CHAPTER 6
IN THE OFFICE OF DOCTOR ECCLESTONE
The woman sitting behind the desk looked formidable, like the desk itself; solid, traditional and reliable. The angled plaque at the front of the desk, a short prism-shaped section of light oak inlaid with gold-leafed lettering resting on the edge of the blotter, read ‘receptionist’: In terms of expression and body language the woman behind the imposing mahogany barricade certainly wore the surly, no-nonsense look of a doctor’s receptionist well enough, even if her relative youth and fine-boned facial structure threatened to soften it. The stiff, rustling navy blue uniform, though, seemed more at home in a 1950s hospital drama than against the twenty-first century backdrop of a West End private practice, albeit one located in an imposing Edwardian mansion block.
But then, despite the modernised appearance of the building’s smoked glass entrance hall, and the updated elevator within, there was nothing at all incongruously modern about the backdrop here. Indeed, the medical office was decorated in a traditional older style, something of the flavour of a doctor’s surgery from the past; it quite reminded her of one of those ‘past times’ reconstructions one sometimes comes across on those worthy, but little watched (she imagined), television channels.
The architectural fireplace room provided the centrepiece, the gentle glow of the coal fire imbruing the place with a reassuringly relaxing and comfortable atmosphere despite the frosty woman’s presence. Glass-fronted mahogany bookcases ran around three of the walls, punctuated by the door through which she had entered and a couple of large bay windows spaced well apart in one of the end walls between which was a row of soft-backed leather upholstered chairs. A heavy deep brown Axminster covered the floor and looked to flow through into the room beyond the intimidating guardian receptionist, the one presently closed off from her curiosity and clearly the lair of her quarry - the woman’s name was emblazoned in black on an etched brass plate.
‘As bold as brass’ came to her mind and she suppressed a giggle, despite her nervousness - or was it perhaps because of it? Was she losing her nerve? And so soon? Why? Was it the way the woman looking her up and down? Was it the haughty disdain in the woman’s eyes, something in her educated, self-assured commanding tone? Just what was it, exactly, about this woman that seemed to be sapping her self-confidence? She was only a receptionist after all, she reminded herself - though not too convincingly she had to admit, even to herself. And now the woman was proffering her a chair, indicating the high-backed little wooden seat set before her desk - she’d better take a seat.
A door had been left ajar at the far end and now caught her eye - as observant as ever, she took care to mentally note all she could. Through it she could make out clinically white walls, greyish flooring, a white fronted cupboard supporting an old-fashioned silvery metal instrument steriliser tank and what looked to be a narrow leather top examination couch pressed up against the rear wall alongside it. A rail curving out from the wall above the couch supported a floor length dull green modesty curtain which, possessed of a plastic-like quality, was presently drawn back against the wall, forming a vertical roll of heavy pleated shadowy folds. A white clinician’s coat hung from a hook alongside the cupboard. More than that she couldn’t possibly see, and what it meant in the context of a psychologist or psychoanalysis’s practice she had no idea. But who could know what might constitute a clue?
A creaking sound to the side drew her attention from the woman in front of her. The uniformed receptionist glanced across over her shoulder, the woman’s deep blue eyes looking past, almost through her, as if she wasn’t there - or she just didn’t matter. She felt she should be annoyed at what she perceived as blatant, disdainful disrespect. In truth, though, she felt grateful for the excuse to take her eyes off the woman before whom she was now seated.
The chair she was presently occupying seemed so low in relation to the reception desk that she almost felt as if she were drowning in the roughened green expanse of its tooled leather-framed blotter. This, taken together with the woman’s cold, superior, attitude, somehow conspired in a way that was rapidly undermining her fortitude. In short; she was beginning to feel like a frightened rabbit caught unawares and defenceless out in the open and under the gaze of a most fearsome predator. And this was a white-capped, blue-uniformed predator that seemed increasingly to loom over her in a most ominous manner. She felt about ready to bolt for cover, if there were such a thing as ‘cover’, given the situation. The distraction, this creaking and rustling originating slightly to her rear and over to one side, was the next best thing. Becoming aware for the first time that she and the intimidating receptionist woman did not have the room to themselves she twisted slightly in her seat, turning her head to see what was happening.
Both her own and the receptionist’s eyes came to rest at the same time on a smart middle aged woman dressed in a navy and white polka dot silk blouse with a large bow of the same fabric tying at the throat, a tailored suit jacket and a matching tailored close-fitting navy cotton skirt. Her deep, lustered dark chestnut hair was pulled back in a bulky pile of swirls and twirls that literally shone under the wall lights that were mounted immediately above her head. A fox fur stole, draped lazily about her stylish if anachronistically padded shoulders and gazing sightlessly back at the onlookers, gave her a dated and slightly dusty aristocratic air.
Up to that point the woman’s face had been buried in a well-known society interior design magazine, her white gloved hands near silently turning the pages. When the woman glanced up from the pages and the woman’s beautifully made up eyes met hers, she felt herself blush. But her reddening cheeks were not so much triggered by meeting the woman’s gaze as much as from catching sight of the girl who was accompanying the woman and who was perched on the seat next to her. Whereas the woman was comfortably seated in one of the plush upholstered easy chairs the girl next to her was seated on a lower-standing plastic chair of the sort one might still find in a modern classroom her substantial haunches barely accommodated by the narrow curved and clearly uncomfortable seat.
So quiet had the girl been and so enrapt in her magazine had been the older woman, that, her attention immediately grabbed by the stern-looking receptionist, she had been completely unaware of the duo’s presence. It was a shock; it was as if she had walked in viewing the office through tunnel vision. So much for her much vaunted observational skills. She looked away quickly, not wanting to stare and embarrassed by the woman’s young companion’s blushes - no, embarrassed for the poor young thing’s blushes; either way she had no stomach for being complicit in deepening the young girl’s shame...
Young girl? Was she, really that young? She looked a little too well endowed for even the embarrassingly precociously developed young thing she first appeared. On closer examination the girl was almost buxom, in a plump, adolescent puppy-fat sort of way, and pretty-faced too, despite the merest hint of a double chin. Why... Incredibly enough the received impression - assuming one had a sufficiently refined eye for detail - was that under different circumstances and dressed differently the girl might easily have passed as being of her own age - or if younger, then only ever so slightly so. Nevertheless it took more than a double-take to discern even that much.
But she did possess a sufficiently refined eye for detail. Indeed she had taken in much through that fleeting window that exists between discreet inquisitiveness and embarrassing intrusiveness. She had watched as the seated well-to-do woman had glared a warning towards her fastidiously fidgeting charge, having first briefly acknowledged what had presumably been a nodding sympathetic smile from the receptionist with an odd sort of conspiratorial glint evident in her large hazel eyes.
As for the woman’s young companion, the shy-looking young thing seated awkwardly alongside her and who up to that moment had been staring fixedly down at her glossy patent Mary Janes: A flash of the most unfortunate teeth braces ever to see light of day in the modern age
had been the accompaniment to what had presumably been whispered words of apology. Presumably whispered as she had made out little beyond a hesitant, lisping stammer; presumably apologetic as the girl’s sullen, almost vacant face had in an instant become painted over with the most contrite, sheepishly crestfallen expression she had ever seen. ‘Crushed and defeated’ was the phrase that best came to mind; that was the perceived impression. The girl’s demeanour in that instant, she would have likened to a partially flowered rosebud trampled underfoot before ever having had the chance to open fully. The complexion too - at least until the cheeks had been set alight with embarrassment - had carried across that latter analogy. The girl’s complexion had appeared ghostly pale in the shadows thrown by the straw boater she wore perched low and squarely on her head. The perfectly unblemished skin appeared porridge-like and blanched like a plant shoot struggling out from beneath a stone having rarely bathed in as much as a single dawn’s rays. Her large round grey eyes were set innocently wide under naturally curling long lashes and had a sort of seriousness about them, a sense of innate intelligence residing somewhere behind them. And yet those undeniably pretty eyes had a sort of placid vagueness to them too, a guileless empty-headedness that seemed at odds with that innate intellect she felt sure was lurking there somewhere in the background.
This absentminded, glassy, soullessness in the girl’s eyes - coupled with a faintly worried quizzical aspect that almost hinted at fluster - seemed to tell of an individual who to some degree was permanently struggling for comprehension. Here was someone to whom, without guidance, the world was in danger of becoming a dizzyingly indecipherable puzzle. This was an impression that had been reinforced when just for an instant her eyes had met with those of the girl. She had observed the girl, hastily averting her eyes to stare fixedly down at the mirror-like finish of her bottle-green patent shoes, instinctively reach for the woman’s hand and the latter, accepting it reassuringly in her own gloved hand, patting it almost as if in praise... Yes, that was the impression; is if she were actually actively praising this painful display of embarrassingly cute shyness on the girl’s behalf, whereas it was a situation in which one might have expected some sort of encouragement to the contrary, some sort of encouragement to the girl to ‘open out’. It sort of beggared belief and she began the process of reassuring denial, of convincing herself of her misinterpretation of events and gestures, both.
From those patent shoes up she had had time to note prim white knee socks, trimmed around their tops by fussy threaded bottle green ribbons that emerged from the fine white ribbed fabric at either side to form prissy ribbons just below the girl’s knees. Then there came the impossibly pale alabaster-smooth, coltish legs that flowed flawlessly up and flared out into plumpish, puppy-fat thighs that were pressed defensively together against the unrequited exposure occasioned by a skirt hem that was clearly rendered embarrassingly brief when seated, even if it might have been entirely decent when standing.
She could hardly stifle her incredulity. She had thought the whole concept of school uniform was completely outdated. She hadn’t worn one at her sixth form college, as that establishment she had recently completed her last year of schooling in had been known, and certainly wouldn’t have expected to at her age, whatever the era. But it wasn’t just the concept that was outdated here; every aspect of styling was equally anachronistic. The way in which the girl was dressed belonged to a bygone era - and to a much younger age group. Much younger; indeed the outfit was positively infantile. There was no other word for it, unless that word was ‘humiliating’.
Fine polyester-knit fabric, a concoction of modesty, practicality and. longevity, vied with the sort of amply-starched pointless disciplined crispness that spoke loudly of petty rules and daft, irritating restrictions. Surely, she thought, the whole getup was practically tantamount to mental abuse. And yet she could sense nothing suggestive of pent-up rebellion in the girl’s demeanour, just a sort of submissive, compliant acceptance - malleable, childlike, matching the cow-like docility she could read in the girl’s eyes.
A full-circle bottle-green skirt of crisp sewn-in knife pleats, no longer than a traditional ‘games’ skirt, flared out from a broad waistband above which the one-piece garment opened out into a fitted pinafore bib-styled bodice, narrow at the waist and widening decidedly towards the shoulders. The latter lay half hidden beneath a rather twee open fronted, waist length cape.
Light grey and with a diagonally-striped bottle-green ribbon trim, the cape fastened at the neck where the two sides came together tied by a bow of bottle-green and white diagonally-striped ribbon and possessed, positioned halfway down one side, a large embroidered badge of some kind, some sort of motif or coat of arms surmounted by what looked like the name of an institution. The same design was echoed on an embroiled fabric shield that was attached to the front centre of the diagonally striped ribbon which in turn ran around the crown of the girl’s boater before terminating in the form of two long tails at the rear, these falling fully to the centre of the girl’s back.
She felt sure she had glimpsed the words ‘delinquent’ and ‘reform’ and even the word ‘psychiatric’. What the latter would have in connection with a school uniform seemed questionable. As the words ‘psychiatric hospital’ were staring at her from the glaring white plastic badge pinned on the breast pocket of the uniform dress of the buxom woman presently seated opposite her across the reception desk she decided that impression must have come from there.
The top of the pinafore-like bib came to little more than just above the girl’s breasts, producing the unsettling impression of an older girl somehow squeezed into a much younger girl’s undersized cast-offs, even though it clearly fitted perfectly, to the point of seemingly having been tailored to the girl’s figure. The girl’s blouse was white with a vertical bottle-green stripe running through the fabric and seemed as crisp as cardboard. The latter possessed a high, stiff collar which was fastened cruelly tightly around the girl’s neck, a school tie of grey with diagonal stripes of bottle-green and gold running across it knotted primly at her throat.
The girl’s presumably long hair had been first plaited either side then tied off each side with a large light-grey bow formed of ribbon diagonally striped with bottle green and gold. The long plaits had then been wound up before being pinned at either side of her head with the bows at the centre of each coil.
It was as she returned her attention to the forbidding receptionist woman that a cut glass public-schooled accent coming from behind her back made her veins freeze over. It was only a quietly hissed admonishment, followed by an intriguingly brief interchange, but it was that it was issued at all that that was so disturbing - whatever did it mean?
“Stop fidgeting dear and sit up straight... Whatever is the matter now, child?”
“Please Miss...” A scraping chair buried the given name below audibility “...I need to go to the... loo...” The voice was uncertain, hesitant and infected with a lisp that threatened coherence and left her wondering if the impediment wasn’t linked to those teeth braces she’d glimpsed near filling the girl’s mouth.
“Lavatory”, the woman corrected, and somewhat unnecessarily tersely, she thought.
“Lavatory”, the girl quietly dutifully repeated in that awkwardly lisping voice of hers. “I, I, I need to go to the l, l, lavatory...” A sort of slurping sibilant wetness had crept in to the girl’s speech now, as if she were sucking excess saliva between her teeth. She sounded as if she were about to quite literarily die of embarrassment as once again she was cut off mid-sentence.
“Wipe your mouth, child... with your hanky, child, you’re dribbling again... look; you have drool all trickling down your chin. Can’t you feel it?” There came a muffled, mumbled protestation of some sort from the girl, which she was unable to make out, before the woman went on: “Well, why haven’t you got your handkerchief with you?” she hissed. It’s part of your school uniform; i
t is to be kept neatly folded in the pocket sewn into your knickers for that very purpose - that is the rule.” Whatever the reply it was inaudible, but it clearly irritated the woman: “If you are so worried about showing your knickers you shouldn’t talk so much, should you? You know you always dribble when you speak. It’s the fault of those retainers fitted to your teeth - and if you’d looked after your teeth you wouldn’t be saddled with all that ugly iron work. Besides; as I understand it you were happy enough to flash your knickers at all and sundry before I took you in hand.”
There came a soft rustling accompanied by the plastic squeaking of a chair and what sounded like the rubbery snap of elastic before the woman’s self-assured voice reasserted itself over the unnerving quiet of the waiting room: “Dab it, child, don’t rub it all over your face like some street urchin with a rag you’ve just found in the gutter - dab your lips genteelly with the corners of the handkerchief... Now fold it neatly and tuck it back in its little pocket - come on, there’s only the receptionist watching and I’m sure she doesn’t want to stare at your knickers longer than necessary. Now you can smooth your skirt back down, spread out the pleats nice and neatly; I don’t want to see any creases when you get up, or there’ll be trouble. As for the lavatory: you know my rules regarding that. Your guardian says you are to be supervised at all times - that’s all times - and your guardian pays my wages. If you need the lavatory, you use it at home, where I can keep an eye on you, or not at all.
“But I, I need the, the... l, l, lavatory... urgently...” The girl’s voice was subdued, timid and pleading, as if on the edge of tears. It clearly cut no ice with her stern chaperone, governess or whoever the woman was accompanying her.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 2 Page 9
