in her bag for her purse, accidentally tipped the tray so that the plate slid, spilling soup over the man before her in the queue.
‘He was nice about it, though it ruined his jacket. It was light-coloured and the soup was tomato and I was mortified. But he laughed and when I asked how I could make it up to him he said I could come to the pub. So I went. He seemed to like me.’ She sounded apologetic.
‘And you liked that?’
‘I liked being the centre of someone’s attention.’
Up till now, she’d barely held my glance, her eyes always flickering off to the quince tree, or to some point in her imagination projected on to the glass. But now she looked at me with a fierce directness that almost made me smile.
‘Not everyone wants attention,’ I said, and regretted it because she took it as criticism, which I should have foreseen.
‘Yes, wishing to die is seen as attention-seeking, I know.’ Her voice was low and she hardly raised it but at moments of tension I noticed that her diction became precise.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
It bothers me how infrequently people in my profession apologise. Everyone makes mistakes, why would a psychiatrist or an analyst be different? ‘We should learn to make the mistakes as fast as possible,’ Gus says. ‘It’s mistakes that let the light in.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘That was stupid of me. Of course everyone wants attention, provided it’s the right kind.’
She laughed, none too cheerfully. ‘Who knows if this was the “right kind”? It was enough that I was paid any attention by anyone, let alone a man.’
While I was a medical student, I took this tall, thin girl called Wanda Williams out on a date. Because it seemed expected of me, I put my arm round her at the cinema and afterwards she invited me back to her room, in a dismal part of London. When we got in she put on the kettle and then excused herself to go to the bathroom. I was sitting on the bed, leafing through a magazine and wondering when I could decently say I was leaving, when she came back into the room. She’d taken off all her clothes and there was a line round the middle of her waist, where the elastic from her knickers had left a red mark, and another higher up where her bra had cut. I remember that the sight of these cruel-looking red impressions dividing up her pale flesh filled me with pity and dismay. I couldn’t leave after that, so I went to bed with her and watched my unenthusiastic but polite performance with the inner imager I rarely manage to switch off. It would have seemed rude to do otherwise but it depressed me no end.
Several men to whom I’ve confided this story have revealed that they’ve found themselves in similar situations. There was desperation about Wanda Williams and I found myself hoping that it had not been like that for Elizabeth Cruikshank. Somehow I didn’t think it had been. Her despair felt of a different order.
Neil Cruikshank, it turned out, was an engineer, with a research fellowship at Imperial College, employed by the polytechnic to do some external examining. A stocky, squareshouldered, fair-haired man, with a moustache.
‘I should never have married a moustache, Doctor. I might have guessed I wouldn’t get on with one.’
She gave me my title with that faint edge, which seemed to imply: Yes, I know you are a doctor, but somewhere I know, too, that underneath all this, the hospital, the consulting room, the professional qualifications, you are no different from me.
We are most of us badly cracked and afraid that if we do not guard them with our lives the cracks will show, and show us up, which is why we are all more or less in a state of vigilance against one another. Although I paid lip-service to this idea I hadn’t properly acknowledged it in those days. It was Elizabeth Cruikshank who showed me the truth of it. She had a faculty of divination which is not uncommon among psychiatric patients but in her case it was developed to a degree which enabled her to see through to the back of one’s mind. But that was a recognition I had yet to reach, so when she added, ‘You know, don’t you, in advance, I mean, when you do something you’ll regret, like marry someone you shouldn’t?’ I took refuge in a doctorly, ‘Go on,’ that being one of many such mindless phrases I hid behind.
‘But you do, don’t you?’ she persisted, and made a quizzical movement with her hands, which made me think of the wings of a wounded bird.
‘I’m not sure I do,’ I said, being a practised coward.
A few haphazard fruits, which had ripened on the quince, were still hanging, gold and knobbly, on the branches outside. My mother was brought up in India and she used to tell us how if a mango tree didn’t bear fruit they would pierce the trunk with a nail to make it fructify.
‘You could make jelly with those,’ Elizabeth Cruikshank suggested, looking away from me to the garden. ‘It makes good jelly, quince.’
I dropped by Cath Maguire’s office later on my way home.
Maguire was a lesbian but not the sort that doesn’t get on with men. I had occasionally speculated what had made Maguire prefer her own sex. She was an attractive, sparky woman and while not my type exactly certainly could have been many men’s. But when I once tentatively started on this line, she shut me up by saying, ‘You’re not suggesting that women are second best or anything, are you, Dr McBride?’
But one lucky consequence of Maguire’s preference was that we had the kind of good-natured intimacy which is only possible between a man and a woman where sex will never be a factor. And I’d long given over questioning the whys and wherefores of Maguire’s sexuality. What mattered to me was that I trusted her instincts and depended on them to fill out my own.
‘How’re you getting on with Mrs Cruikshank?’ I asked.
‘Elizabeth? I like her. Quiet, like I said. Doesn’t make demands. Probably doesn’t make enough. Always very polite.’
‘Any visitors?’
‘None I’ve seen, anyway. A couple of phone enquiries from her children but so far as I know they haven’t visited.’
So she had children. I wouldn’t have guessed this and there was no mention of them on her record. She looked almost too girlish to have given birth. ‘How many?’
‘Two, I gather. A boy and a girl. The girl was a bit, you know, stand-offish but the boy sounded nice.’
By the phone in her room was a book squashed face down. Maguire read two or three books a week.
‘Does she read?’
‘She’s got a couple of books out of the library, but now you come to mention it, I’ve not seen her read them, unless she keeps them for nights.’
‘What are they? Did you see?’
Maguire screwed up her face as she did when trying to concentrate. It gave her a look of a small girl which always made me feel warm towards her.
‘Not fiction anyway.’
Maguire devoured fiction. Her favourite author was Ruth Rendell but I’d noticed some surprising ones too. For a time she seemed to be reading her way through Proust.
‘She used to be a librarian.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t mind that job myself.’
‘Too late,’ I said. ‘I need your help here.’
‘You know, I don’t know if in the long run a really great story isn’t more help.’
THAT AUTUMN, OLIVIA HAD DECIDED TO ENROL IN SOME evening classes and she was out at one of them when I got home. She had a tendency to these sudden enthusiasms. They rarely lasted, and I therefore hadn’t bothered to ask much about this latest. I was never quite abreast of which