Becoming Tess

by H K Thompson

  “In that case, Alun, you will have to come and interview her. I will, of course, make arrangements for that if you’d like me to, and give you any other assistance you need.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the phone line. She sensed that he had relented just a little. Perhaps he had thought better of the impatience and frustration he had shown to her, of the pressure to pursue his inquiry that he had applied. Perhaps it was because she had stopped resisting that he said:

  “I don’t want to do this anymore than you don’t want me to. I’ll talk to my Superintendent and see what leeway there is. Perhaps it can be delayed. I don’t know. Maybe your therapist can make some progress and this Tess Dawson agrees in the end to talk to us. But this isn’t open-ended, it can’t be.” He paused, assessing the situation and continued: “For what it’s worth I don’t think that a woman alone could have done what was done to Dawson. I think it was a methodical and probably professional attack. I think whoever did it went there deliberately to do it. But I do want to know what your girl was doing there and what she knows about what happened.”

  “That’s absolutely fair enough. Let me know what the outcome is.”

  “Yes, of course I will, as soon as I can. All I can realistically hope for is that we’ll get a delay for two or three weeks. That’s all.”

  “That’s great. I can’t say that’ll be long enough but who knows. How long is a piece of string? I’ll let the Director know and her therapist. She’ll be relieved. Thanks, Alun.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  There was a tone as the mobile disconnected and Ann hung up her phone. Next she had to liaise with Evelyn and the Director. She picked up her phone again, looked up a number and stabbed Peter Archer’s into the keypad. The phone rang and was answered immediately.

  “Archer,” came the terse reply.

  “Hello, it’s Inspector McKenzie. I’m calling as a follow-up to our last meeting.”

  “Oh hello, Inspector. Good of you to call. I take it you’ve spoken to Dyfed-Powys Police.” He was on the ball.

  “Yes, I have, to Inspector Alun Davies, the officer responsible for the inquiry. He was rather frustrated that Tess Dawson had nothing to say to me. After a conversation about the interview he’s said that he’ll talk to his Superintendent about giving us some time to see if Tess will talk to Mrs Doyle about her presence in her brother’s cottage, and whether she’ll agree to pass on that information to the police. He’s agreed to do nothing for two or three weeks but he has to see whether his Superintendent will accept that. I told him that I didn’t think Tess was capable of violence or murder and he seemed to have thought that himself. Nevertheless there is a procedure that has to be followed.”

  “I think he’s being very tolerant. If I were in his position I’m not sure I would have given you any time.”

  It was like a predictable slap in the face. The tone was suddenly churlish and bad tempered. She placed her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered loudly to herself, “You bastard”. At least she knew where she stood. She summoned up her civility and patience and said:

  “We’re very fortunate to have such an understanding officer.”

  She was thinking now about how Peter Archer would deal with the Board when it met to discuss this new turn of events. She concluded that he could easily take a stand against Tess staying at Wellbridge House. He shared the view that Tess Dawson was manipulative which brought with it a growing antipathy towards her and to her case. His prejudice against this young woman could eventually sink her chances of finding a constructive way through her situation, of taking full advantage of the opportunities she now had. He would subvert her chances of making a successful return to a life beyond the walls of Wellbridge House. Ann McKenzie was alert to this possibility and she in turn must alert Evelyn. Peter Archer had the power to sway opinion and she was convinced he would try and do exactly that with the Board. She continued:

  “I would be happy to inform Mrs Doyle.”

  “No, I’ll do that personally,” he said, putting her firmly in her place.

  “OK,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  She replaced the receiver. Collecting her thoughts after the skirmish she phoned the Wellbridge House number and asked for Evelyn Doyle. She was found and took the call in the empty staff room. Sitting in her favourite and the only comfortable chair she heard Ann McKenzie’s voice with a smile.

  “Hello,” she said. “Nice to hear from you. What’s new?”

  “I’m actually rather annoyed and a bit worried,” the Inspector said.

  “What’s happened? Things didn’t go well with Dyfed-Powys?”

  “They went fine, actually. No. I’ve just come off the phone with your Director, that’s why I’m annoyed and worried. Alun Davies is pretty confident that he can give us, or rather you, some time, maybe two or three weeks, to talk to Tess before he will have to come and question her himself. I don’t think he’ll be as patient and sympathetic as I’ve been. Archer, in my view, has made it very clear that he’s tiring of what I think he considers to be Tess’s manipulative behaviour and he’s beginning to feel fed up with Tess and he probably won’t support her staying at the unit.”

  There was a pause from Evelyn. She was considering the implications of what Ann McKenzie was saying. She had never heard her so exasperated and ruffled. What was more, everything she said about what Peter Archer was thinking was probably true. It had only been a matter of time before he came to the end of his limited tolerance. Now Tess was exposed because of her decision not to talk.

  “I see. You sound upset and I can understand why you do. I think you’re almost certainly right about Peter Archer. It was only ever a matter of time before he became impatient with Tess. If you’re right then the Board meeting that’s coming up is rather important. I will ask to attend, which I don’t usually do. I’m allowed to but I prefer to keep my boundaries clear.”

  “I’d feel a lot happier if you did,” Ann interjected.

  “The thing is, it’s very easy to read Tess’s silence as one long manipulation and the Board just might read it in that way too if Peter Archer encourages them to, although I do think that would be out of character. I can understand Archer not wanting to go out on a limb for Tess. She makes him angry. I’ll have to make the case as to why she must be allowed to proceed on her current course. That’s not too difficult.” Evelyn paused before continuing. “And there’s another thing here, Ann. Therapy can’t fix things. It doesn’t work overnight and it doesn’t work to a timetable. It works at its own pace. That’s what I’ll fight for. In the end I hope we get the result we’d all like. You see, expectations can induce resistance and a sense of failure in the patient. It has to take the time it takes. Tess is willing and that’s our one real advantage.”

  “I hope so. Keep me in touch. And thanks for your reassuring words. I think I’m a little too involved. Don’t ask me why, I just am.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you can still do your job.”

  “OK. We’ll speak soon. Bye.”

  “Bye, Ann.”

  They both hung up and Ann stared blankly at her desk full of paper and a computer screen which told her of the twenty-nine emails in her inbox. She groaned, pushed herself up from her chair and left her office in search of a drink. When she returned with tea her phone rang. She picked it up and was surprised to hear the voice of Alun Davies again.

  “I’ve spoken to my boss and she’s OK about you having some more time at your end. She took it in her stride, didn’t seem to be that important to her. So, take some more time and I won’t come back to you until she gives me a nudge. It’ll almost certainly be after Christmas and New Year now. Can’t see it happening before. That OK?”

  “That’s great. Thanks so much, Alun. You’ve been a star. Goodbye.”

  Ann McKenzie felt a small weight lifted from her shoulders. Between them, Evelyn and Alun had made her job seem possible again and her anxiety about Tess eva
porate. She opened her inbox and scanned its contents, settling down for the long haul.

  Chapter 11

  It was true to say that, by now, the sessions were the centre of Tess’s life. She had a strong sense that she was moving forward. At her following scheduled session time she arrived on time at the therapy room door and entered at the second she was due, nodding in greeting to Evelyn and taking up her position on the chair, head inclined down to the rug, deep in concentrated thought.

  “I want to tell you about what happened in Wales with Stephen,” she began slowly.

  There was some hesitation, as if she were searching for the right approach, perhaps the right place to begin. Tess looked up momentarily. Evelyn, who had been intently watching emotions pass across Tess’s face as she spoke, met her look and inclined her head slightly to the left in mildly quizzical encouragement. She smiled faintly and Tess continued after some moments thought, set on her starting point.

  “My mother had written to me that she thought Stephen was in some kind of trouble and that she wanted me to go to West Wales and see what was going on. He’d had nothing to do with her for ages before that, but he’d phoned her out of the blue last February. She was worried because he was incoherent. She thought he was on drugs and that he was in trouble because of them. I said no, straight away, without thinking. I was horrified at the idea, at seeing Stephen drugged and unpredictable and at the thought of driving all that way in the winter. I would have been hard pushed to find the money for diesel let alone any accommodation if I had to stay to find him. I told her this and she tutted that someone of my age couldn’t pay for her own diesel or for a B&B, but in the end she put so much pressure on me that I agreed very reluctantly, and she said she’d send some money straight away. She did. I took some time off the job I was doing. I told them there was a family problem that I had to deal with and they were quite helpful. They gave me a week unpaid.”

  Evelyn listened to Tess’s even, matter-of-fact account of the story. What seemed important so far was that Tess’s mother had coerced her into doing something she hadn’t wanted to do. Perhaps she had felt duty-bound, morally obligated to her mother to run such an errand. Perhaps her sense of obligation came from a distant echo of sisterly concern that a young sibling could feel for another who might be in trouble. There was, perhaps, a touching and irrational loyalty to mother and brother that got the better of Tess’s weak sense of herself and poor judgement about what was good for her and what was not. It seemed that she had responded like a cajoled child, unable to resist the pull and push of the manipulative Irene. As it had ever done, the possible proximity to her brother by giving in to her mother would place her in peril. She had agreed to a meeting with her brother that would probably take her back to the disturbing relationship she had had with him throughout her childhood and teens. Evelyn listened with a sense of foreboding as the story continued, evenly and factually. So far there was little obvious emotion. At the moment Tess needed to feel in control. Evelyn listened.

  “I left for West Wales about four days later. I had another conversation with my mother who said she’d phone me and let me know whatever she could find out about where he actually was. She told me she’d found a postcard that had views of a place called Newport. It wasn’t the big Newport in South Wales but one on the Pembrokeshire coast. She thought he was living somewhere near there because he’d once mentioned the sea and a river estuary and the hill behind the town and he’d made a strange joke about it that she hadn’t understood. She’d been worried about him then, too. I asked her if that was all the information she had and she said yes, very impatiently, as if I was a fool for asking.” Tess paused again.

  Evelyn was thinking that Tess might be half-reflecting on the churlishness of her mother’s response and that she might even be realising just how selfish and demanding her mother had been. She had achieved some distance on her story by telling it out loud. This was often an effective way of seeing something familiar for what it really was. It could lead to an important insight that might rattle an outdated set of beliefs that were too embedded to be seen clearly in the usual course of events. Evelyn hoped this might be the case. There had been a small but bright spark of anger at her mother for thinking her a fool. Evelyn was encouraged. She said:

  “You seem angry that your mother could think you a fool.”

  Tess thought for a moment then said, “Perhaps,” paused and carried on, hardly registering the intervention, intent on her narrative. Perhaps, Evelyn thought wryly, she is telling me not to interrupt.

  “It wasn’t a lot to go on. Newport, a river and a hill. I left early on the next Wednesday morning. I had to be back at work on the following Wednesday but I wasn’t intending to be away that long. I thought that if I went there, looked around but couldn’t find him I would just tell my mother I tried but didn’t succeed. She wouldn’t like that but I’d have done what she asked me. I thought that I needed a break anyway and Wales sounded nice so I sort of made it feel better that way.”

  “It sounds as if you needed to justify what you were doing against your will. Did acting as if you were doing it for your own benefit make it seem better, easier?” Evelyn asked, picking up the self-deception that subtly undermined Tess’s strength and confidence.

  Tess looked up. She looked surprised, as if she had been taken unawares, with her guard down. A flash of anger crossed her face followed immediately by a look of intense shame. She said:

  “You’re probably right.” She paused. “And that strikes me as sad and pathetic. That I couldn’t stand up to my mother so I had to make excuses. At my own expense.”

  By the end of her sentence she sounded exasperated and impatient, as if she were judging her own weakness harshly.

  “I wasn’t strong enough just to admit I’d been manipulated by my mother and move on and not go to Wales, because she would have made me feel guilty for not going. That has happened so often in my life. I hate the fact that I keep on doing it.”

  “Now you’ve seen what you do more clearly and perhaps next time you won’t have to repeat it,” Evelyn replied.

  “I really hope so,” Tess said vehemently.

  She paused as if to catch her breath and release herself from the feeling of self contempt. After a minute or two she felt ready to continue with her story:

  “Anyway…I left, that’s right, on the Wednesday, early. I thought it would take me about four hours to get there. I’d decided to cross the middle of Wales by the old Drovers Road from near Llanwrtyd, over to Tregaron. It took me ages to get to the road. Wales is bigger than you think and when you leave the main road north to south the roads are twisting and round-the-houses. I thought I’d get to the coast at Aberaeron and then drive down past Cardigan to Newport. Because I turned the trip into a sort of holiday (she smiled with self-recognition at Evelyn) I thought it would be good to really see the countryside and take my time. I hadn’t been away for ages.

  Anyway, it took me a long time to get to the turn for the Drovers Road and then it was a twisting and turning drive, up and down and around, through some glorious wild countryside that no one ever sees. All the way over the Cambrians – the high hills that run down the middle of Wales – I didn’t meet one car or even a tractor. At one point the road runs alongside a river down at the bottom of a small valley and I pulled off the road and walked down to the water. It was cold and still and the sun was out and the grass was brown. It looked muted and subtle and wild. There was a buzzard that flew low over the top of me as I climbed the hill back to the car. I felt so liberated, Evelyn, as if I’d escaped from my life and from myself and I was on the run from everything familiar to me. It felt good. I kept the thought of seeing my brother at bay. I ate my sandwich that I’d brought with me and drank a carton of juice and listened to the radio and sat by the road watching nature. I remember the peace of that moment so vividly, as if it were yesterday. I don’t know how long I stayed there but it was a while and then I drove on. I can remember coming over th
e brow of a hill and seeing a red telephone box right there in the middle of nowhere and smiling at the sight of it. I wondered if anyone ever phoned from that box and when the last person had and why. It probably doesn’t even still work but there would be no mobile reception there, in that remote place, so perhaps it did, just in case someone’s car broke down.”

  Tess paused, as if realising that she had wandered onto a byway and her narrative was beckoning.

  “I came to the end of the Drovers Road, down a long valley that ended up more or less in the square in Tregaron. By that time it was lunchtime and I was hungry again even after the sandwich. I parked and found a cafe and had sausage and chips and a cup of tea. I bought a Kit Kat and walked back to the car eating it. It was so delicious. I felt suspended in a moment of sheer contentment. I looked into the window of a shop that sells Welsh gold and was lost in a dream of beautiful things.

  I got back to the car and looked at the map. The route from Tregaron to Aberaeron is twisty and not easy to follow and by this time it was one o’clock and I was beginning to wonder whether I’d make Newport by the time it was dark. I had nowhere to stay and it had dawned on me that I’d need daylight to find where Stephen lived, let alone find a B&B or a hotel. That would take time too. So I started to get a bit anxious and I wanted to get to the coast. Then I knew it would be a straight run south along the coast road. No more twists and turns. As for finding somewhere to stay, it was mid-week so I was sure I’d find a room somewhere. People go to the coast at the weekends during the winter, not during the week.”