Becoming Tess

by H K Thompson

  She had found the tea and coffee trolley that was wheeled into the common room at 10.30am. There it stayed, next to the empty fireplace. Now it was 12.15pm and it was still there, the vacuum jugs perched amongst cups and mugs, a jug of milk and a sugar bowl with white sugar containing white granules and stained lumps where wet spoons had been used, and a mug with a broken handle where the clean teaspoons were stacked. On the surface were coffee and tea rings, puddles of milk and water and grains of sugar, used cups and mugs and stained teaspoons. No one had cleared up. Standing on the shelf below on the two-tier trolley was a tin, colourful and inviting. In it was an assortment of sugary and dry biscuits. She had discovered the treasure trove earlier, after the eleven o’clock rush had subsided and she had braved the centre of the room. She had been sitting next to the wall on a worn, brown rattan chair, secluded and invisible, had crossed the carpet and grasped the rail of the trolley to steady herself. Looking round she saw the other inmates (that was how she saw them, herself included) seated on the sofas and armchairs, one or two on the window seats, all involved in their own thing.

  Now the room was empty. Tess opened the tin and took the two remaining biscuits, one of them broken. She fed the pieces into her mouth and savoured the sweetness of them. This morning they had left her mostly alone with Mark, her designated key worker. He had handed her a schedule of classes and groups she was to attend and given her a brief tour of the ground floor of the building, pointing out the gardens, telling her where she was allowed to go and where not. He invited her to orientate herself and feel free to find him and ask him any questions she had. But she had no questions and he was clearly rushed.

  Mark told her that her first group session would begin after lunch at two o’clock and that attendance was compulsory. Her activities, as he put it, were not optional, they were all part of why she was here.

  “As you know, Tess, this isn’t a prison. We have a different approach here. Your punishment isn’t punishment as such, more a chance to be rehabilitated back into society. You’re regarded as someone who will benefit from a therapeutic approach and that’s what we do here. You’ll be asked to look in depth at why you did what you did and you’ll do that through group work, through art work and through individual psychotherapy.”

  She looked at him and felt blank, except for a vague feeling that she liked him, and that he seemed straightforward and kind. She nodded briefly, looking at his face, and – registering the significance of this – Mark’s face lit up. A start, his eyes said, then he nodded to her, and said “see you later” and left the room.

  Tess, alone again, put out her hand to brace herself on the wall, her fingers spread on its surface, her arm fully extended and locked at the elbow. She felt the solidity and coolness of the painted surface, a warm grey. The building had existed before her and would last long after her, she told herself, and felt reassured, held in a kind of brick and timber embrace.

  She had nodded at Mark. She knew the instant he smiled why he had. In her small gesture she had opened herself to the possibility of returning from being cocooned in her own febrile hinterland, afraid to venture out, where her exhaustion had been easier to live with than the consequences of what she had done. She felt relief for a few moments, as if her spontaneous response had lifted a weight from her. But she knew the brief space that had opened would fill up with the exhaustion and anxiety that she lived with every minute. Except for this one. Yes, it’s a start, she thought.

  She sat down in an armchair and looked at the magazines on the coffee table. A piece of paper caught her eye – ‘An Introduction to Wellbridge House’ – as it peeped out from under copies of the daily papers. She reached for it under the pile and found an A4 stapled copy of what was an information leaflet. It was dog-eared and crumpled, and the front page was covered in rings from careless cups and mugs. It contained text about the place and colour photos of the exterior, the grounds and one or two of the rooms. On the cover was a photo of the friendly facade and front entrance of the country house. She flipped open the first page and began to read. The leaflet told her about the history of the place. She gathered that there was something idealistic about its origins. There was a candid quality to the writing and by the end she found herself impressed and reassured. An interest in where she was began to grow. As she came to the end of the leaflet, Tess was even more impressed that any institution that could write in such a way about itself must be worth something and it was this and her liking for Mark that were slowly shaping her attitude to the place. She was becoming quietly enthused and hopeful.

  *

  Sitting at the lunch table sometime later Tess was drawn into a one-sided conversation with Judith, who had been the first to smile at her the day before, after she had arrived.

  “How are you finding Wellbridge?” she asked. “Getting used to being here yet? It takes a while. Well, it took me a while. Have you found everything you need, like the laundry room? I guess you must have been shown the ground floor, I know I was when I arrived. The laundry room is at the back of the house, behind the kitchen. I suppose they told you that you have to do your own washing and ironing. It’s part of the rehab.”

  It seemed very homely to Tess as Judith talked about domestic things like washing and ironing. She had always paid attention to chores at home; it made her feel as if she had her feet on the ground and that she lived in an ordered domestic world. Comforting too was the fact that Judith seemed unrattled by her lack of response, but then it was already known by her fellow residents that she did not speak, that she had not spoken during her trial nor at any time since. She was the object of curiosity, evoking sympathy in some and antagonism in others, and she was unmoved by either reaction. She nodded briefly at Judith, the same nod that she had delivered to Mark and just that slight inclination of the head made her feel good.

  As the days went by Tess watched each one of her fellow inmates and began to feel that this was where she belonged. This was home. The professional care of the staff had a warmth to it and she found a peace that relaxed her in the old house with its airy bedrooms and large comfortable common room, its echoing dining room next to the kitchen that provided nourishing, palatable food. She had no worries, no responsibilities. Her days were structured, times allocated for each activity from the time she woke until the time she went to bed. She slept better than she could ever remember sleeping. She felt no impulse to go back over the details of her crime, nor did it seem to be expected of her. Anyway, she could no longer remember clearly what had happened. Here there was no past, no future. She lived only in the present.

  *

  After her first week at Wellbridge House she attended her beginning-of-the-week meeting with Mark.

  “How do you feel you’re getting on, Tess? You seem to be settling down well and meeting other people here. I have good reports from your group leaders.” He spoke to her as if his conversations with her were two-way. She liked him all the more for it.

  “You seem to be finding your feet and to be especially drawn to the garden. Ted’s told me you’re a methodical worker and that you seem to know a lot about gardening.” He paused in case she made a reply. Instead she looked at him across the space between them.

  “Well,” he carried on, “now you’ve settled into Wellbridge we’re going to start you with your personal one-to-one therapy. You’ll be working with one of our therapists, Evelyn Doyle, and you’ll meet her tomorrow at eleven o’clock.”

  He told Tess more: that she would be meeting with her twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursday at that time and the meetings would take place in counselling room 3 on the first floor at the back of the building. Mark would show her up part of the way tomorrow and that she was to meet him here at 10.55am. After that she would be expected to find her own way there. She would be expected to be on time. She was not to go early or late but at eleven o’clock. The sessions would last fifty minutes. He’d see her tomorrow.

  After Mark had shown her out, Tess walked slowly to th
e common room mulling over what she had just been told. She felt a curious vibration in her stomach, pleasant but unsettling and unfamiliar, as if she were anticipating something positive. She wondered what Evelyn Doyle would look like and conjured up the picture of an elderly greying woman with glasses and hippy clothes. Why this image? she thought. She pushed open the door of the common room and headed for the trolley. She helped herself to biscuits, a cup of coffee from the coffee thermos jug, and sat down sideways on a window seat looking out over the garden. She could see the gardener cutting the grass at the front with his sit-on mower and tried to empty her mind of tomorrow’s development, of Evelyn Doyle. She wondered how she would really look.

  Chapter 3

  Evelyn Doyle had worked at the unit for ten years. She was not plain and greying but middle-aged, fair-haired with some indications of grey, smartly dressed in professional-looking clothes and she carried a leather briefcase. Driving to Wellbridge House on Tuesday morning, she was reviewing her professional life silently to herself along the leafy lanes that she travelled to her place of work. She found the beauty of the countryside generally stimulated inner reflection. She was thinking that she was dedicated to her patients (sometimes too dedicated) and to the work of recovery and healing that she pursued, she believed, with integrity and commitment. She found satisfaction in her dedication, which few outside the walls of Wellbridge House would ever know about or recognise.

  Counselling is a secret and secretive profession (it felt unhealthily so at times but crucial). The outside world would never know about the miniscule changes and transformational breakthroughs that some of her patients went through in their sessions. She took satisfaction in the slow ebbing of anxiety that some of them enjoyed from their work together. That would be enough reward in itself, she thought. She was saddened and moved by those who were at times too damaged to benefit from their work or even from their sometimes necessarily silent time. She had come to terms years ago with the fact that many patients never recovered enough to lead an independent life. Evelyn Doyle knew the harm that people can do to people and she knew that the damage that many of the women at Wellbridge House had suffered was done long before their destructive behaviour threatened society.

  I’m a carer, she thought to herself as she drove into the staff car park at the back of the building and let herself out into a warm spring morning. It was a recognition that still did not always sit easily with her. She knew the pitfalls of it. She knew the suffering of those she worked with because she herself had suffered, although usually not as badly as those she encountered in her work had suffered. Sometimes I take myself too seriously, she thought to herself and she smiled to herself as she entered the back door of Wellbridge House and walked towards the therapists’ office, leather briefcase in hand. The briefcase contained the report written by DI Ann McKenzie about Tess Dawson.

  To start with, she continued her train of thought, she was sensitive, a prerequisite for therapeutic work. She had been sensitive as a child and she had been called hypersensitive by her mother. Perhaps that was so but the problem for her was that it was always said as a criticism, as if sensitivity were a problem, something to be overcome. In the emotional roughness of her family life her feelings had never been considered. In fact, to all intents and purposes, her feelings were an inconvenience that had to be either ignored or overcome.

  In her family she knew instinctively from any early age that an inner life was seen as a problem to be exchanged for striving and achievement in the outer world. An inner life was not seen as a repository for the riches and treasures of the imagination and the creative spirit but an obstacle to be subjugated to the will. She half-wondered why this particular train of thought had intruded this morning, and distracted herself by opening her briefcase and finding the file on Tess Dawson. She would be seeing her for the first time this morning and she had only a short time to read the background information. Last night she had been much too tired to absorb new information. Not that she placed much importance on briefing files, except for the objective facts they contained. She focused on the file and read:

  Name: Tess Dawson (no middle name)

  Date of birth: 5th February 1975. Age: 31

  Place of birth: Faversham, Kent

  Parents: Irene and William Dawson. Her mother works in a baker’s shop in Faversham and her father is a salesman. Her mother and father separated about twenty years ago but still live about ten miles apart near the town. Neither has been particularly interested in the fate of their daughter. Both had expressed disapproval about what has happened, that Tess had a child that was now dead and that the circumstances in which she had died were unknown. They both referred to the child as ‘it’ rather than ‘she’.

  Reading between the lines, it seemed that DI Ann McKenzie was dismayed by their indifference and upset that both parents had called the dead child ‘it’ rather than ‘she’. The fact that she had recorded this rather gave it away. Ann McKenzie had clearly found it difficult not to show her deep annoyance when she recorded that:

  The mother’s disinterest had overflowed into callous criticism and scathing judgements about her daughter’s inability to lead a normal life. She had, she said, had to rescue her several times from the consequences of her own inept actions. Her daughter was not capable, she said, of leading an ordered and organised life. She expressed the opinion that it was probably better that the child had died as Tess would have been incapable of looking after her properly. In fact Tess had amply demonstrated that fact because the child had died. In my view Irene Dawson is a study in cold detachment and criticism.

  Evelyn Doyle was struck by the increasingly scathing quality of the DI’s observations and impressions and found herself reflecting on her own mother. Her client notes did not usually send her off into a personal reverie but she found Ann McKenzie’s notes evocative so she decided to go with the flow. Was her mother as damaging as Tess’s was? She thought not, not as critical certainly, different in her harmfulness. She considered why. Evelyn had always had difficulty in apportioning responsibility for her unhappy family on her mother. Even now, years after her mother’s death, she felt protective. Although she felt that she had come to terms with the destructive residue of her father and brother she found her mother’s psychological legacy more problematic. It was not black and white, and she found it harder to put her finger on how her mother’s psyche had impinged on her. Her mother had been essentially passive and rebellious at the same time, urging retaliation against Evelyn’s father on the young Evelyn in the form of silent insubordination and defiance.

  It was her mother’s insecurity that encouraged her to make Evelyn her proxy. Evelyn could get away with things that she herself could not and her mother took pleasure in watching the undermining of the Tyrant by her daughter. There was no comeback on her that way. On the contrary, Evelyn, when she was young and before adolescence, could get away with murder, even making her father smile or laugh at her rebellious antics and ploys. She enjoyed the complicity of her father and the covert rewards and congratulations of her mother. Both led to a growing nascent belief that relationships were to be manipulated to reconcile opposing forces and win the approval of both her parents. Evelyn had no idea as a child what either hidden agenda was, leading to second-guessing and confusion. Relationships were unfathomable and rooted firmly in anxiety and insecurity for her. She had only the slightest inkling of this at the time, except for a certain constant discomfort and tension, and years later, when she had realised that honesty was the best policy, she began to unravel the complex network of jumbled communications, double messages and deceptions that had been hard-wired into her brain.

  Evelyn extricated herself from her personal associations and read on, although she noted to herself that she was now in full analytic mode. She then counselled herself about the dangers of muddling up her prospective client and herself.

  During my visit to William Dawson he volunteered very little by way of background information. He e
xpressed some regret that his daughter had not made the most of her abilities, that she had a degree from a good red brick university but that he had no idea what she had done since graduating. This meant that William Dawson had known nothing of his daughter’s life for the last ten years. When I asked him why he knew so little about his own child he replied that having children had not been his idea and that he had never been close to either his son or his daughter. It turned out that neither did he know where his son Stephen was. He disclosed that he and his wife had separated when Tess was ten and Stephen twelve (he appeared not to be sure of this). He and Irene have never divorced.

  Evelyn Doyle reflected here that there had been no final act of schism between the parents, always a problem for children. She began thinking about her own father, who had been an engineer who had probably fled to engineering as a means of controlling his inner demons and terrors, with tools and electronics and blueprints for machines that did important things in the fields of medicine and of early micro-circuitry. Evelyn reminded herself how, at the relatively young age of thirteen, she had secretly vowed that she would escape the narrow, sometimes cruel and insensitive world of her family and find a way out of her unhappy life. She had not imagined then that she would become a counsellor and psychotherapist working with disturbed and distressed people in a penal institution. By that age she had some inkling that all was not well, that her life was not conducive to health and happiness. She knew something was badly wrong. Once she realised and accepted that, she was on the road to recovery, but it took ten more long years before she could more fully articulate how wrong and find out what could be done about it.