by Don Boyd
She passed a slip of paper with a telephone number. “Is this correct?”
Margot nodded. “Yes, that’s right. That’s my number; he left a message for me yesterday… Dead? Who are they?” Margot’s heart beat faster.
“He didn’t say, but he has this crazy thing that this may be a double suicide? Romeo and Juliet.” Elvira loved a good drama.
“Suicide? I only have three young English boys and none of them are likely suicides. I would have known. I can’t even guess.”
“We can never know what is going on in the minds of the young. Even you, my sweet Americana.”
Margot was used to her friend’s simple aphorisms. She didn’t bother to follow that line of philosophical enquiry, and whatever Elvira was going to say, she was not going to change her mind. None of the three English boys Margot treated would have had the guts to kill themselves, let alone in any form of pact with their girlfriend. And only one of them had a girlfriend and Robert was her only client whose suicidal tendencies ever came to her small, tidy room. And Tilly, of course, but so long ago.
Margot stood up abruptly and gave Elvira an affectionate hug.
“Tell Carlos I am looking forward to seeing him, that I will see him earlier, or whenever he wants me to be free. He knows where my office is. And you can tell him that I am absolutely certain that he has a murder on his hands. Not suicide.”
Robert was sitting on the last step at the top of the stairs that led to her studio. Tears streamed down his face as he lumbered up to welcome Margot, and he fell into her arms like a child. The telephone was ringing in her office as she gently pushed him aside while she fumbled for her keys.
“Robert, Monday is your morning. Today is Wednesday.” But she knew why he was there.
“Paulo and Domatilla are dead!” he bleated. “Paulo and Domatilla seem to have killed themselves!”
Margot dropped her bag and stared at him incredulously. Elvira’s information had been correct. If it hadn’t been Robert imparting the news, she wouldn’t have believed it.
She didn’t want to believe it.
“Paolo and Tilly? What do you mean by ‘seem’? There is absolutely no way that those kids would have killed themselves.”
Margot resumed the process of finding the keys, emptying the entire contents of her bag onto the cold stone floor. No keys. She sat down. Robert knelt down and picked a set of keys from the debris.
“How? Maybe this is a grotesque mistake?… Who told you?”
“A policeman rang the news desk at the magazine early on and then I rang Hugo. He was still at the hospital.” Robert seemed to be so informed.
The answer-phone had clicked into action but the ‘phone rang again within seconds. Margot led the way across the small corridor which she used as a waiting room and ignored the black, old-fashioned telephone beckoning her from the beautiful sixteenth-century Italian writing bureau which dominated the high-ceilinged studio – the desk had been a thirtieth birthday present from Archie. She drew the green chintz curtains which divided the studio in half, and sat down in her Eames chair – Margot’s psychiatric throne. Her face had drained of colour.
“Paulo and Domatilla?”
Robert sank into the deep and comfortable orange armchair opposite, her client’s refuge, as she finally answered the telephone. It was an unfamiliar voice and she hesitated.
“Who is this, please?” And then she realized; it was Elvira’s husband. “Carlos! How silly of me! Buenos dias, Carlos!”
She listened and then reached for her diary.
“Of course you can. I can be free at five o’clock this evening but I have another client at six… yes. Domatilla, too… was… Five o’clock? OK. Five! See you this evening, Carlos. Adios.”
She dangled the handset in her hand for a few seconds, replaced it abruptly and wrote a note in her diary.
“I am so sorry about this, Robert… I am not sure I can go on with this. And I know how much Tilly meant to you. They were very special. Therapists are not supposed to have favourites but they were like that for me.”
“I know what they both meant to you, and Archie, of course…”
Robert stared at her for two minutes without uttering a sound. She stared back.
Margot was used to these pauses. On a couple of occasions Robert seemed to be almost asleep. His eyelids dropped and he seemed to be in a trance. Today she lost her usual concentration. She was absolutely devastated by the news about Paolo and Domatilla. She had grown to love them in the way that parents do. Margot and Archie had decided not to have children, and Paolo and Tilly were as close as it came to a substitute.
Robert broke out of his trance. He shot up rather abruptly, kissed her and hurried out like a recalcitrant schoolboy who had been spared a punishment. Margot continued to stare at the empty orange armchair.
Ethical questions inevitably arise, especially when death interrupts the psychiatric relationship. For instance, do members of kith and kin have any rights of access to the notes and records of every session? I have always been clear about this issue. These are secret while my patient is alive and they will remain secret when they are dead or stop coming. Barring the period proscribed by law, I usually destroy all my notes as soon as I can, and have only made exceptions when there has been a clinical or academic reason to write up a case study. All good therapists keep their records carefully locked away and disguise the identity of their clients if they present a case publicly in order to protect their anonymity. But what am I going to do about the Spanish police? They have obviously come to the wrong conclusions, and what if they have a killer on the loose?
The clients’ right to confidentiality is a vital element of all good psychotherapeutic practises but do I have a conflict when crime is involved? Professional ethics and the law in the US put the onus on us to inform on any harmful intentions we might know about. But this is not the situation here. Technically, the police here have absolutely no rights to my notes. And, anyway, Tilly is a British subject which makes it even more complicated, legally.
Robert rushed off. Not his usual style. Maybe he feels somewhat responsible?
To say that Margot found it difficult to concentrate on her work that day would have been a ludicrous understatement. She paced around her tiny studio. She washed her hands a couple of times. She sat silently in her patients’ chair. She turned the radio on and off. She closed the shutters only to open them a couple of minutes later. This would have been one of the two days that she would have seen Domatilla and tried to review the numerous, detailed notes she had written about Tilly. She nearly broke down on a couple of occasions.
Only two ‘phone calls came through. One from Archie – Robert had called and asked him to break the news to Tarquin. His broken, baffled voice finally provoked the inevitable cascade of tears. She sobbed like a child. While she tried to recover, he told her that Paolo’s funeral had been rather hastily arranged for Friday morning and that he was going to pick up Tilly’s parents at the airport that day. He had offered to shepherd them around. Margot asked him if there was anything she could do to help – book a hotel, or arrange a driver? Archie seemed to have taken care of most of the necessary arrangements. He suggested that she should out of courtesy call Hugo and Eusebio. Archie, as always, so wise and sensitive.
She hung up on him, very reluctantly. She was trying to control herself. And then Laura called, a very brusque Englishwoman who demanded to see her urgently. Margot slightly reluctantly made an appointment for an exploratory meeting at midday the following day. She had another simple rule about her roster of patients. She would only take someone on if she felt that they genuinely needed her kind of simple analysis. She also insisted on their commitment to the process of psychotherapy. They had to believe, at least at first, that the ensuing process with Margot as their psychotherapist, would eventually have a positive impact on their lives. Their commitment to the process had to be as earnest as hers would be to their well-being. She had no interest in anybody who just
wanted to use his or her time with her as an opportunity for any complicated emotional or psychological game. Women who merely wanted a diversion from the humdrum nature of their lives, or men who wanted to flirt and tease with a beautiful woman, were swiftly despatched or politely referred to other therapists. For this reason she had built up her limited but select range of clients with people who genuinely wanted her help and who could benefit from the years of her broad-based apprenticeship in the USA, which had included stints at shrines in her field at the University of Chicago and at the Chicago Institute of Psychotherapists. Most of these clients had been coming to see her for many months, and in some cases many years. She invested an intense, emotional commitment to her ‘patients’, as she sometimes called them, and could therefore only cope with, at the most, about a dozen at any given time. She tried to spread appointments evenly through the week, and in some cases she would see a patient two or three times a week. Most of them had been loyal and consistent and she reciprocated that with an intense sense of responsibility, bordering on obsession. She had been seeing Domatilla with Paolo for many months. Their relationship had become so important that Margot had imagined that Tilly would always have been part of her life. When it dawned on her that she would never see Tilly or Paolo again – she broke down and sobbed once more.
Her two clients that morning, a young mother of two called Audrey and an older businessman called Clive, spent most of their counselling time discussing the murders. It seemed that everyone in the world already knew something about them. Margot tried to discourage this but the ex-patriot community is so small and in terms of the analysis they were going through, their reactions proved useful. Thankfully, neither of them knew the extent of Margot’s relationship with Tilly or Paolo, although they probably knew she had been seeing Tilly as a client. Margot guessed that all their information was inaccurate hearsay, probably gleaned from the early editions of the Spanish newspapers and live newscasts on television that had been running lurid headlines about the way they had been found. Apparently, the police were still treating the incident as a ‘double suicide’, a fact which led to a serious discussion with Audrey about the nature of obsessive love.
Clive was more interested in Barcelona police procedures – apparently there had been some criticism. Why had the police not taken Hugo, Emma and Eusebio out to the scene of the crime? (There had been a genuine belief that Hugo might have been helpful psychologically – Tilly had still been alive when the bodies were discovered). Why were they releasing Paolo’s body so soon?
Margot refused to take fees from either client. She admitted that she herself had also been somewhat pre-occupied and less focused. To say the least. She had also been thinking about Xavier. She gingerly tapped his number into her ‘phone and then cancelled it. She left a message for Robert, thanking him for the opera ticket, (she had forgotten earlier), and asked him to call back before lunch. He returned her call during her session with Clive but he had gone out to lunch when she tried to reach him again. She also began to wonder why Robert had left their box at the opera house so suddenly.
Chapter Ten
Before Carlos arrived, Margot had time to look at her notes about Paolo. Clients’ notes were a strange medium. At college she had developed a style which served to record the vital clinical information she needed to help her satisfy her supervisor’s monitoring process, and at the same time helped her integrate a personal aide memoire. She smiled. At times they were so badly written, and read rather like an idiosyncratic, awkward school essay. At other times her cryptic, barely decipherable scribblings became the catalyst for the entire thrust of her therapeutic philosophy. One of her supervisors had teased her so much about this that she had stopped sharing them with anyone. In that sense they had became her intensely private diary.
Thinking back, she shouldn’t have agreed to see Paolo as a client in the first place. But rather like Robert, his arguments had been so forceful and charming. And he shared everything with Tilly.
“You are the only person Tilly trusts. There is nobody else!”
Nobody else was as qualified.
June 23rd 2008
Paolo ‘Lorca’ McAlpine - brought up in Seville. Father, older, Scottish merchant aristocracy. Killed in car crash. Mother (née Lorca, no relation of poet but much coveted family name), young, Spanish. Three husbands including McAlpine. Aged eight – packed off to a remote, second-rate (?) boarding school, Scotland. (Which one? Archie taught at one many years ago. Must ask him about this one day. He never mentions it.)
Tape recorder requested – his request.
Margot clicked the small tape recorder she occasionally used. She didn’t really like taping her sessions – certainly Freud and Klein would have disapproved, but she made the odd exception. In this case, Paolo had been vehement. For some reason, he had wanted his story documented in the way that he was going to tell it.
“Will you promise to make a transcript?” he begged.
A transcript somehow implied that one day somebody else should read it.
“This could destroy our secret bond, Paolo?”
Paolo laughed: “I don’t care!”
While I was hunting for a fresh tape, he explained that when he was a boy, Guy, his prep school housemaster who had doubled as his Spanish teacher, had mesmerised him.
Tape recorder (his request). Transcript of Paolo’s story about his Spanish teacher.
“I don’t feel ashamed anymore. I don’t feel any need to hide it all away now. I want to talk about it, talk about all of it, so that maybe somebody might learn from it. I want to move on, move on in my life, without a horrible secret which I haven’t sorted out. I want to cry about it. I want to love without feeling that I have to find and give good sex to be loved…”
“Sorry, Paolo, can you stop for a moment, please. I must check this recorder.”
Short break while I check that the machine is working properly. While I do this he tells me that he is in love with Tilly. And that Tilly has met Guy. Tape recorder his request. Notes for transcript: he talked slowly and fished for the words to describe everything.
“There I was, one of the more ‘fêted’, yes fêted specimens, of this ‘special’ Scottish institution. There I was, masquerading as a respectable recruit of Scotland’s establishment! Trussed up like a grouse hen in my weekday uniform – tweed jacket, blue serge shorts, red stockings, and on Sundays, in my Royal Stuart kilt, formal black dress jacket, tartan ‘trews’ and stiff, studded Eton collar piercing my neck. Superior? Elite? Privileged? This ludicrous fancy dress! We were forced to wear it. It summed up the hypocrisy. This idea that we were better than everyone else. We weren’t even allowed to talk to the local boys – they were called keelies.
“We loved him… Guy! I will call him Guy but that isn’t his real name. Spanish classes were like street theatre with him. He was a kind of brilliant leading man, master of ceremonies. We could only speak Spanish in his classes – he was very strict about this. We all had Spanish names – animal names. I was el mono (the monkey). As soon as he rounded the corner of the building near to his classroom, each class would burst into a Catalan song. This was the beginning of our favourite lesson of the week. This ditty started with the lyrics ‘Adeu petita rosa’ and we would elongate these syllables to be in time with his entrance into the classroom. He was like a king or a rock star. His open tweed jacket would sweep by our tiny wooden desks, his red neck scarf swishing by – ‘Rosa blanca del mati’ – I can still hum the tune.
“The first task of the day was a ritual he called ‘Las novas’ (the news or information of the day), which we would write in Spanish on the blackboard before he came in to the room. We would write, in Spanish always, the date, the weather, which we would copy from the BBC website which one of the richer boys found on his Mac (even then, we used email; only the needier kids walked around with handsets), and other, naughty schoolboy stuff: ‘el mono està en apuro’ would signal that I was in trouble and would be due a beating that d
ay; it was still legal then in private schools.
“All of us… eagerly… would wait for one special ritual Guy would perform every Spanish lesson. On reaching the top of the classroom, hands suggestively in his pockets as if he was feeling his balls, our tall, handsome, elegant profesor would call up one of the boys to the front and help him very slowly and sensually to rub out las novas, leaving certain letters on the board. We laughed so much: ‘FL’ would be picked out of the words now rubbed off the board: (French letter, which is apparently what he used to call condoms when he was at school) and then ‘ST’ elicited a gale of treble voiced hoots and giggles (sanitary towel), ‘VD’ equally a winner. Venereal diseases, even in post-Aids days, got huge laughs. As the blackboard was lowered to rub out these ‘infantile transgressions’ as he would call them, a long piece of wood propped there deliberately would fall to the floor for our leading man, our superhero to scoop up. This was ‘Carolina’, a crude sculpture of a naked woman, with breasts, red lips and a bushy vagina which had been clumsily carved onto the plank of wood with a penknife and coloured chalk. We were ten or eleven years old. We laughed without really knowing why and yet we somehow knew what this was all driving at.
“The first act of Guy’s performance would end with the boy who had been ‘naughty’ enough to leave the suggestive letters on the board receiving a very tame spanking in front of us – we loved this. He would be hugged for his spanking before walking proudly and glowingly back to his desk. I so wanted to be that boy. One of our handsome leading man’s chosen few. Guy was so good-looking, almost woman-like. Witty. Worldly. We were all lonely… precocious… impressionable… vulnerable… and pre-pubescent. We all wanted to be one of his special boys. Especially because he was the best… he was the best Spanish teacher in Britain, bar none.”
Lonely, precocious, vulnerable, pre-pubescent and more. He dug deep for those words. El mono’s parents were thousands of miles away in Seville. Unlike los otros animales, he didn’t hear from his parents by telephone, or e-mail or text messages; he couldn’t take advantage of Sundays out with Mum or Dad. El mono hardly received any letters – the mail was distributed on a table in the common room every morning after breakfast and he would scour the envelopes for a sign of the telltale aerogramme from Spain. No luck for the monkey. El mono was fortunately pretty good at games – this kept him apart from the bullied boys. He was as good at arithmetic as he was at Spanish, of course, and French, English and History. And he was desperate to be liked. El mono wanted a mother, a father, and a playmate. He wanted to be singled out. And so, of course, el mono wanted desperately to become one of “Guy’s” special boys.
