Caroline laughed. “Of course not. In fact, I think I may have given you the wrong impression. He uses hand steriliser, you see, and is worried about handling coins, but I wouldn’t say he’s obsessed.”
Berthea raised an eyebrow. “Some degree of concern about germs is quite natural,” she said. “But, if you’ll forgive my saying so, your young man seems to be rather too concerned.” She hesitated for a moment before continuing. “You see, perhaps I should explain. I’m a psychotherapist. I’m professionally interested in these matters.”
Caroline attempted to make light of the situation. “I assure you, James is quite normal.” Is he? she asked herself. Is he really?
They were now at the entrance to the mews, and Berthea Snark was pointing to a red-painted door halfway along the row of houses. “My place,” she said. “Let’s talk further once we’re inside. You can tell me all about your James.” Then she added, “And his fears.”
Caroline frowned. Perhaps she should not have accepted this invitation after all. Hansel and Gretel, she thought.
Chapter 12. The Wound in the Psyche
“ A cup of tea?” asked Berthea Snark. “Or would you prefer coffee?”
Caroline chose tea, explaining that she could not drink coffee in the afternoon or early evening. “It’s the wrong taste,” she said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Berthea. “Coffee is possible between seven-thirty in the morning and eleven-twenty. And then again after eight-thirty at night.”
Caroline laughed. “That’s very precise,” she said.
“I’m not entirely serious,” said Berthea. “And I’m quite happy to bend the rules I set for myself. But we do need some rules in our lives, you know. As a psychotherapist, I can assure you that we need rituals and rules to anchor ourselves.” She paused. They were standing in the entrance hall to her mews house and she now directed Caroline along the small corridor, which led to a room at the back. “You know, we did ourselves a great deal of damage in the sixties and seventies. Which was before you were born, of course, but which will be affecting your world every bit as much as anybody else’s.”
Caroline looked about her. They were in a comfortable sitting room, neatly furnished in a surprisingly contemporary style, with one wall entirely taken up by shelves. A row of CDs stacked two deep, occupied one of the shelves, the rest being filled with books.
“What did we do?” she asked.
Berthea gestured to a chair. “Please sit down. What did we do? Well, I suppose I should have said something was done to us. We, in the sense of the mass of the people, the men and the women in the street, so to speak, didn’t do it. It was done by people who considered themselves opinion-formers. Social change tends to come from the moulders and manipulators of opinion, does it not? So people who may be dismissed as theorists are actually immensely important. Mrs Thatcher made the great mistake of thinking that the academic talking heads did not count. They did.”
Caroline raised an eyebrow. Was this woman mad? Was she one of those people who had some grand theory that they would thrust upon anybody they met, even somebody who had helped them retrieve their Brussels sprouts from the pavement? She waited for Berthea to continue.
“There was a body of opinion in this country that set out to remodel the fabric of our society,” Berthea continued. “They weakened the common sense of the people; they intimidated them. They decried that which people – ordinary people – actually believed in. They spoke in the language of liberation, but what did they liberate people to? To a new servitude – a servitude of shallowness and impermanence, of loneliness and alienation.
“They destroyed the familiar – they preached against it, ridiculed it. And in doing this they weakened the notion of order in people’s lives. People used to have a sense of what their lives meant because they belonged to things, and observed certain rules. You belonged to a union, or a church for that matter, which gave you a sense of who you were. It made you proud of your craft or your trade, or of being Catholic or Church of England or whatever. It gave structure. You also knew where you came from – you had a body of which you were a member. You shared a culture.”
Berthea continued to talk as she moved into the little kitchen off the sitting room. Caroline watched her as she filled the kettle and plugged it in. This woman was mad. She would drink her tea, then look pointedly at her watch and make her excuses.
“Half my professional time,” said Berthea over her shoulder, “is spent trying to help people who simply don’t have any purpose in their lives. They come to me because they are unhappy – they think that therapy will help. But what are they trying to heal? The wound in their psyche or the wound in society? They’re actually perfectly all right in themselves – it’s society that has done the damage because it’s the one who’s sick.”
Berthea came back into the sitting room carrying a tray on which there stood a teapot and two mugs. She sat the tray down on a side table and poured for both of them.
“These observations,” she said, “make me sound rather like some unreconstructed Marxist – saying that society’s to blame for everything. I’m not a Marxist, but I can’t help noting the insights that many Marxists have offered in that respect. I think they’re right, you know. They’re right in their analysis of how the human self is largely defined by social and economic factors. Of course it is. And they’re right when they insist that recalcitrant social problems – crime, for instance – have a social foundation. I would go further: I’d say that a very great deal of personal unhappiness stems from those roots.”
Caroline sipped at her tea. It had an unfamiliar flavour.
“Malawian Lost Tea,” said Berthea. “A little discovery of mine. Do you like it?”
Caroline nodded.
“I give tea to my patients,” said Berthea. “I find that it calms them. But it’s also a little ritual, isn’t it? The pouring and the serving, the sharing. And that’s what these poor people who come to me need so desperately: a sense of belonging. And what’s better than inducing a sense of belonging than shared ritual?”
Caroline was about to say something, but Berthea was now in full flow. “Eating together,” she went on. “That’s one of the oldest, most basic rituals. If we eat together we join one another in an experience that declares and reinforces our shared humanity. If you eat with another you are, for the duration of the meal, joined with that person. The proud cannot be proud when they are eating with others because all are on an equal footing – creatures in need of sustenance. And yet what are we doing to mealtimes? Destroying them. Do schools teach children to eat together? They do not. Snatch a meal from a cafeteria, eat in isolation, huddled over a tray. Where’s the bonding in that?’
To her surprise, Caroline found herself agreeing. Her attitude towards her hostess was changing rapidly; the suspicion she had felt earlier was being replaced by a feeling that this was a woman who was really rather wise. And this made her ask herself whether she belonged? And if she belonged, what did she belong to? To Cheltenham? To the world of her parents? She had sought to distance herself from all that – from the world of the haute bourgeoisie, with its preoccupation with possessions and class – but had she found anything to replace it? Berthea had mentioned rituals, and her parents certainly had plenty of those, with their Sunday lunches and golf club dinners (they certainly ate together) and bridge evenings, and all the rest. Were they happy as a result? In a moment of sudden understanding, Caroline realised that they were. Her parents were perfectly happy.
The realisation struck her as depressing – ineffably depressing. For if they were happy, then it must mean they had something right. And if they had it right, then she had it wrong.
Chapter 13: I Do Not Want to be my Mother
“Now how on earth did we get onto that subject?” asked Berthea Snark. “I thought we were going to talk about your boyfriend.“
“It was rather interesting,” said Caroline. “What you said made me think about my parents.”
Berthea put down her mug and signalled for Caroline to pass hers for topping up.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “Most people think about their parents rather often. Every day, in fact. We find ourselves doing something the way our parents did it, or using an expression they used. It’s alarming, because we think that we’re turning into our mother or our father. But we aren’t really. We show some of their traits, perhaps, but we don’t turn into them. Not unless we have a very passive personality. Such people become their parents because they’ve nothing else to be.”
“I do not want to be my mother,” said Caroline.
“Of course you don’t,” said Berthea. “But the fact that you say it with such conviction indicates that perhaps you need to change the way you view your mother. You need to accept her.”
Caroline said nothing. Berthea Snark did not know her mother; if she did, she would understand.
“Acceptance is so important,” said Berthea. “Acceptance comes first, then liking. Accept yourself, and then you’ll end up liking yourself. Not that I’m suggesting that you do not like yourself – I’m sure you do.”
Caroline felt emboldened. “Do you like everybody?”
The question seemed to take Berthea by surprise, but she soon recovered. “Me? Well, no, I don’t think I do.”
“Who don’t you like, then? Your mother?”
Berthea shook her head. “Oh no, I admired my mother deeply. She was the most selfless of women. She did educational work in the East End – years of it – at a time when such things were encouraged. There were university missions – they thought of themselves as missionaries. Nowadays we’d find that very condescending. No, my mother was a good person.” She paused. “It’s my son I don’t like.”
Caroline gave a start. Mothers did not say such things. Mothers loved their sons. They had to.
“But let’s not talk about me,” said Berthea quickly. “Your boyfriend – what’s his name?”
“James.”
Berthea had fixed her with a gaze that Caroline found quite disconcerting. Perhaps it was time for her to look at her watch.
“James is such a solid name,” said Berthea. “Is he a solid type?”
It was as much as Caroline could do not to laugh. “I wouldn’t call him solid,” she said. “More artistic. He’s interested in fine art. We did a course together.”
“Then it sounds as if you have common interests,” said Berthea. “That’s always a good sign. But you said that he’s worried about germs.”
“Yes.”
Berthea looked thoughtful. “I don’t know why I’m discussing this with you,” she said. “As a psychotherapist, one is not meant to enter into attempts at diagnosing at one remove. Even if asked to do so – which you haven’t really done, have you? You haven’t asked me.”
Caroline hesitated. Did she want to know more about James, or should she leave matters where they were?
“I can see that you’re undecided,” said Berthea. “So let’s leave it at that.”
“Oh, no,” Caroline blurted out. “Please tell me.” She had not intended to offer Berthea encouragement, but now she seemed to have made up her mind anyway.
Berthea sat back in her chair. “There’s something called OCD,” she said. “Obsessive–compulsive disorder. It’s possible that your boyfriend has that. Probably a very mild form of it.”
Caroline said nothing. She had read about OCD in a magazine not long before. There had been an article about a woman who had been unable to stop cleaning her house. She never went out; she just scrubbed and vacuumed and dusted, finishing one part of the house and then immediately starting all over again.
“Of course, it’s astonishingly common,” Berthea went on. “You shouldn’t imagine that your boyfriend is all that unusual. So many of us have some degree of OCD – you and me included.”
Caroline smiled. Berthea was obviously trying to make her feel better.
“You don’t think I’m serious?” asked Berthea.
“Well, if you could see my room,” said Caroline, “you wouldn’t accuse me of being an obsessive–compulsive.” Her room was not tidy; it was, in fact, the untidiest room in the flat, and she could not remember the last time she vacuumed it. Last month? The month before?
Berthea was amused by the suggestion that a diagnosis could be an accusation. “We don’t stand accused of conditions,” she pointed out. “Conditions are things that happen to us. And tidiness and neatness are not the sole criteria. OCD has many facets. Intrusive thoughts, for example.”
Caroline frowned. “Thoughts that …”
“That you don’t want to think,” supplied Berthea.
“Such as?”
“Doing something terrible. Imagining the worst of yourself.”
Caroline looked down at the floor. What if she were to jump to her feet and accuse Berthea of being an interfering busybody? What if she swore at her – foully – turning the air in this mews house vividly blue with scatological invective? Or she could even reach forward and slap Berthea in the face – quite hard – without saying anything but by this gesture making it very clear that she did not approve of being corralled inappropriately into this community of obsessive–compulsive hand-washers and vacuumers.
Berthea was watching her. “Would I be right in saying that some – how should I put it – impermissible, but rather delicious temptations have just run through your mind? Those are intrusive thoughts, you see. I believe that you might just have demonstrated the phenomenon to yourself.”
Caroline did not reply.
“But don’t worry about it,” said Berthea. “To be mildly obsessive–compulsive is an indication of a certain sort of achieving personality. Creative people – people who have the urge to excel – commonly fall into this category. And if we didn’t have them, then we would be a terribly dull society, don’t you think?”
Caroline was not sure what to think; obsessive–compulsiveness had seemed to her to be a pejorative label but perhaps it was really a compliment. One interesting fact was emerging from this discussion: that she and James perhaps had more in common that she had imagined. She felt rather consoled by this; perhaps they could be obsessive–compulsive together, in a companionable way, sharing bottles of hand steriliser, or, if they wished to avoid possible cross-infection – and what obsessive–compulsive would not wish to avoid that – having his and hers bottles, carefully set out on the dressing table, lined up, of course, so that the edges of the bottles were in a perfect straight line.
After this unplanned meeting with Berthea, Caroline set out again on her trip to the shops. She had a great deal to mull over, and when she returned to the flat she found that there was even more to wonder about. There was a note, slipped under the door, addressed to her. I am having a little gathering tonight, she read, just a few people who belong to a society of which I’m a member. Would you care to join us downstairs? Tea and sandwiches. 6.30, for about an hour. And it was signed, Basil (Wickramsinghe).
Chapter 14: Basil Wickramsinghe Throws a Little Party
Shortly after Caroline returned home from her unsettling cup of tea with Berthea Snark, a thin, rather dowdy-looking woman somewhere in her mid-thirties made her way to the front door of Corduroy Mansions, peered at the list of flats and their corresponding bells, and rang one. Within the building the bell sounded in the flat on the ground floor.
Basil Wickramsinghe, accountant and High Anglican, moved to his window and discreetly peered out. By craning his neck and standing far enough back he could just see who was calling upon him. There were some callers he did not like to receive and whose ringing would be ignored – local politicians soliciting votes being head of that list, just above so-called market researchers. Or his distant cousin, Anthony, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, with whom he had very little in common and who invariably outstayed his welcome. Today, however, he was expecting visitors – quite a number of them – and he could see that this was the advance guard in the sha
pe of Gillian Winterspoon, who was coming early to help him with the sandwiches.
Gillian Winterspoon was the sort of woman who in the language of marriage banns would be called “a spinster of this parish”. She had met Basil during an advanced professional training weekend at the Great Danes Hotel near Maidstone; a weekend during which they had both wrestled with the intricacies of the latest taxation regulations affecting non-residents. It was exotic stuff as far as they both were concerned; neither had any involvement with the heady world of non-resident taxation – or non-taxation, as Basil so wittily called it during the tea break after the first session – but both needed the credit that attendance on the course brought and which the Institute of Chartered Accountants quite rightly required of its members lest any of them become cobwebby.
“I’d call all this the non-taxation of non-residents,” quipped Basil, “leading to non-revenue.”
Gillian Winterspoon, who had found herself standing next to him at the tea break, nervously scanning the assembled accountants to see if any of them might conceivably talk to her, had seized upon this remark with delight.
“That’s terribly funny,” she said. “You’re right. No taxation with non-representation. Perhaps we should all throw our tea into the Medway.”
Basil smiled at her. He appreciated both the compliment to his humour and the reference to the Boston Tea Party. He introduced himself, and she reciprocated. Each was relieved to find a friend in this room of others who appeared to know one another so well.
At the end of the weekend they were sitting next to one another at every session. Gillian was delighted to have found a man who appeared to enjoy her company – not a reaction she had encountered in many men, alas – and for his part, Basil found her mild manner undemanding. He was nervous of women and did not have a great deal of confidence in that sphere, especially when he found himself with high-powered woman accountants power-dressed in brisk business suits. Gillian gave rise to none of these anxieties.
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