“Then what did you do?”

“It was seven o’clock on Sunday morning. I called the airport, booked a passage to Zürich, and twenty-four hours later I was here. Three hours after arrival I was sitting in Dr Tschudi’s office.”

“Was the prisoner Staunton very much depressed by the outcome of the case?”

“It could hardly have been worse for him, because he has a very poor opinion of psychiatry.”

“But he yielded?”

“Doctor von Haller, if a wounded soldier in the eighteenth century had been told he must have a battlefield amputation, he would know that his chances of recovery were slim, but he would have no choice. It would be: die of gangrene or die of the surgeon’s knife. My choice in this instance was to go mad unattended or to go mad under the best obtainable auspices.”

“Very frank. We are getting on much better already. You have begun to insult me. I think I may be able to do something for you, Prisoner Staunton.”

“Do you thrive on insult?”

“No. I mean only that you have begun to feel enough about me to want to strike some fire out of me. That is not bad, that comparison between eighteenth-century battlefield surgery and modern psychiatry; this sort of curative work is still fairly young and in the way it is sometimes practised it can be brutal. But there were recoveries, even from eighteenth-century surgery, and as you point out, the alternative was an ugly one.

“Now let us get down to work. The decisions must be entirely yours. What do you expect of me? A cure for your drunkenness? You have told me that it is not your disease, but your symptom; symptoms cannot be cured—only alleviated. Illnesses can be cured when we know what they are and if circumstances are favourable. Then the symptoms abate. You have an illness. You have talked of nothing else. It seems very complicated, but all descriptions of symptoms are complicated. What did you expect when you came to Zürich?”

“I expected nothing at all. I have told you that I have seen many psychiatrists in court, and they are not impressive.”

“That’s nonsense. You wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t had some hope, however reluctant you were to admit it. If we are to achieve anything you must give up the luxury of easy despair. You are too old for that, though in certain ways you seem young for your age. You are forty. That is a critical age. Between thirty-five and forty-five everybody has to turn a corner in his life, or smash into a brick wall. If you are ever going to gain a measure of maturity, now is the time. And I must ask you not to judge psychiatrists on what you see in court. Legal evidence and psychological evidence are quite different things, and when you are on your native ground in court, with your gown on and everything going your way, you can make anybody look stupid, and you do—”