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.
3. Laurence Green, a straightforward no-nonsense Freudian. He even had a white beard and glasses. The now genuinely depressed Harvey – clinically depressed, to give it the term that separates the illness from the everyday experience – did the sessions on a couch and everything. He used to face Laurence’s formidable bookshelf and wonder, since Laurence used to say virtually nothing, whether the solution to how he felt could be found in any of them. His hot flushes: could they be sorted by Bruno Bettelheim’s The Art of the Obvious? The suffocating tightness in his throat: would there be something on that in Separated Attachments and Sexual Aliveness by Susie Orbach? The raised, banging heartbeat: any joy in Self in Relationships: Perspectives on Family Therapy From Developmental Psychology, edited by Astri Johnsen and Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson? When, having given up on prompting a response from Laurence, the sessions would fall into silence, the name Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson would sometimes rotate at high speed in Harvey’s head – Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie – until he wanted to scream. This tic had also happened to him on other occasions with the names Benedict Cumberbatch, Barack Obama, Tiscali broadband and the phrase ‘Apples, hazelnuts, sultanas, raisins, coconut, bananas’.
4. Adrienne Samson, the sixty-three-year-old Kleinian. Their sessions were somewhat overshadowed by the death, halfway through their time together, of Harvey’s mother. Joan had always been powered by rage, a magnificent, sometimes inspiring rage, but then came the great forgetting, the neurological airbrushing, of Alzheimer’s, which meant that she forgot what it was she was angry about. Harvey never quite realized how much he felt for his mother until she got ill. When the time came to move her to a residential nursing home in Ashford, and the manageress of the Day Care Centre in London that she had been attending said to him: ‘We’ll miss her: she’s so sparky and fun and interesting – she really perked things up here …’, he found his throat closing and tears of sadness and pride welling in his eyes.
As the disease worsened, Joan imagined that she was still married, and that Harvey, on his visits to the nursing home, was Eli. Eventually, Harvey found it easier just to go along with this idea. The more Harvey accepted the role of Eli, the more Joan was placated: he even bought a pair of glasses exactly like Eli used to wear in the 1960s in order to avoid his mother asking where his glasses had got to. He saw, at these times, even if only through the distorted lens of dementia, a version of something he had no memory of, which perhaps only existed before he was born or when he was very young: his mother happy and in love. He got a sense of what marriage to Eli might have been like before it went bad; he saw peace on her face. He wondered how it would have been – what it would have done, or not done, to him – to have been brought up by a mother like this. The visits were, in a bleak way, blissful.
The leaving of them, however, was not. Every time he said goodbye, Joan would die more than a little. She would panic; then she would get angry. For Harvey, these moments were a weekly microcosm of his parents’ divorce. There was comfort in that at least – that by the time he reached the door of her tiny room, Joan, shouting at him to fuck off and not come back ever, was recognizable once more as the mother he knew. Towards the end, though, this pattern changed. Then, when he left she would only get sad. Once, she asked, with great clarity, ‘Which wife am I again?’ To which it occurred to Harvey to say, the only one, my love, but he found that it felt wrong to lie within the lie, and so simply answered, truthfully, ‘The third.’ Another time, Harvey turned back to say goodbye and she had taken all her clothes off. She did not pose for him in some grotesque sexual way. She simply stood there. It seemed to Harvey a statement of self, of wanting to strip all things away in the hope of being re-seen and re-found. It seemed to him like that for a moment, before he closed his eyes.
Adrienne found much to chew on here. She suggested, more than once, that Harvey taking on the role of Eli in these visits