PART THREE
NOTES TOWARDS A CASE HISTORY (II)
Anna paid me to listen to her stories and feel besmirched by them. The stories themselves had the effect of rendering me helpless. Once I had swallowed this fact, I set out to discover why. And to uncover who in her life she was paralysing through me. The analyst is, after all, a mere standin for more potent players.
Anna is lying on the couch. She is in deepest black today. Dramatic layers of it, black trousers, black shirt, black silk waistcoat, black jacket, some chiffon cloudiness of scarf which might as well function as a veil in the way she wraps it round her hair, her hands. Since I know by now that she dresses for her performance, I ask her why she is in black. She tells me she is in mourning, in solidarity with a friend. Yet another friend who has been abandoned by a lover, which seems to be a recurring theme in her friend’s lives or certainly in her stories. Anna herself it seems, from the way she tells me these things, is never abandoned. But she doesn’t let me press her on this, which is what I am primarily interested in.
She goes on to tell me her friend’s story in full dramatic detail. In her characterisation, her friend is an innocent who has allowed herself to be beguiled by a married man who has promised her everything, including eventual marriage. They spend almost every weekday night together, but not weekends. On weekends, the man goes home. Her friend grows to mind, in part because of the fulsome promises, in part because of the imposed secrecy. She wants full commitment. Honesty. One Saturday, because she feels she has to hear his voice, her friend rings his home number, which she has covertly extracted from his place of work. A woman answers the phone. Anna’s friend swallows hard and asks for Mr Sutton. She is told he isn’t in, so taking her courage in hand she asks whether she is speaking to Mrs. Sutton. There is a pause and the woman announces, there is no Mrs. Sutton. She is the housekeeper. Who is she to say called? Anna’s friend hangs up. She is devastated. She confronts her lover with his lies, and he leaves her, just like that, from one day to the next. Anna consoles her friend and suggests a wake to celebrate his passing.
Anna tells me this story with a great many details and flourishes which include a vivid evocation of the couple’s sexual life. This last, I know, is conveyed in part to tease me, in part to prove her status as an informed analytic patient.
When she has finished I wait for a moment, then ask, in good transferential mode, whether she is telling me this story because she feels that in some way I have let her down or left her feeling abandoned or perhaps been too secretive about my own status.
She laughs. ‘Nonsense. The reason any of us ever come to shrinks is that you never abandon us. We pay you, after all, like prostitutes. You’re in our thrall.’
I let this pass and after a moment find myself asking her, ‘When you were little, Anna, did people believe what you told them?’ I do not know quite why I have said this, but as I say it I realize that the time has come for me to be a little more confrontational. Unlike most patients, Anna rarely mentions her childhood. We need to find out why. Then too, I want her to know that although it doesn’t particularly matter in my understanding of the analytic context, I do recognise that she fabricates.
She doesn’t answer me. Her silence, in itself, is unusual. I wait and at last she says in a dreamy voice, ‘They did and they didn’t.’
I wait and when nothing more comes, I ask, ‘Who do you identify with in this story, Anna? Who are you? The man, the housekeeper who delivers the truth, your vulnerable friend?’
‘No one ever leaves me,’ she says with a note of harshness.
‘Because you do the leaving first,’ I say without thinking. ‘Because you’re unwilling or afraid to meet the challenge of commitment.’ I realize as I hear myself, that I am irritated. Otherwise I would hardly be so direct.
‘Death,’ Anna says. She seems surprised by her own enunciation of the word, for she is then quiet for a long time. She covers her face with the veil. She is more troubled than I have ever seen her.
‘Staying means death. Boredom, repetition…’ I eventually hazard
‘Death means death,’ she says. ‘Just death. A cigar is sometimes just a cigar.’
Suddenly I feel her restlessness. She tosses her scarf, fiddles with buttons. Staying still is indeed death. She needs to get up.
I need to keep her there.
‘What do you see when you say death?’ I ask.
She fidgets some more and then all at once she is very still. ‘A man in a bed. His eyes are as wide as saucers. He’s skinny. Like a skinned cat. Horrible. He can’t move. He is death. I love him.’
She says this with the creaking slowness of a tape whose battery has run down and then makes a sucking, swallowing noise. Then in one swift gesture, she is off the couch. Her own eyes are very wide. I know at once that she has said something she didn’t intend to say. It has made her nervous. And angry. Before I can stop her she has planted a kiss on my lips and is out the door. My watch tells me we still had some fifteen minutes to go.
I have an intuition that Anna will not be back for her next session. I am right, though the rightness is not altogether consoling. I feel we may at last be getting somewhere and that this is the point Anna will choose to leave.
In fact she doesn’t turn up for five sessions at which point she rings me to say she won’t be coming back. But the next day, as if she has been carrying on an argument with herself and the Anna who phoned me has lost, she shows up at her usual time. I am on edge. She doesn’t seem to be. She neither apologises nor explains. She simply lies down on the couch and says, as if she were me, ‘Where were we?’
‘We were talking about a skinny man. A very skinny man on a bed. Death.’
‘Oh that! She gives me one of her fluttering, inconsequential laughs. ‘I want to tell you about a friend of mine, a very interesting American friend, who quit his job on Wall Street yesterday in order to go and work for the Greens. Left his wife in the process, but that’s secondary.’
She isn’t dressed for any dramatic part today. She looks, for her, rather ordinary. Perhaps that gives me courage.
‘Anna.’ I stop her. ‘I don’t want to hear any stories today.’
‘You’re paid to listen.’
‘That may be. But today I want to explore why it is that you’ve told me so many stories, true or false, over the past months.’
‘To give you pleasure,’ she says, as if it were self-evident. ‘I’ve told you that.’
Something clicks inside me. I have been blind. I have interpreted every aspect of the content of her stories in terms of the transference, except the whole storytelling process itself.
‘But I’m not enjoying it,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you tell me stories because without them you feel I won’t be interested in you. Without your stories, you’re no one. Nothing.’
‘Nothing,’ Anna repeats, as if she is tasting the word, then laughs. ‘That’s right, a boring, dirty, little nothing.’
‘Dirty?’ I prod.
‘A dirty, little beast. That’s what she called me.’
‘Who?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Your mother?’
Again no answer. She is lying very still and I wait. I don’t wait too long, since I don’t want to lose the moment, and I try again.
‘Who are you trying to please with your stories, Anna?’
‘Who?’
‘Yes who? A bullying brother, a bored carer, a depressed mother who needs cheering, your father? I flap about wildly.
‘My father died before I can remember,’ she says flatly.
I can feel her sudden heaviness.
‘You were four, I think you once told me.’
‘Thereabouts.’
‘Not too young for stories,’ I press her. ‘He told you stories.’
Her face suddenly takes on a look of acute disgust. ‘No, no I told him. He was so skinny. And he smelled bad. It was so hot.’
‘So that skinny man, the one you associat
e with death, is your father.’
She is silent. She squirms about on the couch and then starts to speak in an uncharacteristic, disjointed way and I know that we have finally broken through to something. A picture begins to emerge of a family. An angry, often railing mother, a small child and a sick man. Every evening the child goes to sit with her ailing father in a darkened room and tells him stories. In her eyes, the stories keep death at bay. His death. He tells her that too. He loves her stories. As long as she can keep telling the stories, he will stay alive. Scheherezade in reverse. So she tells him anything, everything, fabricates, recounts, dramatises, excites. And one day, she is unwell and her mother won’t let her go to him, however much she pleads. Her illness gets worse. She is feverish, delirious perhaps. And when she emerges from the fever, he is gone. He has abandoned her. He is dead, her mother eventually tells her and sends her away from the only home she has known. She feels she is being punished for his death, for failing him, but the fault is shared by her mother, who has prevented her from going to him. Whatever the fault, she is devastated. She loses the ability to speak. She doesn’t know for how long, but she knows her voice has gone. Gone with her father. She is mute.
***
Anna lies absolutely still. She doesn’t speak. In her silence it becomes crystal clear to me that her exuberant and compulsive storytelling is also a way of warding off her own anxiety about annihilation.
When her hour is drawing to a close, I say, ‘That was then, Anna. This is now. And now we know a little about why you’ve been entertaining me all these months. Let’s hold on to that. It’s a big step.’
She gets up. Her look is a little dazed and then with a touch of her usual spirit, she says to me, ‘It may be crap.’
She is rubbing her wrist and I remember her story of the little boy who couldn’t speak and caught her there, on the wrist.
‘That too,’ I say. ‘A gift from you to me. A veritable gift.’
11
Rain drummed on the car roof and pelted against the window. The wipers struggled against its force. Red brake lights punctuated the wet blur of the motorway world.
Norfolk drove with total concentration, drove fast, despite weather and as if he were alone. He had barely exchanged a word with her since they had hit the open road.
‘Two weeks today,’ Leo murmured, switching off the crackling din of the radio. ‘Isabel should have arrived in Manhattan two weeks ago today. Same rain. Everything else different.’
Norfolk flashed her a look, but said nothing.
‘By now we might have been in New Mexico. Big skies, tumbleweed, adobe…’
She felt the inadvertent welling of tears. So much hope had been vested in her holiday with Isabel. It was as if her friend’s fearlessness, her openess, her electric proximity would somehow take Leo over and out of herself to deposit her in a better place. And now, she had been landed emphatically back in herself. And her fears for Isabel grew with each passing day.
Leo forced herself into composure. She should be focussing on what Isabel wanted of their joint adventure. It might provide some kind of clue.
She tried to recreate the moment in which the plan had been conceived. They were sitting together in the half-light of the loft, murmuring, while Becca watched a video in the bedroom. Isabel’s face, as it came to her now, was shadowed with something Leo didn’t altogether understand. A burden to be shed, perhaps. Her shoulders were tensed with the effort of holding it up. She didn’t have her usual easiness. Her gusto. No, Isabel hadn’t been at her best over Christmas. That’s what must have cued Leo’s present insistence that Daniel Lukas might know things.
It was Leo who had come up with the notion of setting off across America. Two women in a car on the open road. Easy riders. Isabel’s face had lit with animation.
‘But if you were in New Mexico, Holland,’ Norfolk broke into her thoughts, ‘you wouldn’t be here with little ol’ me in the glory of English hills and dales. Look at the bright side.’
‘I’m working at it,’ Leo mumbled.
‘You’re not working hard enough. And Isabel might have taken you to a few of the kind of places we’ll probably end up in today. She told me she intended doing a little of her gene tech research while you were holidaying. Not altogether a holiday therefore.’
‘Did she?’
He was off. No longer paying attention. Jeff tumbled into her mind. Jeff used to drive like that on those weekend journeys from Boston to New York. She would often choose to sit with Becca in the back seat. Becca with plump legs kicking into the air and a dreamy baby smile on her face. Past now. All past.
She stole a glance at Norfolk’s profile to reassure herself about the present, heard a siren came up from nowhere. A police car overtook them, its blue light punctuating the gloom.
‘Relax, Holland. I’m not driving too fast.’
‘I wasn’t…”
‘You were. But at least you have the grace to be silent.’ He chortled. ‘Rare tact.’
She would have liked to continue the conversation, liked, too, to have touched the hand which quickly pressed her knee, but his attention was on the road again and she was back in her solitary bubble.
Rare tact. She had a sudden image of herself reporting those words to Daniel Lukas, as if she needed to prove to him that she wasn’t the demented creature who babbled on his couch or that other furtive being who invaded his files. Ridiculous thought, she chastised herself. She hardly needed that man’s approval. Yet she had to admit that she felt an intimacy had grown up between them, despite everything, despite her intentions. That was odd.
She mused for a moment on what he had said about her helicopter panic and then remembered that during her pregnancy and while Becca was small, the panic had receded. That was odd, too. Maybe Jeff had filled a lack her father had left - a strong and solid presence to replace Daddy. Or maybe it was due to Becca herself, who needed her to be in charge. And then Jeff wasn’t there for her anymore. Gone before the actual separation, and that tangled fear, that abandonment and anger which the helicopter represented had re-asserted itself.
Leo caught the unfurling of her thoughts, the hunt for reasons, and wondered at how much, Daniel Lukas’s ways of thinking had taken hold of her.
The rain spluttered itself out with the end of the motorway. Through the greyness ahead, Leo glimpsed the tracery of pale honey-coloured spires. Exeter Cathedral. Its startling beauty made her rue the fact that on their way out of London she had argued with Norfolk about heading here first. He had insisted, had told her that it made geographical sense. He had discovered that each of the series of mysterious numbers on the diskette sent to Iris Morgenstern was not code but referred to ordinance survey map locations. They were evidently sites to do with Isabel’s investigations - sites possibly leaked to her in her clandestine guise, sites of experimental plantings or labs. Exploring them would lead them to Isabel. He had been excited, adamant. The Sturridge Hotel could wait for the evening.
Now, as they walked up a lane bordered by the towering red brick of the city wall and turned into an old church close from the end of which the Cathedral emerged in all its ancient magnificence, Leo was glad that she had allowed herself to be persuaded. She paused to take in double-ranked buttresses and castellated parapets. Norfolk’s arm tugged her along.
‘Wonderful, I know. But we should make use of our time. Unless you want to hang out here while I get us maps and some other bits and pieces. We could meet in the pub along the lane. Just over there.’ He pointed across the square, towards the end of a Georgian row. ‘Half an hour. OK?’
Leo nodded. She walked slowly towards the front of the cathedral and gazed at sumptuous stone-work saints, the delicacy of a rose window. At her side, a determined busker in renaissance garb plucked out a song on a lute. She gave him a pound and made her way in, then sat on a chair and absorbed the beauty of arches and structure and echoing silence. After a moment, she found herself superstitiously offering up a prayer. A prayer for Is
abel. ‘Please let her be returned to me. To us.’ The words formed themselves of their own accord and realising they weren’t quite right, she added, ‘Above all, let her be safe.’
A child’s howl shattered her thoughts. It reverberated through the aisles, rose higher and higher, filling the nave with a cacophony of pain, like an omen.
Leo couldn’t identify its source. Then she saw a toddler hurtling along, dashing blindly, his face a stream of tears. She was about to go to him, when a man emerged and scooped him into his arms. He planted a resonant thwack on the child’s bottom. The howling grew louder, then ceased, turned to hiccoughing whimper. The child’s eyes were round with incomprehension.
Leo slid out of her seat. The man misinterpreted her motion. She suddenly heard a hiss emerge from him. ‘Sod off, cow. Mind your own business.’
She stopped in her tracks. She stood there, unable to move until well after they had left the church. Foreboding coursed through her, as if it were once again intent on taking up permanent residence in her blood.
Norfolk was late. Leo sipped tepid coffee and waited in a pannelled room beneath ancient beams. To still herself, she picked up a newspaper from a side counter. It was a local paper filled with Devon news of uncertain interest. She scanned the front page erratically. A smallish headline to the bottom caught her attention. ‘Unidentified Woman Dead.’ Leo read swiftly.
A woman’s body had been found in a red Ford Escort, Registration number L42 TBR, which had careened off a small road in the Barnstaple area. It wasn’t clear when the accident had taken place. The car did not belong to the driver. The police were treating the matter as suspicious and were carrying out inquiries. Any information leading to identification of the young blonde woman was welcome.
Leo’s heart set up an erratic beating. Isabel. Isabel driving down a lonely night-time lane, one of those single track roads with a grassy strip at its centre. Isabel skidding into a ditch. No, no. A car, or a van or a tractor, coming up behind her, or in front. A car driven by the brute who had broken into the loft. Deliberately pushing her off the road onto a treacherous slope. Isabel, her body mangled. Isabel, dead.
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