All in the Mind (21 page)

She wrapped her headscarf tight around her face, put on her jacket and set off.

19

An accident on the A1 South reduced the motorway to one lane each way, and it took Sturrock almost two hours before he was back in the Chiswick area. Even with the delay, though, he couldn’t face going back home straight away, so stopped at a little coffee shop near Gunnersbury station. He was killing time.

There were eleven tables in the café. Three were empty. Seven were taken by families or groups of friends. He was the only one there who was alone. He ordered a coffee and a tuna sandwich, and went to sit down. At the table next to him, a couple with a young child in a pram were talking about whether to go to the swings, or whether to go home. The man wanted to go to the swings. The woman thought it was too cold. At the table behind him were two married couples dressed for a long walk. The men were looking at a map, and plotting their route. Their wives were talking about who was doing what and who was going where at Christmas. One of them had a dispute with her sister as to which of them would have their mother. So far as he could tell, both the sisters actively wanted the mother to be with them, which was nice, he supposed. He wondered where the mother wanted to be. Dead, possibly. That was when he knew he was on the verge of a plunge, possibly even well into it. Such a tiny trigger for his thoughts to turn to death.

As the Eastern European waitress brought over his coffee, he felt close to being overwhelmed by the sense of solitude that had been growing all day. He had been with his mother, but had wanted to get away from her. He was heading home to his wife, but didn’t want to get there. He was dreading the visit from his son tomorrow, because
he
was sure it would go wrong, no matter how hard he tried. All around him was the noise of families and friends enjoying their weekend, but not his family, not his friends. By the time his sandwich arrived, he was lost in thoughts about Stella, and whether there was any hope for their marriage.

When he met her, almost forty years ago, Stella had been a bright, exuberant young medical student, hoping one day to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a general practitioner. They first encountered each other one Tuesday morning coming out of a lecture. He wasn’t looking where he was going, bumped into her, and amid all the mumbling and stumbling that followed, they agreed to go for a cup of tea. Both were finding it more difficult to be away from home than they had admitted to anyone else. They became friends quickly, lovers more slowly, and married in their final year of studies. But marriage was followed swiftly by one child, then another, both girls. Stella was thinking about getting back into medicine when she became pregnant again, and their only son was born. By the time Jack had reached primary-school age, she feared medicine had passed her by. She resented it, and at times resented the seemingly effortless rise her husband was making through the ranks of the medical establishment. Even before he graduated, he was being talked about as the best of his generation. It came as something of a shock to his fellow medical students when he opted to specialise in psychiatry, but he felt his strengths lent themselves well to a branch of medicine he thought to be wrongly regarded as the Cinderella service. He was right. He soon became head of the Department of Psychological Medicine in a leading teaching hospital, the youngest doctor ever to do so. For six years, he ran it brilliantly, before deciding he wanted to concentrate on consulting and research.

Sturrock liked to think he was a skilful and profound observer of human nature. But when it came to his own wife, he had failed to see the effect his success and her sense of imprisonment and disempowerment was having. By the time it all poured out, during a dreadful holiday in North Devon when Jack was five, it had felt almost too late to repair the marriage.

They were staying in a rented cottage. The children had gone to bed and Stella had had a little too much to drink. She laid into him with a venom that he had never imagined her to possess. He had been completely taken aback, as if he were witnessing a completely different person telling him about a life he knew nothing about. In the sour silent days which followed before they could pack up and head home, he realised that Stella had been trying to send him signals about her unhappiness before, but he had always been preoccupied with something else. That was the problem. There was rarely a moment when he wasn’t preoccupied with something else or, more accurately, someone else’s psychological problems. He had thought Stella understood, that she shared his commitment to the well-being of others, but he had been wrong. Her anger genuinely shocked him.

‘All these poor unfortunates coming in to see you,’ she’d shouted, ‘and you sit and you listen and you tell them what to think and what to do, and they think you’re God, so
you
think you’re God. You think you know all that goes on within their hearts and minds, but you know nothing about what’s going on in mine, because you don’t even think about it. I’m just the one who will look after your kids while you’re caring for everyone else’s. The one who will feed and water you. The one who will occasionally let you screw me because you spend so much of your time talking about sex to your patients you remember you’re supposed to want to have sex with your wife.’

Sturrock felt one of his skills as a consulting psychiatrist was an ability to defuse anger, and an ability to respond to anything his patients said. But this was Martin the failing husband and father, not Sturrock the brilliant doctor, and he was clueless as to how to respond. Stella was breathing very heavily, almost hyperventilating, fiddling with the silver cross she always wore on a chain round her neck. She had turned her chair around so that she was now looking across the garden, not at her stunned, confused husband, but still attacking him. ‘I’d love to come and hear you talking to your patients. I bet it’s hilarious, you with your great wisdom about feelings and families, when your own feelings are locked away, and your own family sometimes wonder if you even exist. Do you sit and listen patiently, nodding
sympathetically
at all their moans and groans? Well, maybe you should listen a bit to me, and maybe you should listen to the kids and ask them, “Is it true you said to Mummy that I’m never here and I’m always tired when I am here?” Yes, Martin, that’s your own son Jack speaking and you have no idea. But every little bit of every patient’s life, you listen and you think and you tell them what they can learn from it and how all they need is love. Is that what you tell them? Is it? Well, it’s what we need too, Martin, and we don’t get it, and it’s time you knew it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had no idea you felt like this.’

She snorted at him, the snort signalling more clearly than any words her view that it was entirely his fault that she felt as she did, as was the fact that he didn’t know about it until now.

He remained silent. He felt that, with her anger so intense, anything he said would provoke it further. He hoped there would be a calm after the storm, and her rage would cool.

He was close to saying something he said often to his patients, namely, ‘We cannot change other people, the only person we can change is ourself.’ He was even rehearsing in his mind how to say it without it sounding like a criticism, but he concluded that, given her current frame of mind, she would take it badly however he said it.

He recalled the last time he had offered this particular piece of advice to a patient – a depressive named Bernard who was convinced his wife deliberately set out to depress him. Bernard’s response had been to ask him to visit his house. ‘See for yourself what she’s like,’ he’d said. ‘It’s not me that needs to change, it’s her.’ Sturrock had felt that a home visit wasn’t appropriate for the doctor–patient relationship as it stood at that time. Perhaps he was wrong and Bernard was right. Perhaps he should have gone to his house.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Stella asked, only slightly less accusingly.

He didn’t dare tell her he was thinking about one of his patients.

‘I’m thinking I should have seen this coming,’ he said. ‘And I’m thinking I normally know what to say, but right now I don’t.’

Almost a quarter-century on, he now realised what a turning point
that
was, and felt ashamed at his failure to practise what he preached. It hadn’t crossed his mind it was he who needed to change. Despite all the hurt, he was sure that, eventually, Stella would see the importance of his work and the sacrifices it entailed.

His tuna sandwich lay on the plate in front of him, untouched. His coffee was almost cold. The two couples he had listened to at the table behind him got up to go, full of purpose as they set off on their walk. He noticed one of the men take the hand of his wife as they left the cafe, and tried to remember the last time he and Stella had held hands. They were in a dreadful, dreadful rut, and neither appeared able to do anything to shake themselves out of it. He tried to imagine what he would say if Martin Sturrock the husband and Stella Sturrock the wife came to see Professor Sturrock the psychiatrist.

What was the problem? The problem was that when they started out together, they were equals, both clever and idealistic, with powerful if unformed ambitions for themselves and, once they fell in love, for each other. He’d told her he finally realised why they called it ‘falling’ in love. It was like a dive into somewhere warm and safe, but also edgy and exciting. He’d said he could see to the ends of the world now and wanted to go there with her. She’d pushed the end of his nose and giggled. Now all that felt like a scene in a black-and-white film telling the story of life in Britain hundreds of years ago. The arrival of their children totally changed the nature of their lives, and the relationship between them. She, despite being the one who had most wanted to start a family, seemed to resent the grind and the loneliness attached to motherhood. He could see she was stressed, but not that she was unhappy. He was stressed too, but he was fulfilled in his professional life, and underestimated how much that grated with her. He would come home, play with the children if they were not already in bed, try to share some of his day with Stella, and expect her to share hers with him, and he just didn’t notice that she was becoming more distant.

He began to withdraw into his work. He recalled one morning, when he was running a bit late, and Jack was playing up, building for a major tantrum. Stella looked exasperated. He’d gone into the
playroom
to remonstrate with Jack but then pulled back, saying to himself that if he engaged, he would be there for several minutes, and he was late already. So he just turned and left, hoping Stella wouldn’t notice, which of course she did. Outside on the front doorstep he’d stopped and listened to the cacophony inside – Stella calling him back, Jack screaming. Then he’d started to walk, and didn’t give it another moment’s thought for the rest of the day beyond the insight, which came into his mind right then, as he walked, that he was walking away from his family. It felt like a point of departure.

After that, her resentment grew. His resentment at her resentment grew. The rut developed. A fault line formed. They rubbed along, kind of, especially when anyone else was around. Their friends and neighbours would not have thought for one moment that they were anything other than a happy, loving couple. But they were neither happy nor loving.

Their sex life had gone from poor to virtually non-existent. He had been shocked by how readily both seemed to accept it. How many times had he urged his patients to work at their sexual relationship with their partner, to try to be more tender, to try to find the points of connection that had drawn them to that person in the first place, to understand that it was easier to love someone who was acting in a loving way towards you? He’d lost count of the number of people whose problems he’d traced back to issues in their marriage, and whom he’d helped to a better place. Yet in his own life, he had been hopeless, absolutely hopeless. And what was his response to the collapse of his sex life? Not to try to be more loving and tender, but to go out and buy sexual gratification elsewhere, which in turn, as he knew it would, bred guilt and angst, which in turn fuelled the depressive streak in him that had always been there, but which he had just about managed to keep under some kind of control. And now there was Hafsatu. A wonderful, mesmerising, torturing symbol of the guilt invading his professional life, poisoning everything.

He hated feeling like this. Hated being like this. Hated the fact that he ought to take a lead in resolving the problems in his marriage, but he couldn’t. He ought to forgive Stella for the way she had changed,
forgive
her rages and her tantrums and her attempts to make him feel dreadful about himself, but he couldn’t. And the worst thing of all was that as he surveyed the wreckage of their marriage, he heard so many echoes of another marriage, that of his parents, and he saw in his own weaknesses so many of the things he used to criticise, silently, angrily, in his father.

And what would Stella say, if she was sitting there on the sixth floor of the hospital, alongside Martin the husband talking to Professor Sturrock the great solver of mental problems? She would sit with her arms folded across her chest and say that she might have been at fault at times, but it is so painful when your husband doesn’t seem to understand what you feel and why you feel it, and wants you to share his concerns for these other people that he is looking after when he can’t even look after you. He could hear her saying it: ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to feel you are trying to hold a family together but your husband and partner is more interested in other people? I wouldn’t mind if he looked after us as well as them. But he looks after them instead of us. And it hurts. It really, really hurts. And what hurts most of all is that he doesn’t even notice that it’s hurting.’

Sturrock laid his head down on the café table and tried to stop the voices in his head. Conscious of the waitress standing close to him, he sat up, but he could still hear Stella. He buried his head in his hands, told himself to stop listening, stop hearing, stop letting Stella’s voice and her anger take over his mind. But he was stuck there, Sturrock the Professor, hearing an everyday story of marital breakdown and its attendant psychological agonies. Professor Sturrock knew what to say. But Martin Sturrock wouldn’t be able to deliver. What was the point of Martin Sturrock keeping a dream register or a best–worst list? He would never change. He just couldn’t do the forgiveness.