care if I slept with another woman. I couldn’t say as I’d not tested it, but certainly she was too secure in her own attractions to bother her head about my harmless flirting.
Bar was a dermatologist, a very able one, Denis was a consultant in geriatric psychiatry and Chris, before she had the kids, had been a midwife. So when the six of us got together the conversation was often work-centred, which meant that Olivia, as the only one of us not medically qualified, sometimes played up. She’d been PA to, and mistress of, a high-powered MP when I met her. He’d dropped her like a hot brick when the press got wind of his extra-curricular activities and rapidly returned to the arms of his plain and uncomplicated Southampton wife. I imagine it was this jolt to her self-esteem which propelled Olivia into my unembarrassed arms.
We met over a medical delegation she’d organised to the House of Commons, where I sat beside her at lunch. The button on the sleeve of my jacket got caught in the lace of her blouse. I’m deft-fingered, and I disentangled it with the occasional flamboyance which can visit me when I am not trying too hard. The episode, conducted across the table from the treacherous MP, acted as a tonic to Olivia’s wounded feelings. Looking back, I can see that her animated responses were designed to put the MP in his place, rather than to encourage me to take it. But she was attracted by my doctor’s status, and maybe, too, by my patina of cultural sophistication, though as is often the way, she liked the idea of this more than its manifestations. When we got to know each other better, and she discovered that my flash of extroversion was atypical, I suspect she was shrewd enough to recognise that this had compensations: I was unlikely either to dump her or gainsay her.
Nowadays, Olivia ran a boutique in the smarter part of Brighton. It was a waste of her intelligence but I’d long abandoned my earlier efforts to steer her career and the job seemed to suit her, mainly because much of the stock found its way on to her person.
‘Livy, that’s a fabulous frock. I’m green with envy.’ Bar, the least envious woman alive, was generous with compliments. Privately, I preferred her outfit, which was a pair of well-cut black trousers and a silk shirt. Besides being good-tempered Bar had a good behind.
‘Like it? It’s Gina Frattini.’ Olivia pirouetted, showing off the dress’s elaborately ruffled skirt.
‘I haven’t a clue who Gina Frattini is,’ said Chris, coming out of the kitchen in a pair of filthy trousers, ‘but she’s obviously posh. I’m afraid I’m as you see me, covered in dog hair as usual.’ The Powells had four children and three rowdy dogs. It was debatable which they spoiled more.
‘You’ve worried Dr McB about his trousers now!’ Dan had observed me covertly brushing at them. It was a subject for badinage among the assembled company that I’m fussy about such things.
The dogs had been shut in the kitchen, but after a good deal of barking they were let out, until Cassius, an excitable Labrador, leapt at Olivia’s dress and threatened to rip it, so, to my relief, they were banished again.
Dan, who showed an easy disregard for his clothes but disliked pets, remarked that ‘Olivia’s narcissism’ had ‘its uses’, which I was afraid might lead to one of their scratchy dialogues. I could see Olivia had gone the pink of her dress and fearing she was preparing a retort I lobbed a comment at Dan as a diversion. ‘I saw someone unusual today at Kit’s.’
‘Man or woman?’ asked Dan, who could be readily distracted by an interesting case.
‘Woman. A suicide but not one of your run-of-the-mill sort.’
‘Darling,’ said Olivia, ‘you sound so blasé, poor creatures.’ She hadn’t a grain of true sympathy for anyone misguided enough to land up in a psychiatric hospital.
‘Method?’ asked Dan. ‘D’you mind if I smoke, Chris?’ Dan, who never ate much at the best of times, had left half his first course untouched. Chris wasn’t the greatest cook, but sometimes I wished he would try harder.
‘I mind,’ interjected Denis.
‘That’s why I asked Chris and not you,’ said Dan, lighting up. ‘This is an inter-course break.’ He always made that joke and I was surprised to hear Olivia laugh. We had all long ago given up laughing at it.
‘She seems to have acquired some Soneryl from somewhere, so either she’s a darned poor sleeper or she’s clever.’
‘Darling, no one says “darned” any more,’ said Olivia.
‘Insomniacs are often clever,’ Denis interposed swiftly. ‘There’s nothing to say insomnia addles the wits. Mostly the sign of the sharp ones, in my experience. If you must smoke, Daniel, use an ashtray.’ He removed the plate on to which Dan had been flicking his cigarette and fetched a Stella Artois ashtray, which one of their kids must have taken from the pub.
‘Well, no, I mean, she must have talked someone into giving them to her with a view to bumping herself off. Soneryl’s a barbiturate. Not easy to get,’ I explained for Olivia’s sake. She couldn’t have cared less but I always felt this need to include her in these conversations.
‘She give any reason?’
‘Not so far,’ I said. ‘I think the reasons may be existential.’ I rather wished I hadn’t brought up the subject of Elizabeth Cruikshank.
‘Darling, don’t be so pretentious,’ Olivia said, smiling at Dan as if to say: Isn’t he impossible?
‘Things too much for her?’ Dan pursued, ignoring Olivia.
‘Spare me people who have to attract attention to themselves in that “look-at-me” sort of way.’ Olivia finally succeeded in terminating the conversation.
For once I was grateful to her. It suddenly felt like a betrayal to be discussing Elizabeth Cruikshank round a dinner-party table.
WHEN I SAW ELIZABETH CRUIKSHANK NEXT, THE LATE-afternoon sun was streaming through the window and lighting up my room. It was a big room, with high ceilings, and one weekend, when Olivia had a friend staying, I’d gone in and painted it white because I couldn’t look a day longer at the existing institutional pale blue and cream. I’d also brought from home some paintings which I’d acquired before Olivia and I lived together. ‘Horrible gloomy thing,’ she’d said of the Orpen, a portrait of a sad-faced clown, I’d picked up at Kettle’s Yard.
I have a bee in my bonnet about pictures being crooked on the wall and one thing Lennie failed at was setting them straight. More often than not his big presence disrupted the paintings so, as my patient was settling in the chair, I walked across and adjusted the clown. I felt her eyes on my back and when I returned to my seat she asked, ‘Who is it?’
‘The painter or the portrait?’
‘The clown.’
I could have responded with, ‘Do you feel like that yourself?’ or something equally alienating but more by luck than judgement I chose to answer the question.
‘I’ve always felt it must be an aspect of the artist. What do you think?’ I never told Olivia this but I’d bought the painting because it reminded me of Jonny.
‘You’d need to know sadness to paint that.’
Something
