Stanley and the Women (22 page)

‘What?’
I said, totally baffled. ‘Why did he say it was, then?’

‘Why?
You’d been making a nuisance of yourself, hadn’t you, asking questions and
generally using up time he could have spent reading his sex manual. A brilliant
method of getting you out of the way.’

‘But a
doctor doing a thing like that, even a —Nash interrupted me by sighing
theatrically. ‘I’ve noticed, Mr Duke, I’ve noticed before that you have an
exaggerated respect for doctors. Before it’s too late you must learn that
doctors are no better at doctoring or about things to do with doctoring than… m’m, motor-mechanics are at what they do.’

‘Oh no.
You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘The
point is clear. Now. One would have to see him to swear to it but I’m sure, h’m,
that your son’s discomfort was the result of large doses of one of a group of
tranquillizing drugs. Not nice to see, no, but … no actual harm, the sister
was right there, and of course he won’t remember any of it when it’s over.
Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll get it changed. Yes, I’ll just tell Dr Collings. After
I’ve had a look at the boy, naturally.’

‘But
then she’s bound to know I’ve been on to you, and I thought you weren’t supposed
to …

‘There’s
nothing to prevent me visiting my patient in hospital, and I also intend to
follow up the matter of the tests I asked for, none of which have been carried
out, perhaps needless to say, or at least I haven’t been told of the results.
And then you see I can suggest things to the doctor in charge of his case. And
as regards medical etiquette, allow me to tell you, Mr Duke, I’m too old and
rich and powerful and fed-up to be unduly swayed by that. You can go straight
from here to the Collings woman and tell her I have told you I consider her to
be a disgrace to her profession, which incidentally would be saying something,
and I won’t
turn a hair.
Not that you would of course.’ He had got up as
he spoke and stood now over his desk with his knuckles resting on its top, as
though he expected to have his photograph taken. ‘Would you care for a glass of
sherry? Mrs Duke?’

‘Well,
yes, thank you very much, Dr Nash,’ said Susan, sounding slightly astonished as
well as pleased.

‘Mr
Duke?’

What Mr
Duke would have cared for at this stage was a small tumbler of absolute
alcohol, but he had the sense to see that it would not be available and said Yes
to the sherry instead. This came out of a cut-glass decanter that came out of
an expensive rosewood cabinet with an inlaid top. Some digestive biscuits came
too, in a silver-bound barrel, but there Nash must have been joking. Now the
room seemed like a don’s study in one of the snootier colleges at Oxford or
Cambridge. There were certainly plenty of books. Most of them were across the
room from me and the light was none too marvellous, but from the look of their
jackets a lot of them were not on psychiatry. I saw Susan giving them a good
going-over during the sherry production.

By the
time we got to my turn what had been a consultation or something like that had
started to turn into something else. Before it could finish doing so I said, ‘If
my son gets taken off the drug he’s on, what sort of happens after that?’

‘Of
course. Oh, he goes on to another tranquillizing drug that doesn’t have the
effects you saw but works in the same general way, acting on the so-called neuro-transmitter
system in the brain and in a great many cases, as I told you, bringing about
positive improvement, it’s not known how or why. But it does frequently happen.’

I tried
to take this in. ‘So Dr Collings is aiming in the right direction, so to speak,
but so far she’s missed the bull’s-eye.’

Nash
nodded, swallowing sherry. ‘Broadly, yes. There’s not a great deal of choice in
the matter. Electro-convulsive treatment — not much help to us, except with
patients so far gone in withdrawal that they’re in danger of dying of hunger
and thirst because they can’t be bothered to eat or drink anything. Neurosurgery
— obsolete. Psychotherapy, which is talking to the patient and getting him to
talk — appallingly difficult, with the risk of encouraging him to elaborate and
naturalize his fantasies. Troublesome, too. Group therapy — useless in my view,
likely to be popular with Collings, no matter, harmless as well as useless.
Anyway, drugs are easiest and most effective. There we are.

‘But
she has all these terrible ideas,’ I said.

‘Has
she? I mean I too think they’re terrible, perhaps even more … passionately
than you do, Mr Duke, but I wonder to what degree she can be said to have them,
to hold them. They’re to her taste all right, obviously, but then she must hold
some ideas or views, or must seem to, to, to do so. It would be virtually
impossible for a woman, an individual of that type to say to you, “Your son has
schizophrenia, just as that old man said and as any qualified observer could
have seen. I’m giving him a lot of drugs to try to make him better. And that’s
that.” Wouldn’t it? Be … So she told you your son was trying to find out who
he is and a great deal more in the same strain.’ He spread his hands in the
air.

Susan
gave me a cheerful look that said she and I had never thought of that. I
wondered.

‘There’s
also the point,’ said Nash, ‘that, assuming she takes a similar line when
talking to your son, going on about his efforts to surmount the difficulties
imposed on him by other people, all that, she’ll be likely to acquire his
confidence, which will tend to reduce his anxiety. However unfortunately in
other respects, she is, well, on his side. A supportive approach, as the trade
odiously calls it.’

Susan
was showing more signs of relief. ‘I see that, yes.’

I saw
it too, and tried to feel relief, but mostly what I felt was a slight sense of
being conned. I realized I had hoped, and almost expected, that after listening
to my tale with mounting horror Nash would grab the phone or even go tearing
out of the building as the first step towards getting Steve out of Collings’s
clutches and under the care of Dr Stone or some other angel of mercy. All
right, not on, but I found it hard to swallow the idea of Collings as a
well-meaning blunderer with a duff line in conjuror’s patter. At the same time
I was reflecting that here I was after twelve years’ marriage to Nowell still
assuming that unless people were actually lying they meant what they said.

‘Is
that all?’ I asked Nash.

He gave
me a sharp look. ‘Nearly all of this section, Mr Duke. For the moment I’ve only
one more question for you. Which of the following, if any, would you apply to
your son’s disposition? Cut off, dreamy, diffident, unintimate, unsociable,
solitary, moody, touchy, uncommunicative?’

‘Diffident,’
I said. ‘And a tendency to be dreamy.’

‘None
of the others?’

‘No .’

‘Not
uncommunicative?’

‘No.’

When
appealed to, Susan agreed that that was fair. There was no sign that this
registered with Nash, but he did come round again with the sherry, which she
turned down and I accepted. When he had finished with that he half-sat,
half-leant on the side of his desk. I thought he looked clever, grim and
crafty, also upper-crust.

‘The
trouble with discussing schizophrenia,’ he began — he was obviously just
beginning, ‘is that almost nothing is known about it after seventy years of
study by some very intelligent men, and a great pack of blithering idiots too,
of course. Some of what is known isn’t very helpful, for instance you’re more
likely to develop it if you were born early in the year. North of the equator,
that is. The helpful parts are elementary and mostly negative. Schizophrenia is
an illness, one in which the brain becomes disordered. The cause has not yet
been established, though there’s quite a long list of things that don’t cause
it, like cell senility as I suppose they have to call it, and food allergy and
any sort of virus, and anything to do with society. For a time it was thought
to be tied up with unhappy families, until someone noticed that there were lots
of unhappy families in which nobody had schizophrenia. Heredity comes into it,
though it’s not known where or how.

‘As I
told you, Mr Duke, the subject fascinates me, but not as anything but itself.
It leads nowhere. All schizophrenia patients are mad, and none are sane. Their
behaviour is incomprehensible. It tells us nothing about what they do in the
rest of their lives, gives no insight into the human condition and has no
lesson for sane people except how sane they are. There’s nothing profound about
it. Schizophrenics aren’t clever or wise or witty — they may make some very odd
remarks but that’s because they’re mad, and there’s nothing to be got out of
what they say. When they laugh at things the rest of us don’t think are funny,
like the death of a parent, they’re not being penetrating and on other
occasions they’re not wryly amused at the simplicity and stupidity of the
psychiatrist, however well justified that might be in many cases. They’re
laughing because they’re mad, too mad to be able to tell what’s funny any more.
The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what’s funny is one
of them. And that’s an end of the matter.

‘I
consider you should know of these matters. Think of your son’s illness like a
physical illness of the dullest and most obvious kind, after which he may be
restored to you undiminished, healed, healthy, or he may be more or less
impaired, and the process may be a long one. Meanwhile I’ll see to what has to
be seen to.’

‘Thank
you, doctor,’ I said, and stood up. At the same moment he looked at his watch
and then at Susan.

‘I was
thinking, if you’re not doing anything special for lunch,’ he said, looking at
me now, ‘you might let me take you round the corner to my local, my local
restaurant. It isn’t awfully good but at least it’s pretentious, with the added
merit that at this sort of time of day you can just walk in. And from here you
can walk to it as well. Two minutes away. It’s stopped raining.’

Not for
me, in line for a couple of stiff quick ones and a sandwich in Fleet Street
followed by a slog in the office. I drew in my breath to explain some of this,
caught Susan’s eye and said, ‘That’s very kind of you, we’d love to.’

Nash
was delighted. He went and helped her on with her mack as though nobody else
knew how to handle a thing like that. She played up to him about the proper
amount.

‘I see
you’re an Anthony Burgess fan, Dr Nash.’

‘Yes. I
find him a very interesting writer.’

That
was it. Susan said, ‘I didn’t notice a copy of
Don Juan and the Lunatics.’

‘Oh,
that,’ said Nash, pretending not at all strenuously to have nearly forgotten
what I took to be the great work on madness in literature, its title now
successfully researched. ‘Out of print for many years.

‘I’m
ashamed to say I’ve never read it. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever set eyes on
it. I suppose there isn’t a copy I could borrow?’

‘I may
have a spare somewhere, I’ll have a look. But, er, you mustn’t expect too much,
you know. I’m afraid you’d find some of the literary judgements ill considered.
Where they’re not painfully obvious.’

‘Oh, I
doubt it.’ She seemed to think he was a tremendous old tease to say that, then
immediately went serious. ‘But after what you said just now about mad people
being incomprehensible and madness not telling us anything about the human
condition, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, well, I just wonder
what’s left, what you found to say in your book.’

‘Internally,
in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can
be said about it. Like sex. But the effects it has on the world outside it can
be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use. But that’s by
the way. My subject was just how well or, mostly, how badly writers have
described madness. As a gardener or a cook might with their speciality. A
medical doctor.’

‘Mostly
badly?’ asked Susan in a companionable way.

‘Yes. A
fellow wants to put some madness into his novel because it’s strange and
frightening and quite popular. But if he bothers to go into the reality he
finds it’s largely unsuitable, an unsuitable topic for his purposes. So he gets
hold of a pamphlet by some charlatan or crank propounding a suitably colourful
fantasy and makes a character kill his wife because he’s got an Oedipus
complex, or find he’s strangled a prostitute while under the impression he was
a Victorian sex murderer. Which may be great fun but makes it hard to take the
thing seriously. I mean you wouldn’t have much confidence in Graham Greene if
he tried to tell you Haiti was in the Mediterranean. Good morning.’

The
last bit was said to a waiter, because here we were in the restaurant, which at
this first sight looked quite modest to me, but then probably Nash was better
at detecting pretentiousness than I was. I rather handed it to him for making
no bones about enjoying the way the head waiter and the manager practically
carried him to his seat at the best table in the place. He had put my mind at
rest here and there, and I reckoned I bought his general approach, but I would
have had a little more time for him if he had gone pounding off to see after a
patient of his in some distress instead of going out to an elaborate lunch and
flirting mildly with the patient’s stepmother. Still, that part was very likely
just me being mildly jealous. And I could see a large whisky coming straight at
me.