Sister Read online

  “What were the ‘hallucinations’?”

  “I have to respect patient confidentiality.”

  I thought it strange that he suddenly thought of doctor/patient confidentiality when it hadn’t hindered him up until now. I wondered whether there was a reason for it, or whether it was just another incidence of his incompetence.

  “I asked her to paint what she saw,” he continued, and his face looked kind. “I thought it would be helpful to her. Maybe you could find a painting?”

  The secretary came in. Time was up, but I didn’t leave.

  “You must go to the police and tell them you have doubts she had puerperal psychosis.”

  “But I don’t have any doubts. The signs were there, as I said, but I missed them.”

  “You’re not the reason she died, but you could be why her murderer gets away with it. Because of your diagnosis, no one is even looking for him.”

  “Beatrice…”

  It was the first time he’d used my Christian name. The bell had been rung; it was after school, so now he could be intimate. I didn’t stand up, but he did.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you anymore. I can’t change my professional judgment because you want me to, because it fits with a construct that you have put onto her death. I made a mistake, a terrible misjudgment. And I have to face up to that.”

  His guilt was seeping out around the edges of his words, a trickle to start with before becoming the mainstream subject. He looked as if it was a relief to finally give way to it.

  “The harsh facts are that a young woman with puerperal psychosis went undiagnosed and I must take my share of blame for her death.”

  I thought it ironic that decency can be harder to argue with than its self-serving reprehensible opposite. The moral high ground is just too certain, however uncomfortable.

  Outside the open office window it’s raining, spring rain, collecting the scent of grass and trees before falling onto the concrete pavements below. I feel the slight drop in temperature and smell it before I see it. I have almost finished telling Mr. Wright about my meeting with Dr. Nichols.

  “I thought he believed he’d made a terrible mistake and was genuinely appalled with himself.”

  “Did you ask him to go to the police?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “Yes, but he maintained he was certain she had puerperal psychosis.”

  “Even though it reflected badly on him professionally?”

  “Yes. I found it surprising too. But I put his motive down to misplaced moral courage—agreeing with me that Tess didn’t have psychosis but was murdered would be a cowardly option. By the end of our meeting I thought he was a hopeless psychiatrist but a decent man.”

  We break for lunch. Mr. Wright has a lunch meeting scheduled and I leave on my own. Outside it is still raining.

  I never did answer your e-mail and tell you the real reason I saw a therapist. Because I did go in the end. It was six weeks after Todd and I had become engaged. I’d thought getting married would stop my feeling so insecure. But an engagement ring around my finger wasn’t the new hold on life I’d thought it would be. I saw Dr. Wong, a highly intelligent and empathetic woman who helped me understand that with Dad’s leaving and Leo’s dying within the space of a few months, it was hardly surprising that I felt abandoned and, consequently, insecure. You were right about those two wounds. But it was being sent to boarding school, the same year, that felt like the final abandonment.

  During my therapy sessions, I realized that Mum wasn’t rejecting me but was trying to protect me. You were so much younger and she could shield you from her grief, but it would have been far harder to hide it from me. Ironically, she sent me to boarding school because she thought it would be emotionally more secure.

  So with Dr. Wong’s help, I came to understand not only myself better but also Mum, and quick facile blame transmuted into harder-won understanding.

  The problem was, knowing the reason I was insecure didn’t help me to undo the damage that had been done. Something in me had been broken, and I now knew it was well intentioned—a duster knocking the ornament onto the tiled floor rather than its being smashed deliberately—but broken just the same.

  So you’ll understand, I think, why I don’t share your skepticism about psychiatrists. Although I do agree that they need an artistic sensibility as well as scientific knowledge (Dr. Wong majored in comparative literature before going into medicine), and that a good psychiatrist is the modern version of a renaissance man. As I tell you that, I wonder if my respect and gratitude toward my own psychiatrist colored my opinion of Dr. Nichols—if that’s the real reason I felt that he was fundamentally decent.

  I get back to the CPS offices earlier than Mr. Wright, who hurries in five minutes later, looking hassled. Maybe the lunch meeting hasn’t gone well. I presume it’s about you. Your case is huge—headline news, MPs calling for a public inquiry. It must be a big responsibility for Mr. Wright but not only is he adept at hiding the strain he must be under, he doesn’t load any pressure onto me, which I appreciate. He turns on the tape recorder and we continue.

  “How soon after your meeting with Dr. Nichols did you find the paintings?”

  He doesn’t need to specify—we both know which paintings he means.

  “As soon as I got back to the flat I looked for them in her bedroom. She’d moved all her furniture out apart from her bed. Even the wardrobe was in the sitting room, where it looked ridiculous.”

  I’m not sure why I told him that. Maybe because if you have to be a victim, I want him to know that you’re a victim with quirks, some of which used to irritate your older sister.

  “There must have been forty to fifty canvases propped up around the walls,” I continue. “Most of them were oils, some on thick board, a few collages. They were all large, a minimum of a foot across. It took me a while to look through them. I didn’t want to damage any of them.”

  Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that, or was I just too concerned that you weren’t going to earn a living? I know the answer. I was anxious that no one would buy enormous canvases with colors that wouldn’t go with their room decor, wasn’t I? I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone’s carpet, rather than realizing that you’d made color itself tactile.

  “It took me about half an hour to find the ones Dr. Nichols had told me about.”

  Mr. Wright has seen only the four “hallucination” pictures, not the ones you did before. But I think it was the contrast that shocked me the most.

  “Her other pictures were all so…” What the hell, I might as well go for it. “Joyous. Beautiful. Explosions on canvas of life and light and color.”

  But you painted these four paintings in the palette of the nihilists, Pantone numbers 4625 to 4715, the blacks and browns spectrum, and in their subject matter you forced the viewer to recoil. I don’t need to explain this to Mr. Wright; he has photos of them in the file and I can just glimpse them. Made smaller, and even upside down, they still disturb me and I look hurriedly away.

  “They were at the back of a big stack. Paint from the front of one had smeared the back of the next. I thought that she must have hidden them quickly, before they’d had time to dry properly.”

  Did you have to hide the woman’s face, her gash of a mouth as she screamed, so that you could sleep? Or was it the masked man, dark with menace in the shadows, who disturbed you as violently as he did me?

  “Todd thought they were proof that she had psychosis.”

  “Todd?”

  “My fiancé at the time.”

  We are interrupted by Mrs. Crush Secretary, who gives Mr. Wright a sandwich; clearly his lunchtime meeting didn’t include any lunch and she has thought about this, looked after him. She barely glances at me as she gives me mineral water. He smiles at her, his open, winning smile. “Thanks, Stephanie.” His smile is going out of focus. The office is dimming. I can hear his concerned voice.

 
“Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  But the office is in darkness. I can hear but not see. It happened at lunch with Mum yesterday and I blamed the wine, but today there’s no scapegoat. I know that I must keep calm so the darkness will clear. And I continue, forcing myself to remember back—and in the darkness your dull-toned paintings are vivid.

  I was crying when Todd came in, my tears falling onto the paintings and becoming drops of inky black and mud brown sliding down the canvas. Todd put his arm around me. “It wasn’t Tess who did these, darling.” For a moment I was hopeful; someone put them here, someone other than you had felt like this. “She wasn’t herself,” continued Todd. “She wasn’t the sister you knew. Madness does that. It takes away someone’s identity.” I was angry that he thought he knew about mental illness, that a few sessions with a therapist when he was thirteen, after his parents’ divorce, made him some sort of expert.

  I turned back to the paintings. Why had you painted them, Tess? As a message? And why had you hidden them? Todd didn’t realize my silence had been filled with urgent mental chatter.

  “Someone has to tell it as it is, darling.”

  He’d got so redneck all of a sudden, as if being resolutely wrong was being masculine, as if he could turn the aftermath of your death into an Iron John weekend. This time he sensed my anger. “I’m sorry, ‘mad’ is maybe too blunt to describe it.”

  At the time, I silently and furiously disagreed with him. Psychotic sounded far worse to me than mad. I thought that you can’t be psychotic as a hatter or a march hare. No playful light-hearted storybook images for psychotic. Nor was King Lear psychotic when he discovered great truths in the midst of his ravings. I thought that we could relate to madness as emotion experienced at an intense and troubling level, even respect it for its honorable literary pedigree, but psychosis is way out there, to be feared and shunned.

  But now I fear madness rather than look at its literary pedigree. And I realize my earlier viewpoint was that of onlooker rather than sufferer. “Not mad sweet heaven”—because loss of sanity, of self, generates despairing terror whatever label you want to use for it.

  I came up with some excuse to leave the flat, and Todd looked disappointed. He must have thought the paintings would put an end to my “refusal to face the truth.” I’d heard that phrase in his quiet concerned chats on the phone to mutual friends in New York, when he thought I couldn’t hear, even to my boss. From his perspective, your paintings would force me to confront reality. It was there in front of me, four times, a screaming woman and a monster man. Psychotic, frightening, hellish pictures. What more did I need? Surely, I would now accept the fact that you committed suicide and move on. We could put things behind us. Get on with our lives. The hackneyed life-coach phrases could become reality.

  Outside it was dark, the air raw with cold. Early February is not a good time to be constantly stropping off. Again, I felt in my coat pocket for the nonexistent glove. If I’d been a lab rat I’d have been a pretty poor specimen at learning patterns and punishment. I wondered if slipping on the steps would be worse than gripping a snow-covered iron railing with a naked hand. I decided to grip, wincing as I held the biting cold metal.

  I knew I really had no right to be angry with Todd, because if it were the other way around, I’d want him to return to being the person I thought I knew too—someone sensible and levelheaded who respected authority and didn’t cause unnecessary embarrassment. But I think you’re pleased that I argued with policemen and accosted grown men on their doorsteps and in their flats and took no notice of authority and that it’s all down to you.

  As I walked alone through the streets, slippery with frozen slush, I realized that Todd didn’t really know me at all. Nor me him. Ours was a relationship of small talk. We’d never stayed awake long into the night hoping to find in that nocturnal physical conversation a connection of minds. We hadn’t stared into each other’s eyes, because if eyes are the window to the soul, it would be a little rude and embarrassing to look in. We’d created a beltway relationship, circumventing raw emotions and complex feelings, so that our central selves were strangers.

  Too cold to walk any farther, I returned to the flat. As I reached the top of the steps, I collided with someone in the dark and was jolted with fear before realizing it was Amias. I think he was equally startled to see me.

  “Amias?”

  “I’m so sorry. Did I give you a fright? Here…” He held a flashlight for me to see my footing. I saw that he was carrying a bag of earth.

  “Thanks.”

  It suddenly struck me that I was living in his flat. “I should pay you something while we stay here.”

  “Absolutely not. Anyway, Tess had already paid next month’s rent.”

  He must have guessed I didn’t believe him. “I asked her to pay me with her paintings,” he continued. “Like Picasso with his restaurant bills. And she’d painted ones for February and March in advance.”

  I used to think you spent time with him because he was another of your waifs and strays, but he’s got a rare kind of charm, hasn’t he? Something masculine and upper class, without being sexist or snobbish, making me think in black and white of steam trains and trilbies and women in floral frocks.

  “I’m afraid it’s not the most salubrious of dwellings,” he continued. “I did offer to modernize it, but Tess said it had character.”

  I felt ashamed of myself for being irritated by the lack of mod cons in the kitchen, the state of the bathroom, the draughty windows.

  My eyes were further accustomed to the darkness and I could see that he had been planting up your pots outside your door, his bare hands stained with earth.

  “She used to come and see me every Thursday,” continued Amias. “Sometimes just for a drink, sometimes for supper. She must have had so many other things she’d rather be doing.”

  “She liked you.”

  I’d realized that was true. You’ve always had friends, proper friends, in different generations. I’d imagined you’d do it in reverse as you got older. One day you’d be an octogenarian chatting to people decades your junior. Amias was totally at ease with my silence and with consideration seemed to sense when my train of thought had finished before speaking.

  “The police didn’t take a great deal of notice of me when I reported her missing. Until I told them about the nuisance phone calls. They made a big song and dance about that.”

  He turned his face back to his planting and I tried to have the courtesy for him too to finish his train of thought in peace before I butted in.

  “Did Tess tell you anything about the phone calls?”

  “She just said she’d been getting vicious calls. She only told me because she said she’d unplugged her phone and was worried I might need to phone her. She used to have a mobile, but I think she lost it.”

  “‘Vicious’?” That was the word she used?”

  “Yes. At least I think so. The ghastly thing about old age is you can’t rely on yourself to be accurate anymore. She cried though. She tried not to, but she did.” He broke off, for just a moment, struggling to keep his composure. “I told her she ought to go to the police.”

  “Tess’s psychiatrist told the police the phone calls were in her head.”

  “Did he tell Tess that too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor Tessie.” I hadn’t heard anyone call you that since Dad left. “Awful not to be believed.”

  “Yes.”

  He turned to me. “I heard the phone ring. I told the police but I couldn’t swear that it was one of the nuisance calls. But it was immediately afterward that Tess asked me to look after the key. It was just two days before she died.”

  I could see the anguish in his face, illuminated by the orange glow of the street light.

  “I should have insisted she went to the police.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Thank you, you’re very kind. Like your sister.”

 
I wondered whether to tell the police about the key, but it would make no difference. It was just another instance of your supposed paranoia.

  “A psychiatrist thinks that she was mad. Do you think that she was, after the baby, I mean?” I asked.

  “No. She was very upset, and very frightened, I think. But she wasn’t mad.”

  “The police think she was mad too.”

  “And did anyone in the police ever meet her?”

  He carried on planting bulbs, and his old hands, the skin paper-thin and misshapen by arthritis, must have been aching in the cold. I thought that this must be the way he was coping with grief: planting dead-looking bulbs that would miraculously flower in springtime. I remembered how after Leo died, you and Mum seemed to spend so much time gardening. I’d only now seen the connection.

  “These are King Alfreds,” said Amias. “Her favorite variety of daffodils because they’re such a strong yellow. You’re meant to plant them in autumn but they come up in about six weeks, so they should have time to flower this spring.” But even I knew that you shouldn’t plant things in frozen earth. For some reason, thinking that Amias’s bulbs would never flower made me furious.

  Just in case you’re wondering, yes, I even suspected Amias at the start of all this. I suspected everyone. But as he planted bulbs for you, any residual suspicion withered into absurdity. I’m sorry it was ever there.

  He smiled at me. “She told me that scientists have put a daffodil gene into a rice plant and made rice with vitamin A. Imagine that.”

  You’d told me that too.

  “The vitamin A in daffodils is what makes them yellow. Isn’t that amazing, Bee?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  I was trying to concentrate on my design team’s roughs for a new corporate logo for an oil distribution company, noting with annoyance that they’d used PMS 683, which was already used in a competitor’s logo. You didn’t know there was any other chatter in my head.