Some Kind of Fairy Tale (15 page)

But one man he never overcharged was his local GP, a man called Dr. Bullock, a handsome and tall Londoner from the East End who practiced without fear or favor and without air or grace. Bullock had two sweet daughters who wanted ponies, and knowing nothing about horses he’d not been too proud to ask Peter for
help. Peter knew exactly where to get ponies and what to look out for and how much to pay; and for all this information the doctor was grateful. He in turn had made himself available at all antisocial hours for Peter and his family, especially when the children were very small. One time a shard of hot metal had bounced back from the anvil and lodged in the corner of Peter’s eye. Still bleeding, he’d driven not to the hospital but to Bullock’s office, where the doctor abandoned a patient, took out the hot shard on the spot, patched Peter up, and sent him home.

The two men got along fine and often went for a pint together at The Green Man. It was in this setting over a pint that Peter decided to ask Bullock’s advice about a psychiatrist for Tara. Bullock told him it wasn’t like finding a good horse. “And you can’t even look in their mouths,” Bullock said. “It’s a fucking minefield finding a good shrink.” Bullock said he could easily refer Tara to a psychiatrist but that they would have to wait for some time for an appointment on the public health service. Unless she’d just attacked someone with a chain saw. If Peter wanted to pay privately, Bullock knew a good practitioner who lived locally. He was a bit cranky, Bullock warned, and semi-retired; but he had a very strong reputation as a no-nonsense shrink and one who wouldn’t draw out the consultation in the interest of fees.

So two days later, Peter drove Tara to the house of Mr. Vivian Underwood in the Leicestershire village of Thringstone.

The land lay on a massive geological fault, to which the village had given its name. The coalfields ended and butted up against folded volcanic rock. The day they learned this in school was the day they learned to say that everything was Thringstone’s fault.

Peter stopped the car outside a three-story Victorian palisaded villa, half covered in rampant ivy. The house boasted a massive gable. The front of the building faced north, untouched by the sun’s rays.

“Looks a bit gloomy,” Tara said, showing no signs of wanting to get out of the car.

Peter sniffed. He looked the house up and down. It did have a Gothic aspect. “It’s fine.”

They had to climb ten whitewashed steps to get to the front door. Peter rang the bell and identified himself through an intercom.
Eventually an elderly woman with a severe case of dowager’s hump opened the door. Peter had to fight to avoid turning to look at Tara. The old woman said nothing in response to Peter’s greeting, simply closing the door behind them and leading them up a flight of highly polished stairs, trailing her tiny hand along the stout wooden banister. There was a sizable landing with small tables containing glass museum-style cases, each case exhibiting a curio. One case had a pair of eastern silk shoes with curled and tasseled toes; another contained a stuffed weasel; another a ceremonial knife.

“You’re joking,” Tara whispered.

Peter ignored her as this silent acolyte of the mind’s mysteries opened a door to a large room. It was a kind of library, but with one or two more glass museum cases. The floorboards of the room were polished to the same high standard as the stairs and a threadbare Oriental rug lay across the middle. Vivian Underwood stood at the far end of the room by an ornate fireplace in which a cheap gas fire had been installed and was burning cheerfully, struggling to warm what was a very large room. Underwood had an impressive shock of white hair. He was dressed in a brocade smoking jacket, and his leather slippers revealed bare, white, bony ankles. He was smoking a miraculously thin cigar.

“You’re the short notice,” he said, biting on his cigar. He had a booming style of speaking. “I wanted an afternoon nap but then I remembered I promised that Bullock I’d see you. He’s a good sort and he said you were, too. That goes a long way. I smoke. Got a problem with that?”

“No,” said Peter.

“Not really,” said Tara.

“Good, because if you have got a problem with it I can’t see you. Can’t smoke, can’t see. You can’t smoke anywhere these days. That’s why I gave up and organized my practice from home. You can drive a bloody car pell-mell with a high risk of slaughtering a thousand little children a year but you can’t smoke in case they get a whiff of your tobacco. What sort of a country is that?” He looked at Peter, as if Peter were responsible for all this legislation. “Who are you?”

“I’m Tara’s brother.”

Underwood marched over to Peter and put an arm round his shoulder, turning him around and in one deft move propelling him back through the open door. “Well, Tara’s brother, nice to meet you but you’re surplus to requirements and you’ll find a comfortable waiting room along the hall. Thank you.” He closed the door before Peter had time to recover.

Tara had to stifle a giggle.

“We don’t want brothers listening to us, do we, Tara?”

“I suppose not.”

“Take a seat.”

Tara glanced round. There were several seats. “Which one?”

“You decide, and I’ll pretend I haven’t already drawn some conclusions about you by the chair you choose.”

Tara looked around the room. There was a writing desk with an executive chair behind it and a hard-backed armchair opposite. The huge desk was clear but for three impressive objects: an opulent, marbled ornamental pen-and-inkwell set; a large antique hourglass of beautiful blown glass and cinnamon-colored sand in a heavy oak frame; and a big yellow bath-time plastic duck. Other choices of seats were a rather battered but comfortable-looking leather sofa against the wall; two matching armchairs lodged by the fire; and two more upholstered hard chairs drawn up by the window and illuminated by streaming sunlight. She chose one of these.

Underwood picked out a legal notepad from his desk drawer and sat in the chair adjacent to Tara. He produced a beautiful onyx fountain pen from the folds of his smoking jacket and began writing. “Full name.”

“Tara Lucy Martin.”

“Mrs., Miss, or Ms.?”

“Miss.”

“Date of birth.”

Tara told him. He stopped writing and looked up.

“That would make you thirty-six.”

“Correct.”

“I’d say you were in your late teens. Or early twenties. At the very most.”

Tara looked at Underwood and didn’t blink. He shook his
head, as if saying he wasn’t prepared to speak. The silence endured until Tara said, “I’m not yet seventeen.”

Underwood took a puff on his cigar. “You’d better tell me what this is all about.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Who says you are?”

“You will. You will when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.”

“Try me. I’ve heard some good ones in my time, kiddo.”

So she told him about the bluebell woods, and the man on the white horse, and the gallop through the twilight, and the return home. Underwood listened attentively without a single interruption, making notes occasionally, mostly peering at her with steely blue eyes, only occasionally drawing on his cigar, and then pursing his lips to release miraculously thin streams of blue smoke.

When she’d finished he laid down his pad and his pen and said, “That’s an impressive one.”

“You can say I’m crazy now.”

“Okay, you’re crazy. Consider it said. Now can we move on and do things my way? Right. I’ve only had two of these abduction cases in my long career, and one of those was a UFO abduction. Neither of these went on for your rather spectacular twenty years.”

“Did you believe them?”

“Who?”

“The two people who had been abducted.”

“One yes, one no. In one egregious case the individual in question was just afraid to tell his wife where he’d been for three days. In the other case, which was many years ago, I believe it was genuine. Let me complicate that remark: that is to say, Tara, that I believed that the subject believed her own story.”

“And me?”

“My instincts are that you believe your own story, yes. But just as a kind of exercise, could you let me outline a few logical possibles?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I want to put a few explanations to you, just to see how you respond to an argument.”

“Is this a kind of game?”

“Maybe. But a serious game. Like chess. Will you humor me?”

Tara sighed. “Go ahead.”

Underwood held up a hand, fingers splayed, and counted his
logical possibles
on his fingers.

“One, if we can deal with it first, is the obvious chance that you are lying for complicated reasons of your own.

“Two is that you are a partial amnesiac. You left home a long time ago and you have—for reasons unknown—blanked out twenty years of your life.

“Three, you have received a trauma of some kind and your damaged brain is now desperately trying to construct a story
for yourself
to logically explain what has happened to you.

“Four, there are family or psychological reasons why the truth of what happened is so unacceptable to you that your psyche cannot accommodate it and you are passionately lying
to yourself
.

“Five, you are, for want of a better word, schizoid, and therefore delusional in your apprehension of time and your experiences.”

He went back to the beginning of his counting fingers, tapping away as if he had one more, looking at Tara.

“Is there a number six?”

“Yes. Number six is that events took place exactly as you described.”

“Well,” Tara said. “Thanks at least for number six.”

“There are many more scenarios, but will you continue to play with me for the moment?”

Tara shrugged.

“I want you to entertain the notion that all of these six possibles have equal value. That is, can you for the moment accept that any one of these six reasons might explain what happened? And that none of them is more or less likely than any of the others?”

Tara furrowed her brow. She thought for a moment. “Yes, I can accept that idea.”

Underwood sat back. “Your response there is rather bad news, young lady. Bad news because it indicates to me at least—though not everyone would accept the validity of my test—that you are rather sane.”

“Rather sane? And that’s bad news?”

“Yes. If you had indicated a pathological need to advance the value of your story above the others then I could have gone to
work on you in a different way. But now I know I’m dealing with a rather sane person, my work is much more complicated.”

“I don’t understand you, but I like you,” Tara said.

“Don’t try to charm me. I’m like a bear in the woods, uncharmable. Now, then, I’m going to conduct a physical examination. Blood pressure and so on. You okay with that?”

“Yes,” Tara said, still smarting from his retort.

“Right, roll up your sleeve.”

He performed a basic health check on Tara. He measured her blood pressure, her weight and height, he examined her respiratory system, and he asked if he could take a blood sample for a cholesterol test. He put his hand on her belly and he looked in her ears.

“All good,” he said. “Can you go down to the lady who let you in, Mrs. Hargreaves? Can you tell her to book you in to see me after my last appointment tomorrow afternoon? And can you tell her that I want a urine test? Then wait with Mrs. Hargreaves, would you? One more thing: send your brother back in. He’ll want to know what’s going on.”

Tara went down to find Mrs. Hargreaves, and after a moment Peter reappeared.

“Come in and close the door,” Underwood said. He beckoned for Peter to sit on the sofa but chose not to sit down with him. Instead he stood over Peter with his arms folded. “Anything I tell the brother is not to be repeated to the sister, understood?”

Peter had to resist the temptation to look around the room to see if Underwood was referring to someone else. Then he said, “Sure.”

“Not at all. Nothing is discussed.”

“I hear you.”

“I wouldn’t tell you anything, but you’ll only feel cross and excluded. How old is your sister?”

“She’s thirty-six. I know she doesn’t look it, but she is. Thirty-six.”

“A question that might sound odd but I have to get it out of the way: you are absolutely certain this is your sister?”

“Absolutely.”

“It couldn’t be an impostor, someone who looks like her?”

“There’s not a chance of that.”

“Okay. I think you understand I had to ask you that. Just to get that possibility out of the way. Now, from talking to her, from listening to her thought patterns and her words and observing her body language, there is not the first hint that there is anything at all wrong with her.”

“Except that she thinks she’s been living with the fairies for twenty years.”

“Correction: she thinks she’s been living with the fairies for
six months
.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Huge difference. The point is, at this early stage I can’t diagnose. She’s showing no sign of initial schizophrenic or paranoid or depressive behavior. In fact, she presents as very healthy, with no outward indicators of even a mild neurosis, though I would readily admit that some patients are very good at masking their symptoms. I am absolutely opposed to medication at this point in my assessment. Okay?”

“Fine.”

“Yet she has this delusion.”

“I’ll say she does.”

“Yes, I want you to say she does. Are you religious? Do you believe in God?”

“No.”

“Me neither. I happen to think that all people who believe in God are delusional. I just don’t think it’s a bad thing. Let’s say that they are constructing a delusion in a positive and useful way, in a way that helps them in life. For the moment I want you to see what Tara is doing in the same way. She is constructing a useful delusion.”

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“Would you waste your time being angry or arguing every minute of the day with someone who has chosen to believe in God? No. I want you to adopt the same behavior with Tara as you would with such a person. I want you to tell your parents to do the same thing. For the time being.”