Turning Back the Sun(8)
“Does that hurt?”
He said, “Enough to convince me that I have to go somewhere else—but I don”t know how.” He met the analyst”s gaze, but could not read it. “I wouldn”t have come to you if it weren”t a professional requirement.”
If the man felt affronted, he did not show it. In this country, as elsewhere, anyone seeking psychiatric training had to submit to analysis himself. Yet the town contained only this school medical officer, whose own grounding went little deeper than a dabbling in books sent from Europe.
Perhaps it was because Rayner felt no respect for the officer—an angular, puzzled-looking man—that he expressed his alienation in irate bursts. “I feel I”m wasting away here.” He felt this almost physically sometimes. “I can”t even do a real job … Sometimes I wonder if I”m treating human beings at all. Days go by without my patients asking me a single question about their condition, why they”re suffering—nothing. I might as well be treating cattle. This sounds harsh, but that”s how it is … and the hospital”s hopelessly short of specialists. I”ve found myself doing jobs I”m virtually unqualified for. An ordinary doctor in the capital would never be sewing up some of the wounds which I”ve sewn. But here it”s common practice.”
The man said: “I suppose it”s practical, country medicine.”
“It”s terrifying.”
“But you”re needed here, aren”t you? Respected.”
“Am I?” Rayner laughed, but with a trace of bitterness. “That just lowers my respect for others.”
The officer asked, “But where do you want to go?”
Rayner answered with faint surprise, “The capital.” Where else, he wondered, did anyone want to go? Recently he had published some articles on psoriasis, the skin disease—the hospital laboratory had rudimentary facilities for analyzing it—and he still hoped for a transfer to the dermatology unit in the capital. He”d take any job they offered.
“The capital …” The analyst started jotting things on his pad. “You were born in the capital?”
“Yes.” Rayner became mesmerized by the man”s forehead as he wrote. Its dust of greying hair receded in uneven clumps, as if it had been swept by a bush fire. He imagined the swarm of trite thoughts that might be entering it, and said curtly, “My childhood was happy. It was just too brief.”
“Your parents …”
“My father died when I was fourteen, my mother five years later. In a car crash. That”s how I got this.” He flourished his twisted foot.
The analyst, he knew now, would edge him towards his childhood. Yet this did not spring up in the simple, sharp pictures which the man must want, but in composite images accrued over months and years—images which seemed to stand surety, by their very ordinariness, for a whole season, or place, or person.
In the summer of his fifteenth birthday his mother had rented a villa by the sea, but his memories of it had resolved into pictures from which everything temporary—all movement, guests, bird flight—had been eliminated, like a camera shot on so long an exposure that only the essential and permanent ingrained itself. He could remember the jagged circle of every rock pool which perforated the shore at low tide, and each item of the villa”s furniture. Yet in his memory the place was unpeopled. Where had his mother been? He did not know. His images of her now were pathetically selective and few. And the effort to preserve these remnants had turned them too familiar, blurred by use, not memories of a woman anymore, just memories of memories.
He did not know how much of his mother he could accurately reproduce for the analyst. But the man said, “Tell me what she was to you. Her reality to you.”
But even then she did not appear easily. He remembered her as a pervasive presence more than a physical fact. He had been a solitary child, and he perceived this mother of his boyhood not as a spectator or confidante, but as a benign voice offstage. Of her real life at this time, he could piece together almost nothing.
“Who do you prefer,” she had once asked him, “your father or me?” and the fact that he remembered this question, and the intensity in her soft, sallow face, was a little strange. But he was only five, and he answered, “You.”
Later she became fixed more securely in his memory, inseparable from the big, airy house with its bleached furnishings and feel of internal sunlight. Its dreamy spaces suited her. She was absent-mindedly tender. After his father”s death, the flushed cheeks and dishevelled hair of her occasional drinking touched him with alarm. Perhaps they had become too used to happiness, he thought, because he did not know this other woman.
“Until then I hadn”t thought of understanding her.”
The analyst did not answer.
Rayner said irritably, “I suppose this is somehow meant to affect my relationships with women now.”
The man inclined his strange head, as if listening.
Yet when Rayner thought of these relationships, they seemed too amorphous to describe. However impassioned—and some had preoccupied him for years—they had been conducted in the knowledge that one day he would leave here. His final commitment was to somewhere else. He said, “I haven”t found anyone right for me.” He sounded apologetic, even to himself. “Perhaps I”ve unconsciously chosen women unsuitable to marry … because I know I won”t stay.”