to me.’
‘Not unwelcome, maybe, but drastic nonetheless.’
Something about her made me feel that the distinction might be one she would understand, but it produced nothing. I tried a different tack. ‘I gather you’ve decided not to take any further medication while you’re with us.’
‘I prefer not.’
‘I see. Any reason? I should say I shan’t force anything on you but drugs can sometimes help.’ It was in my mind that it was drugs which had failed to help her leave life, so I could appreciate her antipathy to having them help her endure it.
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said, deliberately brisk. ‘Let’s see how you go.’
I waited again in case she came out with anything more and the silence thickened, hovered for a moment, as if she might relegate it a second time, hung in the air between us and then attenuated and passed over. I felt there was no more to come from her but I made an appointment to see her the following day.
The principal part of the hospital was located in a modern building across the garden from the old house where I had my room. I was about to make my way over there when I heard the unmistakable voice of Lennie, our office cleaner.
Lennie was a recovered schizophrenic. I say ‘recovered’ but more accurately I should say managed. He had stayed on after being brought in for the umpteenth time from under the pier, where he hung out, madder than the vexed sea and covered with sand and pee and some or other form of the more diabolical kind of alcoholic spirit he consumed, and talking wildly to the more other-worldly ‘spirits’ who, on such occasions, invited him to demonstrate his faith in them by committing his body to the deep. I was the duty consultant that night and, I don’t know why, he took to me and I persuaded him that a regular Modecate injection might prove a sensible precaution against the spirits’ more disruptive injunctions.
Lennie took to dropping by my room, where, if I were free, he would stand and smile and I would smile back. As Gus Galen will tell you, there are important conversations which have nothing to do with speech. One day, he pointed at the window which looked out on to the quince, then transfigured by pale pink flowers, and said, ‘You see the blossom better, doc, if I was to wash the window.’ We had problems at the time getting cleaners and, with one of those brain waves which occasionally I act upon, I decided to make an advantage out of the fact that Lennie seemed to want to be useful. The inspiration paid off: Lennie took the job and was by now our longest-standing, and easily most efficient, cleaner, which arrangement allowed me to ensure that he kept up with his Modecate injections. In turn, he cleaned my office as painstakingly as if it were an emperor’s palace.
He was a bulky man, never to be seen without a yellow woolly bobble hat, which sat, jammed on his black head, atop his six-feet-plus frame, like a baby’s bonnet. He had become a popular figure around the hospital: his disposition was as benign as a baby’s and he had only one enemy, Dr Mackie, who was my enemy too.
Mackie disapproved of the informality of my association with Lennie and disliked the way I worked in general with my patients. And Lennie, as is the way with many psychotics, without any tangible information to go on, had picked this up. It was ironic, because it was drugs, more than words, or kindness, which had helped him in the end.
But now I heard Lennie’s usually deep voice risen to a squeaky pitch and hurried down the corridor to find him upbraiding Mackie who was standing in the hallway looking down at his feet.
‘You dumb fucker,’ Lennie was saying. ‘That’s my clean floor you’ve trod your fuckin’ feet over! Get your fuckin’ act together, man!’
From Mackie’s reddening face I could tell he was about to round on Lennie whose arm I now grasped, sternly saying, ‘Stow it, Lennie. Dr Mackie didn’t mean to muddy your floor. Apologise to him, please.’
I don’t know why this public schoolboy style of address came to me when dealing with Lennie, but he responded to it. He quietened down, muttered a sullen ‘Sorry, doc’, and resumed his manic mopping of the hall floor.
I walked through the grounds to the main building conversing politely, and pointlessly, with a flustered Mackie. I knew he wouldn’t easily forgive my witnessing his humiliation at the hands of my protégé.
Luckily, we met Maguire at the entrance so I had an excuse to get away.
‘Good,’ I said, ‘I wanted to catch you. Mrs Cruikshank. How d’you find her?’
‘Always the same. Quiet as a mouse. No bother.’
‘Do you like her?’
‘What’s to like? Haven’t seen enough of her yet.’
‘Well, keep me posted,’ I said. ‘You know how I rate the Maguire nose. And by the way, we can stop trying to push medication on her. She’s safe enough under your beady eye, no need to force things.’
I had to go cautiously, especially with a suicide case, though in those days we had more leeway. God knows how the poor bastards who work in the NHS cope now. But my sixth sense suggested that, her effort to escape from some intolerable anguish having failed her, my patient was less likely to try that solution a second time.
AFTER JONNY DIED, UP TO THE TIME WHEN I FINISHED AT university, I dreamed of him regularly, so that I now cannot swear which of my recollections are real-life memories and which remnants of the dreams. Nor can I judge how far my love of reading was a consequence of having lost my brother, but from as far back as I can recall I have always found solace in immersing myself in others’ lives, and worlds. It was therefore natural that my first degree should be in English literature. However, when I decided to go on to medical school, although I dreamed still, the dreams about Jonny seemed to stop.
I missed them—as I had missed him. But I retained the memory of them and in one, which had seemed to recur, he would say, ‘Eat this, go on!’ and on a slender silver spoon was something I expected to be Milo’s ice cream.
Milo’s was the first soft ice cream I ever tasted and it was a treat Jonny and I used to clamour for when we were out shopping with our mother on the Chiswick High Road. In those days Chiswick had a Lyons, where we ate buttered teacakes, and a draper’s shop called Goodbands, where our mother bought buttons for our shirts and thin apricot satin ribbon for her petticoat straps. And it also boasted an up-to-the-minute ice cream bar. In the dream, I would shut my eyes and open my mouth and Jonny would carefully place something on my tongue, and I knew, though I could never recapture the taste on waking, that it tasted remarkable: better than anything in life.
At the time, Olivia and I lived in a flat in one of Brighton’s Regency squares and on the days I worked at St Christopher’s I sometimes took my exercise by walking to and from the hospital. Walking home that evening, this dream came back to me. I knew it was death’s allure I had tasted from Jonny’s cold spoon and I wondered how it had tasted to Elizabeth Cruikshank.
We were due for dinner later at the home of a colleague, Denis Powell. On the whole, I tried to avoid social events during the working week, but the Powells hardly counted and nor did Dan and Barbara Buirski who were invited too.
Olivia was in the bath when I let myself in and she called out to come and find her. At forty-two she was still a pretty sight, and naked, and wet, and without make-up and in her shower cap, she looked about sixteen. I kissed her shoulder and went to pour us both a drink and came back and sat on the lavatory seat and chatted to her about her day. We hardly ever discussed mine.
Olivia and I were a mystery to me. We had next to nothing in common and there were many occasions when with good conscience I could have finished with her during our erratic courtship. In the end, I was always pulled back by something I could never quite put my finger on. It wasn’t simply sex, though sex was part of it. I seemed unable to do without her,