Trauma by Patrick McGrath Read Free Book Online Page A

Cassie. But later she produced a different account, and it’s hard to know exactly where the truth lies. There must have been nights we argued, quietly, so as not to wake Cassie, but for me they weren’t the dominant feature of those days. Agnes for her part has no strong recollection of a shared sense that we were living useful lives, or that a time would come when we’d have more money, and more time together, and that it would all have been worth it, and so on: the sentiments any couple feels at this stage.
    She said later that the deal was unfair, that she’d felt imprisoned in the apartment, that I was selfish and moody.
Again, this is not how I remember it, and to me it doesn’t sound like Agnes, who was never a passive or put-upon woman. It is my conviction that she revised her memories after the fact so as to bring them into line with her anger.
    This falsification of memory—the adjustment, abbreviation, invention, even
omission
of experience—is common to us all, it is the business of psychic life, and I was never seriously upset about it. I know how very fickle the human mind is, and how malleable, when it has to accommodate belief, or deny the intolerable.
    But it all came back to Danny. He was so important to us, and I have no doubt I allowed Agnes’s feelings about him to influence my own attitude. I have often tried to imagine how I might have seen him had he been just one of the guys in the group and not her brother. Certainly he was haunted by repressed memories he hadn’t yet found a means of articulating, and he was never able to use the group to find the strength to confront his nightmares sober.
    But would I have glamorized him, seen something tough, laconic, even heroic, in a particularly American sort of a way, in his posture of lonely suffering? I believe Agnes’s romanticizing her brother influenced me, and that perhaps I failed to appreciate how weak he was. Perhaps I tended to view his isolation as a mark not of fragility but of resilience.
Had the question been put to me directly I’m sure I would have said he had no resilience at all, but it never was put to me like that, and I accepted too easily Agnes’s picture of the protective elder brother who never let her down, whose courage and recklessness were famous in her hometown, whose readiness to take a beating, when the old man came home drunk, rather than allow him to beat up any of the women in the house, made her cry to think about even years later.
    Then, too, the quiet deference of the other guys in the group—it all came together to create a certain image, but I should have seen how much of his core had been blasted, and how unstable what little remained of him actually was.
The outward form of the man was still apparent to Agnes, but she didn’t suspect how thin a shell it was, that it was as brittle as a wafer. I saw more than she did yet I too failed to recognize the extent of his frailty.

Chapter Four
    I n the weeks following my mother’s death I grew increasingly preoccupied with my newly revived relationship with Agnes. Her reserve excited me. Her implicit statement that regions of her being once mine were now closed to me, this aroused in me a strong urge to penetrate them. I didn’t question it, I didn’t subject this urge of mine to any imperative of deference, or even of common civility. I wanted to know what went on in her mind. What had happened to her while we were apart? I wanted to be in possession of the facts. Agnes clearly had ideas of her own with regard to the scope and depth of this resurgent liaison, but my intention was to disregard those limits and break down her resistance by whatever means necessary.
    “Leon doesn’t suspect you’re having an affair?” I said one night.
    “Charlie, you’re not to ask me questions like that.”
    It was the third or fourth time she’d come to the apartment. Again, it was the happy hour in the bed after sex when tenderness and languor and lingering physical