Bedlam Burning (7 page)

I suppose she mightn't have said a word if Ruth Harris hadn't attempted to round things off by saying, ‘You've been a lovely audience, and before we let Mr Collins go I'd like to ask you, as a bit of market research, why you're all here tonight.'

She turned to Gregory, who said, ‘I'm here because I think Gregory Collins is the most important young writer working in England today.'

Then she asked, ‘And what about you ladies?'

Nicola spoke first. I steeled myself. A knowing little grimace lodged itself on her face and she said, ‘I'm here because I used to sleep with the author.'

Did that past tense mean that she was never going to sleep with me again? It seemed quite possible, and I was disappointed at how little that disappointed me. It was an answer that seemed to please Ruth Harris, however, suggesting that I, Gregory Collins, was a bit of a rake. She then turned to the other woman, and asked her the same question, and the woman replied, ‘I'm here because I hope to be sleeping with the author in the very near future.'

I had no idea whether she meant it, but it was a good line and it might have brought the house down if there'd been a house. As it was, Ruth Harris scowled at her murderously and brought the event to a close. She was now regarding me sourly and, thank God, was no longer offering me dinner.

A part of me thought that Nicola and I should go off with Gregory, and I'd tell her that this was the real author. This might help her see the funny side, at least make her realise that Gregory was no monster and that I hadn't done anything so very terrible. I had no particular desire for reconciliation, but I was vain enough not to want her to continue to think badly of me. The drawback was that this would mean abandoning the woman who'd expressed a desire to sleep with me in the very near future. I could hardly make these explanations while she was present, and I very much wanted her to be present.

But as it turned out, neither Gregory nor Nicola stuck around a moment longer than necessary; and neither of them wanted to be with me. In fact, they left together, and that confused me even more. Had he picked her up on the way to the bookshop? Were they now going off for drinks and flirtation? It hardly seemed likely given what I knew about both of them, but even if they were just walking to the station together, I wondered what on earth they were saying to each other.

Nicola still had no idea who this stranger was. Would she tell him that I was a fraud? Would he then tell her he knew all about it, that he'd set it up, that he was the person I was pretending to be? Would she be as angry with him as she had been with me? And then what? I couldn't imagine and, besides, I had other things on my mind, chiefly the woman in the hornrims. Were
we
about to go off for drinks and flirtation? Well, yes and no. She introduced herself as Alicia Crowe, a name that struck me as utterly unfitting, and said she'd like to talk to me professionally. I assumed she wanted to interview me for the piece I thought she was writing for the local paper, so a few minutes later she and I were indeed sitting in a pub together, having managed to leave a vexed and disappointed Ruth Harris behind, and I was asking the one thing I wanted to know.

‘Did you mean what you said?'

She replied, ‘Wouldn't it be really shallow to want to sleep with someone just because you liked a book they'd written?'

‘Well—'

‘I mean it would be almost as shallow as wanting to sleep with them just because they had nice hair or good cheekbones, wouldn't it? Why does anybody ever sleep with anybody? Is it just habit? Or animal instinct? Or to satisfy their own vanity?'

At first I assumed this was a rhetorical question, but she continued to stare at me through the hornrimmed glasses, and it was clear she wanted an answer. I thought for a second of what a handsome couple she and I could make, even more appealing than Nicola and me, but perhaps this was what she meant by vanity.

‘I suppose people sleep together because they want excitement, fun, warmth, closeness, comfort, love,' I said.

‘Oh yes,' she said, ‘they
want
those things, but is sleeping with someone likely to provide them?'

‘If you're lucky.'

She nodded thoughtfully, as if I'd given an eccentrically challenging answer.

‘You're full of surprises,' she said. ‘I didn't think the author of
The Wax Man
would be very interested in warmth and closeness.'

‘Trust the teller not the tale,' I said.

She knew I was being glib, and perhaps that surprised her too.
The Wax Man
may have had many failings as a novel, but glibness wasn't one of them.

‘I suppose saying that I hoped to be sleeping with the author was a cheap shot. I was using sex to grab your attention. I wasn't really offering to have sex with you. I actually wanted to talk to you about a job.'

I had no idea what she meant. Did she think I was in a position to give her work? Was she offering to be my secretary, my amanuensis? Or did she think I could help her get out of local journalism and into Fleet Street?

‘Why?' I said. ‘Aren't you happy in your current job?'

‘I'm not asking for a job,' she said. ‘I'm offering you one. Possibly.'

I brightened up. The prospect of getting out of the rare book trade was very appealing, but then I had to remind myself that she didn't know I was in the rare book trade, that it was Gregory Collins she'd be offering a job to, not me.

‘What kind of job?'

‘A writer-in-residence.'

OK, maybe she wasn't a journalist after all, maybe she was a college lecturer.

‘Yes? Where would I reside?'

She looked at her watch and said, ‘Finish your drink. It's still early. There's someone I want you to meet.'

‘I'd much rather stay here with you, drinking and talking.'

‘There'll be time for that later.'

‘Will there?'

‘Yes. We could have dinner after you've seen my boss.'

I calculated that by the time we'd seen her boss, then been to a restaurant, it would be getting late and I might very possibly miss the last train home, just like Gregory Collins had missed his last train back to the north. In the same way, I might have to stay over and she would feel responsible and obliged to offer me a bed for the night,
and that would open up all sorts of possibilities. Ah, this was the literary life as dreamed of by the unliterary.

‘Let me get this straight,' I said. ‘You're a journalist or a lecturer or something, right?'

‘I'm a doctor,' she said. ‘A psychiatrist.'

‘Oh,' I said, baffled. ‘So who is it you want me to meet?'

‘His name's Dr Eric Kincaid. You may have heard of him. He's a genius.'

Naturally I'd never heard of Dr Eric Kincaid, but Alicia, or Dr Crowe as I was now entitled to think of her, spoke of him with such awe that I tried to convince myself I had. On the other hand, if she was to be believed, he had heard of me, of Gregory Collins. She said he'd read
The Wax Man
and was keen to meet me. That seemed unlikely but who was I to question it? I wasn't clear what would happen when I met him. Was he going to interview me for this nebulous writer-in-residence job, or was I being taken there for his entertainment, because I was an interesting case study? Either way, I should have run a mile, but, of course, I didn't. We got a taxi and there I was, travelling with this strange, serious, undoubtedly sexy woman in these unusual circumstances, and it didn't feel bad at all. It felt like another part of the adventure, and one I thought I was still in control of. Regardless of how it ended, it was infinitely more fun than my normal life.

It did occur to me, however, that once these two psychiatrists got together and started talking to me, they might well be smart enough to see right through my act. That threatened to be humiliating, but so what? What did it really matter? I didn't know these people and they didn't know me. I would have welcomed the chance to get to know Alicia Crowe better, but it seemed likely that I'd never be able to hold my head up and see her again after this evening anyway. I had to make the most of her company while I could, and that's why I went along with her plan.

‘So where exactly would this writer-in-residence job be?' I asked.

‘At the Kincaid Clinic.'

‘That's some sort of hospital?'

‘An asylum,' she said. ‘A nut house. A loony bin. A funny farm. A booby hatch. Don't look so surprised.'

I thought I had some justification for being surprised. I had no idea
that asylums employed writers-in-residence, and it sounded like a very tough job.

‘Wait till you meet Dr Kincaid,' Alicia said. ‘Then everything will become clearer.'

I doubted that, and I wasn't sure this was an area in which I actually craved clarity. I was still enjoying the confusion. The taxi arrived in due course outside an imposing, dignified Victorian building on the outskirts of Brighton. It looked substantial yet severe, rather small for a hospital, more like a converted vicarage or village schoolhouse, and only passingly like my idea of an asylum. The front elevation was complex, all gables and bays, dormer windows and intricately carved bargeboards. It was Gothic, but not horror-movie Gothic. In fact, it looked quite benign and it took a while for me to notice that the retaining wall was a good deal higher than most garden walls, and that the tall cast-iron gates had some heavy-duty electronic hardware keeping them locked. Alicia produced a high-tech little device that she waved in the direction of the gates and they opened automatically. I found this rather impressive and futuristic.

We walked into the grounds and headed for the main entrance of the clinic. I was aware that an asylum at night with locked gates and high walls was the stuff of dark fantasy and bad dreams, yet I felt unthreatened. And when I first stepped inside the vestibule, to the front desk, where a hatchet-faced night nurse looked at us blankly, I was hit by a severe whiteness, a combination of white-painted surfaces and pitiless fluorescent strip light. It was the sort of illumination that drives away shadows and phantoms. And when Alicia took me in to meet her boss, I saw that his office too was wilfully, clinically, bare and bright.

Dr Eric Kincaid was sitting behind a stark metal desk. He was a middle-aged black man. That surprised me, but only a little. It would have surprised me even more if the head of the clinic had been a woman. It would have surprised me almost as much if he'd spoken with a heavy regional accent. He didn't. His voice was thick and deep and grave. If there was a hint of Caribbean lightness to it, he kept it well under control. This was the voice of authority, of the Establishment.

There was a solidity about him, a scale. He carried a lot of weight but he carried it easily, and everything about him seemed padded and rounded. His wrists and neck were thick with fat and muscle. The
collar and cuffs of his shirt gripped too tightly, and he pulled at them from time to time, to get some temporary relief from their constriction. His bald head was a polished, dimpled dome, his belly was a globe of flesh that pushed out his white doctor's coat, and his fingers were short, spatulate, competent looking. He exuded calm, dignity, competence, maybe even wisdom: or was I just buying into some familiar myth about the power and charisma of doctors? Did he look like a genius? Well, what did geniuses look like? Like mad scientists, like crazy professors, like Einstein? By these standards he looked all too prosaic.

‘Mr Collins,' he said, ‘I'm very pleased to meet you at last. Alicia's told me all about you.'

Alicia caught my eye and nodded winningly, encouraging me to go with the flow, to accept what Kincaid was saying, implying that everything would be cleared up later. Had she really told him about Gregory Collins? How would she have had anything to tell?

‘Nice to meet you too,' I said.

‘I won't lie to you,' Kincaid said, ‘I haven't read your book from beginning to end, but I've skimmed it thoroughly and I'm confident we can work together.'

I couldn't imagine where he got such confidence from, and I was sure it was misplaced.

‘It's apparent from your writing that you have a firm and subtle grasp on the convolutions of the troubled human mind. Have you spent much time with the mentally ill?'

‘Well, I spent three years at Cambridge,' I said.

He considered this remark to make sure I was joking and then he laughed, a laugh that started deep in his belly, then rose swiftly to become a fluting, high-pitched thing. And then Alicia felt she could laugh too. The professional courtesies had been observed.

‘I see we shall all be getting on famously,' Kincaid said.

I smiled as distantly, as formally, as inscrutably as I knew how. I suddenly wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, but I wasn't sure whether matters would be best speeded up by blandly agreeing with him or by saying nothing at all.

‘Do you have many commitments, Gregory?'

I said, ‘No.' What else could I have said?

‘So you could start on the first of the month?'

‘I suppose I could,' I said.

‘Then let's say you will. It's good to have you aboard, Gregory.'

Aboard? In what sense was I aboard? I'd been expecting, at best, to discuss the possibility of a job, but Kincaid talked as though he thought the deal was already done. He could only have got such an idea from Alicia, and I wondered why she'd wanted that. I was inclined to protest, but I knew it was all irrelevant anyway, and a pleading look from Alicia prevented me from saying anything at all. I didn't want to cause trouble, didn't want her to look bad in front of her boss. So, in as noncommittal a way as possible, certainly without actually saying the words, I let Kincaid think I was agreeing to start work as a writer-in-residence come the first of the month. That wasn't far away but I hoped it was long enough for Alicia to find some means to get out of her self-inflicted humiliation. If she wanted to blame Gregory Collins and say he'd let her down, that would be just fine.