The Mandelbaum Gate (19 page)

‘I’m
sure I said nothing out of place,’ Freddy said. ‘Sure of it.’

‘So am
I.’

‘But I
agree, that’s a question that is bound to arise. Well, it’ll all come back,
anyway. A good night’s sleep —’

Gardnor
now took the hint, swallowed down his drink and left. Freddy, on that first
night of his return from oblivion, pondered for some hours, lying awake in his
exhaustion. He had a sense of having exerted himself a great deal, of having
been to a number of different places. But what had he done and where? His
memory gave no answer. Freddy gave up for the night; he let his mind murmur
ironically to itself the boast: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and
he fell asleep, turning his mind’s tongue on Hotspur’s reply: ‘But will they
come when you do call for them?’

‘I am told very privately,’
Freddy said, ‘that she is hiding somewhere in Jordan, and is safe so far.
Where exactly she is, or whether she will remain safe is another question. I
don’t know. My informant could say nothing about that. I intend to mention
nothing to the authorities until she’s .out of the country, and I know of
course, Joanna, that you won’t either.’

‘We won’t
breathe a word,’ said Matt. ‘Who told you she’s still in the country?’.

‘I’m
not in a position to say who my informant is.’

Abdul
Ramdez had in fact come to Freddy at the hotel, the day after his visit to
Acre, to give him the information that Freddy had asked for. ‘She’s still in
Jordan, she’s in hiding. She’s safe so far. But you will not inform the
authorities, Mr Hamilton, or she will no longer be safe, and moreover, someone
very close to me will be in danger also. I can say no more.’

‘You
can trust me, Abdul,’ Freddy said. ‘If there’s something I can do to help her,
anything that you may hear of, let me know. When will she be leaving Jordan?
How will she manage it unobserved?’

‘I
think soon. She will get away. I don’t know how it is to be arranged. I tell
you all that I am able, as you are so anxious.’

‘I won’t
forget this kindness, Abdul.’

Freddy
said to Joanna, once more, ‘Not a word. It might lead to bloodshed.’

‘Oh,
Freddy, I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about bloodshed.’

‘It’s a
dangerous part of the world,’ Freddy said. ‘So I beg you. not a word to a soul.’

‘Of
course not. They would only start searching —’

‘Now,
Joanna, don’t blame yourself,’ said her husband. ‘You were perfectly all right
to her.’

‘It was
I who was at fault,’ said Freddy. ‘It was—’

‘Now,
Freddy, we’ve had all that. Do put your feet up and rest. It’s you we’re
worried about.’

‘It was
the beginning of my sunstroke,’ Freddy said. ‘You’ve got to rest. Sit on the
sofa, Freddy. That chair’s uncomfortable.’

‘I can’t
rest,’ Freddy said.

He called the partial
collapse from which he was still suffering his ‘sunstroke’ for want of any
better explanation of its cause. Dr Jarvis, on his second visit to Freddy at
the hotel, had thought it was probably an attack of ‘coast memory’, which he
said was a type of amnesia that affected white men in the tropics. especially
Africa.

‘That
would be caused by sunstroke,’ Freddy had said.

It was
difficult to know the point at which one was justified in being affronted by a
doctor’s remark. This particular quack, Freddy considered, had gone a bit far
when he had replied, in an off-hand sort of way, that he believed this type of
amnesia was sometimes hysteric in origin but that of course he did not know
what type of amnesia it was — he wasn’t a specialist in that subject.

‘Well,’
Freddy had said, aloofly, ‘I hope — I
hope
— that it isn’t hysteric in
origin.’

‘Hysteria
in the medical sense doesn’t mean, necessarily, a wild outbreak of emotion,
screaming and so on,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s a term we use.’

‘Oh, I
know all that,’ said Freddy.

This
doctor said, ‘We may use the word “hysteric” to describe any symptom — it may
only be a headache or a stomach disorder, caused by some form of mental
disturbance.’

‘Yes,
but I’ve got no mental disturbance,’ Freddy said firmly. ‘So if you are
thinking of recommending me to see a psychiatrist, my answer is no. Not while I’ve
got my wits about me, and remain officially sane, do I consult any
psychiatrist.’

‘Your
sanity isn’t in question,’ the doctor said, as one appealing to reason. Freddy
felt deeply resentful of this doctor, who was an English Jew, now an Israeli
practising in Jerusalem. His name was Jarvis. Many Foreign Service personnel,
including the British, used him for their regular doctor. He had already
attended Freddy, some months ago, when Freddy had arrived in the country with
an arm swollen and inflamed from a new vaccination. Dr Jarvis had seemed a very
agreeable and efficient fellow at that time, but now Freddy found himself in
unaccustomed distress; he felt a choking resentment and could hardly recognize
himself in the sensation. Why, he thought, is this Jew called Jarvis? It’s an
old English name, how does he come by Jarvis? His father must have been
Jarvinsky or something; I should just like to ask him which of the Jarvises he
is, which of the two branches, the Kent Jarvises or the others in Wales. I
should just like to see how he’d answer that question. Jarvis, indeed, with his
talk of mental disturbances. But Freddy, in his distress, was still graced with
those habits of good behaviour which restrain wild-running excesses of
thought; he was endowed also with that gift which some men keep furtively out
of sight like a family skeleton, an inward court of appeal with powers to
reverse all varieties of mental verdicts. And in the space of time that it took
Dr Jarvis to sit down at the table in Freddy’s hotel sitting-room and write out
a prescription, Freddy reflected, I suppose the man is performing his job
according to his lights.

Bewildered
as Freddy was, and gripped intermittently by waves of panic about his forgotten
days, he said, ‘My father had a favourite joke about psychiatrists. He used to
say, “Anyone who consults a psychiatrist wants his head examined.”‘

Dr
Jarvis smiled as one who tries to do so. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I haven’t said a
word to you about a psychiatrist. In fact, I haven’t got a great deal of time
for them, myself. They all hold different theories. There’s hardly two who
would treat a patient in the same way. You don’t know where you are with them.
They’re a lot of bloody robbers as well. I’ve known people, sick people, remain
in the hands of psychiatrists, two sessions a week, for twenty years, and
nothing to show for it.’

‘You
don’t say so!, Freddy said, cheering up a little. ‘Twenty years …’ A few days’
temporary absence of mind due to sunstroke was really nothing to worry about.

‘All I
was going to suggest,’ said Jarvis, ‘was that we get a diagnosis, as far as
that’s possible, to see what caused your loss of memory and perhaps prevent it
happening again.’

‘What
sort of diagnosis? Who from?’ Freddy said. ‘I don’t want to be unreasonable,
but these mental specialists — as you say yourself, they aren’t agreed, they’ve
got no proof, no unassailable theory. Whereas if you settle for sunstroke,
well, that’s an old-established thing, and you know where you are.’

‘Let’s
make it sunstroke,’ said Jarvis.

‘Oh,
all right, I’m willing to be diagnosed,’ Freddy said. ‘I’ll go as far as that.
But I won’t necessarily accept their diagnosis, or act on it, or answer their
probing questions. Probing questions are plain bad manners to me, and that’s
the long and the short of it.’

‘Oh,
well, bad manners, good manners — they don’t exist in the Unconscious.’

‘I don’t
believe there’s such a thing as the Unconscious,’ Freddy said. ‘How could there
be a certainty about something unconscious? If something is unconscious then
it’s unknown. So the Unconscious is only a hypothesis at the best.’

‘Hypnosis
is sometimes employed in cases of amnesia,’ said the doctor, his face
abstracted from Freddy’s protests, ‘to establish association with whatever has
caused it. There’s also a recent drug that releases memory, but I’d have to
look into it.’

‘I
would never agree to be hypnotized. Out of the question. No one should submit
their mind to another mind:

He that complies against his will

Is of his own opinion still.

—
that’s
my
motto. I won’t be brain-washed, thank you.’

Jarvis
was unmoved. ‘I don’t advise further consultation at the moment. Seeing how you
feel about it, there wouldn’t be any point. It would only tend to make you feel
worse. I’m going to insist that you take some leave. Get these pills: three a
day, half an hour before meals.’

‘Are
these the memory drugs?’ Freddy inquired, scrutinizing the prescription.

‘No,
that isn’t the drug I referred to. Those are just old-fashioned sedatives.’

‘I feel
perfectly all right, actually,’ Freddy said. ‘Perfectly normal.’

He felt
terrible, actually, and when the doctor had left, he sat with his head in his
hands, while currents of horror, unidentifiable, unknown to experience,
charged through his mind and body continually. Mind or body, it was impossible
to distinguish one from the other, they were both and neither. The telephone
rang. It was Gardnor, wanting to come round for a little chat, as he put it.
Freddy said he would see him at five-thirty. He shivered although the day was
warm. He poured lots of water on his neglected geraniums. He shivered again.
Then he got his winter suit out of his cabin-trunk where it hung among the
moth-balls. If he still shivered by evening, Freddy decided, he would then put
it on. What day of the week was it? Time was apt to become confusing.

Before
lunch that day, some letters were brought up to him. One from Ma, one from his
sister Elsie and one from Joanna. Freddy decided to spend the afternoon writing
letters. He took his letters down to lunch with him, but read only Joanna’s:

Thank
God you’ve been found, Freddy dear, we were off our heads with anxiety. And
whatever can you have done with Barbara Vaughan? — Of course, it’s only a
coincidence, your disappearing together, but really Freddy, we did seriously
wonder if you’d eloped with her!! I’m in constant touch with the people at
your
end, in case there’s anything I can do at this end, Rupert Gardnor tells us
you’re in good hands. Follow the doctor’s advice, won’t you, Freddy dear,
and…

Freddy decided to start a
set of verses in terza
rima
for Joanna. He did, in fact, start them on
the way upstairs after lunch, but then he fell asleep. When he woke it was half
past three. He wondered what had happened to Miss Vaughan. then lost the
thought. He checked the calendar — Wednesday, the 16th of August. It would not
do to go wrong again. He opened Ma’s letter.

He
could not make head nor tail of most of it. She kept referring to her ‘last
letter’ in which she had apparently described some dreadful threat of Benny’s
following some new dreadful upset about the old garnet brooch. It was plain,
Freddy thought, that she had forgotten to post, or perhaps had not even
written, this last letter. At all events, Freddy did not know what she was
talking about, and could only guess that the two old women were being tiresome
as usual. He decided to ignore the bit about Benny, her threats, and the garnet
brooch, and reply only to Ma’s query about Eichmann. who she fancied was a
famous pianist she had met in the old days.

His
sister’s letter was a brief intimation that her friend, Miss Rickward, was to
arrive in Jordan next week-end and that she believed Freddy knew a Barbara
Vaughan, who taught at Miss Rickward’s school. ‘Between ourselves,’ Elsie had
written, ‘it was a shock for Miss Rickward to learn that Barbara Vaughan was
engaged. Poor Miss Rickward is making a trip out there to see what Miss Vaughan
is up to and so on, and any assistance you can give …’

Freddy
put them aside. He would answer all the letters tomorrow. Perhaps in the
morning. Abdul was coming tomorrow. Freddy fell asleep again till Gardnor
arrived at five-thirty.

By the
end of that week Freddy realized that he was more than ordinarily a subject of
concern at the Legation. Gardnor came on four successive evenings, and on
Friday took Freddy to his flat for dinner. Freddy was touched beyond the
ordinary. There was a look of private strain about Gardnor that Freddy had not
noticed before.

It
appeared that Gardnor’s report had set off an agitation in the office. Freddy
was not quite clear what it was about, but it seemed that most of them felt he
should be in hospital, receiving treatment for his lost memory.

‘It
will come back in its own time,’ Freddy said.

Rupert
Gardnor was now very much on Freddy’s side. He was extremely anxious to impress
on Freddy that any form of treatment, especially hypnosis, would constitute,
in his view, a weak course of action.

On
Friday they sat drinking in the leafy courtyard of Freddy’s hotel.