The Inn at the Edge of the World Read Online Free Page B

Ten minutes to somehow get together a breakfast which would sustain him through the next fifty. He believed the transference process was disturbed when his stomach rumbled. Having abandoned all hope of toast he decided on bread and butter and a lightly boiled egg, but he had left the butter too long in the fridge and when he came to apply it to the bread he found he had cut the latter too thinly, so that it adhered in crumbs to lumps of the former. Never had he seen bread and butter like it. Ronald had been cared for by his mother until the day he married his wife and as a result he couldn’t boil an egg. It was hard – both his egg and his circumstances were hard. His second patient noticed immediately he walked in that the doctor had a bit of dry egg yolk in his beard. It stayed on his mind throughout the session, seriously interfering with his free-associations. After fifty minutes it had lodged itself deeply in his subconscious and he was never quite the same again.
    For lunch Ronald had cold baked beans, but only after a scene with the tin and the tin-opener that was attached to the wall. He had used an old-fashioned one in the end which his wife had kept in a drawer out of obscure sentiment, and which had rusted and gone blunt. As the time for dinner approached he became aware that he had spent the time with his last two female patients wondering, not about their various schizoid, paranoid and oedipal tendencies, but whether they could boil eggs. He was accustomed to wondering what the least unattractive female patients would be like in bed and had – more or less – rationalized and come to terms with it, but never before had his attention strayed in the direction of the kitchen. It was too bad. If his wife knew to what a pitch her desertion had brought him she would feel really dreadful. In believing this Ronald had gone beyond the bounds of what is customarily accepted as common sense, and had entered those arcane regions where only the concerned professional chooses to tread. At the portals of these regions – it is held by the psychiatric establishment – the man in the street, the patient, starts bucking and rearing and digging his heels in; for here in the unconscious are repressed all manner of matters he does not care to confront. Ronald, in his confused state, was telling himself that if his wife could be forced to realize the enormity of what she had done she would be cured and would return to him. It did not, of course, follow. Ronald was applying his discipline incorrectly, rather as a motor mechanic might imagine himself qualified to operate on a horse. What he was really telling himself was that if his wife had ceased to love him she must be insane.
    Years of training analysis had made him into as competent a therapist as any, but, as is so often the case, it had done nothing to ease his own way through the troubled paths of human intercourse: rather it had made of him a single-minded, foraging creature intent on a goal imperceptible to others. His wife had perched, as it were, on a branch watching him uncomprehendingly as he sought through the thickets for a means by which he could form a perfect union with her. In the end she had simply grown fed up – not of waiting for him to achieve this union, for she was not conscious of desiring any such thing – but of watching and listening to his seemingly meaningless ramblings. She had found it all unbearably boring, since she could never understand, not only what he was looking for, but what he was talking about.
    Ronald’s penultimate patient was a wealthy young woman, part heiress to a fortune based on sugar. He had harboured lustful fantasies about her for some time, but had denied himself too overt expression of these. Now, weakened by physical hunger, he found himself staring down at her as she lay, all mounds and curves, warm and well-nourished; and he wondered not only what she would look like without her clothes on, but what she was going to