Whoever she was, Ester thought, but she didn’t utter the words out loud.
Hannah, too, has lived in Paris, and New York, and London, and even Brussels, briefly. She is a corporate counsel for a major international brand, but she wishes she were an architect.
‘I’m good at my job,’ she told Ester. ‘But I don’t enjoy it.’ She reconsidered her statement. ‘That’s probably not entirely true. I get satisfaction from doing it well, and there are times when it’s intellectually challenging. But if I tried to explain what I did most days, you’d stop listening.’
Ester smiled. ‘I’d try not to.’
Hannah’s laugh was tight. ‘You’re paid to, regardless of how dull. Essentially, it’s work that benefits wealthy shareholders by putting more money in their pockets. I don’t create anything, or make anything. I don’t help people. I don’t have any belief in the necessity of what I do.’
‘And do you want to change this?’ Ester asked.
Hannah contemplated the question for a moment. ‘There was a time when I wanted to. Very much. But I’m pragmatic. I’m used to earning well. And I wouldn’t cope with being at the bottom of the pile. Not at this stage of my life.’
Work is not the reason she came to see Ester.
She was frank from the outset about her failure to have a relationship, her words clipped and direct, almost daring Ester to look startled as she uttered the words: ‘I’ve never had sex. I haven’t even kissed anyone since I was in primary school.’ On her wrist she wore a leather cuff, and she turned it, too loose on the white skin. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to have a relationship, although I probably am fussy.’ She pressed the cuff tighter. ‘And if I met someone, how do I explain who I am? That I’m this age and I’ve no …’ she paused, ‘experience?’
Ester asked her to tell her a little more about herself.
Hannah was adopted. She hadn’t been told this. She had discovered it when she was 17, after her mother died, the papers in a neat folder at the bottom of her underwear drawer. She’d tried to find her birth mother, lodging a request for contact with various agencies, but she never received a response.
‘How did that make you feel?’
Hannah shrugged. ‘Disappointed?’ She glanced at the fireplace. ‘That’s a beautiful painting. Is it a Maurie Marcel?’
It is, Ester said.
‘Are you related?’ Hannah asked.
Ester said they were.
She had to be quick; she learnt that within the first hour. Hannah would talk in a seemingly open and frank manner, and then stymie any attempt to analyse or investigate a little deeper. The third time she did it, Ester smiled, gently pointing the habit out to her.
‘I don’t think there’s anything further to say about the matter,’ Hannah replied, and she looked genuinely bemused.
Her childhood was neither happy nor unhappy, she said. ‘Colourless.’
They lived in an outer-northern suburb, and Hannah went to an ordinary suburban public school. She studied hard, she had few friends, and in her final year, she became ill. ‘Glandular fever. I had to work from home. I took the exams and did well enough to get into law — not as well as I would have done otherwise, but well enough. And then my mother died. I was on my own.’
‘And was that hard?’
‘Not particularly,’ Hannah said. ‘We were never close. I was self-sufficient.’
Hannah just doesn’t know how to meet someone. Doesn’t know how to fall in love, to have sex, to be normal, and she asks these questions during most sessions with the persistence Ester has come to know during their time together, wanting this to be just another problem that can be solved with a logical and determined approach.
Today, she wears slim-fitting black pants, boots with a strange lacing system that makes them look a little like orthopaedic shoes, a loose black knit, and several silver discs around her neck. Her hair is damp from the rain, and she musses it with her fingers to dry it, beginning the session with her usual barrage of talk. She is late — as she often is — and she has excuses banked up: meetings that went over time; the need to get something off layby on the way here (she is a compulsive shopper who puts everything on layby, stretching the terms of the agreement to breaking point); taxis that didn’t come.
Ester has told her that failing to be on time only sabotages the session for herself. ‘It’s very hard to do effective work in under an hour.’ She has also made rules with Hannah. More than ten minutes late, and the session will be cancelled. Hannah usually arrives moments after the ten-minute cut-off. Late twice in a row, and the therapy will come to an end. They have come perilously close to this point several times.
Over the last month, Hannah has commenced internet dating.
‘Browsing actually,’ she always says.
She finds it demeaning and demoralising. ‘I don’t think this is something we should shop for. You reach a certain level of income and you can buy most things — cooked meals, a clean apartment, someone to do your chores — but I’m not sure you should purchase a relationship.’
‘What makes you think of it as purchasing?’ Ester asks.
Hannah considers the question. ‘I realise there’s no exchange of money, but it’s still like a display of goods, an advertising of the wares.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘And most of the wares aren’t that enticing. I knew there were a lot of dull men out there but to be reminded of this — en masse —’
Ester smiles, remembering her own experiences of internet trawling.
‘But I’ve decided this is a mountain that needs to be climbed.’ Hannah leans forward, her words becoming more rapid as she confesses her decision. ‘I need to have sex. I’ve picked one of them — the least offensive I could find — and I’m meeting him tonight, for a “date”,’ she puts inverted commas around the words with her fingers and raises her eyebrows, ‘so I can go to bed with him. I can’t put it off any longer.’
Then, sitting back in her chair, Hannah asks whether Ester has changed the room around. ‘I like it,’ she says, appraising the space, which hasn’t altered since Ester moved here, let alone in the fortnight that’s passed since Hannah’s last session.
Ester tells her no, following up with her own question before Hannah gets another chance to divert her, aware that these sessions are sometimes like a sprinting competition. She has to be on her toes.
‘So you see the problem as being simply one of not having had sex? That this has held you back from having a relationship?’
Hannah nods earnestly, and there is something childlike in her desire to believe that such a simple solution is possible. ‘Once I’ve had sex, I won’t feel so anxious. Will I?’
Ester tells her it’s one approach. ‘But perhaps it’s worth also looking at why you haven’t had a physically intimate relationship — or encounter — until now. There are fixes and there are fixes,’ she says. ‘It’s a little like the difference between a quick surface clean of a room, or a thorough clean. The band-aid or the operation.’
Hannah nods. ‘The surface clean shouldn’t be dismissed. It can make a difference.’
Ester crosses her legs and smiles. ‘If you decide to take this approach,’ she says, ‘will you promise me one thing? Look after yourself. Don’t be afraid to back away if you feel uncomfortable.’
Hannah nods, and then laughs. ‘Actually, I can’t promise you that. It’s inevitable I’m going to feel uncomfortable.’
Ester smiles. ‘Fair enough. But don’t push yourself into a place that feels completely wrong. And, perhaps more importantly, be prepared to accept that this may not provide the miracle cure you’re looking for.’
Hannah looks down at her hands. She has delicate, slender fingers, the first signs of age on the paleness of her skin, the back of her hands dry and papery, livery age-spots freckling the blue of her veins. She scratches at one of her nails, shaping it. The si
lence is rare.
When she looks up again, her eyes glitter. She turns to stare at the rain on the window, the film over the darkness of her pupils gone as soon as she glances back to Ester.
‘All my life, I have been lonely.’
Ester remains silent.
‘I knew it, but I didn’t know it. When something is constant, you’re often not aware of it. The house was quiet with just my mother and me. She went to bed by nine, and I spent most nights in my room, studying. I listened to the radio while I worked. People rang the late-night show. Love songs and dedications, it was called. They would talk about their husband who’d left, their first love, their partner that cheated on them. And what would you like to say to him? the announcer would ask. I forgive you, they would say. Or: Come home, I miss you. And then they would play a song for them.
‘One night, a woman rang. She had no one to make a dedication to. And so she was making it to a man she was yet to meet, a man who would love and cherish her. I’m sure he’s out there for you, the announcer said in his smooth, deep voice. I know you will cross paths one day soon.’ Hannah stares at Ester. ‘Who was he to make that assurance?’
Ester smiles.
‘I’ve become so used to being alone. I find it hard to imagine this will ever change.’
Ester nods. ‘You have learnt to be extraordinarily self-reliant, and to do without people. This was probably very necessary as a child. It helped you survive. But the survival skills we develop as a child often don’t work so well for us when we are older. And breaking down patterns, habits, ways of being that are entrenched, can be a slow process.’
The rain drums down, down and down and down. Ester looks at Hannah sitting opposite her — intelligent, original, fierce, determined — and she is seized by a foolish desire to give her something more than this careful response.
They all come in here, day after day, session after session. Loneliness, heartache, despair, anger. Most of her clients are there at the uncomfortable edge of one of the darker facets of life. She could stand up now in her room and open the window, let the rain pour in, across her desk, onto the beautiful carpet, her papers curling up, ink smudging, the sound of the downpour uncomfortably loud and close, and she could look at Hannah and tell her to just go for it — have sex, have it often, throw herself into life with no reserve.
But she does not utter those words to Hannah. Of course she doesn’t.
This temptation often creeps in at the end of the day. And she always resists.
Opposite her, Hannah is picking up her bag, a large, soft, leather pouch.
‘I understand how you could feel that having sex will break down the barriers quickly.’
Hannah grimaces.
Ester smiles: ‘Apologies for the unfortunate choice of words.’
‘I know what you’re saying,’ Hannah interjects. ‘You’re telling me to be careful. To not expect too much.’ And she stands, tiny, delicate in her black, bag swung onto her shoulder. ‘I like your skirt by the way. Is it a Paul Smith?’
At the end of day in her room, Ester sits for a moment. She would like to do a little talking herself. This is how she feels at the end of most days, actually.
On the afternoons she picks the girls up from school, she tests out her voice when she is alone in the car, sometimes venting her frustrations with particular clients out loud, sometimes reminding herself of tasks she is meant to do, or even expressing her own feelings to the dashboard. The sound of her words is strange after sitting in a room alone with other voices washing over her — woes, joys, and grievances layered and twisted and knotted, and dumped, one after the other.
She used to ring Lawrence for this purpose, and the beauty of it was that she didn’t even care that he was — as he so often was towards the end — non-responsive. She would simply talk, chatting about what she would make for dinner or her plans for the weekend, or about a movie she wanted to see, an issue in the news, or her own anxieties about Hilary, or how difficult she found April.
Often she could hear the music he was listening to in the background: the low hum of a guitar, or the steady beat of drums. Sometimes, he was in a café, and there would be other voices around him, a clatter of plates. He would grunt in response, only occasionally asking questions or contributing himself. She didn’t care. She just wanted to talk and talk and talk.
It must have been irritating, she thinks now, smiling as she does so, because her thoughts towards him are not unkind, and this surprises her. It’s happening more frequently, her mind resting on Lawrence momentarily, alighting with a well-accustomed wariness, only to find that the landing is softer each time.
‘Perhaps we will speak again,’ she says to herself, because this is one of those days when she is at home alone and the easiest solution to that immediate need to talk is to bore herself with her own words, which she does.
Opposite, she can see her reflection in the window. The desk lamp is still on, a pool of light in the glass, revealing the pale lines of her face, her dark eyes, brown hair pulled back, the lipstick on her mouth faded now. She imagines facing this woman in this room and talking to her.
‘My husband cheated on me with my sister, and, for over three years, I have been unable to forgive either of them.’
The words are bald when she utters them, and she glances up at the Ester in the window, eyes a little too wide for the calm and curious self who usually listens in this room.
‘Almost three years. And I have not uttered a word to either of them.’
And now that other Ester responds. ‘What are you afraid of?’ she asks, leaping several steps ahead because they know each other well, this client and this therapist, and there is no need for the cautious steps she would normally take.
‘What am I afraid of?’ Ester repeats the question.
Letting go of that anger and hatred. She tries to imagine it, while knowing that the remnants she hangs onto now are tattered scraps, frayed and symbolic only. What would she have left without it?
Ester closes her eyes. It is April she sees. They are in their early twenties, and they are at a party. April is dancing, oblivious to everyone around her. Men and women drift in and out of her orbit as she moves under a hazy night-time sky, the few stars obscured by the sea-spray fog, the air warm and humid, so salty she can almost taste it. It’s ‘Sign of the Times’ by Prince that she’s dancing to, and she’s lost in it.
Ester’s boyfriend of the time is off trying to buy some ecstasy. The plan is for the three of them to go and take it before the night gets any later. But the truth is that Ester doesn’t really want to. She never likes taking drugs when she is with April. Ester knows what will happen. She will sit removed, watching the evening from a distance, judging April, judging her own boyfriend, telling herself that it’s just the drugs making them have such a good time, as though they are cheating. As though, somehow, this is a game with results, and they are cheating. And she doesn’t want it to be like this. She wishes they had never decided to buy any.
She stands, slightly unsteady in her new heels, and weaves her way through the bodies. She has drunk too much, and, in the heat, she feels vaguely ill. These are April’s friends — she doesn’t know many of them — and she takes her sister by the hand and tells her she needs to go home.
April runs her fingers down Ester’s arm, her touch surprisingly cool despite the warmth. ‘Dance with me,’ she says. Ester shakes her head, but before she knows it, she is moving with her sister, as they used to do when they were young, the music loud in their bedroom, dressed up in a strange array of clothes they had stolen from Hilary and Maurie’s wardrobe, and she feels all her self-conscious anxiety slide away, tumbling like silk to the dance floor where she kicks it off to the side, out of their orbit, both of them aware of nothing more than the music and each other.
She is having fun; beautiful, bright, fizzy fun, and April is right there wi
th her, the pair of them sparkling in the joy of it.
Opening her eyes again, Ester is surprised to find herself crying.
‘I miss her,’ she says out loud to the other self, who is a terrible therapist because she is crying too. They smile at each other.
‘The truth is really very simple,’ Ester the client says to Ester the therapist. ‘And also very complicated.’ They laugh.
Lawrence should have been with someone like April, but all the time he would have wanted to love someone like Ester. He’d known that. And so he’d fallen for Ester because that was what he’d wanted to be — a man who fell for a woman like Ester. And yet, wanting is not enough.
She’d loved him. But sometimes she wondered whether part of her love came from being so amazed that someone like him had chosen someone like her.
‘He picked me over my sister.’
‘And then he didn’t,’ the therapist says. Or is it the client?
She leans forward and switches off the lamp, the darkness of the day seeping in now. She stacks her papers neatly on the desk and powers down the computer. Lifting each of the cushions off the two-seater couch, she shakes them, the feathers fluffing up; they are full again, as though no one has sat here all day.
Last is the bin. Still empty after Chris. Hannah doesn’t cry. Ester remembers this as soon as she looks at it, and she pushes it back under the desk, ready for next week’s tissues.
Closing the door behind her, she steps out into the house, the corridor dark, the silence heavy. She needs to work out what she is going to wear, and she flinches from the prospect of trying to decide, because it is not something she is good at. Lawrence had an eye for clothes. He would often advise her if she couldn’t choose, knowing what would suit her and what wouldn’t. She shakes her head at the thought of ringing him now.
‘Help me,’ she would say. ‘I need an outfit for my first proper date.’
Between a Wolf and a Dog Page 20
