The Other Side of You (18 page)

‘What’s your other name, Dr McBride?’

‘David. My family call me Davey.’

‘I prefer David.’

‘You can call me David if you like.’

Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly, unavoidably, uncopably tired. Too tired almost to stand. I bade a comradely farewell to Mackie, returned to reception where I rang through to Trish and told her to cancel my afternoon appointments. I offered no explanation for this and she asked for none. It was the first time I had taken more than an hour off in all the time she had worked for me. I imagine she was too astonished to voice any reaction.

Mackie’s Ford was parked with anal precision by my Renault and I was dismayed to see the figure of Hassid parked there beside it.

‘Hassid?’

‘Doctor, I was thinking—’

Enough was enough. ‘I’ve spoken to Dr Mackie, Hassid. He’s very kindly agreed to drop any charges against Lennie, so if you can think of how we might track him down would you put your mind to it for me? I’d be very grateful.’

I inched out of the narrow space with the added impediment of Hassid’s magisterial beckoning but I was now fully alive to the dangers the day might harbour and, for Lennie’s sake, I paid special attention to my reversing. I didn’t want anything to foul up the truce with Mackie.

As I was about to pull away Hassid halted me with an imperious hand.

I wound down the window. ‘What is it, Hassid?’

‘Please, Doctor, it is Mrs Cruikshank.’

‘Yes?’ I was ready to be openly annoyed.

‘Sister Maguire says she has left us. But she had not returned all her books to the library, I’m afraid.’

‘Never mind, Hassid,’ I said, and now the tears which threatened my composure were born of sheer fatigue. ‘If you let me know what they are I’ll undertake to replace any that are missing.’

I continued to monitor my driving on the short journey home. Olivia would be at the shop so an oasis of potential peace lay before me. I was planning a sandwich, a hot bath and—the prospect was celestial—bed.

‘Darling,’ Olivia’s voice greeted me as the front door banged shut. ‘Is that you?’

I found her in the living room—with Dan. My school Bible was still lying face down on the corner of the sofa where I’d left it. Dan and Olivia were sitting on the sofa and some protective instinct made me walk across and close the little book and place it deliberately on a table by the armchair in which I sat down. I said nothing. I hadn’t, when it came down to it, anything to say.

‘I was passing the shop and Olivia wanted me to run her home,’ Dan suggested finally. It wasn’t much of an attempt at explanation so I didn’t bother to reply to it, except to raise my eyebrows and look at Olivia.

‘I wasn’t feeling too well,’ Olivia explained.

‘Oh,’ I said, non-committally. I felt that someone should do better than this and it wasn’t going to be me.

‘Yes,’ Dan said. He looked dreadfully awkward. ‘So, I brought her home.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’

‘I wasn’t feeling well,’ Olivia repeated.

I wondered how much longer we were going to go on in this vein. I felt completely detached, remote, unfussed, even a little kindly towards them. It wasn’t my scrape and I was mildly interested to see how they were going to get out of it. The only thing I felt strongly about at that moment was a sandwich and my bath.

I got up. ‘Don’t go!’ Dan said and simultaneously Olivia said, ‘Darling!’

‘I’m getting myself something to eat,’ I explained. ‘I’m starving.’

When I came out of the kitchen Dan was standing by the window jingling his keys. He was a terrible fidget and Bar often teased him about it. I wondered how Bar was and what, if anything, she and Dan had talked about the previous evening.

‘Look, I’d better be off,’ Dan said, abruptly. ‘I’ve patients to see…’ He didn’t ask what I was doing home in the middle of the afternoon. He would have known I must have patients to see too.

‘Sure,’ I said. And sat down with my sandwich.

Olivia saw Dan to the door where they exchanged a few words, and then came back and sat on the sofa with her feet up while I went on chewing my sandwich. It wasn’t bad, cream cheese with cucumber, and a lot of pepper, though it struck me that I’d had rather a lot of sandwiches lately. When I’d finished, I got up to take the plate into the kitchen and went to run a bath. I undressed in the bedroom, put on my dressing gown and was going across to the bathroom when Olivia called out, ‘Darling.’

I thought of ignoring this because I really did want that bath very badly but habit is a hard taskmaster so I called back a reluctant, ‘Yes?’

‘Darling, will you come and talk to me?’

‘I’ve just run a bath.’

‘Would you like me to soap your back?’

This time I ignored the taskmaster. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t, thanks,’ and I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I think it may have been the first time it had been locked except by visitors.

I lay for a long time in the bath, topping it up with draughts of hot water as soon as the temperature dropped below the level of just less than scalding and stuffing my toes alternately into the hot and cold tap, as I have done since I was a child.

I didn’t try to think what I was going to say to Olivia, or how she was going to approach me. I didn’t have to try not to think. My mental processes had reduced to a state which appeared to have lost touch with any personal emotion. It was as if I had been filled from top to toe with mud, and the mud
was slowly solidifying inside me. It was a dull sort of feeling but not uncomfortable. Possibly those who have been lobotomised feel somewhat the same.

When I surrendered my bathroom retreat, my first hopeful thought was that Olivia had gone out. The sitting room and kitchen were empty but when I went to the bedroom to my annoyance I found her undressed in bed.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was hoping to get some sleep. I didn’t sleep too much last night.’

‘I’ll snuggle down with you,’ Olivia said.

Over my dead body, I said inwardly. ‘I’ll take a nap on the sofa then.’

‘Darling,’ said Olivia, ‘I do love you.’

If, rather than what she had been doing with Dan, she had sat up all night debating with him how to rile me most she could hardly have achieved a wilder success. But I was too tired and too detached even to attempt to indicate as much, so I just said, ‘Oh?’ as unenthusiastically as I knew how.

‘Darling Davey,’ Olivia said.

‘What is it, Olivia? What would you like to say to me?’ Resigned, I watched the chimerical prospect of sleep slide away.

‘Darling, I do love you,’ Olivia said again.

I stood there, slightly damp in my dressing gown, not even especially annoyed this time. I kept thinking of Elizabeth Cruikshank and her Thomas, shouting at her, shouting because he loved her, and crying, and then dying without her; and how hard it is to find love, and how harder still to be loved, or believe you are loved; and how often and how easily, and cheaply and wantonly, the word ‘love’ is abused. And—and this, as I stood
there, struck me as almost the most pitiful fact of all—how much more conditioned we sorry beings are to respond to the sham, the pinchbeck which parades as love but isn’t love at all.

Olivia didn’t love me. She was, I suddenly understood, afraid. I wasn’t sure of what, unless it was the humiliation of being found out over Dan, but that she was afraid I knew for sure. And hard behind that recognition came a debilitating ennui; for I felt myself about to be bound fast by those invisible cords of compassion which constrain us more tightly than love.

‘Olivia,’ I said, ‘I am so tired I can hardly stay upright. I want more than anything just now to go to sleep. If you have anything to say to me, please would you say it? Whatever it is, I won’t mind. I don’t mind anything right now except how extraordinarily tired I am and how much I would like to sleep for a few hours, preferably on my own, undisturbed.’

‘I’m pregnant,’ Olivia said, with what seemed at the time startling simplicity, though afterwards, when I thought about it, I wondered what other words she could have used.

I
T TURNED OUT THAT I DIDN’T GET MUCH SLEEP THAT NIGHT EITHER
, but I never cared so much as I did that afternoon when I stood by the bed and had my world pulled down around my exhausted head for the third time in a day. After a while, you go over some sort of ridge with sleep and then you feel you will never sleep again.

My first impulse when Olivia broke this news to me was to laugh. I think, in fact, I did laugh, and then I sat down on the bed next to her, naked in our bed, mostly because the news had knocked out what stuffing there was left in me. Hadn’t I twice already that day remarked to myself that you never knew what others had in them till it was revealed?

‘Darling,’ Olivia said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

This might have annoyed me again because its helplessness was guaranteed to evoke my sympathy. But, oddly enough, I believe that Olivia, for all her skill at manipulation, wasn’t alive to that element in my character. She was too unacquainted with such feelings herself.

‘No,’ I agreed. She was nearly forty-three. We’d stopped using any contraception a while ago. Not that we’d had many occasions not to use it.

I was wondering whether she was assuming that I knew about her and Dan when she said, ‘Would you like it if we had a baby?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, unwilling to be drawn. And then, to get it over with, ‘Do you know whose the baby is?’

To her credit, she blushed and said, ‘What d’you mean?’ sulkily, more like the Olivia I knew and had pretended to love.

‘I mean,’ I said, getting up from the bed, ‘is the child likely to be mine or Dan’s? It does have a bearing on my feelings about it.’

To my relief, she didn’t attempt to refute the implication but asked, ‘How did you know?’ and continued to look sulky.

I was better able to cope with a sulky Olivia so I simply said, ‘Bar and I had a drink together last evening. She’d worked it out.’

I was intrigued to note that at this Olivia looked really alarmed. ‘Bar knows?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Bar’s shrewd. Are you surprised?’

‘Has she told Dan?’

‘Heavens, Olivia, how do I know? Bar and I aren’t lovers, it’s you and Dan who are.’ I felt we’d better have things plainly stated.

‘You were, though.’

‘Were what?’

‘Lovers.’

‘No, Olivia, don’t do that. Just don’t do that, all right?’ I had detected that she was about to imply that whatever it was with her and Dan was some sort of reaction to a
tendresse
between me and Bar. ‘Bar and I are friends and have been for years. We were lovers for about ten minutes.’ While you fucked around, I mentally added but managed not to say.

‘Has she told Dan?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, wearily. ‘Look, would you like a cup of tea?’

I watched myself, bearing a tray, with teacups and milk jug and a pot of tea, to my wife who had just confessed to conceiving a child possibly by one of my closest friends. I pictured it, even as I was carrying the tray, complete with digestive biscuits—for which Olivia, rather endearingly, suddenly expressed a wish—into the bedroom where, minute by minute, it was seeming less and less likely that I was going to get any sleep. A part of me began at this point to fuss over the time I had taken from the hospital. I had not intended to squander my snatch of freedom in this way.

‘Look,’ I said to Olivia, who, having delivered her bombshell showed signs of taking up residence in the bed. ‘How pregnant are you? Surely we can work it out from that?’ My mind was now engaged in a calculation. I could remember the last time Olivia and I made what is laughingly called ‘love’: it was the night we dined with the Powells when, with the clarity of hind-sight, I now perceived she had already started with Dan. The night I brought up Elizabeth Cruikshank, to avert bad feeling between the pair of them, then regretted it.

Elizabeth, where are you now? How I would prefer to be back in my room, listening to your cool voice, sharing with you the chaste intercourse of minds and hearts than here in my bedroom with my wife trying to establish the outcome of our last unsatisfactory effort at physical intercourse.

Olivia looked uncomfortable. ‘Seven, eight weeks.’

‘And,’ I pressed, ‘when did you and Dan start up?’

‘It was the day we had dinner with the Powells,’ Olivia said, confirming my intuition with unexpected candour. I thought she had probably forgotten that we also had a brief encounter that same evening but she surprised me by saying, ‘The same night you and I, you know…’

‘Fuck!’ I said, with unusual pertinence, and we both laughed. One trait I liked in Olivia was that when she wasn’t being manipulative she wasn’t sentimental.

‘And Dan?’ I asked. The inner monitor coolly noted that I seemed eerily unmoved by my good friend’s role in this. ‘What does he feel about the child?’

Olivia’s face lost its look of momentary openness and became cautious and closed again. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But he knows?’ Obviously he knew. That was why he was here at the flat when I so unexpectedly arrived. My guess was that Olivia had come here from the doctor’s and summoned him. I was willing to bet that by now he was regretting that he had obeyed her call.

‘Yes.’

‘So? He must have had some reaction.’

‘He was concerned,’ Olivia said, taking refuge in the trite.

‘But I mean does he want it? Does he want to go off with you, have you have his child, if it is his child, leave Bar? What?’

Olivia just looked at me and then did something so maddening it was as well there was no blunt instrument handy to beat her over the head with. She wriggled down inside the bed and pulled the eiderdown over her face to hide.

I hadn’t finished my cup of tea but at this I got up, put it carefully down on the chest of drawers, having first found a
magazine to place it on—because even though there was a saucer I am neurotic about marking polished surfaces—went across to the bed and peeled the eiderdown back from Olivia’s face. Which looked scared. Maybe she expected me to hit her, I don’t know.

‘Listen, Olivia,’ I said. ‘It’s like this—’ and I could not have said if I was consciously repeating Elizabeth Cruikshank’s words to me. ‘Yesterday afternoon and much of yesterday evening I spent listening to a woman, a patient, a suicide, I should say a failed suicide, who was describing, in words more poignant than you could grasp, how she had failed to recognise that the man who said he loved her did love her, most sincerely and dearly and genuinely after all. And by the time she recognised this rare and precious truth he had died, unaware that she had, at last, perceived the purity of his affection for her. Because of this miserable misunderstanding, she has spent the past years in a state of anguish. So bitter has been her self-reproach that recently she tried, really tried, not just mucking about, to kill herself, because, having passed over the chance of real love, life for her wasn’t worth a straw. She is not an hysteric, or an attention-seeker. She is, in my judgement, an unusual and remarkable woman, brave enough to recognise her own part in her own misfortune. Having heard her sorrowful tale, I met Bar, who had come to my room looking for Dan, and hoping that she might, by speaking to me, find that the stories he has been fobbing her off with were true. And perhaps because this woman patient of mine had spent the past seven hours telling me the unvarnished truth about herself, something in me allowed Bar also to be able to tell the truth and, maybe for the first time, tell herself the truth, about Dan, and about you and Dan. I am, as you have pointed out, needlessly
bitchily, very fond of Bar. She was good to me when you were not and I’m afraid I used her badly. She has never shown a flicker of resentment over that, for which, because I don’t deserve such leniency, I offer God, if there is a God, the humblest thanks. Yesterday evening, when she indicated to me what she had for a time suspected, and which, as soon as she disclosed it, we both knew to be the case, I minded, not for myself, odd as that may seem to you, but for Bar, that not content with taking your own husband from her long ago, a man foolish enough to return to you when you clicked your fingers, you felt entitled to take, for reasons which I know nothing of, but I very much doubt are excusable, her husband now as well. All right so far?’

Olivia was looking at me like a frightened weasel so I continued unabashed.

‘Last night, after these two ordeals, both of which were distressing to me, I arrived home, not knowing where you were, that is to say whether, to be frank, you were in our bed alone or in some other bed in some other venue with Dan. I made an assumption, possibly a false one, that you were back in our bedroom—please don’t bother to enlighten me, I no longer give a tinker’s cuss for the truth of the matter—but having no wish to share our bed with my friend’s lover, who is also my wife, I spent a chilly, cramped and unrestful night on the sofa. This morning, feeling far from my best, I was summoned to St Stephen’s, where a patient, who has been under my care for years, and for whom I have developed a sympathy, and whom, as a consequence, I had attempted to help by releasing him from his previous security restrictions, had tried to murder a nurse. As a result of this piece of misjudgement on my part, this man, whose
welfare was and is my responsibility, will spend the rest of his unnatural life in conditions which, when I come to contemplate them, will make me shudder in my shoes. I have not yet contemplated them because I have not had the strength of mind to force myself to do so. But I shall have to soon, because soon there will be an inquiry during which I shall be questioned, long and hard, and probably not very sympathetically, on my motives and reasons for making this change in a treatment plan which has functioned perfectly adequately for many years.

‘I do not know how I shall begin to answer these questions because my own motives are still obscure to me. I rather suspect I may discover they had something to do with some notion I had of being kind. But also I have a feeling that when I scrutinise more closely this kindness I am claiming as my motive, it will prove, at root, to be a kindness not to my patient at all but to myself. In other words, it was myself I was imagining I was releasing from those security provisions and not my benighted patient. I shall pass over the possible reasons for this confusion in me since that is not your business or concern.

‘When I returned to St Kit’s, more than a little undone by this experience, I found that another patient, also under my care, had, while I was listening to the story of my would-be suicide, assaulted a colleague, also for reasons connected with me, in this case an attempt, sadly another misplaced one, to do me a kindness, kindness, you may note, if you care to, proving to be a dubious remedy.

‘Happily, the nurse whom my patient attacked is not dead. She is bruised and badly scared but her life remains intact. Happily, too, my colleague has agreed to accept my apologies for
my other patient’s errant behaviour and not to press charges against him. Happily, though here I am less sanguine, the suicidal patient appears to have recovered sufficiently to discharge herself from hospital. I hope and pray, though, as I say, I cannot be sure of this, that this means that all is well with her. However, all of this, the sum of it, what it means in general, and what, more specifically, it means to and for me, is weighing somewhat heavily on me just now. I understate the position. To be blunt, it has left me impatient with lies and convolutions and falsehoods and evasions of all kinds. To put it more colloquially, it’s left me sick and tired of anything which resembles fucking about. You should know that at present fucking about is something I can’t take. You can fuck around in your physical person, that I cannot help or change. But you may not fuck about with me in any other sphere.

‘Let me tell you what I think. I think that Dan does not want this child, even though the chances are it is his. You and I have been having sex for a number of years, not very often, it’s true, but nonetheless when the act has taken place, however inadequately, it has been without our using contraception. So far as I am aware this has not previously led to any conceptions, unless there are other things you have kept from me?’

Olivia dumbly shook her head.

‘Good. So it is on the cards that this is Dan’s child and not mine. I also suspect that you want this child if it is Dan’s but not if it is mine. After all, we have been there before and I cannot see what in the world would now have made you change your mind. I think that you are worried over whether or not to abort this child because your decision rests not on my reaction, or on
me, but on Dan and on his reaction. And I think that in spite of all this you nevertheless wish me to help you sort out this muddle, both in your own mind and also, quite possibly, practically and with Dan.

‘So let me now tell you what I propose.’

I paused deliberately and was pleased to note that Olivia looked even whiter than Bar had looked last evening. I had never even remotely spoken to her in this manner before and I hoped, most sincerely, that she was terrified.

‘I propose going to spend the night elsewhere. I am not, please note, walking out on you. I could for two pins walk out on you. I could, it may interest you to hear, without difficulty and without disquiet to myself, walk right away from all this and find a slow boat to take me to China. There is very little here to keep me and I am no longer sure I wish to do, or can do, what I have spent my adult life doing, as it now appears to me, ineffectually, possibly even dangerously. However, for the moment, what I want most—if not a night’s sleep, which I suspect will not now come easily to me—is at least the chance of some peace and quiet. In which I can think whatever thoughts I may need or elect to think without further interference. I cannot do that lying in bed beside my wife who may or may not be carrying my child, but who is in any case carrying within her a piece of new life which, for reasons I have no need to adumbrate, may soon be extinguished. To be candid, the thought of that right now is what might induce me to abandon my plans for China and save time and money by simply slitting my wrists. I mean this, by the way: it is not idle chat or fancy rhetoric. So, to avoid that possibility, I am going to collect a few things and take myself
off to some local hotel. And tomorrow morning I shall go, as usual, to work. And what I ask of you now is that you say nothing, not one word, not a single word but allow me to leave this flat quietly and speedily and if, and only if, you do this one thing, then I promise you tomorrow evening I shall return. I shall neither take a boat to China nor will I slit my wrists, however appealing those prospects may seem to me by then, and together we shall rationally discuss the best way of dealing with what you have told me and how we should proceed.’