10

MY APPOINTMENT WITH DR HANNAN’S COUNSEL WAS NOT till eleven so I had time, the following morning, to drop by the National Gallery.

I renewed my acquaintance with Titian’s Man with a Blue Sleeve. I like that blue. And I adore Titian’s supreme confidence. You can see it reflected in his nobleman, who’s so clearly a bastard but one of those bastards you can’t help but admire.

It was almost twelve years since I’d looked at the Caravaggio and I’d forgotten, if I’d ever registered, how young the risen Christ looks. His cheek is almost childishly smooth, the rounded curves defying the recent experience of death, as if in dying his bloom has been renewed. Poor Jesus. I’d never considered it before but how appalling to undergo that agonising death, and have all the relief of its being over, and then have to endure the redoubled torment of coming back.

I looked again at the stupefied pair receiving the news of this unlooked-for return. The hand of the disciple to the right, which comes springing out of the frame, as if the third dimension has been given literal shape, is the left hand, the sinister side, the hand of the unconscious, plucking life and flinging it at us out of the dark.

I’d not taken in the painting properly when Gus showed it to me first, inspecting it only out of politeness, and curiosity—mostly about my new acquaintance. Now it hit me with the delayed force that the revelation they were witnessing plainly hit the two amazed fishermen, when the friend and colleague they had loved—and walked and talked and lain down and slept with, on lousy straw and rocky, inhospitable soil, and starved with, and eaten supper with the night before he died, and believed dead and gone for ever—rematerialised out of the blue to share this other supper with them and knock them back to life.

I doubt you can know until you have someone close to you die how unnatural the loss feels. I, who had lived with that absence from childhood, had a problem understanding the degree to which the dead are dead to most of the living. When I finally accepted that Jonny had gone, I began to believe I could bring him back by willing it. I used to invent elaborate rituals with my toys, toys we had shared. We had a jam jar filled with cowrie shells, a legacy from our mother’s childhood, and Jonny used to form patterns with them on our bedroom lino. He would lay the shells out on the diamond-patterned floor and stand us both inside and speak spells and transport us to China, to India, to Arabia, to Timbuktu.

Those lands he transported us to were as real to me as the rocky Cornish seascapes where we spent our holidays, and where Jonny’s inventiveness presided over rock pools and shrimping nets and fantasies of smuggling. In important ways more real.

At dawn and dusk, at teatime, breakfast, schooldays and holidays and those isolated days I persuaded my mother I was sick and she let me off school—no easy feat, since she was rarely susceptible to pleading—I cast the cowrie shells. I also made potions from dock and dew, which I sneaked out early in the morning to gather in a cracked doll’s cup, another relic from our mother’s childhood, and drew blood from my arm with the pin of an old Thomas the Tank Engine badge and tried to furnish my mind with words, whose precise meaning I didn’t comprehend but whose obscurities I hoped might provide the necessary summoning power. But for all my dedicated efforts, and all my willing suspension of disbelief, Jonny never returned.

But Jesus did. According to the story. The story must have had the same impact on Caravaggio as he envisaged it had on the two disciples for him to have painted the shock of it with such electrifying intensity. An intensity which reached through time and space and penetrated my inhibited English breast as I stood in the particular quiet of an unpeopled gallery. There’s a sense in which I fell in love with Gus the day he took me to see the Caravaggio. But it wasn’t until that moment that I fell in love with the painting he had showed me.

I lingered, as lovers do, over this discovery and my dislike of being unpunctual meant that I raced down the Strand and was sweating into my carefully chosen white shirt by the time I reached the court.

I needn’t have worried. The young counsel was later still. As we went through my testimony again I remarked, conversationally, that there was no way of stopping someone bent on doing themselves in any more than you could halt the progress of a wild horse.

‘Let’s skip the horse ref, yah?’ suggested the counsel, whose hair resembled the tail feathers of a bedraggled mallard duck. I wasn’t fooled; these draggled young men are eagles when they fasten on their prey.

The image was purely for private communication, I assured him. In my testimony I would stick to medical principles of the purely conventional kind.

As I entered the windowless room, where witnesses are asked to kick their heels, a garrulous-seeming woman started up at me.

‘You a witness? I’m here for the bodily violence.’

She sounded as if she might be. The over-talkative have something of the terrorist about them. I organised my expression into what I hoped was a politely repelling aspect and withdrew into my thoughts.

Waiting is no hardship for me. Even today, when I am less oppressed by claims on my time, I am content to wait for hours at airports. It gives me a break from the perpetual feeling that I ought to be doing something—a licensed rest from the overactive sense of duty which my upbringing induced. The garrulous woman was called and I was left thankful for no further interruption. I tried to dredge from memory the story behind the Caravaggio painting. But it wouldn’t come. My knowledge of such subjects is hazy but no doctor could fail to have a soft spot for Jesus. Whatever else, he was a virtuoso healer, a colleague, in fact, though if you were to believe the story one with rather superior credentials.

But your average doctor is not a god and shouldn’t fall into the trap of feeling that is what is required. ‘Stay awake, do your best and don’t expect results,’ Gus would say. But those who suffer, and those close to them, expect results, and when these go awry the doctor can be crucified.

I’ve appeared, several times, as an expert witness and each time the gravity of the occasion catches me. A glance at the judge revealed a narrow-featured man with serious spectacles whose wig had been thrown rakishly over his head like a dishcloth. It took me some years to work out that the greater the authority in court, the greater the licence with the wig.

I steadied myself to tell, if not the absolute truth—for how can any of us fairly do that?—at least to give my considered opinion, which was that on the available information Dr Hannan could not reasonably be said to have erred. Across the room I observed him, repeatedly wiping with a large white handkerchief his hands, the back of his neck, his broad shiny forehead, even his plump trousered knees, and my heart went out to him.

Dr Hannan, it had been established, had discussed the attempted suicide’s case with appropriate care, had requested that his patient be closely observed by the nursing staff and that all medication be strictly supervised. It was the girl’s perseverant cunning which had contrived to steal enough from a hospital drugs trolley, left carelessly by no one could establish whom, to finish the job she had started. There was something awesome about this executive efficiency. It was a disturbing affair, not only because of the girl’s youth but because from her actions you could tell that she might have amounted to something. It takes a special kind of determined will to accomplish your own death.

I pronounced, and under questioning reiterated, my view that there had been no deficiencies in the treatment of Melanie Hope Claybourne whose life had been taken by her own hand. ‘And you remain convinced,’ the prosecuting counsel pressed, ‘that everything reasonable was done by Dr Hannan to prevent any further attempts by his patient on her own life?’ Beneath his professional obligations I got the sense that no more than I did he want to condemn the sweating doctor.

‘Completely convinced,’ was my honest answer.

But inwardly I wondered a little about that name ‘Hope’, which seemed to hint at some ungrasped opportunity. The question which I had half anticipated never arrived, though I detected a shade of its possibility flicker in the eyes of our draggled counsel. What the other counsel might have asked was whether, in the circumstances, I would have followed the same procedures as Dr Hannan. The unspoken question had a certain validity. It was not that Dr Hannan had not done everything ‘reasonable’ for his patient’s well-being; it was that he had neglected to consider the ‘unreasonable’. And as Gus would say, in such cases it is often the unreasonable which is required.

Perhaps it was as well for Hannan that the unreasonable doesn’t make convincing testimony in court. Nor is it yet a recognised prophylactic in psychiatric procedure. No one in any official position would consider saying, ‘The girl was called “Hope”, maybe you should have asked her, and yourself, what that unfashionable yet suggestive name might represent?’ Nor did I have any way of knowing whether I could have succeeded where Hannan had failed. So much depends, I reflected on the train home, dog-tired at the effort of truth-telling, on how far one can gain access to the secret mind. As far as her physical person went, Hannan had behaved irreproachably but the balance of the girl’s life might have hung on whether he could find in her the ‘Hope’ for which she was named.

My mind darted anxiously to Elizabeth Cruikshank, whom it was my duty to try to perceive. How far did she want me to see her? But then, how far do any of us want to be seen? On the one hand, it is what we fear most, that our shamefulnesses, disloyalties, meannesses, cruelties, miseries, the sum of our hopeless, abject, creeping failures be finally laid bare. But the very opposite is also the case. I believed—or believed I believed—that we are in anguish until someone finally finds us out. And the deeper truth is that human consciousness can hold two contradictory states at once, and all our unmet longings wear an overcoat of fear.

To my annoyance I found I had left my scarf, cashmere, and a present from Olivia, in the railway carriage, and had to walk home from the station pursued by a wind screaming ‘All is futile’ around my naked neck and ears.

The lights in the flat were out when I reached it and I went round turning on more than I needed. It would have been consoling to find Olivia at home, and even to have her scold me a little over the scarf. I poured myself a whisky and switched an extra heater on, though the temperature was warm enough.

There was a note on the kitchen counter: Back late. Ham, toms, etc in fridge. O. Sometimes Olivia decorated her initial with a smile which could irk me but I missed it now.

I helped myself to a cold supper of ham and tomatoes and plenty of chutney and, in an act of defiance, because Olivia was fussy about the smell, three pickled onions. It was late, and I was too tired to work so I settled down with a whisky and Mansfield Park. Getting up to refill my glass, and check the answerphone, in case Olivia might have left a message, I thought that when I had a moment I must remember to look up the story of that other supper.