The Witch Of Exmoor Part 11

The D'Angers do not know their ancestral land. Politics drove them out, and now they live in perpetual diaspora.

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of paradise...

David tries to lie still, as he summons up those forests, those waterfalls, those circling birds. The land of many waters. Pterodactyls, dinosaurs and monster fish with s.h.i.+ning scales of pink and blue and silver. The red G.o.d and the maiden with the knife. The crab, the cave, the sacrifice. In the Guyanese savannah, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-eight, some nine hundred believers had died, had died willingly, at one man's command. Could not at one man's command nine hundred live?

The forests and waterfalls fade and dissolve, and David sees instead a dream-image he knows and fears and tries to keep at bay: it is of one small puny deluded stick man, far away and far below, pulling and pulling at a vast heavy carpet of cloth. He is trying to drag it towards a peg, a hook, another seam of cloth? The cloth is as large and as heavy as the globe, and on it stand all the peoples of the globe, weighting it down. The tiny figure hawls and hawls, and strains and sweats, but the cloth does not s.h.i.+ft or give. The figure is himself, and before him are all the rich leaden vested interests, all the dead weight of traditions, all the conglomerates and agglomerates and multinationals and conurbations, and behind them the mult.i.tudes of the thin starving sufferings. There is no hope of moving this ma.s.s. He has neither the brain nor the strength. He might as well let go. It will make no difference if he lets go. But if, by some superhuman miracle, he were to drag it even a centimetre, he knows he would have done well. So he cannot let go. Maybe all that the utmost of his effort can achieve is this terrible tension, without which the whole cloth will retract and unravel and unwind, and, like a released rope, uncoil at a speed which will destroy all in its violence? He must hang on, he must hang on. But he cannot hang on.

Benjamin, along the corridor, lies awake. He is afraid to sleep, for his dreams are terrible. He dreams he is drowning in the lake in the Cave of Gloom. He fights for breath, he surfaces, but there is no surface. The roof of the cave is under the water. There is no s.p.a.ce, no air. He drowns, and the fish nibble at his toes and fingerslittle tickling nibbling fishmouths. His flesh frays, turns white, dissolves, shreds off. He is phosph.o.r.escent decay in the water. He has murdered his grandmother, and for this crime he must die.

He fights to lie awake. He wishes to die. He wishes it were over, that he need struggle for breath no more. Let me let go, he prays. Dear G.o.d, let me go, let me depart to the Island of the Dead. He knows such prayers are sinful.

What is the sin he has committed? It is in the Game. He should not have meddled with those powers. He should not have a.s.sumed those powers. Now he has lost them for ever. He can no longer animate the inanimate, for he can no longer animate himself. He has invoked bad spirit, black spirit. He promises G.o.d, he promises Jesus Christ of the Christians, that if he lives through this night he will renounce all his kingdom. He will recall his subjects and lay them all to rest.

His mind burns, his skin burns, the night prolongs into torture. Will it never end? Shall he creep for comfort into his mother's bed? But he cannot, for he is a wicked boy. He must remove himself, before he kills them too, as he killed his grandmother Frieda. He cannot creep back into his mother, for he is a child no longer. Something frightful has happened to his body. It is not man, it is not child, it is monster. Will the long night never end? He counts up to a thousand, up to two thousand, up to ninety-nine thousand. A long dead march of numbers. But why should he wish for the morning? The morning will bring no relief, the daytime no respite.

Gogo is in a fever of anxiety. Something must be done, but what? Benjamin is fading before her eyes. He too now has a fever: his temperature rises to a hundred and four, to a hundred and five, and sweat drops off his thin body through the sheets and the mattress to the floor. Glandular fever, scarlet fever, viral meningitis? She summons her GP, and blood samples are sent off for urgent testing. She sits rigid, like a plaster statue, by his bed, with a yellow pudding bowl of cold water and a white cloth upon her knee. Mater dolorosa, thinks David with a pang, as he sees her vigil. Then wishes the thought undone. The wooden cathedral of his childhood had been brightly coloured, and so too remains Gogo, even in grief, though her colours are less tawdry than those of the madonnaa dark red skirt, cinnamon s.h.i.+rt, a dark draped plum scarf wound around her head. Benjamin lies rigid, staring at the ceiling, occasionally covering his eyes with a bony crook of elbow. Gogo keeps the lights dim. Benjamin's lips are dry.

Gogo cannot keep vigil day and night, for she has to go to the hospital in Bloomsbury, the clinic in Maida Vale. She rearranges her patients as best she may, but she must keep most of her appointments. She knows she is no longer functioning well. She does not listen closely as symptoms are described, her mind wanders homewards as she examines the X-rays and scans of the nervous systems of strangers. Will Benjamin's illness show up on a screen?

A hired hand sits by Benjamin when Gogo is not there. David too cancels much of his life, and hovers, helplessly. Shall they insist on Benjie's being taken into hospital? You would think that with their joint expertise they would be able to ride the system, to insist on a private wing, on a short cut to instant health, but they are curiously inept in the face of crisis. They do not want to let their only one out of their sight, out of their home. The fever lasts for only a couple of days, although it seems like weeks, and it vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, leaving Benjamin as he had been before he overheated-listless, apathetic, withdrawn. All tests have proved negative. There is nothing wrong with Benjamin. There is everything wrong with Benjamin.

This is not Gogo's field. The nervous system is her fieldthe cervical nerve, the somatic nerves, the cranial nerves, the gyri, the sulci, the cerebellum, the spinal nerves and the sympathetic chain. Benjamin is sick not in the nerves but in the spirit. Neither Gogo nor David know how to reach his spirit. They tempt him with delicacies, they bring him books, they install a television by his bed. He does not eat, he does not read, he does not watch, except while his parents are watching, from a residual politeness. When questioned, he says he feels cold. Sometimes he mutters to himself, 'I can't do it, I can't do it,' but when they ask what it is he cannot do he turns his face to the wall and will not say.

Gogo rings up a friend at the Tavistock to ask about childhood depression. David rings his mother in Birmingham and asks her to come up to London. Perhaps one grandmother can right the wrongs of the other.

Ronjon de Lanerolle, Benjie's best friend at school, is prompted by his elders to come and see Benjie. The visit is not a success. Ronjon is puzzled and irritated by his friend's lack of response to any of his conversational gambits, and ends up glumly watching an Australian soap opera on Benjie's bedside TV. He cannot wait to get away. Nevertheless, he promises to come again soon.

It is Benjie himself who asks after his cousin Emily. It is the first sign of curiosity he has shown for a week. Gogo rings Patsy, and Patsy says that Emily is, as it happens, on her way back to England for a friend's eighteenth-birthday celebration: shall she ask her to ring Benjie? Gogo unburdens herself a little to Patsy, though she is too proud to show the depths of her anxiety. Patsy is sympathetic. She confesses that she has her own worries about Simon. His tutor says he seems to have dropped out of everything and he has run up enormous bills at the college b.u.t.tery and on his bank card. Daniel has had to put a stop to his son's credit. What can Simon be up to? Surely, Patsy asks Gogo, he can't be on drugs, can he? He wouldn't be so stupid, would he? Gogo's silence replies.

Emily comes to see Benjie on the morning after the schoolfriend's birthday party in Crouch End. As we have seen, she is fond of Benjie, and is proud to be requested. She had been happy to play big sister to this charming boy, had treasured his confidences. The role of Nurse Emily appeals to her, but when she sees Benjamin, hunched in his bed, she is alarmed. This case is beyond her. He holds her hand as she sits by the bed. His hand is dry and hot and thin. He looks like a little fledgling bird, a poor wounded bird, a bird blown off course. A little finch.

'What's up, Benjie Boy?' she asks as cheerfully as she can. At first he shakes his head and will not speak. After a while he mutters, 'Grandma Frieda. What happened to her? They won't tell me.'

'They don't know, Benjie,' says Emily. 'She's dead, but they don't know how it happened. That's why they haven't told you. They're not keeping anything from you. Not that I know of.'

'She drowned,' says Benjie.

'They think she fell,' says Emily.

'Do you know what she told me?' says Benjie. 'She told me: Crows are green, and rooks are blue,

Crows are three and rooks are two,

I may live for ever, and so may you.

What do you think it means?'

He has to say it again, before Emily can take it in. She ponders, it's some kind of spell,' she says. 'But it's a good spell, can't you see? It says she'll live for ever, that she's not dead at all. I kind of believe that, don't you?'

Benjie shakes his head but he looks very slightly cheered, before he plunges back into melancholy.

He makes Emily promise that she will go to the Old Farm and collect the Power Game for him and bring it to him in London. Emily had not been keen to go to Hamps.h.i.+re, but for Benjie's sake she consents. He seems to think it is important. He doesn't want to see Jess and Jon, though. He makes this clear. They mustn't know. They will hate him now.

Emily a.s.sumes this is something to do with the legacy, but doesn't know how to respond to his fear. Shall she tell him that she herself doesn't want a penny of Frieda's gold? No, better not, better not even mention it. She pats Benjie warmly, as warmly as one can pat an unresponsive little bundle, and as she makes to leave the sickroom a thought strikes her. 'I say, Benjie,' she says, 'you know, crows are green and rooks are blue. Well, sort of. They're both black, but they have a different sheen. It's one of the ways to tell them apart. It's quite a useful little rhyme. Do you think she made it up? I've never heard it before.'

'Emily,' he says, as she stands on the threshold. 'What are harpies? Are they birds?'

'Sort of birds,' says Emily. 'A sort of mythological bird. With claws.'

'Sort of eagles?'

'Yes, sort of eagles,' agrees Emily, for the sake of agreement. She has never heard of the harpy-eagles of Guyana.

Then Emily goes downstairs to report on Benjie to Benjie's other grandmother, Mrs D'Anger from Georgetown and Edgbaston. Emily has no recollection of having met Mrs D'Anger Senior before, though she thinks she may have done when very small: she had been illogically expecting some sort of ample Black Mama figure and is surprised to find Clarissa D'Anger to be considerably less grandmotherly in manner and appearance than Frieda Haxby. Clarissa D'Anger is smartly dressed, sophisticated of manner, and, despite her five children, trim of figure: she has not a grey hair in her head, and her red high-heeled shoes are dauntingly, dangerously chic. She now offers Emily a cup of tea, and listens with her head c.o.c.ked alerdy on one side to Emily's bulletin. 'Poor child,' she says, and reveals that in her view Benjamin's problems spring from having been sent to a neighbouring comprehensive: he would have been much better off, in Clarissa's view, at Westminster, or, if David would insist on state education, at the William Ellis. 'The state system just doesn't work,' says Clarissa, 'I'm sure it would if David ran it. But he doesn't. Why sacrifice your own child? Such a clever boy. They just don't give his mind enough to bite on. All this project work, it just gets them in a muddle. The quality of teaching is terrible. Where were you, dear? You and Simon both went to Winchester, didn't you?'

Emily mutters that Winchester doesn't seem to have done them all that much good, and makes her excuses. She backs away from this ambitious, tailored, dark-suited, well-spoken interrogator. She feels suddenly hungover and shabby. She has failed the test.

Clarissa D'Anger blames the educational system for Benjamin's breakdown. David and Gogo blame themselves and Frieda. David's friend the poet finds another interpretation.

David's friend the poet is a Guyanese writer called Saul Sinnamary, and he and David have known one another for most of their lives. Both have risen through the systems of both their countries, and Saul leads now a life of global restlessness. He has a reasonably salaried and tenured appointment at a distinguished North American college where he teaches for a few weeks of the year: the rest of his time he divides, as his CV diplomatically puts it, between England and Guyana. He is a little older than David, and less ambitious, or so he claims. He and David meet from time to time, when Saul is pa.s.sing through Britain, and they meet now, in a pub off the Aldwych. (Saul has been recording for the BBC World Service in that imperial monument, Bush House.) David is anxious to ask Saul about the Valley of the Eagles, for unlike himself, Saul has visited the Interior. He has kept his links. You can tell that from his poetry. It is all in there. Gold and waterfalls, myths and fish, bauxite and basalt.

Saul does not know the Valley of the Eagles, but he has been to the Kanuku Mountains and the Makarapan Mountains, he has seen Lake Amuku, and he has seenor he thinks he has seena harpy-eagle. A b.l.o.o.d.y great big bird, huge talons, monkey-s.n.a.t.c.her, baby-s.n.a.t.c.her. A threatened species. A protected species. Thrasyactus harpyia: Harpyia destructor. 'Protect the poet, protect the eagle,' says Saul Sinnamary. 'They won't last long.'

Saul Sinnamary is of the opinion that Benjamin D'Anger is suffering from exile. Although he was born in Britain, he is suffering from exile. He needs the ancestral images. So, in Saul's view, does David.

'We can't live here,' says Saul, over his pint of Murphy's. 'We need to get back for a fix. When were you last there, man?'

David shakes his head.

'Your boy,' says Saul, 'he needs to see where he came from. To get in touch. Western medicine is no use to the Guyanese mind. What use are Freud and Vienna to us?'

'For f.u.c.k's sake,' says David. 'We came from India, not Guyana. And your lot came from Africa, or so you say. How far back do you want to go? To h.o.m.o australopithecus? The Olduvai Gorge?'

Saul Sinnamary insists that he knows what he is talking about. He is a romantic poet and he knows about the effect of landscape on the soul. Jung is a better guide to the psyche than Freud, even though he was a Swissman. Mountains are more use than s.e.x, says Saul. Well, at least as much use. Saul should know, he's seen plenty of both in his time. You take that boy of yours back home for a break, he'll be a changed man, says Saul. And take that white nerve doctor wife of yours with you. She'll love it there. You can take her the easy way if you like, but take her. Take her to the gazebo on Kaow Island, Fred's brother's wife's family are in the catering there. I know, I've been there. It's paradise. A bird should fly home, man. We are homing birds.

David listens to Saul with respect, for this is a man with a human face, a man who loves his own children however far away they may be. Maybe what Saul says has truth in it? Should he go back to Guyana? Take Gogo and Benjamin on a holiday, on a luxury tour, to see the harpy-eagles and the rufous crab hawks and the blood-coloured woodp.e.c.k.e.rs and the saffron-crested tyrant manakins and the greatbilled seed finch and the cayenne jay? Saul is something of a bird man, and he has in his wallet a crumpled, dog-eared checklist of the birds of Guyana which he has ticked off362 species in two weeks, biodiversity run mad, says Saul. Who sponsored his trip, inquires David. 'I gave poetry readings, man, all the way up the Essequibo,' says Saul. 'I lectured them on Caribbean poetry, on Derek Walcott, on flora and fauna, on myth and legend. I caught the pocu and the basha and I helped to cook the rice. They'd never have made it without me. I lectured them on the novels of Wilson Harris. Every trip needs a poet. You've got to get off to the interior, to save yourself. You've got to get out of the cement and the city and go up river.'

'You lectured them on Wilson Harris? Who were these bird fanciers?'

'They were a captive audience, my friend. It was me and Wilson Harris or the piranhas and the electric eels. They survived.' Saul laughs. 'Did you hear that story about Wilson Harris at the 1970 Guyana Republic Celebrations? How he lectured on the continuity of man and nature, on how we're all rivers of fluid locked up in our skin cas.e.m.e.nts, how we need to flow to the sea? I hear it was some lecture. It baffled them all. It inspired one of the greatest sentences Andrew Salkey ever wrote. You look that up one day. That's what you politicians need from time to time. A voyage into the interior.'

David a.s.sures Saul Sinnamary that he will look it up. Saul's speech has set his mind careering. Saul promises to call in one day, to bring Benjamin his book on South American birds.

Saul has been much taken by the story of Frieda's double-dealing double will. On the one hand, he points out, it's one h.e.l.l of an old-fas.h.i.+oned plot. Wills, legacies, inheritance tax, capital gains tax. A real old nineteenth-century property plot. ('This is a real old-fas.h.i.+oned nineteenth-century country,' murmurs David.) On the other hand, it's an archetypal exile's dream plot, a twentieth-century transmigration plot. The family jewels buried in the garden of the homeland, awaiting the return of the exiled prince. Return to St Petersburg, to the Polish estate, to Harbin, to Riga, to Kashmir. Reclaim the jewels, the coalmines, the sugar plantations, the aristocratic tides, the deeds. The herd of cattle, the cinammon tree. Forget that, advises Saul. Forget the property. Birds, rivers, they are the truth of the soul. They are free. They are our great allies.

'So you don't think I should try to reclaim the Valley?' says David.

Saul shakes his head. What is possession? What are politics? if you gave me the whole of Guyana, I wouldn't take it,' says Saul. 'I want to be free to come and to go. Dreams of justice end in the abuse of power.'

'Who said that?' asks David.

'I did,' says Saul. 'I, Saul Sinnamary.' They both laugh.

'Remember Jonestown, man,' says Saul. 'The Reverend Jim Jones, he called himself a socialist. He tried to set up the Just Society.'

David had thought of this, as we have seen, and has wondered whether Frieda Haxby had been aware of this appalling precedent, this disastrous experiment in social engineering and utopian hubris. On 20 November 1978, the Reverend Jim Jones from Indiana had ordered the 900 members of his People's Temple to commit suicide, and obediently they had swallowed lethal draughts from a cauldron of sugar-sweet Kool-Aid and cyanide. There, in the Guyanese savannah, on the rich wet land surrounded by rain forest, they had perished. The just, the egalitarian, the communist society, founded in defiance of US capitalism and the nuclear a.r.s.enal on 27,000 acres in the North West District. Jones had believed himself to be Lenin reborn, and his American followers (80 per cent poor black and one lone seventeen-year-old Guyanese) had believed in him, to the gates of death. They had died, suffering from athlete's foot and other skin diseases. They had rotted in the hot rain. The ideal city, with its corrugated huts, its sophisticated electronic radio and closed circuit TV, its foot-rot, its home-grown vegetables. Even now it has its apologists.

And what of Michael de Freitas, alias Michael X, alias Michael Abdul Malik, a conman on a smaller scale, a power-crazed crackpot who had briefly been the Black Power darling of the Western World? His commune was in Trinidad, and he had been its Prime Minister. He had grown coconut, limes and mangoes, produced milk and manure and propaganda, but then he had taken to drinking blood and murdering his recruits. He had ordered the death of a white woman, and she had been buried half alive in a pit of dung. He had fled from the crime to Guyana, where he had at first been received in style, but as events caught up with him he had gone on the run, had gone into hiding with some ten-dollar notes, some tins of sardines and some biscuits. He had hidden in hotel rooms, in Georgetown, in Linden, then made off into the interior, towards the south-west, barefoot, demented, through the anthills. He had ended up at a thatched shelter called Bishop's Camp, and there, as he babbled of planting green fields, the police had found him. They had flown him back to Trinidad, where, three years later, in 1975, he was hanged. That was the end of commune leader Michael X. These were not good precedents. Michael X had no apologists now.

David D'Anger s.h.i.+vers as though someone had walked on his grave, and takes another gulp of his black Irish beer. Saul is staring round the crowded pub, at the mixed races and faces of London town, with a half-smile on his handsome face. David watches him. Bleed, bleed, poor country. Benjamin D'Anger lies fretting and staring at the ceiling, and Frieda Haxby reposes in a small urn in Patsy Palmer's kitchen, on the shelf above the Aga, among the split peas, lentil and haricots. Will Paine counts his dollars and his pound notes in a darkened room in Kingston. Simon Palmer hallucinates, and walks the hard shoulder.

Saul Sinnamary declines another beer. He must be on his way. Saul is off to Singapore next day, for a conference on post-colonial literature. He'll be back in a week, he'll remember to bring Benjie the bird book, he promises. Promises, promises.

They walk out into the London night. A beggar crouched in a doorway in a filthy flock-seeping sleeping-bag mutters a ritual request for change, but they ignore her. They walk along the Strand together, to Charing Cross tube station. The climate of Singapore is not dissimilar to the climate of Georgetown, Guyana. It is tropical, hot and wet. It too stands on land reclaimed from the sea. In fact, if you stuck a needle through the earth in Singapore, it would come out in Guyana, more or less. Singapore aspires to the skies, a twentieth-century miracle, a model for all Asian city-states. It is rich and clean and wired up. It has self-flus.h.i.+ng lavatories and an air-conditioned subway and many television stations and an authoritarian regime. Both David D'Anger and Saul Sinnamary are thinking this at the same time, as they walk along past the gauntlet of the white beggars, but they do not say so.

At the entrance to the tube, they part. They embrace. 'Don't you worry about your boy,' says Saul. 'I'll come and see you when I get back.'

David is cheered by this encounter. Saul's speech about the birds and Wilson Harris offers hope. He changes trains at King's Cross, and on the Victoria Line he decides that he will suggest a Guyanese Christmas to Gogo. If it's not too late to book. It will take Benjamin out of himself, give him something to look forward to.

But when he gets home he finds he may be too late. Benjamin has been rushed to hospital. He has been found unconscious, face down, in the bath. He has tried to drown himself. Or so it seems.

On Benjie's bedroom floor lies a torn cardboard box labelled CHUM, a heap of wooden soldiers, some white plaster models crushed into smithereens, some plastic animals, a broken mirror and a hammer. Children's toys, the end of childhood, a ma.s.sacre.

David absorbs all this from the hired hand, summons a cab, arrives at the hospital, fights his way through to the bedside on the twelfth floor. Intensive care. Benjamin is wired up, monitored. But he is breathing, and his eyes respond to light.

David and Gogo sit side by side in the waiting-room through the darkest night. They hold hands, they wait. There are no reproaches. There is a solidarity in their suffering.

Benjamin recovers. He can have been out for only a matter of seconds, of a minute. It was Gogo who had found him, visiting the bathroom to replace the soaps. The bathroom door had not been locked. Indeed, it had been ajar. She tells David this, for it is a message of hope.

Has there been brain damage? They are told there has not. They believe what they are told. Gogo is a professional, she has watched the monitor. They would not lie to her, it cannot lie to her. Benjamin shows none of the seven symptoms of brain damage, brain death.

Benjamin is apologetic. He had not meant to cause such trouble. He tries to explain, though they try to spare him his explanation. He looks so old and so small and so sad. He says he has been practising holding his breath. He wants to be a diver, to explore caverns. It had only been a game. A silly game. He had been practising for weeks, trying to break his own record. He had counted up to four hundred. He must have slipped. He is so sorry.

He can come home soon.

Gogo, in the hospital's coffee-shop, cannot stop crying. She never cries, but now she cannot stop. Tears flow from her eyes and her nose and she hardly bothers to wipe them away. David holds her hand.

Where has their Benjamin gone to? Who is this person who tells them that he has tried to drown himself as a game?

Will Paine is homesick. He wants to go back to Hackney, to the Old Farm in Hamps.h.i.+re, to the Pasta Twirl factory in Middleton, even to primary school in Bilston. He'd rather be in Winchester Gaol than here in Jamaica. He thinks of Ashcombe and the bracken and the roaring stags and the blackbirds and the gulls. Frieda Haxby has cut off his retreat. Her Midas money has sent him into exile. n.o.body wishes his returnexcept, perhaps, for the police, who may still have some questions for him to answer. He has read of Frieda's death in the English papers. So she had slipped from the coast path. She was not the first to have done so, as the papers also say. But who will believe that she was not pushed? And why should she have slipped? He should never have left her that small supply of gra.s.s. He should never have left her to stew up her magic mushrooms. But she had taken to the gra.s.s. She said it was good for her liver.

There is plenty of weed in Jamaica. You can smell it on the hot air day and night. But Will does not feel at home on this dangerous island. He wants a respectable life. Here he drifts and wanders. He is afraid. He cannot make judgements here. At least in England he had known how to avoid being at the bottom of the heap. Here he does not know what the heap is made of, or where its bottom may he. He remembers prison scare stories about yardies, about the Jamaicans on Death Row. There is still a death penalty, here in Jamaica. The Queen of England, shame on her, must sign the death warrants. At least he is more free than the Queen.

He dares not surface yet. He sews some of Frieda's cash into his jacket lining. He is surprised that n.o.body has caught up with him, for he had travelled on his own papers. Perhaps he has not yet been identified. Perhaps Patsy Palmer and Daniel have kept what they know to themselves.

He wonders how Simon Palmer fares. He himself is not in an enviable position, but he would not change places with Simon Palmer.

Will Paine is lonely. He would like a friend, but he does not know who he can trust.

It is easier to get out of England than to get back in again. This he knows.

'I wonder,' wrote the young Charles d.i.c.kens, when contemplating emigration as a proper response to an incoming Tory government, 'I wonder, if I went to a new colony with my head, hands, legs and health, I should force myself to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream! ... Upon my word I believe I should.'

Gogo D'Anger has never had much time for therapists and a.n.a.lysts, for witch doctors, shrinks and counsellors, though she has friends who wear these labels. She calls herself a physician, and has tended to regard those meddling with the mind and the psyche as amateurs. Even psychology and psychiatry she treats with suspicion. But now, like many before her, she is humbled, and forced to seek for help. Benjamin, it is clear, is suffering from some form of depression. Is it endogenous or reactive, and does it matter which it is? Is it wise to put a boy of his age on psychoactive drugs, and is there any alternative? And if dru gs, which drugs? Benjamin has never been manic, as far as his parents know, but maybe even they have not observed him very closely? David and Gogo ask around, and discover to their surprise that half their friends, for no very obvious reasons, are on Prozac. They are of the Prozac generation without knowing it. But n.o.body has any clear advice about the medication of the very young.

Neither of them likes the idea of their boy swallowing substances. Substances may poison him for life. There must be some other way to reach him. Since the incident in the bath, they have watched him day and night. He has promised, wearily, that he will not try holding his breath under water any more, but can they trust him?

Gertrude Cohen had been a friend of Frieda Haxby's, but that does not necessarily disqualify her from being the wisest woman in Europe. She responds to their appeal, and comes round to see them, although she says she is now old and retired. She is like a caricature of what such a woman might be imagined to be. One of the most eminent of the 1930s refugee generation, she has written several books on child development, on child psychology and on child psychotherapy. Her accent is guttural, her eyes fierce, her hair grey and wiry and wild. She stares at them through spectacles tethered to her bosom by a gold pin and a gold chain. She had opened her career with a study of separation, loss and survivor guilt, and in later years had specialized in adolescent depression andthough they do not mention thisadolescent death. She had worked with the terminally ill child, wiith the suicidal child. She has been into the caverns of the mind. She has seen grief and torment. There she sits, drinking China tea with lemon, a wise woman who has been into the underworld and led others up to the light of day. They gaze at this old woman, whom normally they would I fear have regarded in benign and superior amus.e.m.e.nt. They gaze at her in a mixture of awe and hope. They throw themselves upon her mercy.

Gertrude Cohen listens patiently, a withered sybil. She has heard all the stories of all the world before. All parents think their child the brightest and the best of the sons of the morning. David D'Anger and Grace D'Anger are Everyman and Everywoman. They tell the strange tale of Frieda's wills, and here Gertrude Cohen shows them the favour of looking more than usually alertfor this is a variation, she concedes. Frieda had been an original. Gertrude Cohen looks at Frieda's daughter Grace with a glimmering of professional respect, as though acknowledging that Gogo had done well to stay alive and gain qualifications and get married and hold down a decent job. Gertrude Cohen accepts another Marie biscuit, which she nibbles with her evenly white false front teeth.

Then Gertrude Cohen plunges them into gloom by declaring that she is far too old to practise. It would be wrong for her even to set eyes on Benjamin. But she is sure they were right to refer the case to her. (They brighten, like good students praised in cla.s.s.) She would like to recommend that they take Benjamin to see a colleague of hers, now practising at the Jameson Clinic. This colleague would be a most suitable person, in her view, to interview Benjamin. Of course, she cannot speak for her colleague, as her colleague is much in demand and may not be able to take on any more cases at the moment, and they will appreciate that even in the event of an acceptance the treatment may be long. (It will also, she implies, be costly, though she does not spell this out.) David and Gogo nod, meekly, gratefully. They wait for the magic name of the designate, the successor. Gertrude Cohen inscribes it on a page of a notebook, which she tears out and hands to them. It reads Lily McNab