Читать книгу Sins of the Flesh - Колин Маккалоу, Colleen McCullough - Страница 9

Jess Wainfleet kept nothing of her professional life in the small house she owned one block behind the middle reaches of Millstone Beach; it was purely a gesture at the normality of having a private address. When HI had been built in 1960 she had fought to be let have an apartment on the premises, only to find her arguments overridden on the grounds that her own mental health was best safeguarded by living off-site. Once informed of the decision, she had accepted it with grace, and immediately acquired her house in Millstone, a shortish, cross-country drive from the Asylum.

The place did come in handy, she admitted; it was somewhere to put her enormous collection of papers, journals and books, it held her wardrobe of clothes, it had laundry facilities, and it was a mailing address. What it was not was a home: that was HI, for Jess was one of those people who literally lived for her work.

Within six months of HI’s being finished, she had organized herself. A bathroom in close proximity to her suite of offices became exclusively hers; opening off it was a room originally intended as a rest and recuperation area for a member of the staff feeling under the weather, and this too Jess commandeered. To all extents and purposes the Director of HI was enabled to live on the premises provided neither bathroom nor rest room suggested that she was making a home there.

Riddled with complexes and well aware of the degree of her obsessive-compulsive psychosis, Jess had managed to make an iceberg of them; what showed was the tip, the rest successfully buried. It would not have been possible were she intimately involved with another person, but since her psychic weaknesses were benign and she had no intimate friend, her colleagues accepted her failings as they did their own—as part and parcel of the profession.

The only person who had ever broken through Jess’s defensive wall was Ivy Ramsbottom, a fellow obsessive of about the same degree—everything compulsively straightened, catalogued and tidied, without going over the top into a clinical mania.

“The world is full of people like us,” Jess had said to Ivy on first meeting, just after noting that Ivy’s china-headed pins were stuck in their little cushion in a shaded pattern that turned them into a graduated rainbow. “It would kill you to stick a black-headed pin into that row of red ones, wouldn’t it?”

A startled Ivy laughed, and owned that it would.

Jess had been walking on Holloman Green to take in the beauty of its copper beeches when her eye caught a fascinating picture framed by cuprous leaves: a jet-black shop window containing three unrealistically slender plastic mannequins, a bride and two bridesmaids clad in fabulous dresses. Above the black window it said in white letters Rha Tanais Bridal. Unable to resist, Jess had crossed the road and walked into the shop. It was a large premises whose changing booths were big enough to hold a client in a full crinoline, and whose dress racks were entirely devoted to wedding clothes.

An extremely tall, attractive woman in a modish purple dress approached her, smiling.

“You’re here out of curiosity, not custom,” the woman said as she shook hands. “I’m Ivy Ramsbottom.”

“I’m Dr. Jess Wainfleet, a psychiatrist,” Jess said bluntly, “and your window fascinated me. The crowds it draws! Even cars passing by slow down to a crawl.”

“There’s not a woman born doesn’t yearn to be a bride. Come into my den and have an espresso.”

That had been eight years ago. The friendship had bloomed, mostly because of their shared obsessive tendencies—it was so good to have someone to laugh with about them! In Ivy, the type was pure, extending to meticulously straight notes on a refrigerator door and the pattern on the china facing all the same way, whereas in Jess it was joined by a manic quality that pushed her to work too hard, sometimes become impatient.

Of course by now Jess knew Ivy’s story, and had been of help to her; the insights and sensitivities of her field made her the best kind of confidante an Ivy could ask for. If there was pain and sorrow in it, that was because Ivy couldn’t reciprocate with the kind of advice Jess’s problems needed. Those, she continued to bear alone and unaided save for the act of friendship itself.

So after the salon at Rha and Rufus’s place, Jess visited her house only long enough to change out of evening wear into an HI outfit of trousers and a plain blouse; then she went home: that is, she drove out to the Asylum.

First step was to patrol her kingdom, its shiplike corridors of rails and unmarked, anonymous doors; sometimes she opened one and entered a particularly beloved room, such as the neuro O.R. When she had agreed to take this job in 1959, she had insisted that HI have all the appurtenances of a general hospital; it cost money, yes, but general hospitals weren’t geared for criminally insane patients in any way, especially security. So when an Asylum prisoner became ill, he was treated at HI, even including surgery or intensive care. Of course the O.R. was also used for experimental animal surgery, chiefly primates—how did one deal with the Todo Sataras of this world, with their tax dollars and inability to understand that trying to treat the violently insane in a general hospital ended up being more expensive than an HI?

Finally, as the big clock on the wall opposite her desk said 4.47 a.m., she eased into the padded armchair behind her desk and opened the cupboard door that occupied her desk’s right side. A safe with a combination lock came into view. Cupping her hand around the striated and sparsely numbered disc, she performed the necessary twirls back and forth until, with a faint “thunk” the last tumbler disengaged. Her hand dropped. A stupid thing to do—anyone trying to see her manipulate the disc would have to have eyes in the end of the chair arm, yet still she did it every single time. That was the obsession, of course. Like knowing no one’s back was going to break because you trod on a crack—but what if someone’s back did break? Therefore you stepped over the crack just to make sure. Rituals were so powerful, so stuffed with meanings that went all the way back to the apes.

“Language,” she said as she lifted bundle after bundle of files out of the safe, “is an expression of the complexity in a brain. Like the verb ‘want.’ An animal can indicate want by making some physical movement or gesture of vocalization aimed at want fulfilment. ‘I want it!’ Only a human can actually say it, including indications of the degree of want, the specific kind of want, the niche want occupies. Without moving any muscles except those of the lips and tongue and upper airway. How do the pathways open up between an infant’s saying ‘I want!’ and a mature adult’s saying ‘I want, but I can’t have my want because to take it would destroy someone else’s superior entitlement to it?’”

Her voice died to a mutter. “What, in the pathways to maturation, can possibly overcome the most primal urge of all—want? Oh, Jess, there is an answer, and you’re the one will find that answer, you are, you are!”

It was a big office, and well furnished, but she hadn’t lit the overhead fluorescents, just flicked on the green-shaded lamp goosenecked to her desk; the room’s far corners were plunged into utter darkness, and unexpected shadows lurked, shook, trembled whenever the worker at the desk changed position. Something in Jess loved this encroaching blackness—as if she, and she alone, held it at bay; it was a harmless demonstration of power, and, being harmless, could be condoned. Mindless power—now that was something else again, never to be condoned.