things behind bars and now they’ve got out. I don’t know what to do.’ He tried to force himself to speak sensibly. ‘Of course it’s only temporary. I’m all right now.’
But his voice shook even as he said it, and she tightened her arms.
‘It
Some old reflex action made him bristle at the word. ‘I don’t need a doctor-’
‘Yes, you do,’ she said firmly. ‘No argument. I’ve decided.’
At that he even managed a shaky laugh. ‘Yes, dear.’
She picked up the echo, as he’d intended, and smiled into the darkness. But her heart was heavy because she knew they’d just embarked on the dreadful road that Dr Ainsley had warned her about. It was sharp and thorny, and the end of it was hidden from her.
When she called the doctor next morning she was half afraid Jake would protest again, but he was too deep in his own private agony to say anything.
The local doctor was a brisk, well-meaning man with little imagination. To him, clinical depression was something to be treated with drugs, and time would do the rest. The medication he prescribed was strong and usually effective. Kelly learned that much from a talk with a fellow student who was doing medical research. But she felt the doctor had looked at only one side of the problem. Jake needed more. From the way he’d reached out to her she guessed it was something only she could give, but as yet she wasn’t certain what it was. She could only watch and wait, and hope that the moment would find her ready.
Jake had never before suffered clinical depression. He’d thought he had, when he was first in the hospital. Now he knew that experience had been nothing, just a bout of being down in the dumps-bad enough, but not to be compared with this bleak hell.
The medication was only partly effective. It dulled the edge of his consciousness, so that instead of the darkness being full of sharp weapons to taunt him it was a place of diffuse misery.
By day he slumped into coma-like sleep, by night he lay awake tormented by demons. They came from inside him, and had names like futility, guilt, hopelessness. From this perspective his entire past life seemed empty, his future non-existent.
His body seemed to be made of lead so that dragging one foot in front of another was an almighty effort. He understood nothing that was happening to him. Faces came and went. Voices echoed in his head. There was Kelly telling him that all would soon be well because Dr Ainsley had predicted this.
‘He thought it would happen sooner…and then you recovered…you were so strong, it was like you’d got away with it…’
He tried to remember when he’d ever really been strong. What had his strength ever been but an illusion, depending on one crucial prop? Then the prop had been removed and he’d seen himself with awful clarity. While Kelly was there, Jack the lad, a bouncing fire-cracker who could enthral the world. Without her, nothing.
Day after day his misery blotted out almost everything else and the world reached him through a fog. The only reality was Kelly, who had quietly moved her things back into his room, and spent each night with him in the double bed. When the fog was heaviest her face was still there, tense with anxiety, watching him with fearful eyes. She took several days off, making various unconvincing excuses, and gradually it dawned on him that she was afraid to leave him alone.
That brought the darkness down again. Her chance was slipping away because of him. History was repeating itself, and it mustn’t be allowed to happen.
‘It’s all right,’ he told her, concentrating hard on the words. ‘I’ll still be here when you get back. I’m not-going anywhere.’
At last he persuaded her to leave, and endured several hellish hours when the walls seemed to be closing in on him. But when she returned at the end of the day he managed a smile.
‘The kettle’s on,’ he said with a fair pretence of cheerfulness. ‘Sit down while I make you some tea.’
‘How have you been?’ she asked, looking anxiously into his face.
‘It’s getting easier,’ he lied.
He knew she doubted him, and he managed to keep smiling until he was in the kitchen. There his control slipped and he stood clinging onto a shelf, heaving with distress while sweat poured down his face. But a movement behind him made him pull himself together and hoist the bright mask into place before she saw his face again.
He had his reward next morning, when she left the apartment with an easier mind. He gave her a cheery wave through the window before turning away as the waves of blackness engulfed him again.
Once he called Dr Ainsley. ‘Kelly said you knew this was going to happen.’
‘You took two bullets, and that’s enough to traumatise any man,’ Ainsley said cheerfully. ‘Inside, you never did recover quite as well as you made out, and pretending just makes things worse. What medication are you taking?’ When he heard he grunted. ‘That’s all right. It’s good stuff. Give it time to do its work and leave the rest to Kelly.’
As days passed the fog lifted a little but the world still reached him at a distance. He read his mail, only half taking it in, but stray words and phrases clung, worrying him. Somewhere out there were things he should be thinking about, taking seriously, but they were muffled, and what could he do about them anyway?
One night he managed to sleep for a few minutes, then awoke sharply. There was a light under the door. He forced himself up and went out, to find Kelly lying on the sofa, frowning as she read a book. Something about her struck him forcibly.
‘You’re going to have a baby,’ he whispered.
She jumped up, full of alarm. ‘Jake-’
‘It’s all right, I’m not crazy.’ He let her draw him down until he was sitting beside her. ‘I knew you were pregnant-I did, didn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ she said gently, ‘you knew.’
‘I remember now.’ He shook his head as though trying to free it of a swarm of bees. ‘There’s something I can’t quite-why are you sitting here alone?’
‘I’m fine-’
‘Why does nobody ever protect you?’ he asked wildly. ‘Why is it always you doing the caring? Your husband should have protected you, but we all know about him, don’t we?’
‘I don’t think anybody really knew about him,’ Kelly said gently.
‘A jerk. He let you down all the time. Now he’s letting you down again.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I’ll show you.’
He hauled himself up and made his way back to the bedroom, returning with a paper which he put into her hand. It was a bank statement showing that his money was fast vanishing.
‘Not just a jerk, but a stupid jerk,’ Jake said morosely. ‘He never bothered to save when times were good. He spent it all on enjoying life.’
‘He spent it on his wife too,’ Kelly remembered. ‘All those presents-’
‘Which weren’t what she wanted. When trouble came he didn’t have any savings. After I was shot the firm’s insurance company made a pay-out, although they used a technicality to make it as little as possible. That’s what we’ve been living on. I thought I’d be back at work long before now, because I was “Jake Lindley” who could cope with anything. But look at me. A mess.’
Kelly was staring at the bank statement and a resolution was forming in her head.
‘Say something, please,’ he begged.
‘All right.’ She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face. She was about to take a huge risk, and she called all her love to help her judge the size of the gamble.
Vaguely she knew that she’d misjudged once before, driving him into Olympia’s arms, helping to bring this nightmare down on him. If she misread him again she might condemn him to disaster, but if her courage failed he might languish in his present misery forever.
‘I’ll say this,’ she told him. ‘I think it’s about time you started work again.’
He stared. ‘You think anyone’s going to give me work as I am?’
‘You’re not going to wait for people to give you work. You can make your own. It’s time you started on that book you always talked about. Heaven knows you’ve got the material. All your experiences in so many countries,
