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 class was when, partly because I was glad to have an hour or two to myself. Olivia never forbade me anything openly but it’s not so agreeable to listen to Schubert, or Bach, when the person with you would rather hear The Archers. Not that I’ve anything against The Archers—it was more that Olivia had something against Schubert: she assumed respect for my tastes but somehow it had the discouraging effect of dislike.
I had a deadline for a paper I was reviewing for a clinical journal, which was an added reason for preferring my own thoughts. So when the phone rang and interrupted them I was put out till I heard Gus Galen’s voice.
‘Can you beat it?’ Gus was one of those people who never announce themselves, as if one spent one’s time simply waiting to hear from them alone. ‘They’ve got that baboon Jeffries giving the keynote address. What the hell is a “keynote” anyway, when it’s at home?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A musical metaphor maybe?’
Gus was referring to the international conference on anxiety and depression which was to take place the following year.
‘Nothing melodious about Jeffries’ approach. It wasn’t so long ago he was advocating bloody lobotomies.’
Lobotomy, or leucotomy, the surgical severance of the frontal lobe of the brain from the subcortical area, became fashionable as a remedy for intractable depression in the late thirties and during the forties and fifties something like 80,000 such surgical operations were performed before it dropped out of style again. But since 1970 there had been a revival of interest in the procedure.
Gus was one of the first modern neurological experts to query the wisdom of this, which, as with everything else, he did vociferously.
‘They claim it worked on monkeys but I wonder what the poor beasts would say about it if they could speak,’ he said, not long after our first encounter. ‘Those baboons haven’t a bloody clue how it works on humans, if it works at all, which I doubt. Monkeying about with the brain like that as
