‘Is one spoonful enough? Or do you want two?’
Nancy looked at the saucepan filled with glistening porridge. Felix cooked it on a low heat in the oven overnight. He said it made all the difference. He was standing poised with a spoon: not a normal soup spoon. It was more like the sort you’d use for stirring a giant casserole. None, Nancy felt like saying: none at all.
‘One will be fine.’
He emptied a large, heaped spoon of stodgy porridge into the bowl in front of her.
‘Would you like some milk or some cream or brown sugar?’
‘Not this morning. I’ll just have it as it is. I’m not super hungry.’
‘I’m ravenous,’ said Felix. He tipped the rest of the porridge into his own bowl. He sprinkled brown sugar on top and poured milk over it. He stirred it so the sugar formed a brown spiral and took a mouthful. He started to say something and then stopped for a few seconds because his mouth was still full.
Nancy put a tiny amount of porridge into her mouth. It felt slimy and reminded her of frog spawn. Felix got up and poured coffee from the cafetière. He put one of the mugs in front of her.
‘Can I get you some orange juice or half a grapefruit?’
Nancy looked at her mug. This morning, in the aftermath of the episode in the market, everything seemed too sharply in focus. Each sound felt so distinct and precise that it almost hurt.
‘Just coffee will be fine,’ she said.
He was opposite her. Although she was looking down at her porridge bowl, she could feel his gaze on her.
‘You know I hate to say this…’ he began.
‘Then don’t.’
‘I don’t want you to feel like I’m policing you. But I worry that when you’re stressed, you just don’t eat. And you’re not eating.’
Nancy gestured at her bowl.
‘I’m having a hearty breakfast,’ she said.
‘That wouldn’t feed a mouse. And you’re just moving it around in your bowl anyway. But I shouldn’t have said anything.’
Nancy took a spoonful of the porridge, a proper spoonful, and put it in her mouth and swallowed with an immense effort.
‘You know I’m not really a breakfast person,’ she said. ‘My ideal breakfast is coffee.’
‘It’s just that I worry about you. You know, with everything.’
Nancy did know and she understood why Felix was doing what he was doing and she understood how he felt awkward and embarrassed saying it. It was something they should probably talk about, but just now that was completely out of the question. It was like having a discussion while she was in a burning building.
‘Have you got lots of work today?’ Felix asked, standing up and pulling on his thick coat.
Nancy pushed the bowl away and leaned back.
‘Today I’m writing about Easter. How many ways can you think of to describe milk chocolate?’ She held up a finger. ‘Velvety. Smooth. Rich. Silky. Irresistible. Decadent.’
‘My friend went out of his way to get you this little job,’ said Felix a little stiffly.
‘I’m grateful. Of course I’m grateful.’ She stood up and put her arms around his neck. Buttery, she thought. Melting. Creamy, Addictive. Warm. Earthy. ‘Stop looking so anxious. I’m going to be fine. Go to work.’ She kissed him on the mouth and felt his lips smile beneath hers.
‘If you’re sure you really—’
‘Felix.’ She put her hand on the small of his back and gave him a push. ‘Shoo.’
When Felix left, she waited and listened for his footsteps on the stairs, the door to the street opening and then closing. She took a deep breath. The quiet and stillness was an immense relief and she almost told herself that this would be enough. But she knew it wasn’t enough.
Then she made the call.
‘Can I come in this morning? Straight away. Is it possible?’
She waited for her request to be passed on. Yes, it was possible.
She would like to have gone by bike, but she didn’t ride her bike anymore. She would like to have walked, but it would take too long and after yesterday she wasn’t sure that walking was a good idea. The underground was impossible for her with the noise and the heat and the crowds and the lack of space, above all the sense of being in a metal tube underground. But there was one good side to being in this new, strange part of north-west London. A train clattered past almost as a reminder. Willesden Junction. The overground. She looked at her phone. She could get there on time.
The walls of Dr Roland Lowe’s consulting room were an unequivocal white, like a laboratory. There was nothing on the wall but framed degrees and there was a blue rug on the floor of the sort designed to be easy to scrub clean.
Dr Lowe looked at her with an appraising expression. He was a gaunt, angular figure, bald with grey hair close-cropped on the sides of his head. Nancy always felt that for him she wasn’t so much a patient to be cured as a problem to be solved.
‘You said it was urgent,’ he said.
‘I think I need to make some adjustments.’
‘Are you having a problem with side-effects?’
‘I’m having a problem with my brain. I think I may need to up the dose a bit.’
‘Has something happened?’
‘Yesterday I had a bit of a – well, a recurrence, I guess.’
Dr Lowe seemed to consider this for a moment. It was as if Nancy was at a garage, and she was telling the mechanic that her car was making a rattling sound. She quite liked that: it felt practical.
‘All right,’ said Dr Lowe. He reached across his desk for a pad of paper. He took a pen from his pocket, removed the cap and wrote something at the top that Nancy couldn’t see. ‘You probably know the drill by now, Ms North,’ he said.
‘Nancy. Please call me Nancy. You sound like you’re talking to a body on a slab.’
It took only five minutes for Nancy to describe her experience yesterday, which had felt like a frail echo of her previous psychotic attack. Dr Lowe didn’t respond. He simply opened his drawer and took out a prescription pad. He wrote on it and then tore off the page.
‘I’m increasing the dose by a milligram. That should help. If it doesn’t improve after a few days, come back and we’ll try another milligram.’ He handed the prescription to Nancy. ‘This should do the trick.’
One hour after she had left Dr Lowe’s consulting room, Nancy was sitting in a room on the second floor of a Victorian house. Its walls were painted sage green, and it had two large, comfortable armchairs facing each other in the centre of the room. One was a mustard yellow, the other scuffed brown leather.
Nancy sat in the yellow chair, as she had always done. She looked at the picture of trees on the wall opposite that she had looked at the last time she was here, two months ago. Everything was exactly the same. The same vase with a single sprig of rosemary, the same rug on the floor, the same view out of the window – except the last time, the tree had been in blossom and now only a few brown leaves clung to its swaying branches.
She wanted to cry in relief.
‘Hello, Nancy,’ said the woman who sat opposite her, in the leather chair: soft white hair and brown watching eyes, her hands folded together in the pleats of her grey skirt. ‘How are you?’
‘You said I should call you if I ever felt the need.’
‘What’s up?’
Nancy looked out of the window once more, at the birds perched in the branches and beyond them the low, grey sky, thinking, readying herself to speak.
‘It happened again. I heard voices talking to me and even though I knew they weren’t real, they felt horribly real. I’ve been doing well. I’ve been obedient. I’ve taken the drugs. I’ve tried to live on an even keel, which goes against my grain. I’ve been careful. I’m all right today. It was very brief, but I know I have to take it seriously and deal with it. Nip it in the bud. I’ve been to Dr Lowe and he’s upped the drugs, and I felt it would be helpful to talk to you. I don’t want to tell Felix. I want him to see me as the woman he fell in love with. Not a patient, a problem, a burden.’
Fifty minutes later, Nancy was walking down the broad, tree-lined street, on her way back to Harlesden. She felt satisfied with her morning’s work. She had dealt with things in a proper way. Nobody would ever have to know.