Today's Reading
He looked at her through narrowed eyes for a long moment, as though her words warranted deep and considered reflection. The pause grew intimidating and Helen was the first to crack.
"And they were taking it apart with such relish. It made me wonder who was mad and who was sane around here."
"Well, that's a very healthy attitude to hold," he said. "Though we don't use the word 'mad' any more. Not of the patients, anyway." He seemed to be enjoying himself. "If I can't persuade you to sit down, do you mind if I do? My back is playing up."
"Please, go ahead."
He resettled himself in his chair, without releasing her from his gaze. "You're quite right, of course. I agree with you."
"In any case," said Helen, who had not caught up with this surrender and didn't want a valid point to go to waste, "has anyone bothered to ask the patients what they think?"
"You're right. I agree with you," he repeated. "What would you have me do? I suppose the problem is materials?"
"Yes. That's what they said. I'm sure they were only trying to help," Helen conceded, disarmed now in spite of herself.
"Always money," he sighed. "Well, leave it with me."
"Thank you...Dr. Rudden."
"Gil, please."
She left the office with a strange fluttering in her ears, her heart beating a little faster in her triumph. Already there was between them that invisible thread that joins two people who have noticed each other for the first time.
It was only a week later that Helen rode into the car park to find a green van with its back doors thrown open and a man unloading three-foot-square cardboard boxes onto the forecourt. She parked her scooter in its usual space and as she approached the van, she could see that one of the boxes had burst open to reveal bulging packets of woolen yarn. Charlie, the caretaker's assistant, arrived dragging a porter's trolley.
"Delivery for Dr. Rudden," the driver said, pushing the last box off the back of the van.
"I don't know where he's going to keep it all," said Charlie. "He's not got a big office."
"Take it to Occupational Therapy," Helen said. "I'll tell him."
Although she had seen him from a distance in the mornings, sweeping up the drive in his Ford Zephyr—the mark of a spiv, according to her father—they hadn't spoken since that exchange in his consulting room. Now, she made her way straight there to thank him, checking her appearance in the glass panel of the day room door as she passed. There was no reply to her knock, so she returned to the art room, disappointed.
He was already there, ahead of her, standing in front of a print of Dürer's Melancholy, which she had hung above her desk. It had come with her from her room at college to her lodgings in Hertfordshire and now here. He turned at the sound of the door.
"You've made this place lovely," he said, the first person to acknowledge that the transformation was her doing alone.
"If you have to spend all day somewhere, it may as well be pleasant," she said, adding, before the conversation could run along a different course, "I came to find you to thank you for the wool. I saw it being unloaded just now. Mountains of it. That was quick work."
He shrugged. "Oh, it took very little effort on my part, really. I have some private clients who have these philanthropic urges. I only had to mention our problem. It's you I should thank for noticing it. Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes."
They locked eyes for a moment and the circuit was only broken by the hesitant tapping that heralded the arrival of the first patients of the day.
"You mean a mental asylum?" her mother had said when Helen called to tell her about her new appointment at Westbury Park. "Oh, Helen."
She had not expected congratulations; her parents were not the sort of people who took much pleasure in others' success. In any case, her mother had an aversion amounting to phobia of any kind of disability. "Don't look at him; he's a bit peculiar," she would hiss, dragging Helen across the road to avoid a mumbling old man or a child in callipers. She had stopped going to church because a woman who sat at the back in a wheelchair used to moan and thrash her head during silent prayers.
"It's not actually called that any more," Helen replied with some asperity.
...
