Four Gated City (52 page)

He looked at her-acute, but he did not see her point. ‘Waste of money, ’ he said. ‘Unless, of course, relatives just want to get rid of somebody and pay to have them kept comfortably-conscience money. But for someone really ill, I’d never advise it.’

‘Lynda wants to come home, ’ said Martha.

‘She asked to go in. She can leave when she wants. But if she is returning into the situation which if you like, triggered her off, then…’

This was a question. He wanted to know what had triggered Lynda off. This meant the doctor who dealt with Lynda did not know; or that Dr Lamb did not think much of that doctor; or that Dr Lamb was trying to find out something about her, Martha.

Martha said:’ Lynda gave up the drugs about a year ago. That was one thing. And then, her son decided to-come closer. Two things. And then Dorothy-three things.’

He looked at her. Then:’ Her son decided?’

Panic began to rise in Martha. She said:’ Mark and I talked about it-well, for years we’ve been talking about it. You know-Paul and Francis. Francis is never at home because of Paul. Paul is going to be at home all the time. We thought

‘It was Mark’s idea?’

Guilt almost overwhelmed Martha: it was her fault. She fought it back.

‘It was as much his
idea
-but it was I who suggested we should actually try to make Francis be at home more.’

He remained silent.

‘Well, was that the wrong thing to do?’

‘Not if she can stand it.’

‘I think she would have stood it if she hadn’t been fighting the drugs. And if Dorothy wasn’t jealous.’

Martha sat thinking: within five minutes, I sit overwhelmed with guilt. Why? Should I be? Did he mean to make me? For two pins I’d rush out now and not say what I want to say … She made herself sit quiet.

‘About Dorothy, you’ll have to deal with that when it arises. She’s definitely not well enough to leave hospital at the moment. There’s been another suicide attempt. About the drugs: when
patients in Mrs. Coldridge’s condition give up the pills, then they usually land back in hospital pretty fast.’

‘Well now, that’s what I wanted to ask. Suppose Lynda had arrived in hospital and had not been given pills, what then?’

He said nothing: he looked inquiring.

‘What I ask specifically is this: do you know the effect on someone if for years and years-in Lynda’s case, getting on for fifteen years, they are always full of some kind of drug?’

‘I see.’

He did.

There was a considerable silence. ‘Mrs. Hesse, I don’t think there’s a doctor in England who is satisfied with what he’s got to work in. If we had ideal conditions then-but we haven’t. In Mrs. Coldridge’s case I can say definitely yes, she ought to take what we prescribe for her.’

Dr Lamb had withdrawn from responsibility, as of course he had the right to do.

Some years before, an Act of Parliament had been passed, which had taken bars off windows, unlocked doors, made strait-jackets and padded cells things of the past, created hospitals that were civilized. Well, not quite. Because, for this bit of legal well-wishing to work, it needed that a great deal of money should be spent on new buildings, doctors, nurses. This money was not being spent. (It was being spent on war, the central fact of our time which is taken for granted.)

Inside the dozens of mental hospitals scattered up and down the country, built like prisons, were many thousands of people who had been strait-jacketed, forcibly fed, kept in padded cells, beaten (in fact, the central fact, had had their wills broken), and were now derelict, ‘deteriorated’. This was not Dr Lamb’s fault, who administered machinery he had not invented. Like the educators, and the ordinary doctor, and like everything else-he was part of a bit of machinery which was supposed to be working to a blueprint which in fact had never been put into operation, because there was never money for schools, hospitals, mental hospitals. The money was spent on war. Thousands and thousands of people all over the country could look forward only to death, they were the victims and the casualties of the past. Meanwhile, all over the country, hundreds and thousands of people, more and more every day, were
in conditions which Dr Lamb wished were much better, but it was not his fault if they were not.

At this point Martha nearly left-out of cowardice.

She said: ‘I want to find out something. I’m trying to find out-you say Lynda is schizophrenic.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘You are not, Mrs. Hesse.’

‘Do you know what schizophrenia is?’

‘No, but there are different theories. And we are treating it better than we did.’

‘Supposing I came to see you and said I hear voices, would I be schizophrenic?’

He said easily:’ It depends. What kind of voices?’

‘And pictures, before my eyes?’

‘A great many people see pictures before their eyes, usually before they go to sleep, and as they wake up. And hear voices.’

‘That’s normal, not schizophrenic?’

‘Quite normal.’

‘If I said to you …’ Martha began, and changed it. ‘No, I
am
saying to you: I saw a scene, a vision if you like, of Dorothy slashing her wrists before she did it.’

He remained where he was, not moving. But the muscles of his face tightened slightly: she knew it was a waste of time, because now what he said would be measured, would be diagnostic questions only.

‘Have you ever heard of
déjà vu
? ’

‘Yes. And read it up.’

‘Dorothy has made suicide attempts before, ’ he said. ‘You knew that?’

‘Yes. She has taken overdoses of pills, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes. She is a suicidal type.’

‘I saw something I was predisposed to see?’

‘Yes. You imagined it.’

‘Dr Lamb, what is imagination?’

He hesitated now, then gave her a charming gentle smile, almost teasing. ‘Mrs. Hesse, you aren’t ill, I can assure you.’

Oh. You think I’m upset because of Lynda and Dorothy both landing back in hospital?’

‘Are you sure you are not?’

‘Well then … no, I want to go on. If someone sat here and said to you, Dr Lamb, I hear voices-no, no, don’t smile. I want to
know, what would be the thing they said, they did, which would make you say “schizophrenic” and not just, oh well, everyone does that?’

‘I’d ask them, do you imagine it? And the reply will be no, I hear voices. Real ones. Like yours or mine, Mrs. Hesse.’ He emphasized this, meeting her eyes, half in inquiry, half to make it sink in.

‘An imaginary voice then is fantasy-one sits and has a sort of day-dream-that’s imagination?’

‘Yes.’

‘But a
real
voice, that’s serious?’

‘A typical reply will be: everyone is talking about me, everyone is jeering at me. They want to kill me.’

Martha suppressed:’ Perhaps they do!’ She said:’ And what happens then?’

‘We treat them.’

‘And then the voices and the pictures go away?’

‘That is the intention, yes.’

Or Lamb, if someone is hearing voices, seeing pictures, they must feel abnormal-different. People hate being different from other people. Don’t you think that

He said:’ It happens two, three times a week. The man who was here before you were, as a matter of fact. I say this: “I know you hear voices. I know you do. You don’t have to convince me of that. But I am a doctor, and a very great number of people sit there and say they hear voices. I tell you, you are deluded. We can treat the condition.” I assure you I don’t, none of my colleagues would, try and make them feel different, or make it worse.’

‘You say, “I know you hear voices, I know that, but you are deluded"?’

‘Yes. Because they are, ’ he insisted gently.

‘Perhaps there are different kinds of voices?’

‘Well yes, some say they hear voices in the air, or coming out of walls. Others say the voices are in their heads. Real voices. Like yours or mine.’

‘But the real criterion, the test is, whether this person says he
does
hear voices. If he says yes, he does, he doesn’t imagine it, and you can’t talk him out of it, then that’s it, he’s deluded?’

‘Well, yes, that’s about it.’

‘So if someone persists, he sticks it out, then he’s likely to be classed as schizophrenic and treated as one. But if he says…’

‘Mrs. Hesse.’ he said again. ‘I do promise you, you can take my word for it, you’re not a schizophrenic.’

‘Yes, but Dr Lamb, supposing I insisted I had seen Dorothy’s suicide exactly as it was, and I went on insisting, and you said no, I imagined it, and then I got angry and shouted at you, and went on shouting, and called you names, what would you call me then?’

‘But you aren’t shouting, ’ he said. ‘You are entirely rational.’

He was waiting, infinitely ready to be kind, to reassure, and if necessary to-give out pills.

She said:’ Well thank you. About Lynda-if she comes home, I think you can take it she will try and do without the drugs.’

‘Well, it’s up to her of course. But if I were you I’d try to persuade her. I don’t think this spell in hospital has done her much good. She’ll need time to get over it.’

‘Will you give instructions that she can leave?’

‘Mrs. Hesse, all she has to do is to tell the doctor she wants to leave.’

‘I see. Well, thank you. Please send me the account. I came for my own curiosity.’

‘Very well. Look after yourself.’

‘Yes, I will.’

‘And how is your mother?’

‘She’s dead. She died less than a year after she went back.’

He said humorously:’ And that was your fault?’

‘When you say it I can’t help feeling it might be-but not when I think it over.’

Lynda did not come home immediately. It appeared the hospital was very overcrowded, patients did not see doctors ottener than once a week, and one week was missed because a doctor was ill. In the end, Dr Lamb intervened, and she came home. She was very thin indeed, low, inclined to weep and to blame herself for many faults, past and present.

Meanwhile Paul had gone to school. He went on the first day of term; and returned bitterly, violently complaining. After the freedom of the school he had left, he was going to find this one hard. He was in a class with forty other children, for one thing.

Suddenly Martha was very busy again. Suddenly there was no time for the sessions when she sat alone in her room. The early mornings were occupied with getting Paul up, fed and to school-
an exhausting business, a fight all the way. And Lynda, alone, wanted company and a great deal of reassurance.

Martha began dreaming. Her nights became filled with fantastic, instinctive or routine dreams. It was as if something in Martha that needed to talk, to express, to speak, to advise, could use this channel or that-pictures, or voices, if she was able to sit quiet in her room, waiting, listening. And if not, was quite prepared to use dreams instead.

Chapter Two

A visit to Margaret Patten’s house in the summer of 1958; not a dropping-in, a passing by, a collecting of children, or of plants, but an event which had been built up to, expected, planned for, experienced painfully, or at least vividly, and afterwards remembered. A visit typical of all such occasions in its quality of muddle, confusion, general irritation-for so things continued. It seemed impossible that these people should not be all at cross purposes.

Margaret’s invitation for the afternoon had been casual, and repeated in half a dozen telephone calls about something else. She had sounded increasingly, guilty, but off-hand. Mark had said:’ She’s up to something.’

She was manipulating them. What did she want? For weeks now he had been trying to see her, but see her, as he put it, ‘properly’. He had been trying to make his mother discuss her son, his brother, Colin. Mark had been back from Moscow for over two months: Margaret had not had time to do more than hear the most brief of accounts over the telephone and once as she hurried past to the theatre. She had not had time to talk about Colin, but she wanted Mark, Martha, as her accomplices in some plan of her own. The two needs-Mark’s, Margaret’s-were meshed somewhere?

A couple of years before, the Cold War having been officially declared as over-that is to say, was referred to as being in the past in newspapers and on the television-Margaret had inquired of an old chum recently returned from the embassy in Moscow, if anything was known about Colin. He said not. Inquiries had been made, on that kind of a level, but it was suggested he was dead. Then, a friend of Patty’s who had been to Moscow on some kind of delegation, said that another friend had mentioned a Mr. Coldridge, met at somebody’s flat. Had Mark been in Moscow perhaps? Mark, then, after consultation with Patty who, after all continued to know the score, even if retrospectively, simply applied for a visa to the
Soviet Union, as a writer. He got a visa without trouble. In Moscow he had asked his interpreter, an infinitely helpful young woman, if it would be possible for him to meet his brother; he spoke as if there could be no doubt at all that Moscow was where Colin must be. The interpreter, non-committal, said she would make inquiries. After two days or so of ballet, the theatre, and excursions of various kinds, the interpreter had said that of course it would be perfectly in order for Mr. Coldridge to see his brother, it was only too natural, after so many years. His telephone number was so and so.

Mark telephoned, and heard his brother’s voice reply. Colin had no idea, apparently, that this was to happen, or so it seemed, for when he was told who it was, there was a short silence, and then:’ How did you find me?’ ‘I was given the number by Intourist, ’ said Mark.

They met an hour later in Colin’s flat, which was not half an hour’s bus time from the hotel. It was a small, pleasant flat, in a new block which housed scientific workers. Furnished in an anonymous contemporary style, it could have been anywhere in the world. Colin was married to a charming Russian woman who taught ballet to children. She had a child from her previous marriage; her husband had been killed at Stalingrad. This boy was fifteen. There was also a little girl, the result of this marriage. Mark entered a family scene: was made very welcome.