David Baddiel – The Death of Eli Gold (страница 19)

‘Why don’t …?’ Violet began, about to suggest asking the waitress, but before she could finish he had leant across the table, his pinched waist awkwardly angled against the Formica edge, and extended his long index finger towards the window. On the fogged-up glass, he wrote: Inside the radiator, a coral reef.

‘What use is that?’ she said, as he sat back in his chair, surveying his handiwork with a satisfied air. Various other diners in the Piccolo were looking round from their tea and cakes and staring. Violet felt annoyed by this action. When he had written on the ceiling in the Eagle it had felt spontaneous, a sheer outpouring of self, but this had an element of self-consciousness about it, of deeply considered writ-erliness. It felt contrived. ‘Are you going to telephone a glazier? To cut the window out for you?’

She noticed you could now see through the window, or at least through the bits of window revealed by his letters. This fractional view obscured the daily commotion of the Liverpool Street forecourt, lending its towers and turrets something of the collegiate calm the architect must have intended.

Eli, however, was still looking entirely at the window. ‘I don’t need to take it away,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that’ll do as an aide-mémoire.’

* * *

How many therapists, then, has Harvey Gold been through? The answer, leaving aside the many friends and minor acquaintances who he has, in his more frantic moments, forced to listen to his troubles, is eight. They are:

1. Prof. Stephen J. Wilson, professor of child psychology at the University of New York 1957–78, a Winnicottian (trained, in fact, under the man himself), writer of numerous significant case studies and one commercial work, Neither Angels nor Monsters, bought in its millions in 1966 by young American family-starters desperate to escape the parenting traps of their parents. Eli met Wilson at a party in 1974 thrown by Susan Sontag, just after splitting with Harvey’s mother, his third wife: Joan, the pale-faced postgraduate student he had settled upon as the prospective third way between Violet’s artlessness and Isabelle’s sophistication. Joan was always a feminist, but had become, immediately following Eli’s desertion, arch; he mainly switched off during her recriminations, but had managed to catch ‘and no doubt you haven’t even stopped to think about what your fucking selfish fucking behaviour will do to our child …’ On meeting the professor, therefore, it occurred to him he could kill two birds with one stone: rebut at least one section of his ex-wife’s rants, and gain a further bit of cachet with the New York literary salon, enamoured as it was at the time with psychoanalysis, by putting his six-year-old son into therapy. This, at least, is how Harvey now reads the fact of his having had a short series of sessions with Professor Wilson. Of the sessions, and of Professor Wilson himself, he has very little memory, although, once in a while, in his dreams, an image of his father seems to merge with that of a smiley, kindly, white-haired benevolent, who emerges from behind a plain white door to say: ‘Now Harvey – do you remember when the bed-wetting started?’

2. Donovan (‘Donny’) Lanes, a counsellor, really, rather than a proper therapist, who Harvey saw once a week while an English student at Leicester Polytechnic in the mid- to late 1980s. This was during a period, Harvey knows now, when he was not depressed. He thought he was depressed, but in fact he was simply attracted by the idea of depression, in order to cement some sense of his own seriousness. Actual depression, Harvey knows now, is quite different, being a condition much less like the student Harvey imagined – something gaunt and brooding and gravitas-gaining while at the same time sexy; Socrates crossed with Robert Smith of The Cure – and more like a continual panic attack crossed with severe influenza.

Donny’s main focus was Harvey’s mother, which struck Harvey at the time, even before he was an old hand at therapy, as a little route one. It being the mid- to late eighties, however, it may have been less about his counsellor adopting a crude Freudianism than a fascination Donny developed with Joan, the proto-feminist. When Harvey talked of Joan – of her bookish, pinned-back beauty, of her endless fury with Eli, of her insistence on keeping him always informed, even as a child, of her agonizing and infinitely various menstrual issues, of her aggressive intelligence, of her ongoing project to write a feminocentric response to Solomon’s Testament called The Solo Woman’s Testament – he could see in his counsel-lor’s eyes an excitement, a love even, growing at this picture he was painting of an undiscovered English Gloria Steinem. Harvey could almost see the book cover forming in Donny’s mind – Joan Gold (she had kept the name, despite everything): A Woman’s Struggle by Donovan Lanes – even as he once again took her side on another instance of what Harvey had previously thought of as a clear infliction of maternal damage.

Donny was particularly energized by Harvey’s revelation that Joan had, in her late thirties, become a lesbian. Harvey had known, even at the time, even in the confusion of puberty, that his mother had made this choice politically. All Joan’s choices were political, and, at the same time – in Harvey’s opinion – psychological: motivated, that is, by a need to enact some kind of revenge on Eli. Because this revenge was ongoing – Joan never seemed able to find the emotional or sexual act that could completely cancel out the outrage of his leaving – it had to conform to the changing political tapestry of the times. The politics of the mid-seventies necessitated that her revenge take the form of sleeping with – and dismissing from her life immediately afterwards – an enormous number of unsuitable men; the politics of the late seventies and early eighties required becoming a lesbian. As he grew into adolescence, Harvey found it hard to believe that, ten years after their divorce, the anger inside his mother towards her ex-husband could still be powerful enough to impel her towards a completely new sexuality. In truth, the teenage Harvey, already the person he is now, already astounded, flabbergasted, by the pin-down force of desire, simply could not accept that sexuality could be shepherded in this way. Sexuality, Harvey thought and thinks, directs you, not the other way round. He feels guilty about this; it makes him, in his mother’s language, a reactionary.

The sessions – and particularly any attempts to talk freely on this subject, of sexuality and its discontents – were hampered a little by Harvey’s growing suspicion that Donny was gay. This was not something which Donny proffered, but he did, Harvey noticed, have a tendency to draw any conversation towards the subject of safe sex. Moreover, he was, when not counselling, the singer in a local electronic duo, and Harvey had noticed that all the singers in the electronic duos of the time, The Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Erasure, all had something in common. He wasn’t sure about Sparks.

Harvey tried very hard, in a very mid-1980s way, to think himself into a space during the sessions where it didn’t matter that Donny might be gay, but it was problematic. Firstly, because Harvey assumed, despite his possession at the time of hair so stiff with Studioline it made him look like a permanently alerted porcupine, that Donny found him attractive; and secondly, because, even though Harvey was not then depressed, from the tiny acorns of his faux-depression the enormous black leafless tree of his real depression would still grow, and it was women, obviously, and the tension between his desire for every other pixie-booted one he saw on campus, and his fractured and difficult relationship with his girlfriend-from-home, Alison, a timid, passive aggressor with a sharply cut bob, which formed the basis of much of his emotional complaint. Suspecting that Donny might be gay, and therefore not subject either to the desire for, nor the demands of, women, made Harvey feel like talking about it all to him was, as it were, preaching to the never-going-to-be-converted: too alone, even in the distinct separation of the therapy room. When he spoke of his terror, for example, of the prospect of splitting up with Alison, Donny would nod sympathetically, but Harvey thought he could detect a certain blankness in his slightly bulbous blue eyes, and attributed this – despite Harvey’s complete ignorance of the lifestyle – to Donny living within a world where sexual traffic was always free-moving, and the idea of desire becoming bogged down in the dull pull of attachment was anathema.

Two months before he left college, however, Alison left Harvey: for Donovan Lanes, who was neither, it turned out, gay, nor entirely ethical about passing on revelations from his sessions to the partners of some of the students he was counselling. There was then a period of fifteen years, during which Harvey disavowed therapy.