Stanley and the Women (21 page)

‘But
don’t the others, Dr Collings and Dr Gandhi, surely they know about anything
like side-effects, don’t they? Or are they using some new treatment or
something?’

‘No, it
isn’t that, they know about them. They just haven’t recognized them in this
case. I mentioned them to Dr Gandhi, you know, said that was what I thought
they were, and he said Oh no, and went on about attention-seeking, well, you
heard. The thing is, Dr Collings thinks it’s that, and Dr Gandhi, he always
tends to agree with her. It’s not easy for him. She rather … I can’t say
any more but perhaps I don’t need to.’

I
thanked her and said, ‘I’ve just come from Dr Collings, and she mentioned these
reactions, but she didn’t seem to think they were all that important.’

The
sister looked back at me without replying. She had very clearly defined black
eyebrows.

‘But
those twitches can be no fun at all,’ I said.

She
nodded. ‘And they’d start to clear up in minutes if the drug was changed, not
the treatment, just the drug.’

‘There’s
a Dr Stone here, isn’t there? Couldn’t he …’

‘He’s
tried before,’ she said at once, ‘in the past, I mean. There’s a limit to what
anyone can ever do. Just, doctors have their patients.’

‘I
suppose so. But surely if —’

Between
being ordered to stop by Dr Gandhi and a moment ago, about when I mentioned his
twitches, Steve had hardly moved. Now, having slowly sat half up, he made a
clumsy turning movement so that his legs dangled over the edge of the bed, and
the twitches began again. They seemed worse this time, more violent, perhaps
because in his unstable position they threw him about more. The sister put her
arm round his shoulders and told him to stop in a firm and strict but not
unkind voice. I said he was all right and similar things, rather like the two
ambulance men with the old loony outside Rorschach House about fourteen hours
previously. It had no effect, but just when his eyes looked ready to roll up
and back in that unpleasant way the tension left him in a couple of seconds,
the twitching stopped and he let himself be eased back into a more restful
position under the clothes. He had always been a docile sort of chap and still
was, even now he was mad.

Soon
afterwards the sister went away, having assured me that these attacks would do
no lasting harm and that his medication was bound to be changed soon. I wanted to
stay and talk to him, but that was obviously not a good idea if I had set him
off on a round of spasms just by turning up — perhaps it had been the sound of
my voice that had done it again a minute before — so I left. When I inquired,
Dr Collings was not in her office. Would I like a call to be put out for her?
No thank you, I said, and went back to the Apfelsine and drove to work.

I thought it best to keep
out of Steve’s way, for the time being anyhow. Phone-calls told me he was
satisfactory, nothing more. After turning it over in my mind for twenty-four
hours or so I rang Nash. He listened to only a small part of my story before
suggesting I might go to see him at noon the following Tuesday. When I asked if
I could bring my wife he said I could if I thought it would help, making the
helping sound a fairly remote possibility. It would have taken a good deal more
than that to get me to leave her behind, not that I expected anything remotely
like a replay of the morning at St Kevin’s, but you never knew.

Down Rosslyn
Hill we rolled when the time came in a brisk downpour. With her ideas about
Nash as a literary figure Susan had dressed in a bit of her best in a check
suit and black-and-white shirt, but I had allowed for that and knew that she
was perfectly serious about whatever might turn up. At the lights at England’s
Lane I said, ‘Have I ever told you about Don Barley?’

‘I don’t
think so. Who’s he?’

‘Oddly
enough, I was just coming to that. Don Barley and his mother lived next door
but two to us in SW16 during the war. There wasn’t a Mr Barley, I’ve forgotten
why. I suppose things might have turned out different if there had been. I can’t
really remember what he looked like either, Don. I was only about five at the
time and he was seventeen. Anyway, one day Don got a poisoned foot from cutting
it on a tin or something. His mother fetched the doctor along. He did the
necessary and said he’d be back Friday. He must have rubbed it in somehow that
there was absolutely no need for him to see Don before the Friday, Mrs Barley
being a bit of a fusspot. Well, Friday comes and the doc turns up, and he takes
one look at Don and rushes out for an ambulance, and gets him into hospital
right away. And he died there at nine o’clock that night — they hadn’t got
penicillin in those days, you see. His mother had noticed he was poorly, but
the doctor had told her nothing needed doing till the Friday, and doctors (a)
knew what they were talking about and (b) you did what they said regardless.

‘I can’t
really say I remember that happening, any of it. I doubt if I was as much as
five. But I remember very clearly my mother telling the story, time and again
and always in a very horrified way. It was a rotten thing to happen all right,
but she went on about it sort of more than that. It wasn’t that we knew the
Barleys all that well. My mum certainly didn’t blame Mrs Barley or anything
like that — she always said how awful it must be to have to live with it for
the rest of your life. What it was, I think, I didn’t see it at the time, actually
I didn’t see it in full until I started telling you about it just now, what it
was, she realized that if it had been her and one of us she’d have done the
same, or she easily might have done. My dad would have had more sense,
probably, but only probably, and there again he could have been off on his
travels. I’m pretty sure his Midland trip used to take the inside of a week. Just
right, in fact.

‘So if
you should think I spent rather a long time making up my mind to get hold of
Nash this last time, I don’t say you do or you have or you ever will, but if
you ever do, or anything else like that, just remember I’m a boy from SW16
whose parents were so much in awe of the doctor that they might have let him
die of blood-poisoning rather than do what the doctor didn’t order. I suppose I
might have reacted against it, but I don’t think you do with that sort of
thing. Anyway I haven’t.’

Susan
put her hand gently over mine on the wheel. ‘How dreadful.’ She was nearly
crying. ‘Poor Mrs Barley. And I understand about your mother too. But as far as
I’m concerned you can forget the rest of it, the last part of what you said.
Remember I’m not like the others, Nowell and Trish Collings and the rest of
them. I don’t think things like that about you.’ Now she was cheering up. ‘With
me you don’t need excuses. I say, how terrifically Jewish that sounds, doesn’t
it?’

‘By
me would be even better,’ I said, squeezing her hand. ‘There must be
an accident or a demonstration or something. They’re not moving at all up
there.’

But in
the end we were being let into 100 New Harley Street at only two minutes past
the hour. It was a big old place with eight doctors in it, if as I assumed they
were all doctors. Nash’s part was at the back, looking out on to a garden with
a lot of trees in it now being rained on steadily. The room reminded me of a
men’s club in St James’s, the sort where they keep out the under-seventies.
Nash himself was got up in full professional gear, including a tie that was
obviously the tie of something or other, no doubt for Susan’s benefit, and the
same could be said of his manner —bland, almost hearty. Not quite so obviously,
but nearly, he found her a good deal better-looking than he had expected to,
which I thought was a bit cheeky of him. Susan must have taken that in, though
busy at the same time on the furniture, curtains, etc.

On Nash’s
suggestion I began again at the beginning of the main Rorschach House episode.
He seemed to be paying close attention, not interrupting, now and then holding
his breath for a moment and letting it out in a kind of voiceless groan, either
as a comment on what I was telling him or because it was a thing he did while
he was listening. Susan never took her eyes off me.

When I
had reached the schizophreniform-disorder passage near the end of Part 1, Nash
came to life and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Duke, I think perhaps I’ve heard all I
require to know of that conversation. But you mentioned an earlier encounter
with, with Dr Collings in — am I quite mistaken or was it in a
pub?’
He
shook his head slightly once at what things were coming to. ‘Can you describe
that occasion to me? Not in full, please, just the general drift, or anything
that impressed you particularly.’

I tried
to oblige. After a minute or two of highlights Nash gave a faint whimper with
his mouth shut, like someone taking a nap and dreaming.

‘Would
you mind,’ he said, ‘could I ask you to repeat that, Mr Duke? Your son is
trying to — what was it?’

‘To
find out who he is.’

‘That
of course is an approximation, your paraphrase of a partial recollection of
what she said.’

‘Word
for word, I promise you. Only half a dozen of them, after all.’

‘I find
that very difficult to believe.’

‘It
stuck in my mind the moment she said it.’

‘Which
doesn’t mean I can’t believe it, I just find the effort rather extreme. Just as
— if you told me that a foreigner, say a Frenchman, had said to you, with
serious intent as far as you could make out, er, “You English, you are so cold,”
or a writer, a novelist, a practising one, had solemnly assured you that his
object was to strip away the smooth surface of things and show the harsh
reality underneath, well, I would quite likely be sceptical, would I not,
properly too. Then I might well reflect that somebody, some real person, was
bound to pronounce those words sooner or later and it was just a question of
waiting long enough and being in the right place at the right time. I’m sure
you take the point.’

With a
touch more than simple even-handedness, Nash delivered the item about the
novelist to Susan. He would naturally have heard from Cliff Wainwright what she
did and was, but even so there was more than a touch more than up-your-street
to the way he handled it. She chuckled very prettily and did one of those
little sweeps of the eyes showing polite sexual approval. All of which was
perfectly fine with me.

‘There
are a couple of further comments I might make at this stage,’ he went on. ‘Schizophreniform
disorder. The Collings woman gave you to understand that it was a condition
substantially different from schizophrenia itself. This is not the case. The
difference is no more than legal. She clearly, even she clearly agreed with my
diagnosis but couldn’t face letting you see that. I could have wished to be
spared the insult of her confirmation, in fact the danger-flag, the, the, the
tocsin
of it. M’m.

‘Now as
to the matter of your son’s, er, need to be himself, not what … other …
people … want … him to be, this as the cause of his illness. That’s
rather surprising in a way. Not fashionable any longer. Nowadays it’s more the
sort of stuff peddled by quacks and gurus and social workers rather than
psychiatrists. But it has the advantage of leading directly to attaching blame
for the patient’s condition to his parents or parent. Now any decent parent,
almost any parent whatever, is going to be upset, harrowed, thoroughly daunted
by that accusation and will show it, will very likely protest, make an issue of
it, claim good intentions and so on, which leaves the way open to the
supplementary accusation that he’s allowing his own self-esteem to take
precedence over his child’s welfare. Checkmate. Or rather, one more to their
side.’

I said,
‘I didn’t think I’d mentioned that part.’

‘No, I
don’t recall your having done so.

‘So how
did you …

Nash
went into an elaborate dumb-show, sucking in his breath, dilating his eyes,
shaking his head slowly from side to side and turning his hands palm upwards on
his lap. Then he caught sight of Susan and went back to normal in a twinkling. ‘Oh,
I’ve come across that sort of,’ — here he faltered slightly — ‘person before.’

‘But
why would anybody play a game like that?’ asked Susan indignantly. ‘I don’t
know, Mrs Duke,’ he said, having done the first half-second of the dumb-show
over again. ‘I’ve no idea. Why anybody should behave in that fashion.’

‘There
you are,’ she said to me, meaning she had been broadly right about Collings.

After
waiting politely for a moment or two, Nash said, ‘Following your …
interview with Dr Collings you say you were allowed to visit your son. Tell me
about that if you would.’

I told
him, a selective version only because I found I had got a bit tired of telling
people things. He listened as before, nodding every so often in an as-I-thought
way. Susan was as before too.

‘This
other doctor you saw,’ he said firmly. ‘Dr Gandhi? Was he, er, did he, er, an
Asiatic I take it?’

‘Yes.’

Nash
sat on for a long time behind his desk without saying anything.

He
might have been trying to make up his mind to say something he had on the tip
of his tongue, or just as likely wondering what was on television that evening.
If it was the first he never got there but woke up suddenly and said, ‘I can’t
tell you that your son didn’t resent your arrival at the place where he was, I
can only tell you that his distressing behaviour wasn’t caused by anything of
that sort. As Dr …
Gandhi
must have known.’