44 Scotland Street

“Can he help himself?” Pat said. “Could he be anything other than what he is? Could he behave any differently?”

“I’m not sure if your personality is under your control,” said 298

Paternal Diagnosis

Pat’s father. “It’s the way you are, in a sense, rather like hair colour or stature. You can’t be blamed in any way for being short rather than tall, or having red hair.”

“So Bruce can’t be blamed for being a narcissist?”

Pat’s father thought for a moment. “Well, we have some control over defects in our characters. For example, if you know that you have a tendency to do something bad, then you might be able to do something about that. You could develop your faculty of self-control. You could avoid situations of temptation.

You could try to make sure that you didn’t do what your desires prompted you to do. And of course we expect that of people, don’t we?”

“Do we?”

“Yes, we do. We expect people to control their greed, their avarice. We expect people who have a short temper at least to try to keep it under control.”

“So Bruce could behave less narcissistically if he tried?”

Her father walked to the window and looked out into the darkness of the garden. “He could improve a bit perhaps. If he were given some insight into his personality, then he might be able to act in a way which others found less offensive. That’s what we expect of psychopaths, isn’t it?”

Pat joined him at the window. She knew each shadow in the garden; the bench where her mother liked to sit and drink tea; the rockery which in recent years had grown wild; the place where she had dug a hole as a child which had never been filled in.

“Is it?” she asked.

He turned to her. She liked these talks with him. Human nature, sometimes frightening; evil, always frightening, seemed tamed under his gaze; like a stinging insect under glass – the object of scientific interest, understood.

“Yes,” he said. “Most people don’t understand psychopathy very well. They think of the psychopath as the Hitchcockian villain – staring eyes and all the rest – whereas they’re really rather mundane people, and there are rather more of them than we would imagine. Do you know anybody who’s consistently selfish? Do you know anybody who doesn’t seem to be troubled if And Then

299

he upsets somebody else – who’ll use other people? Cold inside?

Do you know anybody like that?”

Pat thought. Bruce? But she did not say it.

“If you do,” her father went on. “Then it’s possible that that person is a psychopath. One shouldn’t simplify it, of course.

Some people resort to a check list, Professor Hare’s test. It stresses anti-social behaviour that occurs in the teenage years and then continues into the late twenties. There are other criteria too.”

Pat’s father paused. “Tell me something, my dear. This young man – could you imagine him being cruel to an animal?”

Pat was hesitant at first, but then decided. No, he would not.

One could not describe Bruce as cruel. Nor cold, for that matter.

“No,” she said. “I can’t see him being unkind in that way.”

“Not a psychopath,” said her father simply.

103. And Then

Pat went back to Scotland Street that night. Her father had asked her whether she wanted to stay at home, but she had already decided that she would go back. She could not go home every time something went wrong, and then, if she did not return, Bruce would have effectively driven her out. She could imagine what he would think

– and say – about her: Far too immature – couldn’t cope. Fell head over heels for me and then disappeared. Typical! No, Bruce would not be allowed that victory; she would go back to the flat and face him.

There would be no row; she would just be cool, and collected. And if he alluded in any way to what had happened she would simply say that she was no longer interested, which was the truth anyway.

She would be strong. More than that; she would be indifferent.

She walked up the stair at 44 Scotland Street, up the cold, echoing stair. She walked past the Pollock door, with its anti-nuclear power sticker and she thought for a moment of Bertie, whom she had not seen for some time and whose saxophone seemed to have fallen silent. It was a week or more since she 300

And Then

had heard him playing, and on that occasion the music had seemed remote and dispirited, almost sad. It was, she recalled, a version of Eric Satie’s Gymnopedie, a piece written for piano but playable on the saxophone by a dexterous player. It was haunting music, but in Bertie’s hands had seemed merely haunted. It was not surprising, of course, if that little boy was unhappy; anybody would be unhappy with Irene for a mother, or so she had been told by Domenica, who felt that Bertie was being prevented from being a little boy. How different had Pat’s own childhood been. She had been allowed to be whoever she wanted to be, and had taken full advantage of this, pretending for three weeks at the age of thirteen to be Austrian (trying for her parents) and then Californian (extremely trying). Mothers like Irene were bad enough for daughters, Pat thought, but were frequently