“There’s something troubling you,” said Irene when she saw the pained expression cross Dr Fairbairn’s face. “You looked almost tormented just then.”
Dr Fairbairn turned away from Bertie to face Irene.
“You’re very observant,” he said. “And indeed you’re right. I felt a great pang of regret. It’s passed now, but yes, it was very strong.”
“The emotions always register so clearly,” said Irene. “Our bodies are not very good at concealing things. The body is far too truthful.”
Dr Fairbairn smiled. “Absolutely. That’s the great insight which Wilhelm Reich shared with us, isn’t it? Reich was a bit odd in some of his views, I’m afraid, but he was right about character armour. Are you familiar with what he says about that?”
Irene nodded. “The idea we create a carapace of posture and gesture to protect the real us. Like Japanese Noh actors and their masks.”
“Precisely,” said Dr Fairbairn.
For a short while nothing was said. During the exchange between his mother and Dr Fairbairn, Bertie had been watching the adults, but now he turned away and looked out of the window, up at the sky, which was deep and empty. A tiny vapour trail cut across the blue, drawn by an almost invisible plane. How cold it must be up there in that jet, thought Bertie, but they would have jerseys and gloves and would be kept warm that way. Planes were good, but not as good as trains. He had travelled on a plane the previous year, to Portugal for their holidays, and he still cherished
the memory of looking out of the window and seeing the ground fall away below him. He had seen roads, and cars, as small as toys, and a train on a railway line . . .
“You looked anguished,” said Irene. “It must have been a very painful memory.”
“Not for me,” said Dr Fairbairn quickly. “Well, the smack was painful for him, I suppose.”
“For whom?”
Dr Fairbairn shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it,”
he said.
Irene laughed. “But surely that’s exactly what you get other people to do – you get them to talk about things.”
Dr Fairbairn spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I have talked about it in the past,” he said. “I certainly told my own analyst.”
“And did that not draw the pain?” asked Irene gently.
“For a short time,” said Dr Fairbairn. “But then the pain returned. Pain comes back, doesn’t it? We think that we have it under control, and then it comes back to us.”
“I understand what you mean,” said Irene. “Something happened to me a long time ago which is still painful. I feel an actual physical pain when I think of it, even today. It’s like a constriction of the chest.”
“We can lay these ghosts to rest if we go about it in the right way,” said Dr Fairbairn. “The important thing is to understand the thing itself. To see it for what it really is.”
“Which is just what Auden says in that wonderful poem of his,” said Irene. “You know the one? The one he wrote in memory of Freud shortly after Freud’s death in London.
“I know the poem,” said Dr Fairbairn.
“And so do I,” interjected Bertie.
Dr Fairbairn, whose back had been turned to Bertie, now swung round and looked at him with interest.
“Do you read Auden, Bertie?”
Irene answered for him. “Yes, he does. I started him off 170
Dr Fairbairn looked doubtful, but if he had been going to contest Irene’s assertion he appeared to think better of it.
“Of course, Auden had some very strange ideas,” he mused.
“Apropos of our conversation of a few moments ago – about psychosomatic illness – Auden went quite far in his views on that.
He believed that some illnesses were punishments, and that very particular parts of the body would go wrong if one did the wrong thing. So when he heard that Freud had cancer of the jaw, he said:
“Utterly,” said Irene. “But then people believe all sorts of things, don’t they? The Emperor Justinian, for example, believed that homosexuality caused earthquakes. Can you credit that?”
Dr Fairbairn then made an extremely witty remark (an Emperor Justinian joke of the sort which was very popular in Byzantium not all that long ago) and Irene laughed. “Frightfully funny,” she said.
Dr Fairbairn inclined his head modestly. “I believe that a modicum of wit helps the spirits. Humour is cathartic, don’t you find?”
“I know a good joke,” interjected Bertie.
