‘Is it … is it because you’re Jewish?’
He looked up, his face set behind the shield of his trademark grin, the one that brought his nose over his mouth, making him look, Violet thought, Jewish. ‘Of course it’s because I’m Jewish.’
‘But your mother wasn’t. Was she? Catholic, you said. So it doesn’t matter, anyway.’
Eli lit a cigarette. He still had the Zippo. There was too much petrol in it, and the flame seemed to cover half his face, making Violet back off.
‘And you’ve told me you don’t believe in religion, anyway.’
‘I don’t.’
‘So what difference does it make?’
He frowned. The lines on his face, very pronounced in the grey light falling through the window, joined up to form circles, like contours around a mapped hill. She had noticed now many times how Eli’s facial lines served to exaggerate – to underline – his every mood.
‘Well, when I say I don’t believe in religion, what I mean is: I don’t believe in it. Any of it. So getting married in a church – a building which only exists because one thousand nine hundred years ago the Jews got so fiddly about the pissy little dos and don’ts of God-bothering that a whole new mutant religion had to be born out of its already exhausted old womb – that seems to me even more hypocritical than doing it in a synagogue …’
The radiator between them coughed and shook violently, like an old smoker waking up. Eli looked at it with interest.
‘What about me?’ Violet said. ‘What about what I want?’
He glanced at her, surprised. She felt her own eyebrows forming virtually the same expression: the idea of Violet introducing her desires into their conversation – indeed, the idea that Violet had desires, or, at least, desires that could be put up in conflict with Eli’s – was as startling to her as it was to him.
‘Birdy,’ he said, putting his two hands on the one of hers that was resting on the table: she felt their enveloping weight and warmth. ‘What’s more important? Getting married, or where we get married?’
She looked at his eyes, scanning them for insincerity. In this instant, their deep brown seemed to her the opposite: the substantial brown of leather book covers and panelled walls. And if eyes are the windows to the soul, like her mother was always saying, then substance, tangibility, something in Eli’s soul to hang on to, was what she needed to see in those windows. She knew that his words could as easily have been said by her to him – he was the one who didn’t want to get married in a church – but this fleeting moment of Eli being serious – serious, for once, about them – was more important.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said, adding her other hand to the hand pile on the table. Their four hands together, his two in between hers, looked like a sandwich in which the dark meat filling could not be contained by the two small slices of white bread. The radiator croaked again, and then gushed, as the hot water inside forced its way along the cast-iron coils.
‘It must be like a coral reef,’ said Eli, looking away from her towards the sound.
‘Sorry?’
‘Inside the radiator. The water’s having such a hard time getting through it, heating it up – inside, it must be studded with rocks of fur and scale, sprouting off the sides and up off the bottom, like a coral reef.’
Violet looked towards the heating implement. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Have you got a pen?’
She shook her head.
‘What, nowhere? Not in amongst all the God knows what you carry in your handbag?’ Underneath its normal New York insouciance, his voice betrayed, a hint of petulance.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, picking her handbag up off the floor and starting to file through it anyway. ‘You’re the one who wants to be a writer.’
‘I know.’ He opened his palm. ‘But I’m also the one who can’t keep hold of anything.’
She tutted, although smiled at the same time, pleased at the notion of coupledom – you’re this, I’m that, my weaknesses, your strengths – that this declaration assumed.
‘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