At their first meeting, a quick coffee between lectures at the Atlanta convention, they discovered they had a lot in common: he was divorced, she had separated from a common-law husband. She was just coming up to forty, he was forty-four. Light banter, a few quips, some one liners that belonged more to Seinfeld than Freud. Questions and general background, but no hard and fast answers. Two psychiatrists fencing with each other, both knowing that what had partly spoilt their respective relationships was being too deep, too questioning, not fully switching off when home. Keep it light and simple this time.
They'd snatched a couple more coffees together during the convention, then spent two hours at a cocktail bar on the evening it had closed. But their only real date together had been almost eighteen months later, December 1993. She'd come over to the UK for five days to handle a case in Norfolk and had managed to grab an evening in London. He showed her his office and they went to dinner and the theatre nearby. They'd also been able to find out a lot more about each other, not just personally but professionally: their respective views on psychology. She'd felt guilty at one point that she seemed to be hogging most of the conversation purely because her background with Past Life Therapy (PLT) was more unconventional; though Lambourne had admitted his fascination and seemed to be egging her on.
In contrast, he'd only had a few cases involving PLT, mostly conventional cures for phobia: regressing a patient initially back to childhood in search of text-book, Freud-induced phobia, discovering nothing, so heading back even further. Patients with inexplicable fears of fire, drowning or enclosed spaces were often found to have had alarming experiences in past lives which explained their phobias. A recent survey showed that twenty-two percent of American psychiatrists used PLT regularly alongside standard therapy, though she had no idea of figures for the UK and Europe.
'What made you initially regress the boy?' she asked. 'Did you think that part of your problem might lie further back?'
'Yes, but in early childhood — not in a past life. That was totally unexpected.' Lambourne had already explained the main background to the case: the accident, the coma, the dreams with Eyran clinging to non-acceptance of his parents' death through a secondary character who claimed he could find them. Now he explained that much of the secondary character's memory seemed to be buried in the past, it was impossible to determine if Jojo was a friend from Eyran's infancy who had since faded from conventional memory or a complete invention. 'Jojo also has no specific recall of losing his parents — the main shared experience linking the two characters. He said it was "long ago… from before" — seemed almost to be inviting me to go further back.'
'My son's almost that age now,' she commented thoughtfully. Sebastian would be ten next September. But the children she had regressed over the past years, now well over a hundred cases, would no doubt provide the strongest points of reference; very little of it did she relate to her own life. 'When the boy surfaced again and started speaking in French, do you know what year it was?'
'Not exactly. I asked him what he saw on the TV, but he said that they didn't have one, just a radio. I was about to change tack, my knowledge of French radio is non-existent, when he said, "but they have one in the local cafe". So perhaps late fifties, sixties.'
'Or later if they were very poor or extremely religious — thought TV was a bad influence.'
'Possibly. The only thing I managed to find out was where he lived: a place called Taragnon. I looked it up on the map. It's a small village in the south. Provence.'
'Well at least some ground can be gained by verifying his regional accent.'
They were both silent for a second: only the sound of faint crackles on the line between London and Virginia. Why did she feel hesitant? Was it just her current workload, the nightmare of arranging a week away and leaving Sebastian with her father, or a concentrated period of working close to David Lambourne when she wasn't really sure what she felt about him. Then immediately pinched herself for even having the thought, realized she'd fallen into the trap of thinking that all his calls were just excuses to talk with her masked by a thin professional veneer. This was surely different. Though she was one of the main recognized experts, how many cases of true xenoglossy had she experienced in all her years? Her last paper published claimed twenty-three, but only nine did she count as significant, four of which had been with children. Out of almost three hundred regressive sessions. Xenoglossy: use of a foreign language unknown to the main subject. Parapsychological gold-dust: rare and one of the strongest proofs for real regressions, particularly where children were concerned. She should be grateful Lambourne had called her.
'Tell me something about Eyran's parents and his godparents. Is the current family environment strong. Are they supportive?'
'Yes, very.' Lambourne gave her the background: Eyran's parents living in California at the time of the accident, the closeness with his Uncle Stuart and memories of England. '…Particularly a past period which features in most of Eyran's dreams and is only a few miles from where they now live'. Upper-middle class. Thirty-something. Advertising executive. Nice house in the country. One child, a daughter, now just seven. Four-wheel drive. Solid.
'Sounds ideal.' Probably no disfunctionality stemming from that quarter, she thought. But are they going to let us tap dance through Eyran's brain while we explore this past life? 'The only problem I've got right now David is workload. It sounds exciting and I'd love to jump on the first flight — but I just don't think I'm going to be able to get out of here for almost a week.'
'If that's the earliest, fine.' But his voice carried a trace of disappointment. 'I don't really want to do any more sessions with you not here, so I'll cancel next week with the boy and hold the week after. Do you think you'll be over by then?'
'Yes, I think so.' She was already thinking ahead to preparation for the first session. 'We're going to need that time anyway. For a start we'll need a French translator, preferably a native Francophile who can also tell us if the regional accent is correct. And some method of transcription between us so that too many voices don't start interfering with the patient's concentration. There's also a number of things we'll need to know from the boy's godparents. Look — keep the next session date, but use it to counsel the godparents. At this stage, inform them that the secondary voice has spoken in French and your next session will hopefully find out exactly why. But don't tell them or even infer that it might be a voice from the past — after all, we're not even sure of that ourselves.' Only seconds ago the case had started to feel tangible, and already the adrenaline was running: she was afraid of losing it.
'How many sessions should I schedule initially?'
'Try and plan two within five days. That at least should get us to the first stage: finding out if the regression and its central character are real.'
From her room, if she looked out the window at an angle, Marinella Calvan could see the University of Virginia Rotunda in the distance, the half scale copy of Rome's Pantheon which, in the spring and summer, attracted a steady stream of tourists. The centrepiece of the seat of learning founded by Thomas Jefferson which at the US Bicentennial was voted 'one of the proudest achievements of American architecture in the past 200 years.' This was old, grass roots America, hallowed learning halls to some of the founding fathers of the Constitution, and one of the last places you'd expect a department of parapsychology. Yet the University of Virginia had for the past thirty years, largely under the guidance of Dr Emmett Donaldson, been one of the leading centres for the study of parapsychology in America.