3

WHEN I GOT BACK TO ST CHRISTOPHER’S I FOUND HASSID outside my room. It had been in my mind that Hassid was ready to be discharged and only my indulgence had allowed him to linger so long.

‘Hi, Hassid, are you waiting for me?’ Who else would he be waiting for? The thought of some new demand, even a trivial one—especially a trivial one—fell like a dead-weight blow.

‘Doctor, I am sorry, may I speak to you, please?’

I suppressed irritation, unlocked the door and, with a manner as warm as I could muster, indicated that Hassid should enter too. At first I didn’t register what was wrong with the room. Then I saw that the plate for the sandwiches, on which Elizabeth Cruikshank had stayed her savage appetite, was still on the floor, along with an empty mug and glass. The waste bin had not been emptied, the chairs had not been aligned into their customary military precision, the whole room smelled of whisky and had the disordered air of use.

Lennie’s attentions entailed a fascist-like efficiency. That he hadn’t been in was obvious. But then I had asked him to leave the room till the following day.

‘It’s Lennie,’ Hassid said, apparently extracting, with his conjuror’s skill, the name from my mind. ‘He’s gone.’

Oh Christ! I thought. Not now, please.

‘How do you know, Hassid? Maybe he just hasn’t been in today. Maybe he’s unwell.’

‘No, Doctor. Lennie is never ill, believe me.’ Hassid’s expression, portraying superior insight, was ever so slightly smug. ‘It is Dr Mackie. Lennie has gone. Vamoosed.’ He gestured with the elegant hand. ‘Believe me.’

Jesus wept! Another matter I was going to have to deal with.

‘What happened, Hassid?’

Hassid’s glance was wandering to the blue chair so I indicated that he should sit down and told him to spill the beans. Thinking of beans, I noticed the coffee machine still bore the dregs of the previous evening’s marathon.

‘Would you like some coffee, Hassid?’

‘Gosh, thanks, Doctor.’

‘It’s cold. That all right for you?’

There was only one clean mug which I gave to him while I used the mug Elizabeth Cruikshank had drunk from. Hassid accepted the mug of cold stale coffee graciously. Maybe he imagined the British medical profession preferred their coffee cold. As he settled himself in the blue chair, nursing a slender ankle across his knee, it crossed my mind that maybe he was homosexual, and that this was potentially a contributing factor to his breakdown. One I may have overlooked. We’d touched on girls a little, but in deference to his religion I had treated his diffidence as cultural rather than a physical or affectional matter.

And then into my mind erupted a rogue voice, which uttered this heresy. I don’t care! it announced. I don’t care any longer what Hassid’s, or anyone’s, sexual preferences are, or whether they matter to them or not.

But despite this voice I cared about Lennie’s whereabouts, so while I sipped the disagreeably cold and bitter coffee—which I took a perverse pleasure in drinking—in my twice-worn shirt and underclothes and socks—matters over which I am fastidious—I listened to Hassid’s story.

‘It was your car, Doctor. Lennie found Dr Mackie putting a note on it.’

So I was right about the author of that prissy note. ‘What happened, Hassid?’

‘There were fisticuffs, Doctor.’

This wonderfully old-world word brought an involuntary grin to my tired face.

‘You mean they had a fight?’ My smile must have broadened. The idea of Mackie and Lennie in a punch-up was cheering me up no end.

‘I would say that Lennie was doing most of the hitting, Doctor. Dr Mackie didn’t do so much.’

Lennie, Hassid explained, with the glee of one who brings distressing news, had argued with Mackie and in the course of the wrangle had become so incensed that he had hit the doctor. Mackie had rung the police while Lennie, showing, to my mind, great good sense, had scarpered.

‘And this was all over my car?’

‘Yes, Doctor. Lennie didn’t like that Dr Mackie was complaining about it. He wanted to come and see you, Dr Mackie did, but Lennie said you were with somebody. He stopped him. Dr Mackie shouldn’t have insisted, should he, while you were with someone, even if it was late and after hours? It was Mrs Cruikshank, wasn’t it?’

It’s not only Jane Austen’s world that’s a neighbourhood of voluntary spies. But curiosity is one index of mental health. High time, I thought, for Hassid to be returned to the student environment.

‘Do you have any idea of where Lennie might have gone, Hassid?’

‘No, Doctor. But he gave me this so I think he was not thinking of coming back.’

Hassid dug in his trouser pocket and produced a rosette in the blue and white Brighton colours. ‘Dr Mackie asked me to stay and watch Lennie while he rang the police. He tried to get Lennie to come inside with him but Lennie said he wouldn’t. He said he “weren’t no bleeding loony”.’ Lennie’s thick voice emerged unmistakably through Hassid’s lucid accent. So Hassid had a talent for mimicry too. Well, as I’d been noting, you never knew what people had in them…‘Then he gave me this and said, “Great knowing you, kiddo,” and ran. Dr Mackie was angry with me but I am not a policeman and I do not think he was entitled to ask me to restrain Lennie. I am one of the “bleeding loonies”, after all,’ Hassid concluded politely.

For all my concern I had to laugh, and did so a little too raucously. I would have to sort it out with Mackie. After all, I was to blame for the badly parked car. What with one thing and another the gods were ensuring that Nemesis was having a field day with me: Lennie, though not one of our inmates, was a registered outpatient and technically my responsibility.

I rang Mackie’s number, got no reply, rang my secretary, Trish, and left her a message, and then went to reception to see if they could throw light on Mackie’s whereabouts.

‘Oh, Dr McBride, one of your patients left this for you.’ Maureen, our receptionist, handed me an envelope and although the handwriting was unfamiliar the second I saw it I guessed who it was from.

It was an italic hand in brown ink and when I opened the envelope I looked at the signature for confirmation. There wasn’t much else to detain the eye, for all that was written on the postcard inside were three lines.

Dear David,

Thank you.

Elizabeth Cruikshank

I turned the postcard over but it was only a faded sepia print of Brighton Pier, the kind I’d seen plentifully on sale in the hospital shop.

‘When did she go?’ I had left a message for Mackie and hurried, as if my life depended on it, over to Elizabeth Cruikshank’s ward.

‘I’m sorry, Dr McBride, I should have said.’ Maguire looked anxious. ‘She left this morning, after you went, ever so quietly. She packed her stuff up and just went. We couldn’t stop her, could we? She asked for you and I explained you were called away and we couldn’t say when you would be back. She said she had to go and anyway you would know she would be gone.’

Had I known? Perhaps I had. Perhaps that was what I had understood when I had experienced that terrible sense of dereliction on the Downs.

It dawned on me that in all the world this was the person I was closest to. Closer than I’d been to anyone save Jonny. I had left the gap he had made unfilled, that door in my soul ajar. But it was through it, through the door, which I had never closed, that Elizabeth Cruikshank had walked back into the known world. And somehow, in that process, she had closed the way behind her and shut Jonny out.

How this had happened, what strange emotional logic this betrayed, I couldn’t begin to fathom, still less comprehend. But I felt the consequences as rudely and forcefully, and, it seemed, as mortally as if someone near and dear to me had taken a twelvebore and shot it, point-blank, into my chest. I think I may even have gasped aloud and stooped over with the pain of it because Maguire said, ‘Are you all right, Doctor? They can’t blame you for this one, surely? She was voluntary.’ And because of all that had happened, and because of who Maguire was, and because even if she didn’t understand why I felt as I did, and could never understand, I knew she wouldn’t judge me, I put my hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Cath, would you just give me a hug?’ I needed to know that someone was there. And good old Maguire hugged me as hard and as close as if I were a long-lost sweetheart come home.

‘I always said you were wasted on women!’ I didn’t bother to conceal the fact that for the third time that day there were tears in my eyes. ‘Get away, you great flirt,’ Maguire said, and I smacked her behind and we both blushed, from which I deduced that she wasn’t as lesbian as she made out.

I found Mackie, finally, taking a late lunch in the canteen. He was forking fish fingers into his mouth and the sadist in me noted a blotch of ketchup on the white collar of his neat bluestriped shirt. My sensitive nose was conscious that my own shirt stank rancorously of sweat.

‘Colin,’ I said, aware, in contrast to Mackie, that I presented a pretty crumpled sight and purposely the more genial. ‘I’ve been looking for you. I owe you an apology for my car.’ And, God forgive me, I believe I beamed.

Mackie looked uncomfortable. He was the type who, aggressive himself, is at a loss to know how to deal with cordiality in others, however assumed.

‘McBride! I’m afraid events have evolved, ah, unfortunately.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, disingenuously. ‘I hope I didn’t inconvenience you too much?’

‘I’m afraid you did. You saw my note?’

‘I did and I would have come to apologise but—’

Mackie waved this aside. ‘That cleaner of yours—’ Seeing me raise my eyebrows, he adjusted: ‘I should say, ours. He behaved most aggressively over my placing the note on your windscreen. I’m sorry to tell you he attacked me. I’ve had to bring a charge of assault, of course.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry. I feel responsible.’

‘No, no, how could you—’

‘But I do, Colin.’ (I applied the Christian name like a poultice.) ‘Technically, he’s my patient. Of course we employ him too, but obviously I must take full responsibility if his medication is proving inadequate.’

‘What’s he on?’ As I had hoped, Mackie’s professional instincts began to engage.

‘Modecate, a hundred mil, monthly.’

‘Ought to be holding him,’ Mackie said. ‘You might try reducing the interval to three weeks, I suppose. How long has he been on it?’

‘Pretty much since he fetched up here about three years ago. But look, he’s your line of country. I’d welcome your thoughts. I shouldn’t dream of trying any talking stuff on him.’

Mackie was visibly thawing so I pushed on while I had an advantage. ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking of using him as an example of what we can’t do with talk alone in the paper I’m giving in Rome. Gus Galen’s asked me to give the response to Jeffries. Look, it would be a huge help to me if I could talk some of that stuff through with you.’

This was not sheer guff, for as I was speaking I was allowing myself to become aware of something, something which, unwilling to acknowledge, I had pushed out of consciousness till now: Mackie was lonely. Mackie, in his way, was as lonely as I was. I knew nothing about him, of his life away from the hospital, and I had never attempted to discover anything. I had played on his hostility as a justification for my own dislike, but in truth I had been an accessory to the bad feeling between us. I had discouraged him because he made me feel discouraged. And discouragement, like every other emotional emission, is contagious.

But so is its opposite.

‘I’ve not spoken to the police, as such,’ Mackie was now saying. ‘They were too tied up last evening—would you believe?’

‘It would be a kindness to me if you could see your way to dropping it,’ I said. And this time my cordiality wasn’t faked. ‘I’ve had a hell of a day, to tell you the truth.’ I sketched for him an outline of the St Stephen’s disaster.

Mackie took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes and I observed that they were that pale blue colour which fades under spectacles. They were bloodshot, as mine most likely were. ‘I had a hell of a day yesterday, too. Fact is, my mother’s ill. My sister’s in Canada and the burden falls on me. I probably overreacted to your car. In the event, the police didn’t come out; though it’s as well someone wasn’t being murdered—sorry, not very tactful in the circumstances! I’m sorry about your St Stephen’s man.’

‘Thanks. As I needn’t tell you, it rather goes with the territory.’ I heard Elizabeth Cruikshank’s cool voice: Why do you do this? Is it love or damage? But mine and Mackie’s damage were of different orders and I didn’t want to get into the wolf man with him, not even on our new terms. ‘I’d be very glad if the police weren’t involved. I don’t think Lennie’s basically violent. He’s just got an overprotective thing about me. I’ll give him a proper talking-to.’

‘Yes, well,’ Mackie said, unwilling to relinquish a justified grievance too readily. ‘If it happens again I’ll be forced to do something. He gave me a very nasty knock.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘Where did he hit you?’ Other than the ketchup stain there was no obvious mark on Mackie’s impeccably turned-out person.

‘It was in the, ah, stomach,’ Mackie said, primly; from which I deduced that Lennie’s blow had in fact landed rather lower down.

Poor Mackie. Poor Lennie. Poor all of us, if we but knew it, blindly crawling along our parallel lines, unmindful that all around there are others as much in need of comfort and consolation.

‘Come by my room sometime and we can chew things over,’ I suggested with a heartiness born of this small victory. I doubted he would. And I had no intention of discussing Lennie at the conference. But I felt relief that the enmity between us had for the moment been dissolved.

Mackie must have been feeling something similar because he said, awkwardly, ‘Surely, yes, I’ll do that, thanks, ah, David,’ which was the first time he had addressed me by anything other than my surname.

‘What’s your other name, Dr McBride?’

‘David. My family call me Davey.’

‘I prefer David.’

‘You can call me David if you like.’

Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly, unavoidably, uncopably tired. Too tired almost to stand. I bade a comradely farewell to Mackie, returned to reception where I rang through to Trish and told her to cancel my afternoon appointments. I offered no explanation for this and she asked for none. It was the first time I had taken more than an hour off in all the time she had worked for me. I imagine she was too astonished to voice any reaction.

Mackie’s Ford was parked with anal precision by my Renault and I was dismayed to see the figure of Hassid parked there beside it.

‘Hassid?’

‘Doctor, I was thinking—’

Enough was enough. ‘I’ve spoken to Dr Mackie, Hassid. He’s very kindly agreed to drop any charges against Lennie, so if you can think of how we might track him down would you put your mind to it for me? I’d be very grateful.’

I inched out of the narrow space with the added impediment of Hassid’s magisterial beckoning but I was now fully alive to the dangers the day might harbour and, for Lennie’s sake, I paid special attention to my reversing. I didn’t want anything to foul up the truce with Mackie.

As I was about to pull away Hassid halted me with an imperious hand.

I wound down the window. ‘What is it, Hassid?’

‘Please, Doctor, it is Mrs Cruikshank.’

‘Yes?’ I was ready to be openly annoyed.

‘Sister Maguire says she has left us. But she had not returned all her books to the library, I’m afraid.’

‘Never mind, Hassid,’ I said, and now the tears which threatened my composure were born of sheer fatigue. ‘If you let me know what they are I’ll undertake to replace any that are missing.’

I continued to monitor my driving on the short journey home. Olivia would be at the shop so an oasis of potential peace lay before me. I was planning a sandwich, a hot bath and—the prospect was celestial—bed.

‘Darling,’ Olivia’s voice greeted me as the front door banged shut. ‘Is that you?’

I found her in the living room—with Dan. My school Bible was still lying face down on the corner of the sofa where I’d left it. Dan and Olivia were sitting on the sofa and some protective instinct made me walk across and close the little book and place it deliberately on a table by the armchair in which I sat down. I said nothing. I hadn’t, when it came down to it, anything to say.

‘I was passing the shop and Olivia wanted me to run her home,’ Dan suggested finally. It wasn’t much of an attempt at explanation so I didn’t bother to reply to it, except to raise my eyebrows and look at Olivia.

‘I wasn’t feeling too well,’ Olivia explained.

‘Oh,’ I said, non-committally. I felt that someone should do better than this and it wasn’t going to be me.

‘Yes,’ Dan said. He looked dreadfully awkward. ‘So, I brought her home.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’

‘I wasn’t feeling well,’ Olivia repeated.

I wondered how much longer we were going to go on in this vein. I felt completely detached, remote, unfussed, even a little kindly towards them. It wasn’t my scrape and I was mildly interested to see how they were going to get out of it. The only thing I felt strongly about at that moment was a sandwich and my bath.

I got up. ‘Don’t go!’ Dan said and simultaneously Olivia said, ‘Darling!’

‘I’m getting myself something to eat,’ I explained. ‘I’m starving.’

When I came out of the kitchen Dan was standing by the window jingling his keys. He was a terrible fidget and Bar often teased him about it. I wondered how Bar was and what, if anything, she and Dan had talked about the previous evening.

‘Look, I’d better be off,’ Dan said, abruptly. ‘I’ve patients to see…’ He didn’t ask what I was doing home in the middle of the afternoon. He would have known I must have patients to see too.

‘Sure,’ I said. And sat down with my sandwich.

Olivia saw Dan to the door where they exchanged a few words, and then came back and sat on the sofa with her feet up while I went on chewing my sandwich. It wasn’t bad, cream cheese with cucumber, and a lot of pepper, though it struck me that I’d had rather a lot of sandwiches lately. When I’d finished, I got up to take the plate into the kitchen and went to run a bath. I undressed in the bedroom, put on my dressing gown and was going across to the bathroom when Olivia called out, ‘Darling.’

I thought of ignoring this because I really did want that bath very badly but habit is a hard taskmaster so I called back a reluctant, ‘Yes?’

‘Darling, will you come and talk to me?’

‘I’ve just run a bath.’

‘Would you like me to soap your back?’

This time I ignored the taskmaster. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t, thanks,’ and I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I think it may have been the first time it had been locked except by visitors.

I lay for a long time in the bath, topping it up with draughts of hot water as soon as the temperature dropped below the level of just less than scalding and stuffing my toes alternately into the hot and cold tap, as I have done since I was a child.

I didn’t try to think what I was going to say to Olivia, or how she was going to approach me. I didn’t have to try not to think. My mental processes had reduced to a state which appeared to have lost touch with any personal emotion. It was as if I had been filled from top to toe with mud, and the mud was slowly solidifying inside me. It was a dull sort of feeling but not uncomfortable. Possibly those who have been lobotomised feel somewhat the same.

When I surrendered my bathroom retreat, my first hopeful thought was that Olivia had gone out. The sitting room and kitchen were empty but when I went to the bedroom to my annoyance I found her undressed in bed.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was hoping to get some sleep. I didn’t sleep too much last night.’

‘I’ll snuggle down with you,’ Olivia said.

Over my dead body, I said inwardly. ‘I’ll take a nap on the sofa then.’

‘Darling,’ said Olivia, ‘I do love you.’

If, rather than what she had been doing with Dan, she had sat up all night debating with him how to rile me most she could hardly have achieved a wilder success. But I was too tired and too detached even to attempt to indicate as much, so I just said, ‘Oh?’ as unenthusiastically as I knew how.

‘Darling Davey,’ Olivia said.

‘What is it, Olivia? What would you like to say to me?’ Resigned, I watched the chimerical prospect of sleep slide away.

‘Darling, I do love you,’ Olivia said again.

I stood there, slightly damp in my dressing gown, not even especially annoyed this time. I kept thinking of Elizabeth Cruikshank and her Thomas, shouting at her, shouting because he loved her, and crying, and then dying without her; and how hard it is to find love, and how harder still to be loved, or believe you are loved; and how often and how easily, and cheaply and wantonly, the word ‘love’ is abused. And—and this, as I stood there, struck me as almost the most pitiful fact of all—how much more conditioned we sorry beings are to respond to the sham, the pinchbeck which parades as love but isn’t love at all.

Olivia didn’t love me. She was, I suddenly understood, afraid. I wasn’t sure of what, unless it was the humiliation of being found out over Dan, but that she was afraid I knew for sure. And hard behind that recognition came a debilitating ennui; for I felt myself about to be bound fast by those invisible cords of compassion which constrain us more tightly than love.

‘Olivia,’ I said, ‘I am so tired I can hardly stay upright. I want more than anything just now to go to sleep. If you have anything to say to me, please would you say it? Whatever it is, I won’t mind. I don’t mind anything right now except how extraordinarily tired I am and how much I would like to sleep for a few hours, preferably on my own, undisturbed.’

‘I’m pregnant,’ Olivia said, with what seemed at the time startling simplicity, though afterwards, when I thought about it, I wondered what other words she could have used.