The Other Side of You

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‘Yes, Doctor.’

I glanced at Maguire who nodded.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll let it be known you’ll be out for the day. I hope the home team wins.’

Hassid made off, presumably to find Lennie and deliver the news of my official blessing, and Maguire remarked that Hassid was ‘a nice kid’. ‘Nothing much wrong there that a few friends wouldn’t put right. He’s been chatting with your Mrs Cruikshank.’

‘They’ve something in common now. As I said, she was a librarian, too.’

‘Might she want to help with the books, then?’

I thought this unlikely but I didn’t want to quash Maguire who had a knack of getting recalcitrant patients out of themselves. I could tell she was longing to know how I was doing with this particular recalcitrant. ‘She’s clever, our Mrs Cruikshank. But she keeps her cards pretty close to her chest.’

‘The bright ones do. What’s in that bag she carries about with her all the time?’

‘I don’t know. How did she get it, do you know? Was it with her when she was brought in?’

‘Must have been. Unless it came with her other things. That army man who found her brought some of her bits over for her. Poor fellow. He was ever so distressed.’

‘Did you talk to him?’ Maguire was a conduit for information.

‘Not really. To be honest with you, he couldn’t wait to get away.’

‘I’m glad Hassid’s made her into a friend.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Maguire said. ‘Like you say, she keeps herself to herself.’

‘Funny, Lennie taking him up.’ I wondered how our cleaner would respond to Hassid’s learned dissertations. It was possible that Lennie’s less conventional mental processes would grasp Hassid’s quantum ‘reality’ more ably than mine.

‘Well, you know,’ said Maguire, ‘Lennie’s an outsider too. To my way of thinking, he’ll do the boy more good than that idle lot up at the university.’

Dan Buirski and I were booked to play squash that evening. He had a late clinic so I caught up with some admin for my secretary, Trish, while I waited for him to ring when he was ready.

I enjoyed my squash evenings with Dan. The exercise, for both of us, was an antidote to the tensions of work. He was a year or two my junior, better toned and fitter than I was, and his nature was more competitive. But I could usually give him a hard game and even occasionally beat him.

The phone rang and expecting it to be Dan I answered, ‘Ready when you are.’

‘Darling,’ said Olivia’s voice, ‘are you still squashing tonight?’

Olivia rarely rang me at work unless over some domestic crisis. ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing’s “up”. I thought you might like me to collect you.’

‘That would be nice.’

She must have detected surprise in my voice because she said, a shade defensively, ‘My French class is just round the corner.’

Dan said Bar was out that evening so he and I had a drink while we waited for Olivia. She was flushed when she arrived and explained she’d had some difficulty parking and seemed genuinely bothered over keeping us waiting.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘it gave this man a chance to buy me a consolation drink.’ I was aware my defeats at Dan’s hands might disappoint Olivia.

‘All’s fair in love and war,’ said Dan. ‘Olive Oyl, since you’re driving I don’t suppose you’ll want anything, will you?’

Dan’s teasing often had an edge to it and I expected this to annoy Olivia but she appeared to be in one of her accommodating moods and invited him back to our place with the suggestion that there at least we could have a decent drink.

While I was hunting for a corkscrew the phone rang and it was Bar. ‘Is my husband there, by any chance?’

‘He’s next door boozing with my wife. You’d better come over and keep me company.’

‘I’d love to but I’m exhausted,’ Bar said. ‘Tell him I’m home, will you, there’s a lamb. I’m going to take a drink into a hot bath.’

Olivia and Dan were laughing when I came back into the sitting room. I was glad to see them getting on for once.

‘That was Barbara. She says she’s too tired to peel out again to fetch you.’

I was going to add that I’d take Dan home myself when Olivia said, ‘I need to drop something off at the shop. I can give Dan a lift.’ She was trying hard that evening. It was nice of her to offer to go out again when I knew she must be tired.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ll run him home and drop whatever it is off for you,’ but then the phone rang again and it was Gus, fussing about the conference, and then Olivia came into the study and mimed that it was late by pointing at her watch and indicated that she would give Dan a lift after all.

She was a while returning and when she did I was engrossed in Mansfield Park. She went off to have a bath and I read on in my chair for a while so that by the time I came to bed she was apparently asleep and didn’t hear me thanking her for running Dan home.

9 (#ulink_674c91aa-14cd-5a3a-ac70-6644ef35e991)

CIRCUMSTANCES AROSE WHICH MEANT THAT I WAS OBLIGED to postpone my next appointment with Elizabeth Cruikshank.

In the days when social policy over the treatment of the mentally ill was more conservative, many hundreds of men and women in Britain had been confined to ‘care’ for the bulk of their adult lives. One of my duties at St Stephen’s, the hospital in Haywards Heath, was to monitor the patients who had been inmates so long that the hospital had become their only home. Among those whom it was my melancholy business to oversee, one case especially troubled me: a man who suffered from the unshakeable conviction that he had a wolf lodged in the upper portion of his skull. His behaviour was always perfectly docile but to his perturbed mind this phantom, to which he was the unwilling host, was a threat not to himself but to the world at large. In fact, as I had said in my report when he first became my responsibility, in my view he was now too institutionalised for the world to be anything but a far more serious menace to him.

Not long after my first encounter with this unfortunate, I found myself, due to some delayed appointment, killing time by visiting Whipsnade Zoo. It was a filthy November day and, walking briskly to keep my circulation moving, I landed up at the far corner of the zoo, by the enclosure which houses the wolves.

I was at once drawn by their lean shadowy forms and their long-legged stilted gait. But what held my attention most was the way their narrow, vigilant muzzles and haunted eyes put me in mind of this man, so much so that I began to speculate whether the captive creatures mightn’t suffer from the fantasy that they had a desperate human being trapped inside their skulls. Whenever I saw this patient now, I thought of those penned-in wolves. I could never decide whether it was the influence of the delusion or being confined like a beast which had rendered him so visibly lupine.

But that he was a harmless, docile wolf, I was convinced, and for more years than I could bear to calculate, he had been stashed away in the upper storeys of the hospital which had originally served as one of the big Victorian asylums.

St Stephen’s had retained in its running a remnant of the asylum policy wherein the madder the inmate, the higher up the large mock-Gothic pile they were placed; and, in the cases of the potentially violent, in locked wards, with confining cells, and with nurses trained to deal with any dangerous outbreaks. We even had restraining jackets, based on the old ‘strait’ kind, though as Gus once said, why a ‘restraining’ jacket was deemed to be less offensive than a ‘strait’ one, beat him. He and I agreed one evening, over a whisky or two, that if we were ever forcibly confined we would rather be straitened than restrained. (‘And while we’re at it,’ Gus had added, ‘what in God’s name is wrong with the old word “asylum”?’)

My purpose in visiting St Stephen’s was to conduct the long-term patients’ annual review, which had been scheduled for the following day. For the most part this meeting was a mere routine of briefly reviewing, and then renewing, existing measures—security levels, medication, treatment plans—but when the wolf man’s name came up I found myself asking, ‘Why, as a matter of interest, do we keep him on level five?’ Five was St Stephen’s top security ward.

I was the consultant and the person who’d known the wolf man longest and, as I had expected, no one had any answer to this question.

‘Have we any evidence of violence?’

Level five’s charge nurse, an Irishman with bad skin and reddish hair, said that, as far as he knew, we didn’t.

‘Has he been any trouble at all, Sean? Anything not on the record we should know about?’

‘Nothing, Dr McBride, so far as I’m aware. Though…’

‘What?’

‘He’s always saying he might do something. Or so I’m led to believe. Can’t say he lets on to any of us.’

‘But that’s his delusion, isn’t it? My point is, why are we pandering to it? We’ve never had the smallest peep out of him in all the time I’ve been here. I think we should try him out on level four, or even three, see how he goes. Anyone got any objections?’

I knew they wouldn’t have. And I caught the train to London with the self-satisfied feeling that I’d performed at least one valuable action that day.

The reason the meeting at St Stephen’s had had to be brought forward was because I was obliged to be in London the following day. I was to appear as an expert witness in a medical case, which gave me an opportunity to visit Gus.