by Paul Torday
‘He used to come to my cottage sometimes, and tell me what he was up to. Stories I could never repeat to anyone, not to his mother when she was alive, nor to you now, Mrs Gascoigne. He trusted me and knew I would keep a confidence. He used to sit in that chair, and when I told him what a naughty, wicked boy he had been he would say, “Don’t worry about it, Ellie, life is for living.”’
‘But what was he up to, Mrs McLeish?’
‘Just the sorts of things that a boy running wild gets up to, especially when the parents don’t keep a very close eye on him.’
‘Did they not spend much time with him?’ I asked. I had gathered this from Michael already, but it would be interesting to hear another point of view. Mrs McLeish’s loyalty, however, was to her employers, even the dead ones.
‘Och, old Mr Gascoigne had an awful lot of racehorses down in England and France, so he had to be going off to see them.’
She would not be drawn on any other details. I tried another tack.
‘So his parents did not keep a close eye on him?’
‘He was often left on his own here,’ said Mrs McLeish. ‘But Mikey hated leaving his beloved Glen Gala. He had friends here. And I looked after him, and cooked for him, and washed for him, and told lies for him if I had to.’
‘Lies about what? Which friends?’
Mrs McLeish chose to answer the second question, not the first.
‘Willie that has the petrol station now, Mary who runs the pub in the Bridge of Gala: a lot of local people. He had other friends too, people I think he met when he was out walking. I never met them. Mikey was a great one for walking on the hills, and he would talk to anyone he ran into.’
When did Mikey become Michael? My Michael would cross the street to avoid meeting someone he knew and would never talk to a stranger, unless that person also happened to be a member of Grouchers. Then, often despite all the evidence to the contrary, Michael would presume he was talking to someone with identical interests, education and background to himself. He was rarely right about this, but never noticed. I did. I had to put up with them if he brought them home, or when he dragged me to their houses.
‘Yes, it was his parents dying so soon after each other that made Mr Gascoigne steady up,’ said Mrs McLeish. ‘It’s a miracle he still likes the place when it took both his parents from him.’
‘He looks so different in the photograph,’ I said. ‘It hardly seems possible it’s the same person.’
‘He never smiles like that these days,’ said Mrs McLeish. ‘He hardly smiles at all. No wonder you didn’t recognise him.’
There was a pause during which Mrs McLeish probably realised her remarks could be taken as suggesting that it was marriage to me that had made Michael the way he was. So she said, ‘It started around the time his father died. Before you were married, Mrs Gascoigne.’
‘He’s never really talked about that,’ I said. ‘What exactly happened?’
Mrs McLeish gave me a peculiar look. ‘It was an accident. They were behind with the hind-stalking, but Donald had slipped in the snow and twisted his knee, so Mr Gascoigne went out anyway, on his own. He knew every inch of those hills. Mikey told me that his father had listened to the weather forecast, looked at the sky, and had dressed as warmly as he could, before setting out.’
Mikey, I thought. ‘Did Michael not go with him?’ I asked.
‘He was unwell. He sometimes was, in those days. He had a migraine, and when he was like that, he was of no use to anyone. So his father went out alone.’
Mrs McLeish interrupted her story for a moment. ‘But your tea’s getting cold, Mrs Gascoigne.’
‘Go on with the story,’ I told her. ‘Never mind the tea.’
‘You’ve never been up here in midwinter, Mrs Gascoigne. You don’t know what it can be like. The weather turned at midday but by then Mr Gascoigne would have been miles from the house. He was a big man, bigger than his son, and could cover the ground quickly, even in snow.’
‘It snowed?’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t just snow: it was a blizzard that came down from the north. The temperature dropped like a stone and the snow froze as it settled. By two o’clock the sky was as dark as night. I was sitting here in my cottage and when the storm broke I wanted to go down to the house to make sure Mikey was all right, but I couldn’t even walk a few hundred yards in it.’
I didn’t like her calling him Mikey. We depended on Mrs McLeish but there was something about her that repelled me now, as if she shared secrets with Michael that were kept from me.
‘Mikey tried to walk up the track to see if he could meet his father on the way down from the hill but it was impossible to stand upright. The snow was horizontal. In the end he rang the Mountain Rescue, who were already answering a dozen other calls. There were climbers and walkers stranded all over those hills in that storm, and two others died that day.’
‘How awful,’ I said. ‘Did they ever find Michael’s father?’
‘No,’ said Mrs McLeish. ‘They never found the body. The police and the search and rescue teams didn’t get there until the following morning. They searched on and off for three days. Mikey took them to all the places he thought his father would have gone, but they never found him, not even in the spring, when the snow was long gone and the hill had dried out.’
There was a silence after Mrs McLeish finished her story. Then she stood up. ‘I suppose we’d better get on with the job, Mrs Gascoigne. You’ll be wanting to get away.’
It was true. The last thing I wanted was to spend the night alone at Beinn Caorrun. I’d done it in the past but my nerve was gone. Even with Rupert in the bedroom and all the doors locked, I knew I wouldn’t sleep a wink on my own. We walked down to the Lodge together, and began the task of putting the house to sleep for the winter.
It was while I was putting away some table mats in a cupboard that I found it. A bulky-looking magazine lay beneath a pile of old newspapers that Michael liked to keep - articles he had started but not finished, incomplete crosswords and Sudoku puzzles that he never returned to - and that normally ended up being used as firelighters. Beneath this pile I caught sight of the magazine and somehow I knew from its position that it had been hidden, and that I wasn’t intended to know about it. I reached down to pull it out, checking over my shoulder that Mrs McLeish wasn’t near by in case I should straighten up with a copy of Loaded in my hand. But Michael wasn’t like that, I thought, looking down at the cover page, which said European Journal of Psychiatric Medicines. A Post-it note marked a page, and there was an online article headed ‘Bloomberg Company News’ which had been printed out and inserted into the pages of the magazine as an additional bookmark.
I opened the magazine at the Post-it note and read:High or mega-dose antipsychotic medication is now increasingly accepted as the norm in treatment of long-term mental illness. This presents the medical community with two important ethical issues. The first issue is that the chemistry of some antipsychotics, or neuroleptics as they are sometimes known, can lead to forms of ventricular tachycardia. This has in a small, but important, number of cases resulted in patient death. Other well-reported symptoms in a number of long-term studies carried out at high and medium-security facilities for the mentally ill have been akathisia, and extrapyramidal symptoms consistent with the onset of Parkinson’s disease. This data should cause us to question the time frames for the evaluation and licensing procedures for some of these treatments before prescribing them to our patients.
A further and more troubling question is: what is the behavioural norm towards which we wish our patients to return? What is standard behaviour, and what is not? Clearly violent behaviour is not acceptable to society as a whole, but is that violence caused by a feeling, on the part of the patient, that we are seeking, by chemical means, to obliterate his identity ...
I couldn’t understand why Michael should be reading about this, but then the article he had printed off fluttered out from the pages of the journal. I caught it an
d read it. It was an interview with someone, but one word in particular caught my eye:If I look to the product revenue streams that are going to sustain and build our share price going forward ... Serendipozan, recently approved by both NIHCE in the UK and the FDA in the US, has to be one of our stars.
Dr Heidi Schnoffler (CEO), Tertius AG,
Bloomberg Financial News Channel
I carefully put the magazine back where I had found it, and shut the cupboard door just as Mrs McLeish came into the room, with an armful of dead rowan branches.
‘Mr Gascoigne’s overfond of these things,’ she said. ‘The berries have dropped off and rolled all over the floor. It’s taken me ages to sweep them all up. By the way, we’re short of storage space, Mrs Gascoigne. There’s an old linen press that was moved into the hay barn a few years ago because Mr Gascoigne took against it. But I think we need it back in the house, to keep all the sheets and blankets in.’
‘That’s fine, Mrs McLeish,’ I said absently, thinking about Serendipozan and why Michael should have press cuttings about it. ‘Where will you put it?’
There’s room enough on the landing. Donald will move it for me. We’ll give it a good spray of woodworm killer first.’
A couple of hours later, I was in the Range Rover, with Rupert snuggled up in his basket in the boot. He loved car journeys. As I started the engine, for some reason I glanced up at our bedroom window. The sun was full on it and the reflected glare blinded me, and then in an instant the sun was behind a cloud, and my heart leapt to my throat. I thought I could see a girl standing in the window, looking down at me. Then I thought it was myself I was looking at, and then the sun was out once more and I was blinded by the glare from the glass panes. When the sun went in again, I found myself looking up at an empty window.
I sat for a while with my damp hands on the steering wheel, my heart thudding. I ought to go and check, oughtn’t I?
‘No,’ I said out loud. ‘It was just a reflection of some sort.’
What else could it have been? I put the car into gear and released the handbrake. I needed to be away from this stupid place and its stupid reflections.
The journey down to my mother’s house in Gloucestershire was easy enough. As I approached Stanton St Mary, it was getting late and in the headlights familiar streamers of mist were coming off the water meadows. The lights were already on in Stanton House and, as I drove up the drive, I felt an odd sense of relief. The pleasure that I felt as I arrived home (for I still thought of this house as my home, much more then Beinn Caorrun or the flat in London) usually did not survive the first half-hour with my mother, who always managed to find something quite maddening to say to me. But in those first moments, I would always have the recurring memory of how it had felt, as a small girl, to walk my pony back across the paddock to the stables, after hacking down to the village and back. Then, when the pony had been stabled, there was tea with Marmite-and-cucumber sandwiches in the kitchen and half an hour’s piano practice, followed by a hot bath. Later, I would be allowed to take supper upstairs in my nursery, where I would read a few pages of a book under the watchful eye of my nanny. In those days of plenty, when my parents were still married, we had a housekeeper who doubled up as my nanny, and home felt like a place of love and security: at least, until I was sixteen. Then the pony was sold, and I was taken away from boarding school and put into a day school, all within a few weeks of my father’s departure.
My mother was thrilled to see me now, but only because it gave her a chance to tell me about her new lover. This conversation began the following afternoon.
‘He’s so-oo charming, Elizabeth, darling. You’ll adore him. He’s renting a farmhouse in the village until he finds something more suitable.’
‘How did you meet?’ I asked.
‘In the Stanton Arms at a quiz night. I’ve been dying to tell you, darling.’
‘And his name?’
‘Charlie Summers. I think he’s related to Henry somehow. A sort of second cousin.’
Quite a lot of people liked to claim they were related to Henry somehow. Henry Newark was well off, and was generous to his friends and relations.
‘And what does Charlie do?’ I asked, trying not to sound too like my mother herself, when she used to ask who I had danced with at a party.
‘He represents a firm that sells the most wonderful dog food. If I had a dog, I’d feed it nothing else. As a matter of fact, Charlie thinks we might get a dog. Henry’s dogs all eat it and he says they are all so much better since they changed to it.’
We might get a dog? Whatever else this dog food rep was, he was a fast worker.
My mother must have seen something in my expression, because she said, ‘Darling, you don’t mind your poor old mother having a bit of fun, do you? I get so lonely.’
I got up from where I had been sitting and hugged my mother. Of course I didn’t mind, not really. The dog food rep would be no worse nor better than the last one: charming, shiftless, middle-aged men with no steady income and a good sales pitch. They usually stayed with my mother until the point when they discovered they could not persuade her to take out a mortgage on her house, the only real asset she had, in order to invest in their computer maintenance business, or their wine business, or their dog food business.
Later that evening we talked about Michael. My mother sat beside the fire in her old armchair, smoking, with her cigarette stuck on the end of an ebony cigarette holder. I used to ask my mother why she made such a spectacle of herself: smoking was bad enough in itself, wasn’t it, without drawing attention to oneself by looking like someone from the 1920s? All she ever said was that the cigarette holder ensured that the smoke would not harm her.
I sat beside my mother on the floor, with my knees drawn up, and a glass of white wine in my hand.
‘And how is dear Michael?’ my mother asked. I knew she didn’t think much of him, and she was unconvincing in her attempts to appear interested or affectionate as far as he was concerned.
‘Oh, he’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
My mother glanced at me. Self-absorbed as she might be, I was her only child, and she knew every tone of my voice, every nuance and inflection of my speech.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing’s the matter,’ I replied, and sipped my wine. My mother said nothing, but gave me a level stare until at last I said, ‘Well, I’m a bit worried about him.’
‘Worried how? Has he been a bad boy? I can’t see Michael getting up to any mischief of that sort,’ my mother said dismissively. The unspoken assumption that I was the only girl in the world who had the lack of judgement to fall for Michael nettled me.
‘Nothing like that, of course not,’ I said sharply.
‘Then what?’ asked my mother.
I paused and tried to collect my thoughts.
‘It’s just that he’s been behaving quite oddly,’ I said. ‘I can’t quite describe it. It isn’t any one thing. Most of the time he’s just his normal self. You know what a creature of routine Michael is.’
‘I do indeed,’ agreed my mother.
‘But lately he’s been different. It’s almost as if some of the time he’s the Michael I know, and some of the time he’s an actor pretending to be Michael, and then ...’
I stopped again, not wanting to finish the sentence. My mother surprised me by finishing it for me.
‘Some of the time he’s someone you don’t know at all.’
‘Yes. That’s exactly it. How did you know?’
‘I didn’t, except that I have always felt that Michael was slightly too good to be true. No one is as perfectly self-controlled and conventional and polite as Michael is. I’ve always assumed there had to be another side to him, and hoped that, whatever it was, he wouldn’t be unkind to you.’
I told her about the strange conversation we had had that night at Caorrun. I also tried to describe the articles in the journal I had found, but couldn’t remember the exact details.
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br /> ‘Anyway, as long as he isn’t beastly to you, darling,’ said my mother, who was becoming bored with talking about Michael and wanted to get back to the subject of the dog food salesman.
‘No, Michael has always, always been kind,’ I said. ‘But what should I do if it goes on like this?’
‘Well,’ said my mother. ‘The obvious thing is for him to go and see his doctor.’
‘I don’t know. Michael doesn’t seem to like his doctor. He seems wary of him. I’m not sure he’d agree to go.’
‘Who is his oldest friend, in that case?’ asked my mother.
‘Is it that lawyer chap? The best man at the wedding?’
She meant Peter Robinson. I thought about this. Michael had hundreds of friends and he had no friends at all. Peter was the closest thing he had to a real friend, someone Michael might confide in, if there was anything to confide.