“Jenny, come with me and I’m going to make you some breakfast,” she said.
“Is it still only breakfast time? Goodness. Well, at least I’ve got plenty of time to clean the boys’ bedrooms. But I haven’t gone through the list properly.”
“Come on.”
“I got rid of Mary, you know.”
“Did you?”
“So now it’s just me left. Well, me and Chris and Clive. But they don’t count.”
“How do you mean?”
“They’re not going to help me, are they? Men don’t, in general. That’s been my experience, anyway.”
“Toast?”
“Whatever. I don’t care. God, this kitchen’s in a mess, isn’t it? Everything is in such a mess. Everything. How on earth am I going to do it all, with nobody to help?”
TEN
Things got a bit misty after that. I said I wanted to go out shopping and I think I even started looking for my coat. But I couldn’t find it and people all around me kept telling me not to. Their voices seemed to be coming in at me from all directions, and also scratching at me from the inside as if there were wasps inside my skull crawling around my brain and waiting to sting me. I started to shout at them to get them to go away and leave me alone. The voices stopped, but I felt them gripping my arm. I was in my bedroom and Dr. Schilling was so close to me that I could feel her breath on my face. She was saying something I couldn’t understand. I felt a pain in my arm and then everything faded very slowly into darkness and silence.
It was as if I was at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. Every so often I would emerge and see faces, which would say things I couldn’t make out, and I would sink back into the comforting darkness. When I woke up it felt completely different. Gray and cold and generally horrid. A policewoman was sitting by the bed. She looked at me and got up and left the room. I wanted to go back to sleep, just be unconscious, but I couldn’t make it happen. I thought of what I’d done and then tried not to think of it. I don’t know what had become of me, but there was no point in dwelling on it.
After a time Dr. Schilling and Stadler came into the room. They looked a bit nervous, as if they were coming into the headmistress’s study. It seemed funny until I remembered that they probably just thought I would carry on behaving stupidly. I must have been feeling better because then I felt irritated by these people in my bedroom. I looked down and saw I was wearing my green nightie. Who had got me out of my own clothes and into this? Who had been present when it was being done? Another thing to try not to think about.
Stadler stayed just inside the door, but Dr. Schilling came forward clutching one of my French earthenware mugs that are really for the children. People didn’t understand. The Hintlesham kitchen was a complicated operation and nobody had it in their head except for me. God knows what else was being done down there.
“I brought you some coffee,” she said. “Black. The way you like it.” I sat up to take the warm mug in the hollow of my hands. The bandage made it a little awkward but protected me against the heat. “Would you like your dressing gown?”
“Please. The silk one.”
I put the coffee down on the bedside table and got into the dressing gown with much wriggling. I thought of being thirteen years old and wriggling into my bathing costume on the beach while tightly bandaged in a towel. I was being as stupid now as I had been then. Nobody cared whether they saw me or not. Dr. Schilling pulled a chair up closer and Stadler stepped forward to the end of the bed. I was determined not to speak. I had nothing to apologize for and I just wanted them to go away. But I never have been able to bear silences, so I did speak.
“It feels like visiting time in hospital,” I said with more than a trace of sarcasm. Neither of them spoke. They just kept looking at me with ghastly expressions of sensitivity and sympathy. If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it is the idea of being pitied.
“Where’s Clive?”
“He saw you during the night. It’s Tuesday. He had to go to work but I’ll ring him in a minute and tell him how you are.”
“You must be pretty sick of me,” I said to Dr. Schilling.
“That’s funny,” she said. “Because I’ve just been thinking the same. I mean the opposite, I suppose. I think you must be pretty sick of me. We’ve been talking about you.”
“I bet you have,” I said.
“Not in a bad way, I hope. One of the things we’ve been arguing about. Or, rather, talking about.” She gave a glance across at Stadler as she said this, but he was fiddling with the knot in his tie and didn’t seem to be paying any attention. “I feel, we feel, that we may not have been open enough with you and I want to do something to correct that. Jenny…” She paused for a second. “Jenny, firstly I want to apologize if you feel that I’ve been intrusive. I think you know that in my day job I’m a psychiatrist treating patients. But here my job is to do anything I can to help the police catch this dangerous person.” She was talking to me very gently now, as if she was a doctor talking to a child in bed with a temperature. “You have become an object of somebody’s obsessive attention. One of the ways of catching the person is to find out what it is that has attracted the attention, and that can sometimes mean that I become pretty intrusive myself. But I just want to say that I know that you already have a perfectly good doctor and I don’t want to replace him. Nor do I want to tell you how to run your life.”
I gave her a sort of sarcastic frown, if such a thing is possible. I suddenly had this image of the two of them deciding to come in and treat me delicately and “sensitively.” That funny Jenny Hintlesham who needs careful handling.
“I suppose you’ve discovered that I’m completely batty,” I said. This was planned to be a crushing put-down but it came out all wrong. Dr. Schilling didn’t smile.
“You mean yesterday?” she said. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to talk about anything that had happened with her. “You’re under a great deal of pressure. We’re all here. We’re trying to do something to help. But the pressure is on you. You’re the one it’s hard for. I want you to know that we appreciate that.”
I held up my bandaged hand and looked at it. Maybe it was just my silly imagination, but it seemed to hurt more when I looked at it.
“You feel my pain, do you?” I said with some bitterness. “I don’t want you to be sympathetic with me,” I added quietly. “I want you to make all this go away.”
I expected Dr. Schilling to get cross or flustered, but she hardly reacted at all.
“I know,” she said. “Detective Inspector Stadler is going to talk to you about that.”
She moved her chair to the side, but still close to me. Stadler shuffled forward. He had the expression of a kindly local constable who had come to a primary school to give the little tots some road-safety advice. It looked very odd on his libertine’s face. He pulled up a chair.
“All right, Jenny?” he said.
I was slightly shocked by his using my name just like that, but I just nodded. He was very close. I saw for the first time that he had one of those dimples in his chin. They almost tempt you to put your finger into them.
“You’re wondering why we can’t just catch this man, and I know what you mean. It’s supposed to be our job, isn’t it? I’m not going to give you the standard lecture, but the fact is that most crimes are bloody easy to solve. Because most people don’t put much effort into their crimes. They hit somebody or steal something and somebody sees them do it and that’s it. We just pick them up. But the sort of person who does this is different. He’s not a genius but this is his hobby, and he puts a lot of effort into it. He could just as well have been wearing an anorak and spotting trains. But he’s picked on you instead.”
“Are you saying you can’t catch him?”