I
HAD BATHED AND SHAVED AND THERE WAS STILL NO SOUND
from our bedroom, so, with reluctance, I put on the clothes I had been wearing the day before and made myself a second pot of coffee, relieved that any confrontation with Olivia could be postponed.
From the noise outside, the traffic was only just starting up and since there was no need for me to get off to work for nearly an hour, I took another look at the tale I’d been reading.
They must have known, really, the two companions, that this stranger was the lost friend they believed dead—though they didn’t know they knew—because when they got to the inn, at Emmaus, they persuaded him to come in and eat with them. And when, over supper, he broke bread and revealed himself, and then vanished again as suddenly as he had appeared, they said to each other, by way of confirming his identity, ‘Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way?’
One heart; two people. Standing in the kitchen, looking out at a green and incandescent orange sky, in which a frail crescent moon was lingering still, my own heart burned, thinking of my brother’s bright incipience given for my pitifully uninspiring life.
The phone rang.
‘Davey?’
My first thought was that it must be Bar. Then I recognised with alarm the voice of Cath Maguire. The use of my first name betokened something serious.
‘Cath?’
‘St Stephen’s have been ringing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s your wolf man. I’m sorry.’
‘What?’ Maguire was no panicker.
‘He’s tried to kill a nurse. I’m sorry.’
When I got to the hospital, Maguire was at reception, waiting for me, her comely face twisted in an anxious knot. ‘I’m sorry, Dr McBride, I know you’re fond of him, poor soul.’ She’d recovered her formality but I was as touched as I was troubled by the concern which had led her to discard it.
‘What happened? Is she all right?’ My poor wolf man, I doubt you meant anyone harm!
‘They’ll fill you in better than me but from what I’ve gathered this new nurse was afraid of him. You know how fear breeds fear?’
I did. Fear was fingering me there and then. It was I who had ordered that the wolf man’s security restrictions be lifted.
‘And do we know how he did this thing?’
‘I gather he tried to strangle her, with a telephone cord.’
‘Jesus! How the bloody hell did he get his hands on a telephone cord, for Christ’s sake?’ At least they couldn’t lay that oversight at my door.
‘God knows, Doctor, I didn’t ask.’
I drove to Haywards Heath, swearing at other drivers for my own errors of judgement, and as I walked into the hospital reception—smelling, as it always did, of disinfectant—my heart was racketing wildly between my mouth and my shoes. Although my most pressing impulse was to ask to see my patient, I was aware it was important that we deal first with the injured nurse. I recognised, too, that, unfairly, I wanted to blame her for this catastrophe.
The nurse had been taken off to the local medical hospital and I was relieved to hear that, physically, the worst we had to address was some bad bruising to her neck. Her mental state, I was given to understand, was altogether a graver matter. The nurses’ union was already involved, as the senior registrar informed me, a low-sized man with a serious case of dandruff, judiciously professional in his speech, but, I sensed, under a veneer of sympathy, thanking his lucky stars that he was not in my place and secretly relishing the fact. People do so enjoy another’s crisis.
The wolf man was under lock and key and drugged up to the skin. But his anguished gaze locked fast on to mine as I entered the security cell where he was detained.
‘Peter?’ I said, and it’s a curious fact but, perhaps because to me he had always been ‘the wolf man’ and I had seldom used his given name, only then did I connect him with ‘Peter and the Wolf’. It crossed my mind that perhaps it was Peter rather than the wolf man who had committed this atrocity.
‘Doctor, will they hang me?’
‘No, Peter. They won’t hang you. Peter, why did you do it? Can you say?’
‘I said I weren’t safe. I said so. They can’t hold that against me, can they?’
‘I don’t know, Peter. I don’t know what happened. Could you tell me? Did she scare you?’
‘Please ask them, Doctor. Ask them, will they hang me?’
‘Peter, did you do this thing because that is what you wanted, to be hanged?’
But however much I questioned him further he spoke no more words to me, either then or later, but merely looked at me, beseechingly, with his trapped-wolf’s eyes.
I did what needed to be done, approved the extra security provision and attempted to begin to establish how he had contrived to get hold of a phone. It seemed likely he had secured this during his move down a floor. One of the nursing offices had had a spare, perhaps left out on an unattended desk, and our guess was that the wolf man had lifted it quietly and later removed the cord. I was surprised he had it in him to be so forward-planning—but I should have remembered that what people have in them is often a surprise.
Driving back towards Brighton, the traffic had increased with the onset of the day and after a couple of near scrapes with other cars, and with anger mounting inside me, I pulled over to the Dew Drop Inn, which infelicitous pun I’d marked on my journey down.
The Dew Drop’s clientele was for the most part lorry drivers, exchanging comradely badinage, or reading the
Sun
over a quiet smoke and enjoying the sight of pairs of substantial breasts over plates of, equally substantial, breakfasts and mugs of orange tea. I longed to be one of their number, freed from responsibility for
the crazed actions of others and to be looking, peacefully unmolested, at pictures of pretty naked girls.
I ordered the ‘Full English’ and two rounds of the thick white toast which, well buttered, is more consoling than tranquillisers. And a pot of tea, because although the waitress swore blind it wasn’t I guessed that the coffee was instant.
‘You all right, dear?’
The tea had arrived in advance of the breakfast and I nodded thanks to the middle-aged woman whose pleasantly ordinary face was signalling a nosy concern. She left the table and the briefly checked tears returned. I put my hands over my face and relinquished control.
Of course my poor wolf man wanted to be out of it. I must have known this. How could I not since it was my own position exactly? It was why I so often drove with my seat belt unfastened, even as I did so, coolly and clinically noting the danger I was inviting; it was why I was always secretly longing to contract some fatal illness, so I could retire from life’s gruelling demands with guiltless dignity; it was why I worked too hard, and long, over other people’s affairs, because it lent to existence a point and purpose. It was also why, though I had never formulated the thought, I had acceded to Olivia’s request that we never have children, for I knew that children are hostages to fortune and that a part of me would resent the claim on my affection, a ballast to ground me when I preferred not to be grounded, so that I could the more easily slip away.
And in my desire to offer up my will-to-live to other lives, I had robbed the wolf man of his escape. He would never now be free of some overruling constraint, which would shackle him
for the rest of his days to a life he would rather be rid of, enough to contemplate taking another’s life. And that life too would now for ever be tainted by an increment of fear.
Beware, beware of those who care! I, who cared so little for myself, had by way of compensation cared too much for others and they were the losers thereby. As I’d flicked my ignorant way through the school Bible that morning, which now seemed another world away, I had paused over Cain’s resounding cry at the first recorded murder: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The ancient question was a rhetorical one, a piece of brilliant dramatic irony, for far from being his ‘keeper’ Cain was his brother’s killer. And hadn’t I always believed I had been Jonny’s keeper? It seemed that in this case also a keeper was a killer in disguise.
It was in Jonny’s stronger reality, which had never left me, and of which I had become the living custodian, that I had found the model to hold out my hand to others more obviously wanting than myself, to protect them, as, fatally, he had protected me. The recognition made me literally shake now as the tears ran down unrestrained.
The breakfast arrived and I dabbed at my face with the thin paper napkin, because in my hurry that morning I had forgotten my usual handkerchief, and ate the eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms, my white toast, buttered thick and anointed with sweet bland marmalade, as if it was I who was to be hanged and this was my last requested meal. And then, because physically to move seemed more than I could manage, and to delay my departure further, I ordered another mug of orange tea from the nosy waitress and sat longer than
I could calculate in a more dead than alive trance.
When I summoned the strength to get myself up from the table to settle the bill, I went and sat in the car, by the parked lorries, and, still unready to face any further incompetence in my driving, leaned my arms on the steering wheel and laid my face on my arms and wept uninhibitedly like a child.
After a while, I stopped crying and drove my car, pretty much without conscious navigation, till I found a way up to the South Downs. I stopped the car in a lay-by and walked up a rutted track, turning up my collar against the driving cold. I’d had no opportunity to replace the lost scarf.
I walked on upwards and when I’d gained height, enough that I could no longer see the road, I stopped and turned my face to the icy wind blowing in from the sea. It had brought in its skirts a collection of gulls, white birds in a cruel white sky, harbingers of more ill weather to come. I stood under the chilly sky and the wheeling birds, with winter-bleached grass beneath my rapidly freezing feet, and howled like a wolf into the countering wind.
I howled for my wolf man, for Bar, for Olivia, for Dan, for Elizabeth Cruikshank, and for her Thomas, who suddenly, absurdly—for in life we were perfect strangers—I missed almost as sorely as I missed my lost brother.
But I also howled for myself, because for the first time even the unreality of Jonny was not there for me, no one and nothing was there, and I couldn’t for the life of me see how I was going to manage alone.
W
HEN
I
GOT BACK TO
S
T
C
HRISTOPHER’S
I
FOUND
H
ASSID
outside my room. It had been in my mind that Hassid was ready to be discharged and only my indulgence had allowed him to linger so long.
‘Hi, Hassid, are you waiting for me?’ Who else would he be waiting for? The thought of some new demand, even a trivial one—especially a trivial one—fell like a dead-weight blow.
‘Doctor, I am sorry, may I speak to you, please?’
I suppressed irritation, unlocked the door and, with a manner as warm as I could muster, indicated that Hassid should enter too. At first I didn’t register what was wrong with the room. Then I saw that the plate for the sandwiches, on which Elizabeth Cruikshank had stayed her savage appetite, was still on the floor, along with an empty mug and glass. The waste bin had not been emptied, the chairs had not been aligned into their customary military precision, the whole room smelled of whisky and had the disordered air of use.
Lennie’s attentions entailed a fascist-like efficiency. That he hadn’t been in was obvious. But then I had asked him to leave the room till the following day.
‘It’s Lennie,’ Hassid said, apparently extracting, with his conjuror’s skill, the name from my mind. ‘He’s gone.’
Oh Christ! I thought. Not now, please.
‘How do you know, Hassid? Maybe he just hasn’t been in today. Maybe he’s unwell.’
‘No, Doctor. Lennie is never ill, believe me.’ Hassid’s expression, portraying superior insight, was ever so slightly smug. ‘It is Dr Mackie. Lennie has gone. Vamoosed.’ He gestured with the elegant hand. ‘Believe me.’
Jesus wept! Another matter I was going to have to deal with.
‘What happened, Hassid?’
Hassid’s glance was wandering to the blue chair so I indicated that he should sit down and told him to spill the beans. Thinking of beans, I noticed the coffee machine still bore the dregs of the previous evening’s marathon.
‘Would you like some coffee, Hassid?’
‘Gosh, thanks, Doctor.’
‘It’s cold. That all right for you?’
There was only one clean mug which I gave to him while I used the mug Elizabeth Cruikshank had drunk from. Hassid accepted the mug of cold stale coffee graciously. Maybe he imagined the British medical profession preferred their coffee cold. As he settled himself in the blue chair, nursing a slender ankle across his knee, it crossed my mind that maybe he was homosexual, and that this was potentially a contributing factor to his breakdown. One I may have overlooked. We’d touched on girls a little, but in deference to his religion I had treated his diffidence as cultural rather than a physical or affectional matter.
And then into my mind erupted a rogue voice, which uttered
this heresy. I don’t care! it announced. I don’t care any longer what Hassid’s, or anyone’s, sexual preferences are, or whether they matter to them or not.
But despite this voice I cared about Lennie’s whereabouts, so while I sipped the disagreeably cold and bitter coffee—which I took a perverse pleasure in drinking—in my twice-worn shirt and underclothes and socks—matters over which I am fastidious—I listened to Hassid’s story.
‘It was your car, Doctor. Lennie found Dr Mackie putting a note on it.’
So I was right about the author of that prissy note. ‘What happened, Hassid?’
‘There were fisticuffs, Doctor.’
This wonderfully old-world word brought an involuntary grin to my tired face.
‘You mean they had a fight?’ My smile must have broadened. The idea of Mackie and Lennie in a punch-up was cheering me up no end.
‘I would say that Lennie was doing most of the hitting, Doctor. Dr Mackie didn’t do so much.’
Lennie, Hassid explained, with the glee of one who brings distressing news, had argued with Mackie and in the course of the wrangle had become so incensed that he had hit the doctor. Mackie had rung the police while Lennie, showing, to my mind, great good sense, had scarpered.
‘And this was all over my car?’
‘Yes, Doctor. Lennie didn’t like that Dr Mackie was complaining about it. He wanted to come and see you, Dr Mackie did, but Lennie said you were with somebody. He stopped him.
Dr Mackie shouldn’t have insisted, should he, while you were with someone, even if it was late and after hours? It was Mrs Cruikshank, wasn’t it?’
It’s not only Jane Austen’s world that’s a neighbourhood of voluntary spies. But curiosity is one index of mental health. High time, I thought, for Hassid to be returned to the student environment.
‘Do you have any idea of where Lennie might have gone, Hassid?’
‘No, Doctor. But he gave me this so I think he was not thinking of coming back.’
Hassid dug in his trouser pocket and produced a rosette in the blue and white Brighton colours. ‘Dr Mackie asked me to stay and watch Lennie while he rang the police. He tried to get Lennie to come inside with him but Lennie said he wouldn’t. He said he “weren’t no bleeding loony”.’ Lennie’s thick voice emerged unmistakably through Hassid’s lucid accent. So Hassid had a talent for mimicry too. Well, as I’d been noting, you never knew what people had in them…‘Then he gave me this and said, “Great knowing you, kiddo,” and ran. Dr Mackie was angry with me but I am not a policeman and I do not think he was entitled to ask me to restrain Lennie. I am one of the “bleeding loonies”, after all,’ Hassid concluded politely.
For all my concern I had to laugh, and did so a little too raucously. I would have to sort it out with Mackie. After all, I was to blame for the badly parked car. What with one thing and another the gods were ensuring that Nemesis was having a field day with me: Lennie, though not one of our inmates, was a registered outpatient and technically my responsibility.
I rang Mackie’s number, got no reply, rang my secretary, Trish, and left her a message, and then went to reception to see if they could throw light on Mackie’s whereabouts.
‘Oh, Dr McBride, one of your patients left this for you.’ Maureen, our receptionist, handed me an envelope and although the handwriting was unfamiliar the second I saw it I guessed who it was from.
It was an italic hand in brown ink and when I opened the envelope I looked at the signature for confirmation. There wasn’t much else to detain the eye, for all that was written on the postcard inside were three lines.
Dear David
,Thank you.
Elizabeth Cruikshank
I turned the postcard over but it was only a faded sepia print of Brighton Pier, the kind I’d seen plentifully on sale in the hospital shop.
‘When did she go?’ I had left a message for Mackie and hurried, as if my life depended on it, over to Elizabeth Cruikshank’s ward.
‘I’m sorry, Dr McBride, I should have said.’ Maguire looked anxious. ‘She left this morning, after you went, ever so quietly. She packed her stuff up and just went. We couldn’t stop her, could we? She asked for you and I explained you were called away and we couldn’t say when you would be back. She said she had to go and anyway you would know she would be gone.’
Had I known? Perhaps I had. Perhaps that was what I had understood when I had experienced that terrible sense of dereliction on the Downs.
It dawned on me that in all the world this was the person I was closest to. Closer than I’d been to anyone save Jonny. I had left the gap he had made unfilled, that door in my soul ajar. But it was through it, through the door, which I had never closed, that Elizabeth Cruikshank had walked back into the known world. And somehow, in that process, she had closed the way behind her and shut Jonny out.
How this had happened, what strange emotional logic this betrayed, I couldn’t begin to fathom, still less comprehend. But I felt the consequences as rudely and forcefully, and, it seemed, as mortally as if someone near and dear to me had taken a twelvebore and shot it, point-blank, into my chest. I think I may even have gasped aloud and stooped over with the pain of it because Maguire said, ‘Are you all right, Doctor? They can’t blame you for this one, surely? She was voluntary.’ And because of all that had happened, and because of who Maguire was, and because even if she didn’t understand why I felt as I did, and could never understand, I knew she wouldn’t judge me, I put my hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Cath, would you just give me a hug?’ I needed to know that someone was there. And good old Maguire hugged me as hard and as close as if I were a long-lost sweetheart come home.
‘I always said you were wasted on women!’ I didn’t bother to conceal the fact that for the third time that day there were tears in my eyes. ‘Get away, you great flirt,’ Maguire said, and I smacked her behind and we both blushed, from which I deduced that she wasn’t as lesbian as she made out.
I found Mackie, finally, taking a late lunch in the canteen. He was forking fish fingers into his mouth and the sadist in me
noted a blotch of ketchup on the white collar of his neat bluestriped shirt. My sensitive nose was conscious that my own shirt stank rancorously of sweat.
‘Colin,’ I said, aware, in contrast to Mackie, that I presented a pretty crumpled sight and purposely the more genial. ‘I’ve been looking for you. I owe you an apology for my car.’ And, God forgive me, I believe I beamed.
Mackie looked uncomfortable. He was the type who, aggressive himself, is at a loss to know how to deal with cordiality in others, however assumed.
‘McBride! I’m afraid events have evolved, ah, unfortunately.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, disingenuously. ‘I hope I didn’t inconvenience you too much?’
‘I’m afraid you did. You saw my note?’
‘I did and I would have come to apologise but—’
Mackie waved this aside. ‘That cleaner of yours—’ Seeing me raise my eyebrows, he adjusted: ‘I should say, ours. He behaved most aggressively over my placing the note on your windscreen. I’m sorry to tell you he attacked me. I’ve had to bring a charge of assault, of course.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry. I feel responsible.’
‘No, no, how could you—’
‘But I do, Colin.’ (I applied the Christian name like a poultice.) ‘Technically, he’s my patient. Of course we employ him too, but obviously I must take full responsibility if his medication is proving inadequate.’
‘What’s he on?’ As I had hoped, Mackie’s professional instincts began to engage.
‘Modecate, a hundred mil, monthly.’
‘Ought to be holding him,’ Mackie said. ‘You might try reducing the interval to three weeks, I suppose. How long has he been on it?’
‘Pretty much since he fetched up here about three years ago. But look, he’s your line of country. I’d welcome your thoughts. I shouldn’t dream of trying any talking stuff on him.’
Mackie was visibly thawing so I pushed on while I had an advantage. ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking of using him as an example of what we can’t do with talk alone in the paper I’m giving in Rome. Gus Galen’s asked me to give the response to Jeffries. Look, it would be a huge help to me if I could talk some of that stuff through with you.’
This was not sheer guff, for as I was speaking I was allowing myself to become aware of something, something which, unwilling to acknowledge, I had pushed out of consciousness till now: Mackie was lonely. Mackie, in his way, was as lonely as I was. I knew nothing about him, of his life away from the hospital, and I had never attempted to discover anything. I had played on his hostility as a justification for my own dislike, but in truth I had been an accessory to the bad feeling between us. I had discouraged him because he made me feel discouraged. And discouragement, like every other emotional emission, is contagious.
But so is its opposite.
‘I’ve not spoken to the police, as such,’ Mackie was now saying. ‘They were too tied up last evening—would you believe?’
‘It would be a kindness to me if you could see your way to dropping it,’ I said. And this time my cordiality wasn’t faked. ‘I’ve had a hell of a day, to tell you the truth.’ I sketched for him an outline of the St Stephen’s disaster.
Mackie took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes and I observed that they were that pale blue colour which fades under spectacles. They were bloodshot, as mine most likely were. ‘I had a hell of a day yesterday, too. Fact is, my mother’s ill. My sister’s in Canada and the burden falls on me. I probably overreacted to your car. In the event, the police didn’t come out; though it’s as well someone wasn’t being murdered—sorry, not very tactful in the circumstances! I’m sorry about your St Stephen’s man.’
‘Thanks. As I needn’t tell you, it rather goes with the territory.’ I heard Elizabeth Cruikshank’s cool voice:
Why do you do this? Is it love or damage?
But mine and Mackie’s damage were of different orders and I didn’t want to get into the wolf man with him, not even on our new terms. ‘I’d be very glad if the police weren’t involved. I don’t think Lennie’s basically violent. He’s just got an overprotective thing about me. I’ll give him a proper talking-to.’
‘Yes, well,’ Mackie said, unwilling to relinquish a justified grievance too readily. ‘If it happens again I’ll be forced to do something. He gave me a very nasty knock.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘Where did he hit you?’ Other than the ketchup stain there was no obvious mark on Mackie’s impeccably turned-out person.
‘It was in the, ah, stomach,’ Mackie said, primly; from which I deduced that Lennie’s blow had in fact landed rather lower down.
Poor Mackie. Poor Lennie. Poor all of us, if we but knew it, blindly crawling along our parallel lines, unmindful that all around there are others as much in need of comfort and consolation.
‘Come by my room sometime and we can chew things over,’ I suggested with a heartiness born of this small victory. I doubted he would. And I had no intention of discussing Lennie at the conference. But I felt relief that the enmity between us had for the moment been dissolved.
Mackie must have been feeling something similar because he said, awkwardly, ‘Surely, yes, I’ll do that, thanks, ah, David,’ which was the first time he had addressed me by anything other than my surname.