The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers Read Free Book Online Page A

not seen her read them, unless she keeps them for nights.’
    ‘What are they? Did you see?’
    Maguire screwed up her face as she did when trying to concentrate. It gave her a look of a small girl which always made me feel warm towards her.
    ‘Not fiction anyway.’
    Maguire devoured fiction. Her favourite author was Ruth Rendell but I’d noticed some surprising ones too. For a time she seemed to be reading her way through Proust.
    ‘She used to be a librarian.’
    ‘Really? I wouldn’t mind that job myself.’
    ‘Too late,’ I said. ‘I need your help here.’
    ‘You know, I don’t know if in the long run a really great story isn’t more help.’

7
    T HAT AUTUMN , O LIVIA HAD DECIDED TO ENROL IN SOME evening classes and she was out at one of them when I got home. She had a tendency to these sudden enthusiasms. They rarely lasted, and I therefore hadn’t bothered to ask much about this latest. I was never quite abreast of which class was when, partly because I was glad to have an hour or two to myself. Olivia never forbade me anything openly but it’s not so agreeable to listen to Schubert, or Bach, when the person with you would rather hear The Archers. Not that I’ve anything against The Archers —it was more that Olivia had something against Schubert: she assumed respect for my tastes but somehow it had the discouraging effect of dislike.
    I had a deadline for a paper I was reviewing for a clinical journal, which was an added reason for preferring my own thoughts. So when the phone rang and interrupted them I was put out till I heard Gus Galen’s voice.
    ‘Can you beat it?’ Gus was one of those people who never announce themselves, as if one spent one’s time simply waiting to hear from them alone. ‘They’ve got that baboon Jeffries giving the keynote address. What the hell is a “keynote” anyway, when it’s at home?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A musical metaphor maybe?’
    Gus was referring to the international conference on anxiety and depression which was to take place the following year.
    ‘Nothing melodious about Jeffries’ approach. It wasn’t so long ago he was advocating bloody lobotomies.’
    Lobotomy, or leucotomy, the surgical severance of the frontal lobe of the brain from the subcortical area, became fashionable as a remedy for intractable depression in the late thirties and during the forties and fifties something like 80,000 such surgical operations were performed before it dropped out of style again. But since 1970 there had been a revival of interest in the procedure.
    Gus was one of the first modern neurological experts to query the wisdom of this, which, as with everything else, he did vociferously.
    ‘They claim it worked on monkeys but I wonder what the poor beasts would say about it if they could speak,’ he said, not long after our first encounter. ‘Those baboons haven’t a bloody clue how it works on humans, if it works at all, which I doubt. Monkeying about with the brain like that as if they were God All Bloody Mighty, though God would have more sense than to be so interfering.’ As with many of his other associations, Gus appeared to have some informal access to the mind of God.
    There was, and still is, a political division in our profession between an interventionist approach, which roughly speaking means drugs and ECT, and the so-called ‘talking cure’. Most psychiatrists practised a largely unconsidered mixture of the two, but Gus was passionately against the hard-lineattitude and his training in neurology combined with his forceful personality gave him clout.
    There’s a place for drugs, and with schizophrenia or bipolar states only a fool or a miracle worker would attempt to manage without them. But, by and large, I was of Gus’s mind. In fact—and of course he knew this—it was as a result of seeing the consequences of a lobotomy that I began my analytic training.
    Mr Beet was a retired bank manager, a man with a large florid face gone