I snapped at him rather, “No — not faded.”
The Professor asked me if I had seen this man again. I said, “Twice in London.” Perhaps the tone of my voice conveyed to him what I felt. Mr. Van Eck in London was not the Man on the boat.
March 14, 2:40 P.M.
A familiar nightmare last night. I was in one hotel or pension, Bryher and my mother were in another. I return to my room to find an irate landlady has removed all my clothes and belongings to another room, without consulting me. I am annoyed but in my dream too frightened to be other than polite. There are several children playing about. The children are indifferent but apparently not inimical. The landlady glares at me, “But we have no room here; you must get right out.”
I manage somehow to get my clothes, I am overburdened with them and with a number of awkward packages but I manage finally to reach Bryher and my mother. We are in Florence along the Arno but the Arno is only a riverbed with a few footprints. My mother says, “You are only safe on this side of the river.”
I am still overburdened and lost. My mother died just six years ago, in March. We had stayed in a hotel in Florence, Lungarno, along the Arno. I had first visited Florence in 1912 with both my parents. At this time too, fourteen years ago, I was waiting for the arrival of my child. I had been taken with what the Professor called the epidemic, in a pension in Ealing waiting to go into Saint Faith’s Nursing Home. There had been death in the house. Afterwards, I learned how shocked Bryher had been when she came to see me. The landlady had said, “But who is to see to the funeral if she dies?”
The dream content is commonplace. But I wake with heartache — heartache, yes, in the conventional romantic sense, and heartache or actual physical pain that frightens me.
I recover over my breakfast tray, Vienna coffee and rolls, and I go out and get the Sigmund Freud engraving that I had ordered a few days ago in the shop on the Ringstrasse.
9
7 P.M.
I told the Professor of the shock after my nightmare, as of a blow on my heart. He asked first of Van Eck — was it an Austrian name? He said, “I have an idea.” He rushed off and brought back a leather case, and showed me the name, stamped inside the folder. It was Vaneck.
He was interested to hear that Mr. Van Eck was the adopted son of the Victorian painter. He asked of the nationality. I explained that I thought it was a nom-de-guerre; they were a Dutch family, settled in London. I said painting reminded me of my mother. I told him how as children we had admired her painting and boasted to visitors, “My mother painted that.” My mother was morbidly self-effacing.
I went on to say how difficult it had been to reassemble the story of Peter Van Eck, when after all it was a conventional meeting or voyage-out romance. The Professor asked me to interpret my dream of the two rooms in the hotel or pension. I told him I thought it was fear of being moved, at the time of my pregnancy; perhaps it was fear of death. He asked me for more “historical detail.” I told him of various incidents during the war years when I had stayed in small rooms to be near my husband at his various training units. How difficult it was to get in anywhere at that time and of how once, coming from Buckinghamshire to see the doctor and being caught late in the fog, I had to find a room for the night. Wandering around Bloomsbury, a perfect stranger spoke to me. “I have a room you can have,” he said. It seemed impossible, but he opened one of those green doors in a row of green doors and introduced me to the landlady. “This lady is taking my room for the night,” he said. This did happen. Telling it, it seems part of a dream.
The Professor said, “But I know who the bad landlady is.” I asked innocently, “Who?” He said, “Myself.” I repudiated this and then remembered how upset I had been with Mary Chadwick of Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, when she said at the end of our three months’ session, “You do like to talk, don’t you?” I told this to the Professor; he said, “But Miss Chadwick and your work with her is only a forerunner of myself.” I said, “No. She was a competent nurse, but not a doctor.”
The Professor said, there must be other “historical data” to do with my fear of being turned out. Yes, there were many actual associations. I remembered once, staying in Rome with my parents, running up to my room after a tired day’s excursion and finding the cupboard empty and nothing belonging to me on the dressing table. I had been moved downstairs to another bedroom. It was not the annoyance of not being consulted that so much concerned me as the shock of rushing upstairs and finding my clothes, shoes, and so on had disappeared mysteriously. I tell the Professor that when I go back to my room at the Regina, I seem to brace myself before unlocking the door, lest I find I have been moved out. I am reminded of the hotels we stayed in, in Florence, Rome, and Naples. I feel here that I am in an Italian or near-Italian city.
3:30 P.M.
Now having my early tea, I remember how the Professor asked me why I was so happy to have the hour 5 P.M. for my sessions. I told him how I had associated my happiest memories of early London with the inevitable four o’clock or five o’clock tea and that here I could dream over my note-book, preparing myself for the happiness of talking with him afterwards. He said again that he did not want me to prepare. I could not explain adequately that I did not. He does not, apparently, want me to take notes, but I must do that.
I remember how happy I was with the children across the street, playing at tea parties. We had our intermediate set of dishes for these occasions. My mother got me a set as I was so excited about the Williams’ “real tea set.” It was intermediate between the grown-ups and the dolls.
I think it was my seventh birthday that my mother got me this set. There was a gilt edge to the cups and saucers and the bread-and-butter-sized plates. There were knots of violets.
10
6:40 P.M.
The Professor found me reading in the waiting room. He said that I must borrow any books of his that I wanted. We talked again of Yofi. I asked of Yofi’s father. Yofi is to be a mother. He told me that Yofi’s first husband was a black chow and Yofi had one black baby, “as black as the devil.” It died when it was three-quarters of a year old. Now the new father is lion-gold and the Professor hopes that Yofi’s children will survive, this time. He said, if there are two puppies, the father’s people have one, but if only one, “it stays a Freud.”
The Professor asked me if I had noticed “trouble in walking.” I did not know what he meant. I said I was feeling well and enjoyed going about. But he said, “I mean, on the streets.” I did not even then quite realize what he meant; I said that I felt at home here and never frightened. I said, “The people in the shops are so courteous.” The Professor said, “Yes. . to a lady.”
The Professor asked me again of “historical associations” of moving or being moved. I told him of some of my findings.
I said that there were no doubt infantile associations about “leaving the room” or being sent out of the room because one had been naughty. He said, “Yes, the infantile memory or association is often unhappy.”
But leaving home was not always an unhappy matter. I was sent to stay with a young childless aunt at one time, and will never forget the giant rag doll, a treasure from her childhood that she gave me to play with. She it was who first gave me little gauze bags of assorted beads and helped me to string them. I had had a dream with Miss Chadwick that my uncle’s name was Vaneck; it was really Frederick.