If Britain had seemed reassuringly unchanged, Douglas was the very core of that immutability. ‘So how was America?’ he inquired as casually as though he were asking her about a film she’d been to see. In another context — after fifteen years of marriage, for instance — this remark might well have struck Aileen as insufferably crass. At that moment it was just what she wanted to hear. With a shrewdness new to her, she scanned Douglas’s appearance and manner for signs of a female presence in his life. She failed to find any. He invited her up to his place for dinner later that week. Aileen didn’t stay the night, but they agreed to meet again and on that occasion she did. Douglas’s love-making, as clumsily well-intentioned as ever, sealed her sense of security. Here was no giddy spinner, no flighty drifter who dreamed of staying high for ever. Douglas Macklin was real, solid and comfortingly inadequate. She knew she could manage him. When she proposed that they get married, he frowned slightly, and then said, ‘I can’t see any reason why not.’
A decade and a half later, Aileen could see plenty. Her husband’s work on neuroendocrinology had been rewarded with a research fellowship, but the major breakthrough which he had hoped would establish his name internationally had failed to materialize. After finishing her postgraduate course, Aileen had spent some time at Maudsley Hospital, specializing in the problems of young people. She now worked in the Adolescent Unit of a psychiatric hospital not far from the Macklins’ home in a large Edwardian house in Stamford Brook. For reasons which Aileen thought she understood too well to want to verify, the marriage had remained childless. The couple’s days were devoted to work; their nights, with rare exceptions, to sleep. As soon as she got home, Aileen went up to her study, where she read or listened to the radio or just stared out of the window until it was time to prepare the evening meal. Meanwhile, in the living room, Douglas drank several glasses of whisky cut with progressively less water and watched the news, first on ITV, then on BBC1, and finally on Channel 4. At eight o’clock husband and wife met across the dinner table and battle commenced.
Aileen could no longer remember at what point she had perceived the basic mechanism, so startling in its simplicity: their marriage was a closed system with only a limited amount of any given emotion available. It followed that if one of them had more, the other must have less. For example, if Douglas came home from work elated by some success, Aileen immediately began to feel depressed. If, on the other hand, something had made him tense and snappy, she at once became more confident and relaxed. It worked the other way too, of course. Her good news depressed him, her failures gave him heart. Consciously or not, Douglas was aware of this too, hence the battle. Although the quantity of emotion involved in these exchanges was quite small, it was often critical, just sufficient to make or break the evening for either partner. Moreover, since appearance was all, one could easily cheat. If Douglas could convince her that he was calm and serene, Aileen began to feel tense and edgy, which in turn induced a real calmness and serenity in him. Deceit had become reality; the fake had verified itself.
She could play the game too, but unfortunately she had made two fatal errors. One had been years before, back in their student days at Sussex. Late one evening, in the course of a rambling account of why she was studying psychology, Aileen had mentioned that there was a strain of insanity in her family. She had done this out of vanity: in 1968 madness was still ‘interesting’. Besides, she wanted to show off her sophistication, to demonstrate her awareness of her own motives. ‘I suppose that studying the subject is a way of coming to terms with the anxiety that I might be tainted myself,’ she had told Douglas, ‘a way of defusing the whole idea of madness through a process of objectification.’ To call it madness had actually been exaggerating wildly. All Aileen knew for sure was that her grandmother had begun behaving rather oddly towards the end of her life, and that when Aileen herself had been a child, her mother claimed to have been worried that Aileen might have inherited this ‘oddness’. Exactly what had happened to justify this remained unclear. As far as Aileen had been able to gather later, it amounted to nothing very much more than a tendency to sleepwalk during the periods of insomnia from which she suffered around the time of the full moon. At all events, she had quite forgotten having mentioned the matter to Douglas until the occasion of her second mistake, which was to try to discuss openly with him the deteriorating state of their marriage. To her dismay, her husband had not only refused to talk about it, but had rejected her description of the situation as distorted and exaggerated. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ he replied in that solicitous tone which she had come to fear and loathe, ‘I think you read a good deal too much into things. When I come home in the evening I’m far too exhausted to have any interest in playing the kind of games you’re talking about. I just want to rest, to relax and chat like a normal couple. You don’t suppose there’s any danger of you becoming too involved in your work, do you, Aileen? It’s always bound to be a risk, I should imagine. Particularly for someone with your background.’ It was only then that Aileen remembered having told him about the ‘madness’ in her family, and realized with despair that she had handed her husband a weapon which would assure him of victory any time he chose to use it.
Douglas Macklin poured the last of the wine into his glass and inspected the little flurry of sediment with a passionately disinterested eye. Without this expression changing in the slightest, he transferred his gaze to his wife.
‘So this boy,’ he said. ‘Gary, is it? I didn’t quite catch your conclusion. It almost sounds as though you think he might be right, that someone really is trying to kill him.’
Aileen lit the cigarette for which her husband had made her wait while he toyed with the remnants of his meal.
‘Someone’s trying to kill all of us.’
‘Really? How thrilling. Who, for instance?’
‘You watch the news, don’t you? The PLO, the IRA, the multinational drug companies, the nuclear-generating people. There are enough missiles targeted on London to kill everyone a hundred times over, or is it a thousand?’
The scatty female role was one of her more successful defences, no doubt because Douglas’s residual sexism made it difficult for him to accept that it wasn’t genuine.
‘Oh, I see!’ he exclaimed. ‘You mean this lad of yours is just another burned-out Guardian reader.’
Aileen gazed at him from behind a deliberate smile.
‘And how’s your work going?’ she asked brightly. Too brightly, in fact, for it revealed that his irony had been wasted on a false target.
‘Oh, it’s all rather mundane and boring, I’m afraid,’ he purred. ‘Listening to you, I get quite nostalgic for the old days when the brain seemed to be something special, the seat of magic powers and terrible forces. As usual, reality is less exciting. The brain has turned out to be just another gland, of no more general interest than the kidney or the pancreas. Really, sometimes I almost envy you.’
Aileen carefully flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. Whatever happened, she must not allow herself to be provoked. By the law of compensation, the angrier she became, the cooler her husband would remain. Conversely, if she could frustrate him long enough then he might lose his temper, in which case she would have won.
‘Envy me? Because I deal with the whole person, you mean, not just a mass of tissue?’
‘No, no. I envy you because you live in the past, professionally speaking. You’re treating people whose mental models of the brain were formed years ago, back in the Dark Ages. Your patients are like country folk who still believe that ghosts walk in the woods at night and mutter darkly about strange goings-on at the great house. In fact the woods have all been levelled on an EEC grant and the house is now the headquarters of the local agribusiness, but you’re still up to your ears in tall tales about spooks and spirits.’