started to run. Then it was too late, the balloon was up in the air—and you know the rest.”

Reid hesitated over his choice of words. His voice dropped, and I had to lean forward to hear.

“After he fell, we were in a terrible state. It was panic, really. We went off down a footpath, trying to calm ourselves and think what to do. We left the car far behind and forgot that our picnic was in it, as well as Bonnie’s scarf. We walked for hours. I’m ashamed to say that one of my worries was that if we came forward as witnesses, I would have to explain what I was doing in the middle of the countryside with one of my students. We just didn’t know what to do.

“A few hours later we found ourselves walking into Watlington. We went into a pub to find out about buses or taxis. Standing at the bar was a man telling the barman and a group of regulars what had happened that afternoon. It was obvious he was one of the men who had been hanging on the ropes. We couldn’t help ourselves letting him know that we had been there too. These things bind you together, you know, and you have to talk. The people who hadn’t been there seemed like outsiders. We ended up going home with this fellow, Joseph Lacey, to talk more, and that was when I told him of my problem. Later on, he drove us back to Oxford, and on the way he gave us this advice. He thought there were enough witnesses to the accident. There was no need for us to add our accounts. But he also said that if it turned out there were disagreements, or conflicting stories, then he would get in touch with me, and I could think again. So. We never came forward. I know it’s caused you distress, and I’m deeply, deeply sorry.”

At these words I became aware once more of the meadow, the golden swaths of buttercups, a pack of horses and ponies galloping toward the village at the far end, the distant drone of the ring road, and close by, on the river, a sailing race proceeding with silent intensity. The children were walking slowly toward us, deep in conversation. Clarissa was unobtrusively packing the picnic away.

“Oh God,” Jean sighed.

“He was a terribly brave man,” the professor offered her, just as I had once. “It’s the kind of courage the rest of us can only dream about. But can you ever forgive us for being so selfish, so careless?”

“Of course I can,” she said angrily. There were tears in her eyes. “But who’s going to forgive me? The only person who can is dead.”

Reid was speaking over her, telling her she must not think that way. Jean raised her voice again to castigate herself. The professor’s reassurances tangled with her words. This breathless scrambling for
forgiveness seemed to me almost mad, Mad Hatterish, here on the riverbank where Lewis Carroll, the dean of Christ Church, had once entertained the darling objects of his own obsessions. I caught Clarissa’s eye and we exchanged a half-smile, and it was as if we were pitching our own requests for mutual forgiveness, or at least tolerance, in there with Jean’s and Reid’s frantic counterpoint. I shrugged as though to say that, like her in her letter, I just did not know.

At last we were all standing. The picnic was stowed, the groundsheet folded up. Bonnie, who had still not spoken, had wandered a few steps away, and by her restless movements indicated she was impatient to go. She was either dim, a genuine dumb blonde, or contemptuous of us all. Reid was hovering helplessly, anxious to oblige her but constrained by politeness to make a proper farewell. I slung the backpack over my shoulder and was about to go and say goodbye and put him out of his misery when Rachael and Leo appeared on either side of me.

I’ve never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand. They drew me away with them toward the little muddy beach, where we stood and faced the slow brown expanse of water.

“So now,” Rachael said, “tell Leo as well. Say it again slowly, that thing about the river.”

Reprinted from
The British Review of Psychiatry

Robert Wenn, MB Bch. MRCPsych, & Antonio Camia, MA, MB, DRCOG, MRCPsych

A homoerotic obsession, with religious overtones: a clinical variant of de Clerambault’s syndrome

“Erotic delusions,” “erotomania,” and the associated pathologies of love have produced a rich and varied literature which describes, at
one extreme, unusual behavior or acceptable occurrences without psychopathological implications, and at the other, strange variants encompassed by a schizophrenic psychosis. The earliest references are to be found in Plutarch, Galen, and Cicero, and as a review of the literature by Enoch & Trethowan (1979) makes clear, the term “erotomania” has suffered from the very beginning from a lack of clear definition.

In 1942 de Clerambault carefully delineated the paradigm that bears his name, a syndrome he termed
les psychoses passionelles
, or “pure erotomania,” to distinguish it from more generally accepted erotic paranoid states. The patient, or “subject,” usually a woman, has the intense delusional belief that a man, the “object,” often of higher social standing, is in love with her. The patient may have had little or no contact with the object of her delusion. The fact that the object is already married is likely to be regarded by the patient as irrelevant. His protestations of indifference or even hatred are seen as paradoxical or contradictory; her conviction that he “really” loves her remains fixed. Other derived themes include beliefs that the object will never find true happiness without her, and also that the relationship is universally acknowledged and approved. De Clerambault was emphatic that in the pure form of the condition onset was precise and sudden, even explosive, and that this was an important differentiating factor; paranoid erotic states, he believed, probably erroneously (Enoch & Trethowan 1979), developed gradually.

Central to de Clerambault’s paradigm was what he termed a “fundamental postulate” of the patient having “a conviction of being in amorous communication with a person of much higher rank, who has been the first to fall in love and was the first to make advances.” Such communication may take the form of secret signals, direct contact, and the deployment of “phenomenal resources” to meet the
patient’s needs. She feels she is watching over and protecting the object of her delusion.

In one of his earliest and most celebrated cases, de Clerambault described a fifty-three-year-old Frenchwoman who believed King George V was in love with her. She persistently pursued him from 1918 onward, paying several visits to England:

Over the years, as more cases are described, there has been a tendency both to broaden and to clarify the defining criteria: not only women suffer, not only heterosexual attraction is involved. At least one of de Clerambault’s patients was male, and more male sufferers have been identified since. In their survey of mostly male patients, Mullen and Pathe (1994) conclude that in intrusiveness and dangerousness, men predominate. Homosexual cases have been reported by Mullen & Pathe, by Lovett Doust & Christie (1978), by Enoch and his coworkers, by Raskin & Sullivan (1974), and by Wenn & Camia (1990).