was irrational and obsessive behavior, but she believed it absolutely. Sedatives were exchanged for antidepressants, and for a while we didn’t seem to know whether she was going up or down.
Mental illness can be very frightening, and I was utterly terrified. Physical disease usually manifests itself with visible symptoms—a rash, a fever or a swelling. And there is nearly always some pain or discomfort to which the patient can point and describe.
However, a sickness of the mind, and its function, has no such easy-to-understand physical indicators. Sufferers appear just as they did before the disorder hit, and often, as in Sophie’s case, have no comprehension that they are ill. To them, their behavior appears quite normal and logical. It is everyone else who’s mad for even suggesting they need psychiatric help in the first place.
The plans for a family that I had initially placed on hold had, by now, been well and truly switched off. The little bedroom, which had long ago become my office and storeroom, would, it seemed, never contain a cot and teddy bears, at least not while Sophie and I owned the house.
It was not just that Sophie was too often ill to look after a child, it was also the risk that a pregnancy would cause an upset to her hormones that could tip her over entirely into a void from which she would never recover. Postnatal depression can severely debilitate even the sanest of mothers, so what might it do to Sophie? And even though a professor of psychiatry had told us it wasn’t likely, there was some evidence to suggest that manic depression could be a hereditary condition. I was wary of creating a manic-depressive child. For ten years I had witnessed the destruction from within of a bubbly, lively and fun-loving young woman. I didn’t relish the thought of the same thing happening to my children.
I supposed I still loved Sophie, although after five months of medically enforced separation I was sometimes unsure. It was true that, during those months, there had occasionally been some good moments, but they had been rare, and mostly we existed in limbo, our lives on pause, waiting for someone to push the PLAY button if things improved.
We had definitely been dealt a bum hand in life. Sophie’s parents, typically and loudly, had blamed me for their daughter’s illness, while I silently blamed them back for rejecting her over her choice of husband. The doctors wouldn’t say for sure if that had been a factor in her illness, but it certainly hadn’t helped.
Alice, Sophie’s younger sister, constantly said I was a saint to stick by her all these years. But what else could I do? It wasn’t her fault she was ill. What sort of husband would desert his wife in her time of need? “In sickness and in health,” we had vowed, “until death us do part.” Perhaps, I thought, death would indeed be the only way out of this nightmare.
I shook myself out of these morbid thoughts, let myself into the house and went straight to bed.
Thursday at Royal Ascot is Gold Cup Day. It is also known as “Ladies Day,” when the female of the species preens herself in her best couture under an extravagant hat she wouldn’t be seen dead in at any other time or place.
This particular Thursday the sun had decided to play the game, and it was shining brightly out of a clear blue sky. The champagne flowed and seafood lunches were being consumed by the trawlerload. All was set for a spectacular day of racing. Even I, a cynical bookie, was looking forward to it all with hope and expectation for another bunch of long-priced winners.
“Didn’t walk into another door, then?” asked Larry Porter as he set up his pitch next to ours.
“No,” I replied. “No doors in the parking lot last night.”
He grinned at me. “And all that cash yesterday.” He rubbed his hands. “Fancy trying to rob you on Tuesday when you’re broke, then let you off yesterday with bulging pockets. Bloody mad.”
“Yes,” I said quietly, wondering once again if it really had been an attempted robbery in the first place.
“Let’s hope we have bulging pockets again today,” Larry said, still smiling.
“Yes,” I said again, my mind still elsewhere.
Larry Porter and I could not be properly described as friends. In truth, I didn’t have any friends amongst my fellow bookmakers. We were competitors. Many punters believed that there was an ongoing war between them and the bookies,