The Avignon Quintet by Durrell Lawrence

Author:Durrell, Lawrence [Durrell, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-06-11T20:00:00+00:00

“Dear old Fraud, jolly old Fraud,

We’ll be together whatever the weather.”

“O cut it out,” she said, “I am sure you don’t believe it.” He grinned, for he did not. “I got to know him quite well,” he said, “and he was no humbug. He gave me several interviews and outlined his system with great elegance and modesty. He emphasised its limits. He gave me half a dozen consultations on the couch to show me how the thing worked, which was jolly decent. The thing is it doesn’t – not for anything really serious, anything like psychosis.”

“He never pretended it did.”

“But Schwarz did, and it is his messing about that aggravated the condition of my wife; but that’s not your affair, I suppose, since you are only a locum.”

“Well, I can’t pronounce on his cases,” she said with the light of battle in her eye. “But I am glad you met Freud himself.”

“He was very amusing with his Jewish moneylender touch. I teased him a bit about love being an investment – invested libido. But the old darling was serious. Jews can never see themselves from the outside. They are astonished when you say that they are this or that. They are naive, and so was he, very much so. The way his hand came out for the money at the end of the hour, when the clock struck, was a scream. I asked him if he would take a cheque but he said, ‘What? And declare it to the Income Tax?’ He insisted on cash and when he put it in his pocket he shuffled it until it tinkled, which put him in a great good humour. He looked just like Jules Verne at such moments; indeed there was a sort of similarity of imagination between the two fantasists. Anyway the idea amused him for he had read and admired Jules Verne. But when I told him that the whole of his system was a money-making plant, to be paid for just listening, and by the hour, he chuckled. ‘People want to suffer,’ he said, ‘and we must help them. It’s the decent thing to do. It’s not only Jews who like money, you know. Besides, the hand-to-hand payment is an essential part of the treatment. You feel the pinch or the pain in your infantility.’”

Constance mistrusted the depth of his knowledge in the clinical sense. It was one thing to talk all round a subject in terms of philosophy; it was quite another to adapt it to a therapy. “I am boring you,” he said, and she shook her head. “No, I was thinking of other things, of that whole period when I started medicine. Tell me more.”

Sutcliffe, when they had retired to the bar once more, called for drinks and said, “There is little more to tell. I was with him for such a short time – sufficient however to foster a great respect. The biggest pessimist since Spinoza. For the last session I brought him the fee in coin of the smallest possible denomination.

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