Leo studied the weathered face. She had a sudden acute sense that the woman had become involved in the romance that was Isabel. How much of what she conveyed was fantasy? How much an accurate reading? She hesitated. ‘Do you think I might have a look at the room where she stayed.’
‘Of course.’ The woman didn’t get up. ‘She made me remember, you know. All those difficult moments in one’s own life.’
‘Pippa. Isn’t it time to be getting on with lunch?’ A piercing voice interrupted them. Leo turned to see the woman with the winged glasses and fluffed hair. ‘Mrs Seale’s just come back from her walk.’
‘I was going to show this nice young woman the room Iris Morgenstern stayed in. That’s all right with you, isn’t it Bea?’
Bea’s look was admonishing, tinged with something like jealousy.
‘If you’re quick,’ she said. ‘You can give her the pot plants, too. We don’t want them.’
‘Oh yes.’ Pippa’s eyes creased in a tender smile. ‘Iris left two little plants behind. We kept them for her. I thought she might come back for them, since she had taken the trouble of setting them up on the window ledge.’
‘Pot plants,’ Leo echoed.
She had a vision of rampant tendrils shooting up to block out the light which had momentarily dawned in her mind.
13
The train from Bristol ate up the miles at high speed. Leo looked out her window only dimly aware of their passage. She was trying to reconstruct in graphic detail every minute of the last days she had spent with Isabel. Surely, within them lay clues to the troubled state the two strangers she had talked to this morning had witnessed.
Life was such a blinding affair. One took in only what one wanted or needed. And during that brief pre-Christmas visit, Leo had to acknowledge that she had probably been more alert to Becca than she had been to Isabel. She hadn’t seen Becca since the previous September and she was intent on having her enjoy her holiday with her mother. In a way it had been more than a holiday, Leo now admitted to herself. Leo had taken her to a few childhood haunts in a ridiculous attempt to recapture the closeness that had existed between them in that happy year in London when Becca was a mere eight-year-old. And Isabel? Isabel whom Leo had longed to see. Isabel had tagged along, largely a third-party to mother and daughter. A necessary third party, Leo chastized herself, an eye to help create the mythical tableau that was mother and daughter.
A scene came back to her with a rebarbative aftertaste. They were in a noisy, low-ceilinged restaurant which was one of Isabel’s new favourites. It was close to the loft and had the slightly brutal bareness that Isabel seemed to appreciate of late. Leo was eating a warm goat-cheese salad. Becca’s plate held a sculpted mound of risotto, flecked with exotic mushrooms. Isabel was pushing spinach topped with thin slices of parmesan round her plate. Leo watched. The fork rarely rose to her mouth.
Isabel was talking, addressing Becca. ‘It must feel wonderful going off to university and leaving the ageing, invasive parents as far behind as one can.’
The statement had a lilting enthusiasm, but it was laced with an acerbic edge. Leo hadn’t paid attention then. She was too intent on Becca’s response which had reassured her. Becca had flushed slightly and said with a shy smile that in fact she missed her mother sometimes. Her father, too, she had rushed on to add. ‘But you’re right. It’s great to feel independent.’
‘Yes,’ Isabel had gone on. ‘Independence is the thing. You can never really trust mothers or fathers to have your best interests at heart.’ She had glanced at Leo as she said this and laughed, a little brittlely
At the time, Leo had interpreted it as Isabel’s way of making a pal of this new, grown-up Becca, but not hitting quite the right note. Now she reconsidered. Some force she wasn’t altogether in control of had been driving Isabel’s remarks. She had been over the top. She had gone on to to give Becca advice about men, while Leo sat nervously by. Her advice had focussed on how to keep men at bay - by acting as intelligent as one really was; by refusing to mother or cajole them or listen for hours on end with a fascinated look on one’s face.
‘At heart they’re all deceivers. Boys, lovers, teachers, even fathers. Not a one of them to be trusted for more than ten minutes. Keep yourself independent, Becca.’ Isabel’s voice had trailed off in a peculiar way.’
It came to Leo that this statement was hardly in character. Isabel had never cast women, certainly not herself, as victims.
Nor was she eating with her usual gusto. Her plates went back to the kitchen virtually untouched.
Yes, something must have happened to Isabel in the months since their last meeting that she hadn’t had the opportunity to confide in Leo about. Some deception or terrible awakening.
Pain cut through Leo with the slow scratch of a serrated knife. Pain and guilt. She had failed her friend.
She looked at her watch. If the train was on schedule, she could arrive at Daniel Lukas’s office no more than five minutes late. This time she would press him more astutely. He had to be implicated in Isabel’s state. After all, therapists were all-too-well known for their habit of suggesting to women that they understand themselves as abused.
Even if Daniel’s claim that he hadn’t seen Isabel for some months were true, it could well have been December when he stopped seeing her. Whatever the reason - whether Isabel had attempted or succeeded or failed in carrying out her proposed seduction - the end of analysis would have been a brutal closure, like a door shutting on your fingers. Compounded by the death of her mother, it could easily have precipitated her into taking extreme risks.
Somewhere inside Daniel, perhaps even without his knowledge, there must reside a key which would open the lock to her friend. Nor for the moment - now that she had left yet another message for Faraday - was there anywhere else to turn.
Beneath the old church at its crest, Highgate High Street was choked with near stationary traffic. Leo abandoned her taxi and simultaneously noticed a chocolate shop. Yes, that would be a good idea. She popped in and bought a pretty golden box crammed with delights. Her purchase as securely in hand as a weapon, she quickly walked the remaining distance and pressed Daniel Lukas’s bell.
There was a large bowl of flowers visible on the basement table today. His wife had a gift for arrangement. The lock she noted, bore the word union. Had they chosen it for that reason? The notion suddenly made her feel intensely alone.
‘Yes.’ The answering voice sounded disgruntled.
‘It’s me. Leonora. Leonora Gould.’
‘I see.’ After what seemed like a pause, the buzzer released the door.
Leo raced up the stairs. She arrived slightly breathless. Daniel Lukas was standing beside a desk scattered with untidy heaps of papers. He was in shirt sleeves, his hair decidedly dishevelled. It gave him a boyish air which caught her off-guard. In her imaginings he veered between monster and sage, with no intervening moment of ordinary humanity.
‘You… you weren’t expecting me.’
He didn’t respond, but he gave her a look which was half way between concern and admonishment as he gestured her towards the couch.
Leo hesitated. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. Sorry about last time, too. Stupid of me to do that. Here…’ She stuck out her hand awkwardly. ‘I brought you these. For your little boy.’
‘You don’t need to give me presents, Leonora. You already pay me for my time.’
She felt caught between his sudden intimate use of her first name and the sense of what he was conveying. A reiteration of the rules. With a wave of irritation, she put the box clumsily on the table. ‘For your son, I said. Not for you.’
Again he pointed her towards the couch. She made instead for one of the two leather armchairs and forced herself to look at him directly. ‘I want to see your face, today.’
He nodded and sat down opposite her.
‘I…I’ve been thinking about food. I can’t bear the fact that we’re playing around with it. Tampering with seeds. Modifying genes.
It’s not as if there isn’t enough of it - in the first world, in any case. All these unknown products going into packages, cans, our mouths.’
Daniel watched her. It was another riff in the supposed guise of Isabel. On that level, at least, she was transparent. She was also desperately determined. He allowed himself a little sigh.
‘Do you want my theories, Leonora? Or analysis?’
‘I’m not sure. Both maybe.’
‘Unknown things going into your mouth. Is that what you can’t bear?’
He was doing it again, Leo thought, turning everything into a personal event. A bodily event. She went along with it, nodded.
‘You want to control what you take in?’
‘Are you telling me I’m becoming an anorexic?’ An image of Isabel flashed through her mind, Isabel not eating.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t really like bandying labels about. It’s never quite that simple. But I guess we do live in an age which has anorexic properties. In the midst of plenty, of speed, of high technology, of open markets in goods and people, of a life distant from the sources of food, of a world too vast for us to control, we try to create a kind of controllabe scarcity. We diet, we label, we worry ourselves into scares. The body can appear as our last possible field of control. So we want to be a little more certain of origins, of provenance, of roots - the human kind as well.’
‘Is that the theory?’
He laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh.
‘Hardly that. Let’s call it instant speculation.’
‘And genetic tampering?’
‘What frightens you about it?’
‘What it can do to the environment, to eco-systems.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Unknown things going into your mouth, you said.’
‘You said.’ He corrected her. ‘Penetration by the unknown. Things you can’t identify, aliens making their way into your body. Taking up a home there. Reproducing.’
‘Sex,’ Leo murmured. ‘Mutants.’ She lost her thought. A sequence of images had started to speed through her mind. An IVF laboratory, a hypodermic moving sperm cells into egg. Bright-eyed semen navigating up the birth canal, captain in lead, like in those cartoon body programs for children. Then Norfolk. Norfolk had said something to her about Isabel. Her perpetual hunger, a hole that couldn’t be filled. And something else. She closed her eyes.
Isabel and she, sitting on sofas, opposite each other in the loft. That bare loft, because Isabel had changed, mutated. She wasn’t eating. Like Leo at home. Not letting anything in.
The lights were low. It was late. There was a bottle of wine, almost empty on the table. From next door came the muffled sound of the television. Becca watching a video. Leo murmuring, a little sleepy with the wine, ‘What’s wrong, Isabel. I sense there’s something wrong.’ Isabel, making a shrill sound, like a scoff. ‘Oh it’s nothing. It’s a stupid idea my shrink put into my head. I can only know people by sleeping with them.’ Their eyes meeting. A jolt of electricity passing between them. ‘Maybe we should. In the heat of Savannah.’ Isabel laughing. A joke. ‘Then I can penetrate your wonderfully ordered life.’ Leo getting up, laughing too, uncomfortably, clearing the table. Dusting it all away. Under the carpet. Until Savannah.
‘Sex… Mutants…’ Daniel Lukas’s voice urged her back into the present.
Leo’s eyes flew open and with it the attack she had been hoarding. ‘You slept with Isabel, didn’t you?’
She watched him, watched for a tensing of hands or face, a revealing flicker of an eyelid. But he didn’t flinch. Dark eyes surveyed her with unnatural calm. He was waiting for her to say something more, so she repeated her statement. This time there was no question mark. Her tone was heavy with accusation.
‘Is this sleeping with me, this mutant penetration, something you would wish for yourself?’
Leo gasped.
‘Because otherwise it seems to me that your uninhibited desire to know about your friend is the only desire you manifest. Is it only through her - and perhaps your daughter - that you feel real to yourself?’
The attack was frontal. He was a monster after all.
She looked away, wished herself behind the chair rather than hideously visible in front of him. What did he mean? Did she really only gain a sense of solidity, of three-dimensional life through Isabel or Becca?
No. She mustn’t let him get to her. That wasn’t why she was here.
‘I have no desire whatsoever to sleep with you Dr. Lukas.’ She announced it in a mimicry of his clear, flat tones, though as she said it, her pulse raced oddly. She hurried on. ‘As it happens I have a particularly satisfactory lover at the moment.’
The statement spoken so adamantly sounded like a boast. She averted her eyes again. On the carpet beneath her, she noticed a stain. Like track marks. Sperm, she thought, and looked up quickly.
‘I take it he is neither Isabel’s lover nor your daughter’s, but your own?’
He said it so softly that for a moment she was confused, unsure whether he had spoken or she herself had silently posed the question. Becca with a lover. The idea had rumbled in her ever since Becca had mentioned the ‘cool boy’. It wasn’t the first time, of course. The thought had played through her subliminally for years. A man to displace her forever. Like she had displaced her parents with Jeff. And now she was displaced twice over. No wonder she clutched at Isabel.
‘I knew you’d bring me round to sex, sooner rather than later,’ she muttered.
‘I was following your lead. But since we’re here, let’s talk about it.’
‘It’s personal.’
‘That’s fine. That’s good.’ She thought she heard a smile in his voice. Hearing it rather than seeing it, made her realize that she had moved to the couch and was stretched out on it. She didn’t remember doing that.
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me about your former husband then? The one who made love to Isabel?’
‘What?’ She was shocked at having it spoken out loud like that by someone else. Impersonally.
But as if he had pressed some kind of lever in her, she responded, despite herself. Incoherently, she found herself talking about Jeff. Telling him about those last years, how she had closed herself off in a little casket of safety and beauty, obliterated what she didn’t want to know. Rage leapt out of her, at Jeff for his betrayals, at herself, for letting all those years pass in a limbo of virtuous unfeeling. She felt incandescent, as if she would burn up in her own fury. Rage at him, too, at this know-it-all doctor, who pulled levers in her psyche. Tears poured out of her but only stoked the fire.
At one point, she heard him say softly, ‘So, as you tell it, it would seem that since your father’s death or was it since a few years before your husband’s departure, you’ve kept yourself locked up, a little afraid of living. Your friend, your daughter do that for you, while you wait in abeyance, nursing your hurts, your loss, your integrity. It’s not a bad kind of living. Pretty good, really. It makes cardinal virtues of friendship and mothering. It allows you to love through them. But now you want more. You need to move on perhaps?’
Leo’s anger burned. ‘You’re twisting things again. Twist and turn, that’s all you do, so that I lose things, lose the thread, find it in the wrong place.’
‘Or just another place.’ He waited for her.
When she didn’t speak, he went on. ‘Maybe life is about loss. Or about violation. We all feel violated by it sometimes. Violated from the inside by unruly desires. Violated from the outside, by deaths, betrayals, incursions by others. Even strange foods. Defensiveness is a reaction against that, a way of protecting ourselves in order to go on living with sufficient pleasure. But we can’t deny it all. Can’t deny all the loss or the sense of violation or the pain. We’re not inviolate. We can’t lock ourselves away forever. Loss, violation, may be what keep us moving. They land us in another place. A good place perhaps. You have a lover. You’re moving. That may be a good.’
&nbs
p; As Daniel made this long speech, he wondered whether he had already taken the decision not to see her again. It felt like a summing up. But he didn’t have time to think. She was suddenly bolt upright, her cheeks blazing.
‘Isabel told me you had slept with her. Did she have some kind of breakdown after that? Where is she? I saw one dead woman this week. I don’t want to see another. Not another.’
She was crying again.
Daniel looked at her, felt pain and confusion fill the room. A recent death to bring the first one in its train. All that compounded with the fear about Isabel. She hadn’t told him about the recent death. Too late now.
He kept his voice even. I share your concern, Leonora. I know that apart from everything else, it’s also deeply felt. But here in this room we have to talk about you. About your relations with Isabel, if you like. But not about what Isabel may have told you about me. The statement you attribute to her is a subject for her analysis. Not yours. I’m sorry. I wish I could help. What I can do does not form part of your hour.’
‘I could report you,’ Leo hissed.
He shrugged. He suddenly felt very tired. ‘I don’t really think that would help you locate your friend. But perhaps we should say goodbye now. Your hour’s up. I can refer you to someone else if you like.’
The door, this time, sounded with a noisy slam. Daniel stayed in his chair. All his energy had flown out of the room with her. He looked out of the window. Beyond the brick of the back wall, the chestnuts in the park were bursting into vibrant bloom, almost too full of life. Eva had lived to see their flowering. It was one of the last things she had commented on. She had loved their beauty, heavy, yet somehow fragile. And then pain too intense for the morphine had swallowed her up and she was gone. Almost a year now. 11 June 1997. The minutes of the intervening months had passed with a dull, aching slowness. Yet their accumulated dailiness added up to speed: sitting here now, it was startling to think that almost a year had already passed. A fifth of little Robbie’s life.
Sanctuary Page 24
