Free The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers

know when I first began to ask myself, at some point in any association, whether or not this person would be likely to shop me to the Nazis. I’m not even sure what this question means since I’m not a Jew, a Gypsy, nor, so far as I know, homosexual. I dare say it has something to do with losing my mother’s unquestioning support. If push came to shove, my mother would probably have shopped me because she would have judged it right to save her own skin for the girls’ sake, or my father’s. Perhaps I’m being mean, but Olivia, I often felt, might shop me for a couple of pretty dresses. I couldn’t have told you how Dan would stand this test. He might have proved the staunchest of allies but I wouldn’t be sure until an occasion to test it arose, which summed up some crucial element in my relationship with Dan. Bar—I didn’t have even to consider it—would never betray me, however I might have betrayed her—and I was never too sure about my own potential behaviour in this hypothetical situation—and Gus, I was entirely confident, without a thought to his own safety, would lead a Resistance force to rescue me.
    For Gus the fearful things which lurk for most of us at the ragged edges of consciousness were mere flimflam rubbish and piffle before the wind. With an agile innocence, he simply stepped over them or swept them aside. This, it came to me, in an access of gratitude—as I drank a generous measure of his excellent single malt, in the smoky, familiar room, and felt the muscles in my neck and shoulders begin to ease—was why I loved him. It was also why it was easy to tell him when I was afraid.
    The court case that had brought me to London concerned a twenty-year-old female student’s suicide. The family was attributing the tragedy to the negligence of the consultant, a DrHannan, and I was an expert witness for the defence. From what I could tell, the case had been conducted with due professional propriety but it brought up inevitable anxieties. There but for the grace of some god or other went I. Any of us who did this work could find ourselves in poor Hannan’s shoes.
    Elizabeth Cruikshank was more than usually on my mind because of the postponement of our appointment, and the relaxing effect of the whisky, and the sense of security which Gus induced, prompted me to ask, ‘Would you mind if I talk to you about somebody?’
    Gus, the most voluble of men, had also the gift of listening deeply. He listened now, only getting up to refill my glass as I struggled to summarise the state of affairs with Elizabeth Cruikshank.
    One asset of an analyst’s training is that it teaches you pretty effective recall. Not that in this case there was much to remember. What, when you came down to it, did I really know about my contained, grey-eyed patient after all these weeks apart from a succession of refractory silences? That she had been a librarian; that she had married; that she had two children, who, so far as I was aware, were not close enough to have visited; that she refused medication; that she always had with her a brown leather bag; that she appeared fascinated by the quince tree in the hospital garden; these, and my sense of some mortally dangerous secret, squirrelled away beneath that politely occluding veneer, were the sum of what I had to report.
    ‘She’s got under your skin,’ Gus observed when my sketchy account petered out. ‘Is she a burden? That you mind about her is obvious, but does she weigh on you, get you down?’
    I considered this. ‘No, to a surprising extent she doesn’t. I rather enjoy her presence.’
    ‘That’s good. When all bets are off theoretical statements about “therapeutic commitment” are daylight rubbish. You might as well lean on air.’
    ‘For what it’s worth, I do mind about her. I mind rather a lot.’ For the first time, it struck me that I was anxious about this.
    ‘Yes, you do,’ said Gus firmly. ‘Thank goodness.’ Probably he had sensed my unease. One