And now she was trying to break out of the magic circle: why else would she be coming to see me?
I knew I had to tread carefully, but I felt we had at last found a path. Our work together would consist in unlinking the emotions attached to her father’s death from the charge of her failure to keep him alive. We would need to cut the connection between loving and failure, loving and death and also, perhaps, to re-describe men as something other than a passive absence, a disgusting absence at that, in need of pleasuring.
For the length of a month, maybe two, I was as buoyant, regarding Anna, as a practitioner can hope to be. Then things took a retrograde turn. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. Anna had grown utterly silent. She would lie on the couch, her eyes wide open and stare at the ceiling. She was numb. I thought she might in some sense be re-living or re-invoking the period of her childhood muteness. Once towards the end of a session I quoted Winnicott at her: ‘What a joy it is to hide, but a disaster not to be found.’ I also signalled to her that I would fall in with who and what she wanted of me for as long as she wanted, but that I was also there to resist her projections, to remain an analyst. She didn’t respond.
And then, one day she came in and started to attack me. She told me I was useless, a waste of her time and money, a charlatan. She accused me of never giving anything of myself, of hiding, of creating a twosome of utter inequality. She railed. It was a magnificent performance in which she threw the entire book of psychoanalytic failings at me. I steered her towards the possibility that she might be fuming not only at me, but also, through a screen, at her father.
She gave me her old booming laugh and told me that that was a pitiful attempt at self-exoneration. Next I would sink so low as to bring up Oedipus.
‘Never that.’ I laughed with her and after a moment, she changed her tone, asked me in a small, hesitant voice why I couldn’t tell her about myself, just a little, to equalise things.
I was so pleased to have her emerge from her long silence that I broke a rule and told her a few things she probably already knew - that I had always been a north Londoner, that I had a wife and a child.
‘In fact, a rather staid, boring man,’ she offered with a touch of avidity as she pulled her watch out of her pocket and got up to leave. She seemed lighter and my spirits lifted in tandem.
‘I’ve always meant to ask you,’ I said. ‘Why do you carry your watch in your pocket?’
She looked at me askance. ‘I don’t like it round my wrist. I don’t like bracelets either. For that matter, I’m none too fond of necklaces.’ And off she marched without a goodbye.
Since I was alert to the manner of exits and entrances now, that puzzled me. The following week puzzled me even more. Anna reverted to her own first principles. The stories began again. They were back with a vengeance. She was in full dramatic flow, the dinner-party raconteuse par excellence, telling me now about the totemic practices of the New Guineans, then of the sexual mores of the Inuit, or narrating the complicated plot of a recent film or an office imbroglio. I tried to find common threads, or to bring her back to more germane matter, but I couldn’t budge her. Her language poured over me, an unstoppable torrent. I had the feeling its intention was to drown.
One dark late afternoon, it did. I fell into a doze. There was no excuse for it, not even the difficult night I had had at home. I don’t know quite how long the sleep lasted, but I woke in some confusion. There was a hand on my thigh, stroking, creeping upward. I was aware that my penis was hard, though not quite where I was, not until the fingers curled round it.
I grabbed her wrists, held them hard, shook her. ‘We don’t do that kind of thing here,’ I said in a punishing voice, though the punishment was directed at myself. ‘Never.’
Her look was wild, panic-stricken. But she didn’t meet my eyes. She was staring at my fingers tight round her arm. I let her go. Before I could think of an appropriate phrase, she was out the door.
That evening, I seriously considered ringing her to apologise. But on reflection, I decided it would be best for things to go no further outside the bounds of convention than they already had. Perhaps it was cowardice. Nonetheless, I decided that since she was due the following day, it would be best to discuss the matter in the appropriate space. If she didn’t turn up, I would think again.
She arrived punctually and lay down with a laugh which was slightly shrill. She was wearing the red dress she had worn for her first session and she launched right into an account of a play she had apparently seen the previous evening, a play in which the heroine works as a part-time prostitute in a chic club. I tried to use this as a way into the matter left over from our previous encounter. And then I noticed, that as she spoke, she was rubbing her wrist, rubbing it not with easy soothing gestures, but gouging, prodding.
‘I’m sorry if I hurt you, yesterday,’ I said.
‘Hurt?’
‘Your wrist.’
‘My wrist?’
‘Yes. Your wrist. The one you don’t like bracelets on,’ I heard myself saying.
She started to cry. She had never done that before. Vast silent tears streaked her cheeks. And then, as if it surprised her, she said. ‘I’ve remembered something.’
She told me then, told me hesitantly, that during that time when her father was ill and lay perpetually in his bed, she would sometimes lie next to him. The bed was very high and she would scramble from the chair next to it onto the bed and stretch out beside him beneath the sheets if it was cool, or on top of them when it was hot. They would lie together in the dark or the half light as she talked. Her father’s breathing was loud. She could hear it, like air whistling out of a balloon. She didn’t like the sound of it, but she loved her father and she knew that she had to stay with him. While she stayed with him, her mother stayed away and her mother was cruel to her father. She knew that. Little Anna was his protector.
Sometimes, while she was telling him the bedtime stories he so liked, or when she paused, he would put his hand round her wrist and guide her fingers to stroke his body, down there too, where the knob grew between his legs. She had to stop the talking then, because the knob always made a lump come to her throat, like a block of wood you couldn’t speak over. She didn’t mind though, not even when the knob fizzed, like a bottle of soda pop and made her hand sticky. Her father’s cheeks would grow pink then and he looked healthy and he would place dry lips on her forehead and call her angel, his story angel.
One night, when it was very hot, her mother burst in on them. In the gloom her face was savage. She smacked Anna across the face and screamed something and then pulled her by the wrist. Her father screamed too and pulled her by the other and between their screaming and their tugging she felt she was being pulled apart until her mother won and dragged her, screaming and sobbing now, back to her own room and told her she was a bad, an evil child and had been warned to stay away from her father. And now to keep her away, she would be punished. Severely punished. She was tied to her bed, tied by her wrist, and left in the dark. Left, for she didn’t know how long, because it must have been then that she got ill. And when she was better her father was dead.
Later, in one of the schools she was sent to, during the period of her muteness, she remembered cutting at her wrists, not deeply enough for heavy bleeding, but enough to cause herself pain. Inflicting pain on herself was a way of controlling it: it reduced her vulnerability to the pain the external world could produce in her.
And so, in these memories, what had seemed to be Anna’s mere taste for not wearing any item of jewellery round her wrists, revealed its deep history - a history of being pulled apart by warring parents and punished for something which in itself might have left little residue were it not for the chain of events into which it fell. That chain created the trauma which was written on the text of her body, though debarred from her thoughts. Now that words had been given to it, the talking cure could begin to do its work.
The memories also gave me another clue to A
nna’s perpetual seductiveness. To move beyond it to a deeper self, would be to allow the other to see the foulness that lay beneath. She had internalised her mother’s judgement of her and had to keep moving.
Over the next weeks Anna and I turned these scenes inside out and upside down, viewing them from all perspectives, weighing them for what the world likes to call goodness and badness, finding their residues in her subsequent behaviour.
Other memories came too, including one of her father in an earlier guise, a giant of a man who carried her everywhere on his shoulders, who told her stories of fantastic voyages - of how they would travel together, go to an exotic India, ride elephants, climb mountains, visit Shangri-la. It was an exhilarating time.
Then abruptly, with no forewarning, and to my utter surprise, Anna left never to return. The moment she picked coincided with a phase when she had chosen to cast me in the role of the punishing mother. Perhaps in my eagerness to see her through, I was a little too punishing in my interventions. But there were other forces at play - on my side as well. I wasn’t as alert to her, as I might have been. And on her side, there may have been an unconscious decision, that whatever else might change, she preferred herself in the role of Scheherezade. The period of seduction was over. It was time to kill me off, as far as her own life was concerned, to reproduce the electric charge of the grand finale, rather than slop around in the messy indeterminacy of everyday half-measures.
She gave me the finale in a message on my answering machine. In her most pleasant voice, she told me she was seeing someone else, had been for some time. A woman. She should perhaps have told me. And then her voice altered, grew ugly, menacing. It wasn’t a voice I recognised. In it she threatened to report me to higher bodies for breaking the rules. For getting my dirty paws all over her.
I wondered whether this was the voice of her new therapist. Or perhaps her latest version of her mother.
I worried about Anna. We had unfinished business.
Analysis, unlike stories, rarely has a climactic end.
16
Leo lopped the large branches of lilac here and there and plunged the flowers into the bowl. They tipped and bent, refusing her arrangement, so that she had to start all over again. Nothing was right today. Nothing would be right. She had known it as soon as she woke from a dream in which the dead girl, Jill, danced and swayed, only to fall naked onto a cold slab. It was far too early to be awake. But the throb in her head, a residue of too much wine consumed alone, prevented a return to sleep. She had got up and drunk two glasses of cold water, showered and made coffee and told herself that, if nothing else, it was a good time to phone Becca.
Becca, miraculously, had picked up the receiver. But it was clear from her artificially cheerful hello that the last person she wanted to speak to was her mother. Her answers to questions were uncharacteristically terse. There was impatience in her tone. Leo had sensed a kind of shuttered secrecy which could only spell ‘man’.
She hadn’t pressed. Daniel’s words had come back to her again, as a low ironising command. It was time to live in herself, not centred in her daughter, let alone in Isabel. She relished the sound of his voice even less than the new one her daughter gave her. But she had kept her own tone light, sent a kiss, before hanging up to return to an empty stretch of day.
An early walk to the market hadn’t helped. Daniel’s voice had insinuated itself into her ear again. Not the pleasant-enough voice of the man at dinner, but that darker, edgy voice which walked a tightrope between fantasy and the real and could topple you over into either. ‘Is this sleeping with me something you would wish for yourself?’ it reiterated.
Leo had pushed it away only to find Norfolk’s equally discomfiting notes taking over her inner ear. He had rung last night. With droll seductiveness, he had told her that despite the fact that he missed certain parts of her, he had to stay on in Amsterdam for another few days. And he was full of news she could barely follow. He had taken a sample of the soil he had collected in Devon to Amsterdam with him, had had it tested. There was something distinctly irregular going on. Unidentifiable bacteria had been found in the sample. This was one of the techniques used for genetic modification. But he had only ever seen it under lab conditions. He had grown excited. Told her Isabel was on to something big. More tests were being run. He would have news soon.
Leo had begun to confide the qualms Faraday had planted about him, but he had cut her off, said he had to go, even before she had been able to tell him about the returned suitcase and that Isabel was almost certainly somewhere in Australia.
Maybe, Leo thought as she jabbed the last lilac into the bowl, she should just pick herself up and go back to Manhattan tomorrow morning to take up the fraying strings of her own life. She needed to, as Daniel Lukas had made so graphically clear. The first thing she would do when she walked in the door was throw out Jeff’s perverse clock. No more time for moving backwards. Time for the new instead, for painting walls and rearranging the furniture of home and mind. Or she could go to San Francisco. No, no, not that.
What was clear was that she was of no more use here. All her searching for Isabel had only made her friend more elusive and had cast doubts on the very existence of their friendship.
The cat leapt onto the table and prodded the bowl of lilac with his pink snout. Beast looked thin, a little haggard, not the proudly contemptuous bulk of a bristling tom she was used to. Whatever the lore about the independence of cats, this one was evidently pining for his mistress. Leo stroked the heavy fur. The cat shied away from her touch without so much as a single purr.
She looked out the window. The cars beneath sparkled in the sunlight. In the distance, a woman lay on a small stretch of flat roof and basked as voluptuously as if she could hear the rumble of the Mediterranean beside her. Leo wished that the sun could lift her spirits, but they felt as flat as a failed soufflé.
No, there was nothing for her to do here now but wait for Isabel’s aunt, and that only out of simple courtesy.
The woman she opened the door to was not at all the person Leo had envisioned. Instead of a statuesque, older version of Isabel, a small woman with a face of sweet gentleness stood before her. She had apple round cheeks as burnished and crinkly as a russet and softly curling, grey-flecked hair. She wore neatly tailored trousers with a matching tan jacket that seemed a little big for her. She smiled with the easy warmth of habit. But her dark eyes, despite the absence of visible tears, were ravaged. In them Leo read the fears she herself had conjured over the last weeks.
‘Leo Holland?’ She stretched out her hand to grasp Leo’s like a life-raft. ‘I’m Martha. Martha Morgan. I’m so pleased to meet you. Isabel told me you were her nearest and dearest. Thank-you. Thank-you so much for returning my telephone call and alerting me. I’ve been frantic with worry.’
Leo took her bag and led her in, offered tea or coffee.
‘The first. I’m as parched as the desert on a summer’s day.’ She looked round with an air of wonder. ‘So this is what Isabel has made of herself. Grand. Grand. I knew it. I’ve never visited her in England before. Never could allow myself to leave Elinor. If only I hadn’t –’ She stopped herself, followed Leo into the kitchen.
‘Tell me what you know.’ Her voice changed. Any hint of fluffiness fell away from it. ‘I don’t want to waste any time. Don’t omit details. Tell me from the beginning, please.’
Leo poured tea and began to speak. She had intended to start with the arrival of Isabel’s lost suitcase. But now, with the woman’s sorrowful eyes intent on her, it seemed heartless instantly to convey that her long journey was pointless, that Isabel had failed to alert her aunt to her arrival in Australia, just as she had failed to inform Leo that she would not be coming to the US. So leaving out only Jill Reid’s death, she told her briefly about the investigation Isabel had been engaged on in the West Country and about the last time anyone had definitely seen her at the Lynton Arms Hotel. She was about to tell her about the suitcase, when Martha inter
rupted.
‘You told me she was calling herself Morgenstern?’
‘Yes. Iris Morgenstern. So that the initials stayed the same, I imagine because she wanted to carry on using her e-mail address.’ Leo looked at her curiously. ‘Your name is Morgan, too? So…’
‘Yes, Morgan is our family name, my sister’s and mine. I never married.’ Martha’s smile floundered. ‘Elinor reverted to the family name, when…. Morgenstern was Isabel’s father’s name. Iris is her middle name. She hated it, never used it, though when she was tiny, he used to call her that.’
Leo sat back in the sofa and gasped audibly. Paola Webster’s disquisition rang in her mind and with it came a bleak image of Isabel. Isabel wearing a crying child’s face. Isabel in thrall to a hideous past, impelled to travel to Australia to exhume decomposing remains, family poisons too shameful to pour into a friend’s ear. Leo wouldn’t have known how to communicate that narrative to a friend either.
‘I think we need something stronger to drink,’ she murmured and fled into the kitchen, in part to prevent Martha from reading her face.
But the woman followed her.
Her eyes fixed on the wine bottle, Leo said. ‘I’m sorry, Martha. I suspect your trip here was unnecessary.’ She busied herself with the finding of nuts and olives, while she explained about Isabel’s returned suitcase.
The woman’s face when she finally dared to meet it wore a puzzled expression. ‘No, no. Unless I completely misunderstood what Isabel last told me, that couldn’t be right. Maybe the case was lost on her last trip and finally made its way home. I don’t see…’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘That she’d traced him.’
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