A Natural Curiosity Read Online Free PDF

like saying that some of her patients are just as mad and just as interesting as Alix’s murderer, and that if she were to tell all . . . Yes, there may be an element of that, but it is also likely that Liz resents Alix’s having moved out of reach—and resents the fact that, having moved, Alix seems quite happy, and even occasionally delivers herself of comparisons between Northam and London in which London comes out badly. Sour grapes, of course, Liz says to herself, but nevertheless it is irritating. Liz has been deserted by both her close women friends, both her friends of college days, whom she used to see regularly, on whom she relied for gossip and support and provocation, for reading lists and shared memories. Alix had gone north, and the third of what was once a triumvirate, art historian Esther Breuer, had gone to live in Bologna. Liz has been left alone, holding the fort of London single-handed.
    The baby settles, slumps, nestles, and begins to breathe evenly and deeply. Damn, she’s gone to sleep, says Liz to herself: I should have got Xanthe to take her away, now I’m lumbered.
    Liz ponders the subject of infantile sexuality. The oral phase. Cornelia has an engaging way of sucking not her thumb but her knuckle.
    Although Liz does not yet know it, 1987 is to be the Year of Child Sex Abuse. For some years now the subject has been arousing interest and controversy amongst the professionals, but in 1987 it will catch the press and the popular imagination like a fever. 1987 will be a psychotic year, the year of abnormality, of Abuse, of the Condom. Perhaps it is already possible to detect the early symptoms.
    And as if in anticipation, Liz sits there rocking her step-granddaughter and wondering what normality is. Is this it? This comfortable bourgeois room, with flowers?
    If one reads ancient texts—the Bible, the Koran, Sophocles, the Veda—is one not sometimes led to suspect that the whole of human history is nothing but a history of deepening psychosis? That something went wrong at the beginning of human nature, of human nurture, that humanity mistook itself fatally, for ever?
    False revelations, hoax riddles, grinning sphinxes from prehistory. Murder, arson, pillage, savagery.
    The baby sleeps and sucks, her pearly dewy eyelids a pale veined blue.
    A pity one can’t reinvent the whole thing from infancy, thinks Liz, and get it right. A world without violence, murder, aggression. Some of her calling believed that if you brought babies up properly, if you loved them and fed them and weaned them correctly, there would be no more Paul Whitmores, no more Hitlers or Pol Pots, no more wars: Liz does not believe this. She thinks this is simplistic. The whole thing has got quite out of hand. It is irreversible. Abnormality is in-built, by now.
    Alix, up in Northam, returning again to Tacitus, reaches the same conclusion. Tacitus strikes her as sane. Now what does she mean by this? He is reporting mass historic madnesses that make Paul Whitmore’s aberrations seem trivial. Yet he himself is sane. On the other hand, if you define sanity, if you define normality, so narrowly that only one or two exceptional people can ever achieve it, what does that signify?
    The baby’s little temples beat. Her little life is fragile, hardly yet incarnate. Her skull is soft, frail, open.
     
    Charles Headleand has been reading the Koran. He is reading the Koran because he plans to go to the Middle East to rescue his old enemy, cameraman Dirk Davis, from the clutches of a bunch of terrorists, who have been holding him hostage for over two years. The Koran has driven the Iranians mad. Who would have predicted, back in the 1970s, the tide of Islamic fundamentalism that has swept the land masses of the East, that threatens even the secular monolith of the Soviet Union? Charles certainly did not, although he knows he ought to have done, because he has always been gripped by News, by day-to-day News, has always been a privileged