by Alison Booth
‘But children are interested in these things. I was obsessed with the idea of infinity when I was a kid.’
‘That’s typical.’
In the back seat Charlie seemed to have become bored with our discussion. Gazing out of the window, she looked as if she were miles away, but she could well have been mulling over what we’d been talking about. I took a CD out of the glove box and slipped it into the player. I wanted to distract Charlie from what was threatening to develop into an argument between Jeff and me. We’d had quite a few of those from very early on in our marriage. After seven years I understood enough of Jeff’s character to know that whenever he was worried about something it was best to keep a low profile. But today I found it impossible to let the conversation die.
‘Any child with an inquiring mind is bound to ask at some stage what comes after death,’ I said.
‘You could’ve just said heaven.’
‘But that’s untrue! We don’t know if there’s a heaven. How can I say it’s heaven, if there mightn’t be one?’
‘She’ll find out when she’s old enough to cope.’
The intensity of our irritation with each other was out of all proportion to the issue, but like a dog with a bone I couldn’t let the conversation alone. ‘Isn’t it better to encourage her to think for herself instead of depending on convention?’
Jeff moved into the fast lane. The speedometer showed that we were travelling at eighty-five miles an hour. I looked out the side window at the cars we were passing: most were going above the speed limit.
‘As far as I’m concerned, the matter’s closed.’ Jeff’s voice was tight with anger. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it.’
‘There you are. Down go the shutters. An inconvenient topic comes up and you want to slam a cover over the lot.’
Jeff kept his eyes on the road ahead. The rigidity of his body indicated his displeasure. In the back seat Charlie happily carolled an accompaniment to the music from the CD.
Jeff and I sat on, in a silence reverberating with our discontent.
Chapter 27
NOW
Every time I see Kate, she asks me where my photograph is. ‘I want to finish the departmental website,’ she says, laughing with less and less mirth as the days go by and I still haven’t delivered. ‘It’s one of my Key Performance Indicators. I want it by tomorrow at the very latest.’
After dinner, when Charlie has gone upstairs to work on an essay and my mother is having a rest, I take my laptop into the living room and trawl through the photos in the ‘My Pictures’ directory. I’d swear there are some portrait photos of me somewhere on the laptop but they certainly aren’t where they should be. All the pics I can find are either landscapes or pictures of Charlie. So much for my hope of avoiding the college photographer, the technician with a gift for turning animated human faces into expressionless masks.
My mother comes downstairs as I am pulling our most recent photograph album out of the bookshelves. It is the one I made a year or two ago, even though hard copies no longer seem relevant, not when digital copies of our photos should be on my laptop. Of course my mother wants to join in the search. We sit together on the sofa and trawl through the pages.
‘That might do.’ My mother points to a picture of me taken two years before. My hair was shorter then, but this doesn’t matter. Anyone looking at this image would be able to recognise me. It’s the hair colour and the eyes, and that goofy grin that shows most of my upper teeth.
‘I took this.’ My mother is pleased with herself. ‘It’s a good likeness and I love that white silk shirt with the navy blue blazer. It makes you look very professional.’
I detach the picture from the page and put it to one side.
‘This is fun,’ my mother says. ‘Let’s look at some more.’
I lift out some of the older albums. We start with the one my parents gave me recently, dating from when I was young, from when they were young. As my mother and I work through them, I wonder if my earliest memories may in fact not be memories at all, but simply suggestions absorbed into my receptive mind from photos my parents took of my earliest childhood. I remember this eighteen-month-old Sally standing with a bucket and spade on a beach in Cornwall. I was there, I felt the sand between my toes, I felt the cool breeze on my skin, I smiled at the person taking the picture.
The power of imagination; I couldn’t possibly have remembered events this early, or this clearly. I’ve seen the photo again and again over the years and that’s what is in my memory. What is real, what is imagined? I don’t want to think about this.
‘You’re in a daydream, Sally.’ My mother nudges me gently and flips over to the next page. ‘Look, here’s a photo that got away. It’s that flat you had after you and Jeff separated.’
I picked it up. It must have fallen out of one of the more recent albums. The flat was cheap and dingy, and was on the upper floor of a terraced house in Kentish Town. It was the flat that Charlie and I had moved into after we left Jeff.
‘I expect it’s long since been gentrified, Sally,’ my mother said, slipping the picture back into the album and turning over another page. ‘Hard to believe that was ten years ago. It had a very nice entrance hall, as I recall.’
That staircase. I will never forget it. It rose steeply from the entrance hall laid with its beautiful encaustic tiles that were so popular in Victorian houses. I shudder to think of that floor now, with its geometric design of red and brown and white tiles, interspersed with the occasional blue. How hard those tiles were, and how much damage they could do. The staircase was too steep and narrow for such a fancy hall; the treads small, the risers high.
* * *
After I’d left Jeff, it had been a dispiriting exercise searching for somewhere to rent. I didn’t have much money; all I had was my studentship and a small amount in my bank account. In the meantime I borrowed from my parents.
The strange thing was that Jeff wanted Charlie and me to come back. He thought we could continue as if nothing had changed. But after seeing him in flagrante delicto, I’d made up my mind our marriage was over. Nothing would change that, not all the appeals in the world.
I’d spent a few days flat-hunting before I managed to find a place that was not too far from where we’d been living, so that Charlie wouldn’t need to change schools. I wanted her to have some continuity in her life. It wasn’t until later that I changed our last name from Hector to Lachlan; not until after Jeff had beaten up Zoë and I decided that Charlie and I had to escape London for a while.
It had been a nightmare moving my stuff into the new flat. It wasn’t only the physical exertion of hauling boxes in and out; it was also the grief that occasionally struck me, that this was how our once-happy marriage had ended. My agonising over what to take and what to leave behind didn’t help either. Every object had a memory, nothing was without a past, and all of it hurt. In the end I decided it would be better not to care and that made the task easier. I took what friends had given me together with a few basic things that Charlie and I would need in our new home.
On my second journey up that steep staircase the bottom came out of the cardboard box I was carrying. The contents fell out, evading my snatching hands. The crystal wineglasses I’d inherited from Celia and the lovely glass vase Alessandra had given me for my birthday bounced down the stairs and smashed into a hundred pieces on the tiled floor below. One of the tiles had a small chip out of it. I hoped the landlord wouldn’t notice. He seemed the sort who might.
* * *
My mother is holding up the photo album and pointing to a picture. She is laughing at herself; she is laughing at the sight of herself as a three-year-old girl sitting on her Aunt Celia’s lap. Although my mother says that Celia never took much notice of her until she was ten or so, the bond between them is evident here. She must have been wriggling when it was taken; Celia looks more as if she is restraining her rather than holding her.
Closely I examine my mother’s face in the
photo. She was such a pretty child with her fair curls and her angelic expression. Then I look at Celia. I had always been very fond of her. My maternal grandmother died when I was small and Celia had filled her place, although she was much older than my grandmother. In the picture her head is half-turned towards the camera, showing her strong profile.
Suddenly I realise who it was that Anthony reminded me of when I sat next to him on the plane. It was Celia. The likeness is in the nose, the strong Roman nose, and in the slightly heart-shaped jaw line. Celia’s eyes are downcast in the photograph, which is anyway not in colour. But her eyes were a vivid piercing blue, just like Anthony’s.
‘Anthony looks a bit like Celia,’ I tell my mother.
‘It would be good to keep that nose in the family,’ she says, laughing again and for rather too long. When she sees my face, she adds, ‘You didn’t hear me make that remark, Sally.’
Chapter 28
NOW
Tuesday morning again and I struggle out of bed. I have to be awake enough to talk to Helen, alert enough to be coherent. The strain is beginning to tell; the strain of the early-morning rising, the strain of talking about myself incessantly, endlessly rehashing the past. The twitch under my right eye doesn’t seem to be noticeable so far. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I watch as I feel the nervous spasm. Some nerve is jumping just below the surface; it’s surprising that its effect on the muscle isn’t visible.
I creep out of the house, hoping not to disturb my mother. ‘I’ve got an eight o’clock doctor’s appointment in Hampstead,’ I told her last night. My mother doesn’t need to know that her daughter is seeing a shrink. I tell her only of my successes, never my failures. She knows of my principal failure of course: my marriage to Jeff. She knows of his unfaithfulness and his violence. But I want to protect her from the knowledge that this has left such a lasting legacy.
‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’ my mother said.
‘I just need to renew a prescription. I’ll drive there and then take you to Paddington Station straight afterwards.’
‘You’re much too busy, Sally,’ she said. ‘I could just as easily take a cab.’
But I couldn’t bear to think of her making her way there alone, with her heavy suitcase and the extra parcels from her shopping in London; those little extravagances that she can’t buy in Helston or Penzance.
It’s yet another overcast autumn day, the sky the colour of old pewter with not even a faint gleam where the sun should be. The traffic is unexpectedly heavy. Although in my car at half-past seven, thirty-five minutes later I’m cruising up and down Helen’s street looking for a parking space. At last I see a man shutting the front door of a house a few hundred metres from Helen’s. Slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, as if I’m not waiting right behind him, he climbs into his car and drives off. I pull into the space. As I get out of the car, it starts raining, unusually heavy for London. Although I don’t have an umbrella, I can’t summon up the energy to run.
Because I’m late, I feel even more out of control, even more at the mercy of Helen. She will forgive me of course. It’s all the same to her, late or early, it’s all the same. I’m merely one of the many lost souls on whom she looks down benignly, beatifically.
In Helen’s consulting room, I kick off my shoes and prostrate myself on the sofa. Fifty minutes lying flat on my back – forty minutes today because I’m so late – would be a luxury if I didn’t have to perform. And I’m determined to finish telling Helen about Jeff; about everything that happened after he assaulted Zoë.
But it’s hard to begin, so hard to begin. Where shall I start? I should be logical, I should be consistent; I should start where I left off last Tuesday morning. I shall tell Helen what happened to Charlie and me after Jeff’s attack on Zoë hit the news-papers, after the beginning of my friendship with Zoë.
Instead I begin to talk about Anthony.
‘It’s hard to believe it’s barely four weeks since I met him.’ I hold my fingernails up in front of my face for inspection, a common practice when I begin a session with Helen. I wonder to myself, who is this person who has begun to blather to her shrink about her boyfriend. But I proceed relentlessly. ‘It seems as if I’ve known him forever.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wish he could be here for Jim’s birthday party this Saturday. He’s my friend Kate’s partner. She’s hired a canal boat to take us out.’
Helen says nothing. I’m not surprised. She knows I’m procrastinating. But I think of how Anthony and I are getting to know each other with our long phone conversations, and how we like what we are discovering. Maybe we are lucky being able to get to know each other like this, on the phone, with no anxiety yet about the physical side of things, just chat. He tells me about his day and I tell him about mine. We talk a lot about our work, but we each reveal bits of our past too, gradually, gently, incrementally. Maybe this is what my sessions with Helen should be like.
But my phone conversation with Anthony last night was different. I decide not to tell Helen of Anthony’s news – that one of the US colleagues with whom he is collaborating has decided to accept a chair at Cambridge. This will reduce the probability that Anthony might move permanently to the US, I reckon, but there’s no need for Helen to know this.
Perhaps I wouldn’t consider letting Anthony into my life if it were not for my sessions with Helen. That would probably be her view. But of course I’m simply projecting opinions onto her. She gives little away. I examine my fingernails again for inspiration. I really must file that thumbnail into shape.
‘After I met Zoë I felt much stronger,’ I tell her. My subconscious has fooled my conscious self, has taken it by surprise. This new information erupts unexpectedly, as if it is magma that has found a weak point in the Earth’s crust. ‘I knew that Zoë was braver than me. She’d experienced something similar to me but she’d had the courage to take a strong line.’ I’m drawing breath to continue the flow when Helen interrupts.
‘You felt that you couldn’t have deserved Jeff’s violence if Zoë had experienced it too?’ Helen is back with her old obsession.
‘No, that wasn’t it at all. You know perfectly well I don’t think I deserved to be struck by Jeff. That might be your opinion but it’s not mine.’
I realise that I am no longer angered by Helen’s view, even though I think she is wrong. I never believed I deserved Jeff’s violence. I tell her, ‘It was more that after meeting Zoë I no longer felt so isolated. I felt there was someone I could talk to about Jeff. I wasn’t on my own any longer.’
Helen jots something down on her writing pad. I hear her pen scratching over the paper.
‘I chose to stay and later I chose to go,’ I continue after a while. ‘And the catalyst to my going certainly was that woman I’d seen making love to Jeff.’ I almost say fucking but insert love-making at the last second. I try not to think too much about that incident, I try not to think of Jeff’s expression as he saw me with the woman who turned out to be Zoë. ‘But Jeff’s assault of Zoë made a bond between us. We were connected because she’d shared my experience and we could talk about it.’
‘Were you glad that Zoë had been punished by Jeff? She had stolen your husband, after all.’
Now that Helen has raised this question, it seems like an obvious one. The curious thing is that it has never occurred to me before. Was I glad? I have to think carefully. How different our lives might have been if Jeff hadn’t attacked her.
‘Were you glad?’ Helen repeats.
‘Maybe I was, at some unconscious level. Maybe Jeff’s attack on Zoë made it easier for me to forgive her.’ I hesitate, once more wondering why I’d never thought of this before. ‘I didn’t really have much time to think. All I felt was sympathy for Zoë and a desire to shield Charlie. And so much happened afterwards.’
Helen says nothing. I begin to tell her about my conversation with Jeff when he phoned me at my parents’ place in Coverack, the day he was bailed out of jail. W
hen I finish speaking, she clears her throat. I’ve almost forgotten her presence, so caught up am I in the past. ‘So he was asking for your sympathy. And did you give him any, Sally?’ Her voice is gentle.
‘I wasn’t in the least bit sympathetic. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t listening. He was talking for his own benefit, to justify himself.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that was one of the last times I ever spoke to him, Helen. He died not long afterwards.’
‘Did you regret your lack of sympathy after that?’
‘I’ve never regretted it,’ I say immediately. I don’t tell Helen that I’ve occasionally asked myself this same question and always the answer has been the same: Jeff deserved no sympathy. ‘I couldn’t have encouraged him in his self-delusion. He was getting worse, not better.’
‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to stop there, Sally.’
I feel disorientated as I get to my feet, almost as if I have arisen from the sofa into another time period. Helen smiles at me as she holds the door open, a smile of astonishing sweetness. She is an enigma, my Helen; and our professional relationship guarantees that she stays this way.
Outside, I pass by a young woman as she is turning into Helen’s tiny front garden. I turn and watch as she presses the buzzer on the intercom. Helen’s voice bids her enter, the door clicks open and she is swallowed up. Helen’s day is full of the damaged, the affluent damaged, seven or eight sessions. The miracle is that she remembers us all. Although perhaps she doesn’t; after all, her response is rarely more than a yes or a no. Those in analysis are analysing themselves.
We are nearly there, Helen and I; we are nearly through. We have peeled the layers from the past as if pulling the petals off a tightly furled rosebud, stripping it petal by petal.
But we don’t need to go right down to the very centre. Helen doesn’t need to know everything that has happened to me. There are some things that I will never tell her.
