Dr. Voss at Dinner
Watch a man eat. It tells you more than his credentials.
Voss || Dinner || Suspense || Character
The staff dinner at Coldmoor was held at seven in the evening in a dining room on the ground floor that was formal without being inhospitable — a long table, good chairs, a sideboard with decanters of wine and water, candles in addition to the overhead light that gave the room in winter evenings a quality of amber warmth that was at odds with everything outside and with several things inside. Voss sat at the head of the table. This was, she had learned, invariable: he sat at the head of every meal he attended, which was every meal, without exception. The three other full-time staff psychiatrists — Dr. Lund, Dr. Pellard, and Dr. Renn — sat in the same positions each evening, a seating arrangement that appeared to have calcified long ago without anyone deciding it and without anyone feeling empowered to alter it. Nora took, from the first dinner, the seat beside Dr. Renn, which was next to the window and the furthest from Voss.
She used dinner to study Voss in the way she studied everything — with peripheral attention, the sideways observation of a clinician who has learned that the direct look produces performance and the averted look produces truth. What she noticed, across three evenings of dinner, was a collection of small things that individually meant nothing and collectively meant everything. He ate very little. Not conspicuously little — he served himself with normal portions and the food on his plate diminished across the meal in a way consistent with eating. But she watched closely enough to observe that the diminishment was sometimes achieved by arrangement rather than consumption — the food moved to different positions, divided, separated, in a way that produced the impression of a meal being eaten without the actuality. She could not say with certainty that he was not eating. She could say with certainty that she could not observe him eating.
He spoke at dinner with the fluency of a well-practiced host: asking questions of the other staff that were interested without being intrusive, steering conversation toward topics of general professional relevance with the skill of someone who understands that the appearance of openness is best maintained by controlling the range of subjects that appear open. He asked Nora about her previous work at St. Anselm’s on the second evening with what seemed like genuine curiosity. She answered in accurate outlines, omitting the most significant case — a patient there, a returning soldier, whose breakdown had taken Nora herself two weeks to fully understand because she had initially assumed his symptoms were textbook and they were not. She omitted this because she did not yet know whether Voss was the kind of director who valued precision or the kind who valued the appearance of precision, and the distinction mattered for what she chose to reveal about her methods. “You specialised in trauma response,” Voss said. Not quite a question. “Among other things,” she said. He nodded slowly. “We have patients here with significant trauma histories,” he said. “It was partly why we sought someone with your particular background.” This was the first time he had acknowledged that she had been sought specifically, and she let the acknowledgment sit in the air for a moment before responding, because what sits in the silence after a disclosure is often more informative than the disclosure itself. He met her gaze across the table with the same lightless steadiness as the night she arrived. She said: “I’m glad I can be useful.” He smiled. The precise, adequate, eye-uninvolved smile. “You will be,” he said. And that, she thought later, lying in her room with the radiator clanging and the snow pressing at the windows, was a strange way to phrase it. Not I’m sure you will. Not the professional polite future. Simply: you will be. The certainty of it. As if her usefulness were a fact already established rather than a possibility being hoped for.
She asked Dr. Renn about the third floor when Voss was engaged in conversation with Lund about medication procurement schedules. Renn was fifty, bearded, with the slightly abstracted quality of a man who had spent too long in an enclosed environment and had lost some facility with the social registers required by conversation. He blinked at her question. “What about it?” “I’ve been reviewing the third-floor census. Nine patients, heavy restriction. What’s the reasoning for keeping them so separated from the rest of the population?” Renn looked at his wine glass. “Voss’s protocol,” he said. “Third-floor patients are what he calls complex presentations. Multiple co-morbidities, high intervention risk. Better managed with maximum structure and minimum variable stimulus.” “What kind of variable stimulus?” He looked at the table. “Other patients,” he said. “Each other. The staff.” A pause. He lowered his voice, though Voss was six seats away in apparent full conversation. “Questions,” he said. “Particularly questions.” He looked up at her with the eyes of a man who has decided something. “Don’t spend too much time on the third floor, Dr. Ashby. It isn’t healthy.” She held his gaze. “For the patients?” He picked up his wine glass. “For anyone,” he said.