A Special Relationship

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘Oh, she is,’ I said in one of our early phone calls. ‘As long as you obey her every command.’

  ‘Well, at least you didn’t get sent down for shock treatment – which, I’ve found out, is a last-ditch solution over here.’

  ‘They use it here too,’ I said, thinking about poor scrambled Agnes.

  ‘Hey, that doctor’s gotten you back to some sort of equilibrium.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘Believe me, from the stories I’ve heard—’

  But I didn’t want to hear such stories. I just wanted to be out of here.

  ‘You’re going to have to let them be the judge of that,’ Sandy said, surprising me with her ‘the English doctors know right’ stance. ‘You’re still fragile. I can hear it.’

  Then, just to underscore the fragility of everything, word came back about Agnes. It was nearly three weeks since she’d checked herself out, and I’d had a variety of roommates since then – all short-term internees, and all of whom I treated with polite diffidence, using my Discman and assorted reading matter to keep my distance. I was also allowed to take a walk in the hospital grounds whenever I wanted to – so, once a day, I’d put on the street clothes that Tony had brought me and spend fifteen minutes walking around the inner courtyard of the hospital. It wasn’t exactly the most aesthetically pleasing of spots – as it was a concrete quadrangle, with a patch of green in the middle, around which the hospital staff cadged a cigarette. While I made my daily circle around this grubby enclosure, I always found myself thinking how easy it would be for me to escape – even though I was here of my own alleged free will. In fact, I believed that Dr Rodale encouraged me to take this quotidian walk to enforce the fact that I wasn’t a prisoner, and also to get me to accept the reasons why I’d ended up here. Because I’m certain that Ellen informed her of the escape fantasy I articulated regularly during several sessions.

  ‘So what’s this “escape fantasy”?’ Ellen asked me when I first brought it up.

  ‘It’s simple, really,’ I said. ‘I get dressed and go out for my walk around the courtyard. Instead, I leave the hospital and head for the nearest taxi rank. I arrive back at our house. I pack a bag. I grab my passport. I jump the tube to Heathrow. I buy a ticket on the first plane to Boston, New York, Washington, even Philadelphia – anywhere on the East Coast …’

  ‘And when you get off the plane in America … ?’

  I shrugged.

  Ellen gave me a commiserative smile.

  ‘We all have dreams of leaving,’ she said.

  ‘Even you?’

  ‘Everybody. But what you must try to remember at all times is that you have an illness. Depression isn’t a punishment for being a bad little girl. Nor is it a sign of personal weakness. It is an illness – and one from which you will be eventually released. But this is a very serious condition with which you are grappling. So serious that …’

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Dr Rodale and I debated whether or not to tell you what I’m about to tell you … but we decided you should hear it from us rather than from anyone around the unit. You remember Agnes Shale who shared the room with you when you first arrived?’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Agnes jumped under an underground train last week and was killed.’

  I shut my eyes and said nothing.

  ‘According to her husband, she’d been doing fine for the first week or so. But then, she stopped taking the anti-depressants – because, I gather, they weren’t agreeing with her. The sleeplessness started again. But her husband assured us that she was bonding well with her son – and, outwardly anyway, seemed to be coping well with things. Until …’

  She reached over and took a sip from a glass of water on the table by her chair.

  ‘Now I want to be absolutely clear about something,’ she said. ‘And it’s something that you yourself need to understand. Agnes’s suicide cannot be conclusively tied to the fact that she checked herself out of hospital before anyone here believed she was ready to leave. Depression is always an atypical illness – by which I mean that it can never be empirically tracked or second-guessed. So, do believe me, I am not trying to put a “See what happens if you don’t listen to us” spin on this story. All I want to emphasize is that we all have to be very vigilant about your condition – because it is still a brittle one. But, given time, you will get better.’

  Sandy concurred with this point-of-view when I recounted what happened to Agnes during our telephone call that afternoon.

  ‘Your therapist is right. You definitely don’t want to surrender to regression.’

  Surrender to regression? My dear sister had been reading far too many self-help books again.

  But I did realize that Ellen had been right to tell me the story – that it had a sobering effect, making me prudent about the status of my equilibrium and the slow tempo of recuperation.

  So I kept taking the anti-depressants, and I kept talking three times a week to Ellen, and I kept talking to Sandy (who kept threatening to jump on a plane and visit me – but was far too financially strapped to do so). And when Tony had to skip a few visits because of the usual global crises, I was perfectly sanguine. By the end of week four, the crying fits that marked most days had stopped. When I weighed myself I saw that I had regained half the fifteen pounds I’d lost (and that was enough!). Dr Rodale let me give up the sleeping pills, because I was making it through the night without interruption. Every so often – whenever I felt myself edging towards that black fathomless swamp – I seemed able to skirt the edge and re-route myself back to more stable terrain. The urge to plunge into this morass was still present, but there now seemed to be a safety mechanism in place – a fragile fail-safe that kept me away from the precipice … for the moment anyway.

  Then, a few days into week five, I woke up one morning and took my pills and ate my breakfast and announced to the nurse on duty that I would like to see Jack. There was no sudden lifting of the cloud that made me make this decision; no rays of sunlight streaming through the previously fogged windows of my brain. Nor did I have a massive born-again revelation about the wonders of motherhood.

  I just wanted to see him.

  The nurse didn’t slap me on the back and say, ‘Great news … and about bloody time too, thank God.’ She just nodded for me to follow her.

  The baby ward had a heavily reinforced steel door, with a substantial lock – a sensible precaution in a psychiatric unit. The nurse punched in a code, then pulled the door open. There were only four babies in residence. Jack was in the first crib. I took a deep steadying breath and looked in.

  He’d grown, of course – by a half-foot at least. But what struck me so forcibly – so wonderfully, in fact – was the way he had lost that initial premature, post-delivery amorphous quality, and was now such a distinctive little guy. He was also fast asleep – and though I initially hesitated about picking him up, the nurse gave me an encouraging nod. So, with extreme care, I reached for him and brought him up next to me. Instead of crying, he snuggled his head against mine. I kissed him and smelt that talc-like new-baby smell which was still prevalent all these weeks after his birth. I held him for a very long time.

  That evening, I asked Nurse Patterson if Jack could be moved into my room. When Tony arrived that evening, he was genuinely taken aback to see me bottle-feeding Jack.

  ‘Well then …’ Tony said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well then indeed.’

  Word spread fast about my reunion with Jack. Dr Rodale was all smiles the next afternoon, informing me that ‘this was very welcome news indeed’, while cautioning me that I still needed to approach each day with a degree of circumspection, and with the understanding that nothing was straightforward when it came to the skewed landscape of depression.

  Ellen, meanwhile, tried to get me to concentrate on one salient point. ‘Jack will never remember a thing about this entire time.’

  ‘Lucky for
him,’ I said.

  ‘And I think that, once you are fully recovered, you will begin to forgive yourself – even though, from where I sit, there’s nothing to forgive.’

  They kept me in for another two weeks. It passed quickly – especially as I was now spending my entire waking day with Jack. They moved him to the baby ward every night (as Dr Rodale insisted that I get solid uninterrupted sleep), but brought him back as soon as I was up in the morning – which meant that, when he stirred out of sleep, I was there to change and feed him. Just as he was also by my side until I went to bed at night. I even started to bring him out on my daily walk around the hospital courtyard. With the exception of sleep, the only time that I relinquished his company was during my thrice weekly sessions with Ellen.

  ‘The general feeling is that you’re just about ready to go home,’ she said at the start of week seven. ‘The question is: do you think yourself ready?’

  I shrugged. ‘I have to leave here sometime.’

  ‘Have you talked with your husband about perhaps having some help at home with Jack?’

  Actually, it had been Tony himself who had brought up this issue – reminding me that, before I’d entered hospital, he’d found out the name of a child-care agency in Battersea called Annie’s Nannies, and perhaps I’d like to now give them a ring. Though I told Ellen that I would be definitely investigating this possibility, there was also a part of me that felt I should try to make a go of looking after Jack myself – that bringing a nanny in would be another indication of my domestic ineptitude … especially as I wasn’t working right now, and Jack was still at that stage where he was sleeping for much of the day. So I wrote a note to our cleaner Cha, asking her if she might be able to come in three additional mornings per week and keep an eye on Jack, thereby giving me a short respite from Baby Land. Tony liked this plan – especially as it was going to be around a third the cost of a full-time nanny. Ellen, however, was sceptical.

  ‘If you can afford it, you really should consider constant help,’ she said. ‘You’re still not completely out of the woods yet …’

  ‘I’m doing fine,’ I said.

  ‘Without question. Your progress has been tremendous. But surely, you can afford a month or two of full-time nannying, just until you’re at a stage where—’

  But when I argued that I could easily handle my son – especially as he was still at the non-mobile stage of development – she said, ‘I sense you’re still feeling guilty, aren’t you? And still thinking that you have to prove to the world that you are a competent mother.’

  I shrugged, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘As I’ve been telling you since the start of our sessions together, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with admitting that you can’t cope with certain situations …’

  ‘But I am coping now.’

  ‘And no one’s trying to contradict that. But you’re also in the controlled environment of a hospital – where all meals are provided, somebody changes the bedclothes, and prepares the formula for Jack, and looks after him at night while you sleep …’

  ‘Well, the cleaner will be able to do most of that for me – with the exception of the nights. And if he starts ruining my sleep again, I can always nap while she’s on duty.’

  ‘All right, that may be so – but I still get the feeling that there’s a certain remorse about—’

  ‘Did Agnes feel terribly guilty about … ?’

  She looked at me carefully.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About failing her son and her husband.’

  ‘I can’t talk about another patient. But … do you think about Agnes often?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Did you become close while you were sharing the room?’

  ‘Hardly – since I was so out of it. But … of course I think about her a lot. Because …’

  I faltered. So Ellen asked, ‘Because you wonder if you’ll end up under an Underground train yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I wonder.’

  ‘All I will say is what I said to you before,’ Ellen said. ‘Agnes left before any of the hospital staff felt she was ready to leave. You, on the other hand, are leaving with our medical approval. Because we feel you’re ready to get on with life again.’

  ‘You mean, this isn’t life?’

  For the first time since we started out sessions, I actually managed to make my therapist laugh.

  But before they sent me back to ‘life’, there was an extended question-and-answer session with Dr Rodale, whose primary concern was getting the ongoing pharmacological load just right. So she wanted to know every detail about my current sleep patterns, my diet, my mood swings, my sense of calm, my sense of unease, my sense of ease with Jack, my sense of ease with Tony.

  ‘Oh, I’m certain my husband will revert to type as soon as I’m home … now that I seem to be back in the rational world.’

  ‘So that submerging feeling you often described to me … what was the term you used again … ?’

  ‘The black swamp.’

  ‘Yes. The black swamp. Do you often feel yourself drawn back there?’

  ‘Only when the previous dose of anti-depressants is starting to wear off.’

  She nodded – and informed me that she wanted to ever-so slightly increase the dosage to ward off those lapses.

  ‘Does this mean I’m going to be on anti-depressants for the foreseeable future?’ I asked.

  ‘It looks that way. But if they help you cope …’

  Ah yes, so this was what I had become: a woman who needed help coping …

  Still, Dr Rodale finished our session by saying that she was genuinely delighted with my recovery.

  ‘Yours is the sort of story which helps counterbalance…’

  Stories like Agnes’s?

  Then she told me that I could leave anytime I was ready to leave.

  And so, the next morning, Tony showed up with the car around ten. Nurse Patterson was off-duty, but I’d thanked her the night before. I also thanked Ellen and Dr Rodale, having agreed to see Dr Rodale in two weeks to discuss my ongoing relationship with anti-depressants. Ellen offered me the chance to continue our sessions. I took her number and said I’d think about it. When I mentioned Ellen’s offer to Tony, he said, ‘Well, if you need to pay someone to tell them what a bad husband I am, go right ahead.’

  As usual, this comment was delivered in a sardonic tone. But I sensed there was also a hint of guilt behind it.

  Still, his comment did have the effect of transferring whatever guilt he felt on to me – and certainly didn’t make me want to stretch the family finances any further by doling out £70 an hour to a therapist. My condition had stabilized, after all. The drugs were working. And if I needed to talk my dumb head off, there was always Sandy at the end of a transatlantic phone line. I was going to be just fine.

  But within five days of my homecoming, Tony reverted to type.

  All credit to Jack: he behaved like the perfect gentleman during his first days in Putney. He slept for five solid hours at a go. He slurped down five bottles. He didn’t complain about the service, or the newness of his bedding, or the strange surroundings. Tony seemed reasonably content in his company, just as he also did low-key solicitous things like sterilizing and preparing several bottles, and even changing his diaper on two occasions. No, he didn’t take the night shift when Jack woke at three am … but he did insist that I grab a nap the next afternoon while he kept an eye on the boy.

  But then, after those first few days, he had to go back to the paper – and his return to work also marked the beginning of a distancing process. He started to come in late – nine, ten, even eleven. Then, one night, he called me from the Groucho Club around one-fifteen in the morning, telling me that a dinner with some Chronicle colleagues was running just a little late.

  ‘Fine, no problem,’ I said. ‘And the way Jack is going tonight, I’ll probably be up when you get home.’

  When he r
olled in at five, I certainly was still wide awake – balancing Jack on my lap, trying to negotiate him through a particularly bad dose of colic, watching CNN. Tony was drunk. Seriously drunk. And not pleasant.

  ‘What are you, my mother … ?’ he asked, staring at me with unfocused eyes and equally unfocused contempt.

  ‘I was just up with Jack,’ I said, maintaining a low, subdued tone of voice.

  ‘Well, I am not your fucking child,’ he said, the words slurring. ‘And I don’t … don’t … like the idea of being … I mean, the fucking nerve of you, waiting up for me, like I’m some truant …’

  ‘Tony,’ I said quietly. ‘Go to bed.’

  ‘Don’t you tell me …’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  He looked at me, his eyes blinking with dim bemusement. Then he turned and staggered upstairs. Shortly thereafter, Jack finally conked out. I took him to the nursery, and then went to my room. My husband had fallen facedown on our bed, covering the entire span of it with his rumpled body. I threw a blanket over him, and unplugged the baby alarm, and brought it with me as I climbed the stairs to Tony’s study, and pulled open the sofa bed, and found the duvet, and climbed under it, and fell asleep.

  Then there was light in my eyes, and Tony was by my side, proffering a cup of coffee. Even though it took a few moments for my eyes to come into proper focus, I could see that he looked terrible … and terribly guilty.

  ‘I think I owe you a very large apology,’ he said.

  ‘You were drunk,’ I said, sounding absurdly benign.

  ‘I was beastly.’