Read Online The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Salley Vickers
Tags: Fiction
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said, ‘it gave this man a chance to buy me a consolation drink.’ I was aware my defeats at Dan’s hands might disappoint Olivia.
‘All’s fair in love and war,’ said Dan. ‘Olive Oyl, since you’re driving I don’t suppose you’ll want anything, will you?’
Dan’s teasing often had an edge to it and I expected this to annoy Olivia but she appeared to be in one of her accommodating moods and invited him back to our place with the suggestion that there at least we could have a decent drink.
While I was hunting for a corkscrew the phone rang and it was Bar. ‘Is my husband there, by any chance?’
‘He’s next door boozing with my wife. You’d better come over and keep me company.’
‘I’d love to but I’m exhausted,’ Bar said. ‘Tell him I’m home, will you, there’s a lamb. I’m going to take a drink into a hot bath.’
Olivia and Dan were laughing when I came back into the sitting room. I was glad to see them getting on for once.
‘That was Barbara. She says she’s too tired to peel out again to fetch you.’
I was going to add that I’d take Dan home myself when Olivia said, ‘I need to drop something off at the shop. I can give Dan a lift.’ She was trying hard that evening. It was nice of herto offer to go out again when I knew she must be tired.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ll run him home and drop whatever it is off for you,’ but then the phone rang again and it was Gus, fussing about the conference, and then Olivia came into the study and mimed that it was late by pointing at her watch and indicated that she would give Dan a lift after all.
She was a while returning and when she did I was engrossed in Mansfield Park. She went off to have a bath and I read on in my chair for a while so that by the time I came to bed she was apparently asleep and didn’t hear me thanking her for running Dan home.
9
C IRCUMSTANCES AROSE WHICH MEANT THAT I WAS OBLIGED to postpone my next appointment with Elizabeth Cruikshank.
In the days when social policy over the treatment of the mentally ill was more conservative, many hundreds of men and women in Britain had been confined to ‘care’ for the bulk of their adult lives. One of my duties at St Stephen’s, the hospital in Haywards Heath, was to monitor the patients who had been inmates so long that the hospital had become their only home. Among those whom it was my melancholy business to oversee, one case especially troubled me: a man who suffered from the unshakeable conviction that he had a wolf lodged in the upper portion of his skull. His behaviour was always perfectly docile but to his perturbed mind this phantom, to which he was the unwilling host, was a threat not to himself but to the world at large. In fact, as I had said in my report when he first became my responsibility, in my view he was now too institutionalised for the world to be anything but a far more serious menace to him.
Not long after my first encounter with this unfortunate, I found myself, due to some delayed appointment, killing time byvisiting Whipsnade Zoo. It was a filthy November day and, walking briskly to keep my circulation moving, I landed up at the far corner of the zoo, by the enclosure which houses the wolves.
I was at once drawn by their lean shadowy forms and their long-legged stilted gait. But what held my attention most was the way their narrow, vigilant muzzles and haunted eyes put me in mind of this man, so much so that I began to speculate whether the captive creatures mightn’t suffer from the fantasy that they had a desperate human being trapped inside their skulls. Whenever I saw this patient now, I thought of those penned-in wolves. I could never decide whether it was the influence of the delusion or being confined like a beast which had rendered him so visibly lupine.
But that he was a harmless, docile wolf, I was convinced, and for more years than I could bear to calculate, he had been stashed away in the upper storeys of the
‘All’s fair in love and war,’ said Dan. ‘Olive Oyl, since you’re driving I don’t suppose you’ll want anything, will you?’
Dan’s teasing often had an edge to it and I expected this to annoy Olivia but she appeared to be in one of her accommodating moods and invited him back to our place with the suggestion that there at least we could have a decent drink.
While I was hunting for a corkscrew the phone rang and it was Bar. ‘Is my husband there, by any chance?’
‘He’s next door boozing with my wife. You’d better come over and keep me company.’
‘I’d love to but I’m exhausted,’ Bar said. ‘Tell him I’m home, will you, there’s a lamb. I’m going to take a drink into a hot bath.’
Olivia and Dan were laughing when I came back into the sitting room. I was glad to see them getting on for once.
‘That was Barbara. She says she’s too tired to peel out again to fetch you.’
I was going to add that I’d take Dan home myself when Olivia said, ‘I need to drop something off at the shop. I can give Dan a lift.’ She was trying hard that evening. It was nice of herto offer to go out again when I knew she must be tired.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ll run him home and drop whatever it is off for you,’ but then the phone rang again and it was Gus, fussing about the conference, and then Olivia came into the study and mimed that it was late by pointing at her watch and indicated that she would give Dan a lift after all.
She was a while returning and when she did I was engrossed in Mansfield Park. She went off to have a bath and I read on in my chair for a while so that by the time I came to bed she was apparently asleep and didn’t hear me thanking her for running Dan home.
9
C IRCUMSTANCES AROSE WHICH MEANT THAT I WAS OBLIGED to postpone my next appointment with Elizabeth Cruikshank.
In the days when social policy over the treatment of the mentally ill was more conservative, many hundreds of men and women in Britain had been confined to ‘care’ for the bulk of their adult lives. One of my duties at St Stephen’s, the hospital in Haywards Heath, was to monitor the patients who had been inmates so long that the hospital had become their only home. Among those whom it was my melancholy business to oversee, one case especially troubled me: a man who suffered from the unshakeable conviction that he had a wolf lodged in the upper portion of his skull. His behaviour was always perfectly docile but to his perturbed mind this phantom, to which he was the unwilling host, was a threat not to himself but to the world at large. In fact, as I had said in my report when he first became my responsibility, in my view he was now too institutionalised for the world to be anything but a far more serious menace to him.
Not long after my first encounter with this unfortunate, I found myself, due to some delayed appointment, killing time byvisiting Whipsnade Zoo. It was a filthy November day and, walking briskly to keep my circulation moving, I landed up at the far corner of the zoo, by the enclosure which houses the wolves.
I was at once drawn by their lean shadowy forms and their long-legged stilted gait. But what held my attention most was the way their narrow, vigilant muzzles and haunted eyes put me in mind of this man, so much so that I began to speculate whether the captive creatures mightn’t suffer from the fantasy that they had a desperate human being trapped inside their skulls. Whenever I saw this patient now, I thought of those penned-in wolves. I could never decide whether it was the influence of the delusion or being confined like a beast which had rendered him so visibly lupine.
But that he was a harmless, docile wolf, I was convinced, and for more years than I could bear to calculate, he had been stashed away in the upper storeys of the
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