THE PERILS OF SANITY

By PAUL SAYER

THE PERILS OF SANITY tells the story of Olivia Rowntree, 73, who is approaching the tenth anniversary of her husband Leonard's death. Her GP, an old friend of Leonard's, has referred her for counselling for which she sees no need. But privately Olivia knows that all of her lifelong certainties about love, family and God, seem to be losing their meaning. And when she reaches a critical moment in her faith in herself and humanity, salvation turns up in the unlikely form of a homeless young man.



In this powerful novel, award-winning author Paul Sayer offers a rare insight into the heart and mind of a woman nearing the end of her life, calling into question every contemporary presumption about human ageing and the dying of the light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Sayer
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839783678

Book preview

1

She looked too young for this. Too sweet for gravity.

The blonde hair trimmed to the shoulders. Just so. Baby lips, the downy neck. That tender hollow above the breastbone where tiny chicks might nest. Her skin such heavenly material. A superior creature, as the young are. And rightly so. Everything is best for them. Meant for them. Even the atmosphere: the two of them were breathing the same air, yet really it belonged to her.

‘We’re not the chocolate people,’ said Olivia.

‘Sorry?’

‘The name, Rowntree. You know, Smarties and all that. Famous around here, of course. Or it used to be. No, we’re not one of those. Leonard’s family was from Oxfordshire.’

‘Your husband Leonard.’

The mauve dress. Old for her. Or chosen for that reason? To bring a little of the elusive solemnity. Like the faux coral necklace.

‘My husband, yes.’

The woman, Caitlin, wrote nothing down. Olivia had expected that, thinking she might already have a mental picture of what her new patient might be like, gleaned from the doctor who’d referred her: Ted McManus, Olivia’s private GP. For sure, Olivia knew how people saw her and had seen her all her life: blunt and functional, the accent a bit plummy. And look at the weight on her. Caitlin, in seconds, would have divined these and many other things. And maybe, somewhere along the line, she might let her new patient in on the secret of what was meant to be the matter with her. Though Olivia was not holding her breath on that score. No need for any fuss. Or any of this at all. She was fine. She got by. What else did you need at her age?

When Olivia was told, by Ted’s secretary, that this meeting had been arranged, she had not envisioned the cliché of reclining on a chaise longue with her listener, a bearded eastern European man, sitting somewhere behind her, nodding sagely while she recalled the intimate events of her life, searching for some key incident, the answer to it all. That old chestnut. No, and there was no sofa here, just two high-backed chairs covered in studded green leather on which she and Caitlin were sitting face to face. Meant to be at ease, though it felt a little too companionable: they could never be friends. But it was of the zeitgeist, it seemed, with no barriers to hide behind. Olivia felt a pool of solitude forming around her and she wished she’d kept her bag on her lap: it would have been something to hold on to. But she’d put it down beside the chair and she would feel a fool if she tried to pick it up again. So, she remained with her arms crossed beneath her flopping old boobs, comfortless. And wondering what exactly Caitlin was: a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst? No one had said.

‘Leonard died,’ said Caitlin.

‘He did.’

‘How long – ‘ She waved her pretty fingers in the air. Like the tendrils of a sea anemone, feeling for prey.

‘Oh, nearly ten years ago.’

‘Ten years.’

‘About that.’

Olivia looked down at her own ancient houndstooth skirt which, like all her clothes, was as old as the century. Then some. And her patent burgundy courts pinching her bunions, her ankles filled with water and bulging over the sides. Who wore shoes like that, these days? She would have much preferred her old trainers, and why not? Who would give a damn? Inches away, across the carpet, Caitlin’s slender feet were crossed in naked, narcissistic repose, in purple ballet flats with tiny bows on the front.

Blue-green eyes. The cat’s lashes.

‘I’ll have to ask you, something,’ Olivia said.

‘Sure, anything.’

‘Well, you see, I’m not certain why I’m here.’ Olivia smiled, a little sourly. ‘I don’t think I asked for this meeting at all.’

‘Why do you think you’re here?’

‘Honestly, my darling, I couldn’t say. I believe it was some idea of my doctor’s, Ted McManus. An old friend. Has been for donkeys. But he’s poor at explaining himself, even with those who pay his bills.’

‘He must have thought there was some need. Some incident.’

‘Well, I had a little crash in my car.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ Olivia said, keeping her bogus smile, tilting her head. Thinking Caitlin must know all this. ‘Slipped off the road and into a silly ditch. Banged my head, which Ted probably thinks altered my reasoning in some way. I mean, I know I’m getting on – ’

‘How old are you, Olivia?’

‘Seventy-three, my love. Hasn’t anyone told you that? Or is knowing my age some test to see if I’m still in possession of my marbles, the full bag, so to speak?’

‘It’s not a test.’ Caitlin smiled, pleasantly enough, and the temperature in the room rose a degree or two. ‘Tell me about Leonard.’

‘Oh, you know, the family were all in money, stockbroking, banking and the like. And he became an accountant. Following suit, I suppose.’

Olivia knew this was not enough, but it should be, at least on the subject of his occupation. Leonard was a totter-up of numbers. He did people’s books for them. Told their financial story in the most beneficial way he could and submitted this narrative to the inland revenue. Whichever way you explained it, there was little you could say about accountancy that would hold people’s attention for long. It was the most boring occupation in the world. Everyone knew that.

‘His death was sudden,’ said Caitlin.

‘Yes.’

‘Can you remember your feelings when you were given the news that he’d died?’

‘Shock, of course,’ said Olivia. ‘Absolutely shocking. It was so out of the blue.’

Caitlin paused, perhaps hoping for some elaboration. But Olivia avoided her gaze and looked about the room at the pale-blue emulsioned walls, the half-lifted venetian blinds. God, the things people must say in rooms like this. The outpourings of the depressed and the desperate, and no doubt plenty of well-off old biddies like Olivia who – Who what? Who only came for a sympathetic ear? Someone whose attention they could buy for an hour, once a fortnight. Who had lost their direction in life. Did Olivia need a direction at her age? As for her accident, she was over that by the next day, bar a little fuzziness in her right eye that was improving all the time. Couldn’t everyone just forget it now? She looked at a yucca standing in a Wedgewood blue pot on a chest of drawers, wondering who polished its leaves to such a high shine. Perhaps Caitlin herself, when the office was empty and she paced the floor in her purple pumps, thinking lofty thoughts.

‘You were a teacher,’ said Caitlin.

‘A long time ago, my love. Many moons.’

‘What did you teach?’

‘Music, part-time. Primary school. I was freelance.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘I did, very much,’ Olivia said, though what this had to do with anything was beyond her.

‘Why did you stop?’

‘Cuts in the school budgets, that was usually the reason. Music is a luxury in state education, an indulgence of the dreaming mind. Learning about economics and computers and all that, they’re the necessities now.’

‘Did your mother work?’

Oh beluga, here it comes, thought Olivia. The first mention of her parents, the precursor to some dreary catechism about her childhood, an excuse for the woman to root around in Olivia’s past, like a surgeon probing for lumps in the vital organs. Olivia had never subscribed to the idea that all your travails began in the nursery.

‘My mother was a vicar’s wife. She ran the house and helped in my father’s parish.’

‘Your father was a vicar?’

‘C of E. He had a village parish, near Malton. Then he was asked to take on another from the next village. Then a third, and a fourth.’

‘He had four parishes?’ Caitlin said, with a none-too-convincing note of astonishment.

‘That’s how it is these days. The dwindling congregations. God’s not been hot among the general populace for quite a while, and He’s been taking the blame for all sorts of things lately. I’m sure you’ve heard.’

‘You got on well with your father?’

‘He was lovely. The dearest man. A bit troubled by his faith sometimes, in his later years. But that was part of him, his honesty. He couldn’t just cruise it, going through the motions like some of them.’ Olivia could see him, walking with his quick small steps, bent forward as if he were carrying the woes of the world on his shoulders. Or happily waving into the vicarage every waif and straggler that turned up on the doorstep. And praying for the souls of the little ratbags who threw a brick through his car windscreen. Such was the tolerance demanded of him: that he should be a punchbag to take all their hurt and blows and pass them on to God.

‘Did you share his faith?’

‘Well, it was just there. You wouldn’t think to question it, not when I was young.’

‘But now?’

‘Oh, I still give it a go, I suppose. Dipping in and out. Carol services, the funerals that come around so often when you get to my age. But I don’t know if I even have a bible in the house.’ Christmas congregations in The Minster, the Christian festivals on the racecourse, the happy-clapping in St Michael-Le-Belfrey. Did the people at these things come together to celebrate their faith, or to seek the reassurance of like-minded people, keen to egg each other on? Olivia’s doubts had indeed come and gone throughout her life. Her attention was taken by a ginger cat outside on the window sill. ‘When it comes to believing in God these days,’ she said, distractedly, watching the cat jump down into the tiny front garden, ‘you can only go so far. It’s the evidence thing, the lack of it. You can’t get away from it. Not if you’re completely honest. Lately I’ve begun to wonder that if there is a God, why wasn’t it enough for him just to create the universe? Why does he have to hang around passing judgement on everyone and making them feel so miserable? Why can’t we just enjoy ourselves?’

Certainly, her father had been troubled by such misgivings. Especially during her mother’s painful last months before her death from bowel cancer. Doubts of all kinds infiltrated the house, lingering in the shadows from morning to vespers hour, into the night. The inexorable questions about mortality, the endless drift of the universe and the unstoppable degradation of everything. The holy cross, guilt and divinity: the whole shooting match. But some folk preferred not to think so deeply. Science, logic: such certainties were too perilous. People preferred a little fuzzy madness in their lives, the syrup of fantasy: God on the shelf, in a bottle you could take down for a quick glug when pure reason had become too hard to swallow.

‘Your husband.’

‘Yes?’ Back to Leonard. Such a gadfly, this Caitlin.

‘How long were you married?’

‘A long time, my love. We got married in nineteen sixty-six, when England won the World Cup, the only football match I ever sat through! It was on the telly, in black and white. And Leonard never had any interest in football. He liked to think he had a blokeish, sporty side to him, but you never saw it much. Too wrapped up in his work, you see.’

‘And you had a son?’

‘Hugo, yes. He’s forty now. Hard to imagine, really. He lives in South Africa with his wife and their two girls.’

‘Your granddaughters.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you keep in touch?’

‘We do, though he’s very wrapped up in his business – he’s a partner in a loan company. Among other things.’

Olivia didn’t want to talk about Hugo: he had nothing to do with this…This what? Mental examination? She was beginning to think it really was a complete waste of time. With a little effort, she always believed, she could be happy enough in her own skin.

Caitlin asked Olivia about her days at boarding school, paid for by a scholarship she had won. Olivia cheerfully admitted to having missed home pretty much all the time she’d been there, shedding many a tear, at least to begin with, and drawing the scowling opprobrium of Miss Marchbank, the headmistress. ‘You’re leaking into your knickers, dear, and it is simply not necessary,’ she would say in her trilling voice that carried along the corridors and out across the fields surrounding the school. Olivia was to stop fussing and put her energies into her work. And she did her best, even managing to make a few friends in the process, though, once they parted, she never heard from them again. Hadn’t one become something in the Civil Service? Olivia didn’t know. Caitlin nodded as she listened to all this, yet Olivia wondered if she was really taking any of it in. And when she stopped talking Caitlin stood and went to a small table behind her seat and wrote something in a notebook. The encounter appeared to be coming to an end. Maybe they could meet again in a couple of weeks, Caitlin suggested. That would be lovely, said Olivia.

On her way out she passed the open door of a small waiting room where Caitlin’s next caller, a woman in her mid-fifties, was sitting on the edge of her seat, bug-eyed with expectation, her head perhaps filled with oft-rehearsed woes she was longing to pour into her listener’s lap. No reserve for her about Caitlin’s youth and good looks. Olivia gave her a polite nod and went out through the front door, certain that she would never set foot in this place again.

On the pavement, Olivia tried to tug her kidskin gloves onto her pudgy hands. Then she began to feel light-headed. As if her blood, that sour old juice, was tiring of its constant faltering climb from heart to brain. A fine sweat broke out on her forehead and she steadied herself by grabbing the railings of the next-door solicitor’s office. Was this it? Her last minute on earth? She often thought about what might go through your head in the final seconds. Revelation, perhaps, such as the drowning experience, and the atheists crave as much as any believer: to make sense of it all at last. At the death, literally. Followed by dumbness and a heavy sleep to carry her off… She looked up at the sky, the blue that seemed more rarefied the older she got: coldly beautiful, free of the burden of meaning, its rawness chilling her soul. Then there was a bump behind her ribs. Her heart was starting up again; it had only been taking a rest. She gave up on the gloves, put them back in her bag and breathed in the moist October air.

To her left was the river, and on the far bank of a block of apartments, expensive and anonymous, being circled by white gulls, and standing where an old warehouse had been when Olivia first moved to York. In the other direction, at the top of the street, the traffic was flowing to and from the city centre, cars and canvas-sided lorries, and maroon university buses filled with Chinese students trundling by a backdrop of the Middle Ages afforded by Clifford’s Tower aloft on its green lopsided mound. Olivia had not driven since her accident and when she wasn’t being ferried around by her friend Cicely, she used taxis - she could easily afford them; she could afford just about anything she liked – and this was her intention now, to walk the short distance across town to the rank by The Stonebow. And she set off, trying to put purpose into her stride, but her hips were grating in their sockets, and her feet were ablaze in the tormenting courts. She wished she could somehow be magically transported, this very moment, to the comforts of her living room. Yet what was waiting for her there? Another afternoon in front of the telly, and a long evening doing much the same. A cloud of depression came over her of which Miss Marchbank would certainly not have approved. In morning assembly, in her daily rallying of the girls’ spirits and demeanour, she would tell them that the Misery Mandies, as she called such bad moods, were simply not acceptable and, if they were feeling down in the dumps, they should think of the starving children in Africa and what sort of a day they might be having under all that sun. Maybe Miss M, and the other presences in her childhood, really did affect how Olivia viewed the world now. Perhaps… She was jolted out of these dim reflections when, walking towards the beeping pedestrian crossing on Coppergate, she turned the corner by All Saints and all but fell over the sprawling legs of a young man sitting on a mucky orange blanket, opposite the gate to the churchyard. A beggar, holding out a polystyrene cup.

‘Change?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Got any change, love? Silver, shrapnel, I’ll take owt.’ He was thin, on the tall side, with a long, bristled face, small high cheekbones. His hair was brown and lank with a nibbled fringe, like that of a prison inmate Olivia had once watched, fascinated, as he was escorted, handcuffed to a warder, through York Hospital reception. But this chap seemed more a citizen of the world, more alert than the usual kind of beggar. ‘Come