Chapter 10

“So it all turned out to be this Mervyn fellow’s fault,” remarked Alistair, having listened in, eyes closed, on the summary of last night’s revelations. “But I don’t see why you girls are so shocked about it. I thought everything was always the man’s fault?” He yawned, stretching his long bulk even more luxuriously against the sofa cushions, and continued: “Isn’t anyone going to pour me another cup of coffee?”

It was Diana, of course, who reached for the coffee pot, and Bridget watched the eagerly subservient movement with her usual flicker of irritation. Why couldn’t the wretched man ever do anything for himself? The irritation, however, was a small thing – and she recognised it as such – compared with the enormous relief she was still feeling at finding life in the flat going on exactly as usual this Saturday morning. After Diana’s panicky telephone call last night, and her own somewhat dilatory response to it, she had travelled back this morning in an uncomfortable state of guilt and unease. Suppose something awful really had happened at the flat in her absence? Suppose she’d arrived back to find her flatmate dead, or abducted, or in hospital, because of something that would never have happened if Bridget had rushed back as soon as she was summoned? She’d even felt relieved, as she walked up the road from the bus stop, to see that Acorn House was still standing.

She was even more relieved, as she mounted the second flight of stairs, to hear the sound of voices pitched at an ordinary conversational level, with no indication of trauma or crisis. She was actually glad to hear Alistair’s annoying tones, mocking something someone had just said. Normally she would have been distinctly put out to discover Alistair already here before midday on a Saturday, as it would almost certainly mean that they would have him for the whole weekend. This time, though, after all her fears and imaginings, his familiar provoking presence was positively reassuring. So much so that she even found herself smiling when he stretched out his arms towards her in idle greeting and lamented the fact that he was too lazy to get off the sofa to come and kiss her.

“If a man be a fool” she quoted, “Pray God that he may also be lazy, for it will keep him out of many troubles,” and soon she had joined them in what had obviously been something of a marathon coffee-break.

By now, Norah’s former reticence was quite gone. She seemed only too glad to tell and re-tell her unhappy story. After all the long months of secrecy, of trying to hide her tragic family situation from friends and neighbours, of enduring the social isolation which inevitably goes with hiding one’s real situation from absolutely everybody, she found it an indescribable relief to be confiding at last in listeners who were not only interested but, far more important, had never known her as the person she once was. Among strangers, there was hardly any pain involved in playing the role of victim, because they have never known any other way; to become a victim, a “Poor Thing”, under the shocked gaze of old friends who had previously known you as an amusing, life-enhancing, top-of-the-world sort of person, was humiliating beyond all endurance.

So, having already told her story in such detail to Diana, Norah was now quite ready to repeat the salient points for Bridget’s benefit.

“So you see, Bridget,” she explained, “The reason I’ve run away like this isn’t just that I can’t stand it, though of course I can’t. What I think I’m really trying to do is to force Mervyn to realise that Christopher is mentally ill, so that he will be forced to do something about it. Get him treated somehow – get him into hospital – something. I know that that’s what he needs, and if Mervyn is left to cope with him single-handed for even a few days, then he’ll find it out for himself. You see, all the time I’m there he can get away with turning a blind eye to the awful things Christopher does, because I’m the one coping with the results. You see, the point is, Mervyn finds it intolerably humiliating to face the fact that he, a top-ranking psychiatrist, has a mentally-ill son. But if I’m not there, he’ll have to face it. When he comes home and finds that Christopher has wrecked something for some weird reason inside his head – and when he can’t blame it on me, whatever it is, because I’m not there – then he’ll have to face it, won’t he? He’ll have to do something about it.”

“Such as what?” put in Alistair drily. “Haven’t you heard of Community Care? Don’t you know what it means? It means you. On the job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without any pay at all – what could be cheaper? And in the case of your son – you won’t even get anyone doing an assessment or prescribing the appropriate pills for him to refuse to take. Since the patient’s father is some kind of a shrink, they’ll assume that he’s seeing to all that kind of thing, because he’s the expert.”

Here he sighed, and raised his eyes to the ceiling in mock despair.

“Nobody seems to understand what an expert is, and what can be expected of him. As an expert myself, in a small way, I can tell you. An expert is the man who can’t be expected to do anything. He’s there simply to criticise the people who do do things.”

“But, Alistair, he’ll have to do something! You don’t understand!” Diana interrupted. “The kind of things this boy gets up to when he’s in one of his bad spells – tell him, Norah. Tell him some of the things you’ve told me.”

And Norah, willingly enough by now, did so.

“I’d let him go out shopping,” she began. “I did that sometimes, when he seemed to be having a good day, and mostly he was very efficient. I was upstairs when he arrived back, and when I came down I found he’d brought home this load of groceries from the supermarket and had put it all in the washing-machine. With detergent, and switched on to “Hot”. If I hadn’t been there to cope with the worst of the mess before Mervyn got home – if he’d come in and found the butter and the Rainbow Dip and the soused herrings and bananas all whirling round, and no one but himself to do something about it … Mind you, he got involved in the end, because we had to get a man in to fix the washing machine. The works were all bunged up with gunge even after I’d cleaned it … Mervyn blamed me, of course. He said I didn’t understand that someone as brilliant as Christopher was bound to be a bit absent-minded at times.

“But it wasn’t absence of mind, I knew it wasn’t, it was full-blown delusion. Christopher explained it to me in his weird, logical-sounding way. He was afraid of food-poisoning, he said, from the modern methods of chilling and storing, and so he’d decided that all super-market food should be given a thorough wash before being eaten.