Maddie Read online

  6

  December 1986

  ‘Why?’ Joe said. ‘I haven’t the remotest idea. I’m only a psychiatrist, not a soothsayer.’

  ‘She’s your patient. You’re supposed to know all about her. You told me to look after her. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect you to know.’

  He looked at her, at the way her head was up and her eyes were fixed on his, and wanted to cheer. She looked alert in a way she certainly had not before, and angry. And that was good. Better certainly than the dull edginess that had been so much a part of her for so long. In putting these two women together he might have wrought better than he knew, he told himself, and leaned forwards and folded his arms on the table between them.

  ‘No one really knows what goes on inside another person’s head, Annie. A psychiatrist tries to make informed guesses, and to base a therapy on those guesses, praying all the time that he’s somewhere near the target, let alone the bull’s-eye. Occasionally he manages to get somewhere. Most of the time he doesn’t. He can only sit and make helpful noises and try a few pills and maybe make people feel a little more comfortable while they get better anyway. Most psychiatric illnesses are self-limiting, you see. No matter what we do or don’t do they get better in time.’

  ‘Really?’ she said sardonically. ‘Is that why there are so many people here who’ve been here for years and now need disposal? Did no one remember to tell them their illnesses were self-limiting? Maybe if you had you wouldn’t have to worry now about where you’re going to dump people.’

  ‘Touché,’ he grinned at her. ‘But give me some credit, Annie. I did say most. Not all. And I don’t claim to be the answer to anyone’s problems whatever sort of illness they have. I can’t be. I’m not God – who or whatever God may be. I’m just a doctor with some knowledge of what makes people tick, and how their minds work, and I try to apply some of that knowledge to the people who come to me because they’re unhappy – which is what mental illness usually means – and try to make them feel different.’ He made a small grimace then. ‘Though to tell the truth I’m expected to make the happy ones feel different, too. The ones who are so floridly mad and cheerful. I’m supposed to make them normal, poor bastards. I’d rather not, often. Why extract them from mania to give them reality? I’d rather be manic, myself. It must be rather agreeable –’

  ‘If you know so much about what makes people tick, you must know what makes this Maddie tick,’ she said abruptly. ‘Why she sits there rocking like that, refusing to react to anything or anyone and then suddenly looks at me. So tell me why.’

  ‘You’re sure she did?’

  ‘Here we go,’ she said roughly. ‘If it doesn’t fit in with what the great doctor expects then of course it’s a lie or a stupidity. I’m telling you, that woman looked at me, with intelligence in her eyes. She wasn’t just staring the way she usually does. She looked at me. Sideways, at me. And I want to know why.’

  ‘So do I,’ he said and leaned back. ‘I’m sorry if you thought I didn’t believe what you said. I do believe you. I always have, whatever we talked about. I was only asking for confirmation. I’m sorry indeed if I offended you. I didn’t mean to.’

  There was a short silence and then she said wearily, ‘It doesn’t matter, I just get irritable, I suppose. I meant no rudeness.’

  ‘You offered none. Look, there are two things we need to talk about. One is why Maddie showed that moment of awareness – and you say she went back to her usual state as soon as you looked at her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So she was caught out – that’s interesting. I wonder how often she’s been doing it? How often she’s shown signs of awareness, I mean, that the nursing staff and I didn’t see? I’m a bloody fool, you know. I never thought to interview Cynthia about her, and I should have done. Maybe she knew her better than any of us, doctors or nurses.’

  ‘Maybe. But –’

  ‘And the other thing to talk about is you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, rough-voiced again. I agreed to come here to help with the committee, and I let myself be talked into helping with this patient. But that’s as far as it goes, and as far as it’s going to go. You’ve been trying to make a patient out of me for years, I know that. And I also know I’m not going to let you. You can dig away at me till you’re blue. It won’t get you anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t want to dig at you and I certainly don’t see you as a patient. At least –’ He stopped, clearly struggling to be honest. ‘At least, I don’t think so. I think I’m much the same with everyone. I’m nosy, you see. Deeply inquisitive. If I had my way, I’d make window curtains illegal, so I could look in every house I pass, to see how people are and how they live. I like to know about people and what they do and what they think and why, and how they feel and I have this tiresome drive to meddle if they feel bad and try to make them feel better whoever they are. You should ask some of my friends –’

  ‘I’m not interested in meeting your friends.’

  ‘No, I know. That’s come up before, hasn’t it? Well, all the same – the point I’m trying to make is that I like you. Can’t help it. It happens sometimes. You just like a person. Hasn’t it ever happened to you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Taking a fancy to a person and being interested in them?’

  ‘You’re trying it again – wanting to analyse me.’ She said it loudly, so loudly that the nurses at the adjoining table in the canteen looked over their shoulders at them curiously and then grinned, seeing Joe Labosky sitting there. People always grinned when they saw Joe Labosky. She’d noticed that before, and it made her curiously angry to see it again.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ she said passionately, but in a lower voice, ‘I’ve told you, I don’t want to talk to you now or ever about me. I’m not ill, I’m not depressed. If I’m miserable that’s my affair. Why the hell should you have the right to come along and try to change me? Maybe I like being depressed, if I am. And you can’t be sure I am anyway. And maybe I ought to be depressed. It’s like those madmen you say you ought to leave alone to be mad in peace. Why not leave depressed people alone to be in peace?’

  ‘Because they’re not,’ he said simply. ‘There’s no peace in your life, Annie. You spend all your waking hours in a state of misery. It shows in the way you walk and the way you look and every word you say. It seems such a pity to see so interesting and capable a person in such a state of – of waste.’

  ‘How do you know I’m interesting and capable? How can you possibly know anything at all? You looked after my mother. Fair enough. Now she’s dead and there’s an end of it – what do you know about me?’

  ‘I know it’s not the end of it when someone dies. It’s only the beginning sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ She made her voice as withering as she could. ‘Trotting out silly paradoxes like that – it’s just a trick of speech. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘It means a lot.’ The angrier she got, the more patient he sounded. ‘It means that when a person is dead, you can’t talk to them any more, not properly. You can talk to them inside your head, of course, but they can’t really answer. And if there was anything you should have said and never did, it’s too late. You can’t apologise and you can’t explain and you can’t, above all, tell them how angry you are, and how –’

  She had gone crimson with fury. ‘If you don’t stop this sort of talk I’m leaving. I came here to talk about your patient Maddie, and that’s what I’ll talk about. I won’t fall for this trick of yours, digging around in my mind. It may be your hobby, but it’s my bloody mind. Leave it alone!’

  He smiled equably. ‘Very well. But thanks for listening this far. You’ll remember some of the things I said –’

  ‘Like hell I will,’ she said and got to her feet. ‘Look, it’s obvious that there’s nothing you can tell me about Maddie, so there’s an end of it. I won’t be back. I’ve done all I can with those notes, and I can’t see anything further that I can do that wil
l be of any use –’

  ‘She looked at you,’ he said softly, not getting up, sitting there at the table with his hands folded on it neatly. ‘She looked at you. As far as I know that is the first direct contact she’s made with anyone in this place for years. Maybe she did the same with Cynthia. I don’t know and it wouldn’t be right for Cynthia for me to go to the hostel now and start quizzing her. She’s part of the past now as far as Maddie’s concerned. But you’re here in the present and Maddie looked at you. And after a very short acquaintance too. It’s obvious you’ve had quite an effect on her, somehow. So we need you. Or rather she needs you –’

  And he was furious with himself for that slip of the tongue. After her anger, the last inducement that would have any effect was a plea that he or anyone else among Greenhill’s staff needed her. But the appeal to her relationship with Maddie which however short was, it seemed, forming more and more firmly, now that was different. That might work –

  She stood there uncertainly for a long moment, staring down at the table, and that gave him more time to look at her without her being aware of his regard and he made the most of it.

  He had not been too hopeful, after all, he told himself. There had been a change in her since the last time he had spoken to her. She was still depressed, heaven knew; it showed in every line of her body and in the tone of her voice, as well as in her passionate denial that she might have a problem. To say in one breath that she wasn’t depressed and in the next that it was how she chose to be, and also right that she should be, taking on herself blame for her state and seeing it as a just punishment for her sins, was virtually diagnostic of the illness. But getting her to face it and to accept that she needed help was proving to be something of a hurdle.

  Not that he wanted to try the usual remedies for depression for her. It would be easy enough to put her on a course of Tofranil or Norval tablets or whatever and to wait until the illness burnt itself out eventually before weaning her off them, but that was not his sort of psychiatry. He used drugs, of course he did; only an idiot took a single line and stuck to it, in his opinion. He was as scornful of the narrowness of the methods of Sargent as he was of those of Laing, while not disagreeing with either of their philosophies. It was the blinkered nature of their approach he deplored, regarding the eclectic method as the one most likely to work.

  Not that he called it anything so fancy; not Joe Labosky who had no time for fancy labels. As far as he was concerned it was always horses for courses. What suited one patient would not suit another. You looked at the patient and sought a treatment to fit his or her needs, rather than taking a treatment and expecting all patients to benefit from it. And he was sure, from all he knew of Annie Matthews – Annie Brady Matthews, he corrected himself then, a little wryly – he was sure that for her, drugs would not serve. They might temporarily ease her pain a little, and soften her hard edges, but in the long term she needed to dig out the source of her distress and deal with it. And he thought again of Jennifer, and the way she had sat there lumpishly in her chair and the way Annie had hovered, furiously watchful, over her and wondered again what had happened between those two women in the past to create so painful and awkward a relationship. Because that was undoubtedly how it had been, and it was equally undoubted that it was somewhere in what had happened between them, rather than in ordinary grief, that the source of Annie’s present illness lay. Which she refused to acknowledge, and refused to allow him to treat.

  But it was getting easier. A small chink was appearing in her carapace of denial. First it had been her acceptance of his coaxing to join the committee and then it had stretched to take in care of Maddie. And now it was widening before his very eyes as she stood there and thought about Maddie.

  ‘All right,’ she said suddenly and sat down again and folded her hands on the table in unconscious mimicry of his own posture and looked at him. ‘What do I do next?’

  ‘Be with her as often as you can,’ he said at once. ‘And go on doing whatever it was that made her look at you before –’

  ‘It might be –’ she began and then stopped. And wisely he sat and waited, saying nothing to prompt her.

  ‘It might be,’ she said at length, ‘that I talked to her.’

  ‘People have talked to her before. I have,’ he ventured.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure. About the sort of things people do talk to dumb patients about. How are you? and What are you feeling like? and silly questions like that. Or Pull yourself together, and Don’t be so silly, and the rest of it –’ The scorn in her voice dripped like melting icicles from a dead branch. ‘I didn’t do that. I talked about me. I told her I didn’t like her and that the best thing about her was that I could talk to her and not get an answer. So being insulting by refusing to answer me was really doing me a favour. Could that be why she looked at me?’

  He laughed softly. ‘By God, maybe it was at that. It must have been a surprise to her, if in fact she heard it. I was assuming that after so long she didn’t listen either. That she had dug herself so deep into her trances that she was deaf as well as mute. Genuinely deaf, I mean.’

  ‘She probably is sometimes,’ Annie said. ‘I’ve watched her and she’s different some of the time. But when she’s had something to eat, when she goes to the lavatory and to bed, she isn’t like that then. She still stares, but it’s a different sort of stare. Sharper, somehow –’ She stopped. ‘I’m only guessing.’

  ‘It’s all any of us have been doing for years. Guessing. Go on guessing, then. Go on being with her, trying to talk to her again. Will you?’

  ‘I won’t try,’ she said. ‘I think that makes her go away. Inside herself. I’ll talk if I feel like it. Then she may hear. Otherwise –’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  She shrugged, and the blankness settled over her again, and her shoulders drooped, so that she looked as she usually did, flat and dismal, and her hair seemed to lose a little of the added lustre it had seemed to have as her eyes hooded and her chin went down. ‘Otherwise nothing,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’ve no other ideas.’

  ‘The one you have will do fine to start with. May I come and see you both, you and Maddie, in the next couple of days?’

  ‘You’re the doctor,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you.’ And she didn’t look at him again, not even when his bleep called him and he had to go and said goodbye. She just sat there at the table in the same position and he looked back as he reached the door, on his way to the telephone, and wondered. Was it a real chink he had seen open in her? Or just a temporary flash of the real Annie he was sure lived inside her there somehow? He’d have to do the same thing that she was doing with Maddie, he decided as the big double doors swished softly closed behind him. Wait and see.

  It’s not true, Annie told herself. It’s not true. He was just talking the way doctors do talk, trying to get at you, digging you out like someone digging an oyster out of its shell –

  And at once her mind slid away and she was sitting not in Greenhill’s ugly staff canteen with its green washed walls and eternal smell of elderly instant coffee and burnt toast, but at a corner table at El Vino’s with – what was his name? Oh, yes, Giles, that was it. A silly lovely laughing man who worked on the gossip column and who had taken her out to El Vino’s because it was the first of September and at last they could eat oysters.

  And he had ordered a dozen each for them and a bottle of the best Chablis and piles of brown bread and butter and while they were waiting for the wine to be served he’d told her she’d do fine on the Record, that she’d enjoy working with old Sidgewick on the ‘Probe’ desk, and it was a great opportunity for a new girl in the Street, just as it was a great opportunity for a new girl to come and eat oysters with him, Giles. And he’d leered like a dirty old man and laughed to make it clear it was just a joke and they had drunk the wine and eaten the oysters with great delight and gone back down Fleet Street arm in arm and she had been totally, deliriously happy. She was twenty and she had her first job o
n a national newspaper and was pretending to be a little bit in love with a raffish journalist and it was summer and everything was lovely.

  Until she had gone home and found Jen sitting by the kitchen table, exactly where she had left her that morning, but now stinking of her own urine and with her fingers burned with the cigarettes she had allowed to burn down to their butts, and had known it couldn’t last. Something had to be done and she called Dr Weightman and he had told her it was just one of those things, put Jen to bed, keep an eye on her and it would sort itself out.

  And she had put Jen to bed and sometimes made her get up and sit in a chair but that had been that. No more oysters at El Vino’s with Giles, no more excitement on the ‘Probe’ desk of the Record, and come to that, she thought now, with a sudden flash of humour, no more Record. That was one of the newspapers no one ever remembered any more. I wonder what happened to Giles? Where is he working now? And did he ever marry and write the great novels he told me he was going to and –

  I mustn’t think this way. It’s silly and it’s sick. It’s all you’ve ever done, digging about in the past, remembering, remembering. What good is it? She’s dead, Colin’s dead, they’re all dead and gone, and it just doesn’t matter any more.

  And as though Joe were still sitting there, she heard his voice again. ‘– it’s too late. You can’t apologise and you can’t explain and above all you can’t tell them how angry you are –’

  She jumped to her feet, as anger welled up even more hotly, and pushed her way out of the canteen, roughly elbowing aside a covey of nurses, much to their noisy irritation, and went hurrying out of the staff quarters building across the garden to the West Pavilion. She’d have to tell Sister she wouldn’t be back, that somehow, someone else must take on the problems of Maddie and her food and her other needs; she, Annie, had had enough. She wasn’t going to come back and put up with all this –