The Seduction

by Joanna Briscoe

  She began to paint in the style of the tourist tat sold along the banks of the Seine, working with loose gestures. She twisted her hair and attempted to pin it with a chopstick from the pen jar, but it flopped back into place. She was still in her nightie, under a moth-holed cashmere cardigan. First thing in the morning, she looked washed out, as though lacking in sunlight’s benefits, her eyes large and dark in contrast with hair that mixed dishwater with muted golden-reds. Despite Sol’s easily expressed admiration, she had not felt attractive for a long time.

  She sketched the disposable-cups boats in which the mice would sail. She added beams from the Thames-side attractions as explosions of light: a Dufy imitation veering into Lautrec, St Paul’s and the London Eye crowded together, recognisable in a parody. The mice would appear in pen and ink later.

  ‘I just don’t know how you do that, honey.’

  She stood back.

  ‘Nor do I. If only I could do my real work a tenth this quickly.’

  He paused. ‘So – to continue the discussion,’ he said in the near-monotone he always used when saying anything of significance.

  ‘Er, yes, Dad.’

  ‘Your anxiety is— Honey, anyone with a mother like yours needs help, from the get-go. David has always said this, and he only knows the basic facts. Doesn’t the letter say you’re getting to see a consultant?’

  ‘Yes, yes, but – I’m not going to go masturbating on a couch about my childhood,’ she said. ‘Leave that kind of thing to your friend.’

  ‘I mean a professional psychologist,’ Sol said patiently.

  She shuddered. ‘I—’ She shook her head. She swallowed. An image came to her: a faceless practitioner probing her to expose all her failings. In the most extreme corner of her mind, she was naked, spewing the truth as he pinned back her insides until her psyche was revealed.

  ‘They’ll make me talk about Lizzie,’ she said rapidly.

  Sol opened his mouth. ‘You’re scared?’

  She paused. ‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice. She turned to one side, and couldn’t catch his eye.

  ‘I know.’ He held out his hands. ‘Well, view this as a challenge,’ he said. ‘Then there’s a chance you’ll rise to it. Come on. Stubborn creature. You are brave. That’s what you are.’

  She buried her head in the comfort – wool, air scent – of his shoulder.

  ‘I can’t help you with this on my own,’ he said. ‘And if that was really her calling—’

  ‘I do not want to talk about that woman.’

  He raised an eyebrow.

  She wanted to laugh, reflexively, and tease him, but his expression stopped her.

  ‘Your paintings are becoming darker as well,’ he said.

  She hesitated. ‘I didn’t even know that. Really? Look … oh, hello Fern!’

  Suddenly, Fern was standing between them, just as she had done as a young child, headbutting her way into a hug, so they had called her their Oedipus, their little Foedipus. Now she was there in T-shirt and leggings, and they were all clamped together; Beth kissed Fern’s head; Sol eased Beth’s shoulder.

  Freeze this moment, she thought.

  It froze. A picture in her mind she summoned later, treasuring it and hating herself.

  ***

  ‘That is so goddamn amazing, Mum?’ said Fern, gazing at Beth’s completed illustration. She reached up and whispered one of their ongoing jokes in her ear then gurgled laughter that Beth echoed until her hand wobbled.

  ‘Oh, the mice are legitimately cute,’ said Fern, resting her head against her mother’s shoulder so that Beth lifted her left hand and stroked her hair as she worked. ‘Massively. I want to live with them. They’re the nicest mice in the world.’

  ‘Oh, Fern,’ said Beth. ‘Thank you. Don’t feel the need to …’ please people, she was going to add, but stopped herself, because there was a genuine generosity to Fern, as well as politeness. And yet it seemed to her that it was a decision Fern had made early in her life to be positive, and that beneath the determined buoyancy lay a vulnerability that Beth could not even explain to Sol.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ she said, passing Fern’s letter to her.

  ‘I don’t know.’ A shrug, envelope stuffed away. Then a smile. ‘I challenge you to Monopoly after lunch, Mama, but only if I can be the dawg,’ she called as she left the room.

  Beth’s phone rang. Sol wheeled round, snatched it, answered it.

  ‘Who?’ said Beth, and her voice was shaking.

  ‘Oh, baby,’ said Sol. ‘Look at you. Come here.’

  ‘It was the same, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but hung up. You’re all white. Jeez, I hate it that she does anything – anything at all. You don’t need that therapy appointment, then?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I just said I do.’

  ***

  While Fern shut herself in her bedroom with music, Beth went around the corner to her studio, to seal the day with real work. But the studio, though so close, was too small, and once there, instead of painting, she began some of the immense task of sorting and packing materials in preparation for a move in autumn to a better space in a warehouse used by some artist friends.

  She looked at the cityscapes she was working on, waiting for the disturbing element to emerge from the hyperreal. It didn’t. She had called the series City Lies. Why? She didn’t know. It sounded vaguely modish. But in fact, the answer was there: lies. Lies of omission. There was technical accomplishment, the layering and brushwork critics wrote about, but a lack of real meaning. Subconsciously, she had been playing with the tropes of earlier success, and therefore at some level she lied.

  She put her head in her hands. Fern’s face slotted in front of the paintings, and the canvases receded in all their emptiness. What did lurk there, in Fern, in that shuttered Pollyanna? The daughter Beth had spent so many years spooning as she fell asleep, hair rubbing; sewing her Sylvanian Family clothes; chatting together, Fern fast-talking on the loo lid as Beth brushed her teeth. And what was she doing away from her child on a Saturday? She glanced at the almost complete series again as she closed the door. She would have to delay her gallerist’s studio visit. It wasn’t right. Many things, after all, were not quite right.

  ***

  By the time she came back, the house was, as so often, filling: her childhood artist friend Aranxto, who lived nearby, on a flying visit with some of his retinue, and clearly irritating Sol; a neighbour there ranting about illegal canal moorings; and Fern’s best friend Maia practising make-up and back bends on the sofa.

  ‘When’s the studio relocation?’ asked Sol in the kitchen, as they fetched more tea.

  ‘There’s never enough milk. In the freezer? Oct … fourteenth.’

  ‘Aranxto sounds like a goddamn trumpet. A studio upgrade. But the same price? In what world does that happen?’

  ‘It’s so much less central. Back end of Finsbury Park. And cold water only. So probably freezes in winter. But who cares? I’m so excited! The space is big, good for client visits, and I can see the friends working there for the odd lunch.’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘Which ones are there?’ he said, as she had feared he would.

  ‘Oh you know, the usual. Anna, Killian, Lars, Chris, blah …’

  ‘Cool,’ he said.

  She opened her mouth. ‘Oh and Jac—’ she began, but he was turning round and opening his computer.

  ‘I need to prep for Leeds tomorrow,’ he said, checking emails.

  Later, she went up to Fern’s room and kissed her head as she lay in bed.

  ‘Mmm, rub,’ said Fern, and Beth pressed her fingers into her scalp, their age-old ritual, while gazing round the room in case the letter Fern had been sent was visible.

  ‘I love you,’ said Beth.

  ‘Love you more.’

  ‘Fern, what is that weird smell on you?’

  ‘Bath stuff? Like, nothing?’

  Fern’s phone buzz
ed. She reached out and snatched it.

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ said Beth. ‘Hang on, Aranxto just texted you? What? He—’

  ‘Mum, do not look at my phone!’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ said Beth. ‘He’s here, for a start! Why does he even have your number?’

  ‘Duh, Mum,’ said Fern. ‘He’s my godfather?’

  ‘Yes. Aranxto the crappest godfather in the world! Who forgets your birthday.’

  ‘I think basically he’s got a bit better,’ said Fern, in flat tones.

  Beth waited. Fern fiddled with her phone. ‘Night, Mum,’ she said eventually. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you more times infinity.’

  ‘I love you infinity times infinity times a million billion times infinity.’

  ‘All that, times infinity, forever,’ said Beth, planting a row of final kisses on Fern. ‘Goodnight, beloved.’

  ‘Times infinity,’ shouted Fern through the bedroom door.

  ‘That times infinity,’ shouted Beth from the bottom of the stairs.

  And more and more and more, she thought.

  FOUR

  ‘The thing is, there’s basically stuff I can’t – I’m not – going to blabber on about,’ said Beth as she was led from the waiting room into the overheated guts of the hospital. The late September morning was cold outside.

  There was a silence. The therapist who had been assigned to her after her assessment held the door open and guided her down further corridors.

  After several weeks of insomnia, Beth was wearing make-up that functioned as protection, her eyes enhanced with dark shadow so that they were almost too large.

  ‘That I can’t blurt out to anyone,’ she added.

  The therapist nodded slightly.

  ‘And so.’ Beth hesitated. ‘This may be a shocking waste of your time.’

  ‘We’ll talk in my office.’

  ‘Just where are we going?’ Beth asked jokily, as corridors led into others.

  ‘Now that would be telling,’ said the therapist with a single moment of flippancy, but she didn’t look at Beth, and carried on walking, straight-backed, into the strip-lit gloom.

  ***

  They approached a room whose clinical aspect, in what appeared to be a deranged Victorian castle of a hospital, made Beth hesitate at the door. She swallowed. The blinds were lowered; a fan heater blew in the corner of the room, creating a hush of privacy above the activity of the river shifting four floors below.

  Beth sat and attempted, for some minutes, to sketch out her life history as requested. She stumbled, unusually lacking in fluency, and blushed.

  ‘So what sent you here?’ asked the therapist eventually, her tone gentle.

  ‘My “increasing overprotectiveness and excessive anxiety”, in the words of the man who originally urged me to come. Oh, and my “disproportionate reactions”,’ said Beth, having already formulated the answer in the hope of forestalling probing; but its delivery sounded rehearsed, and not quite accurate, and she made a couple of gestures to denote spontaneity that only betrayed self-consciousness. She took a breath. ‘I knew I needed to come, really. There were – reasons.’

  The therapist gave a suggestion of a smile, and nodded.

  ‘So,’ she said, and she drew out some worksheets. ‘Practicalities. With this number of sessions, we’re meant to be doing fairly straightforward CBT.’

  Beth looked blank.

  ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But if I can, I go beyond, into more eclectic therapy. I have a psychotherapy training as well. I suspect you’d shoot too many simplistic worksheets down in flames …’

  ‘I suspect you’re right.’ Beth smiled.

  She moved in her seat. She was thankful for her work clothes, yet still she felt inadequate: an escapee from her part-time teaching job. There had been too long a gap since her last show. A clump of eyelashes was twitching with tiredness; her face seemed exposed, the contrast of dark brown eyes with the muted reds of her hair a little uneasy. She unhooked the hair where it had caught behind one ear. She could veer into rabbity flaring, she realised, her skin reactive. Shame washed over her.

  This Dr Tamara Bywater, Consultant Chartered Clinical Psychologist, didn’t resemble her idea of a female therapist: a moulting hen, or an upholstered termagant in strict glasses. She was neat, faintly dull-looking, without descending into full-blown dowdiness. She wore a grey skirt and appeared older than Beth.

  ‘Anything else brought you here?’ asked Dr Bywater, who then waited, no judgement visible, only the smallest head tilt of encouragement. She waited more.

  ‘Um. Sometimes I fear I’ll just fuck everything up,’ said Beth in a rush.

  Dr Bywater nodded.

  ‘That things are just – well, they’re good at the moment. Better than I deserve. Things’ll go wrong if I …’ she said, waiting for the therapist to contradict her, to reassure her. ‘I fear – what if I sabotage everything? Accidentally.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ said Dr Bywater eventually.

  ‘I just – I just fear it. I kind of want you to just tell me to stop being neurotic.’ Beth laughed. ‘I did before,’ she said, when there was silence once again.

  ‘When?’

  ‘As a child.’

  ‘It’s one of the great tragedies of childhood that children imagine they are to blame for adults’ actions. Or simply for chance events,’ said Dr Bywater.

  ‘I kind of was, though – or later,’ said Beth in a stutter. ‘To blame. And –’ she looked around the room ‘– a – a phone call disturbed me.’ She swallowed. ‘A lot. And my daughter Fern going adolescent. Turning? Turning thirteen, I mean. She has been changing.’

  ***

  The memory of Fern unwrapping birthday presents formed the next snapshot later in Beth’s mind, to follow the post on the mat. She could trace more changes back to that day, and yet, when she really searched her memories, they had been there before: the brief absences, glimmers of evasion.

  Fern was a joy, a pleasure to buy for; a girl awash with passions. There was the anticipation of her receiving gifts – the usual puppies calendar, a monkey top, stationery, animal-based objects, oversized fluffy slippers, the token products from Sephora and lip gloss – but a flicker of uncertainty made Beth pause, and Fern’s over-bright politeness as she opened her presents, face buried in a big hug, confirmed that they were wrong, too young, and the clothes were only ever worn in bed, with strange excuses. Later, she had her party, pubescent girls huddled together and hysterical, easily bored. They sat in a row and held their phones to their faces, photographing the set, semi-seductive smiles that accompanied Snapchat messages.

  ‘Visit?’ one of them said to Fern, leaning towards her and glancing at her phone.

  Fern nodded stiffly and looked at her lap.

  ‘Who?’ Beth wanted to say.

  Aranxto gave Fern an iPad. She looked embarrassed, then grinned self-consciously.

  ‘What?’ Beth said to him later. ‘You neglect her for thirteen years, and then you suddenly give her a massive present? Of course, I’m grateful. She’s thrilled. Thank you. But—’

  ‘They’re boring when they’re rug rats,’ said Aranxto lazily. ‘They get more interesting when they can talk.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘She’s quite cool, your kid.’

  ‘And her godfather has just discovered that?’

  ***

  ‘It doesn’t sound much now, does it?’ said Beth. ‘My daughter’s become a teenager – ooh dear!’

  ‘It’s likely to be a trigger,’ said Dr Bywater. ‘Perhaps it links to a similar occurrence in the past. Is there anything you can think of?’

  Beth gazed at her, her jaw slack. To her horror, tears were needling her eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you were challenged.’

  ‘Yes.’ Beth glanced at the clock. The walls seemed to expand. Then came an image of the back of her mother’s head, de
tails of her hair magnified into rustling shining ropes.

  ‘Well. Perhaps you experienced something yourself at the same age. Past events can be powerful triggers. We’ll see if we can help you.’

  Beth closed her eyes.

  ‘Do you have other issues you want to explore?’ asked Dr Bywater.

  Her enunciation was notably old-fashioned: a soothing therapeutic tone overlaying an accent that resembled an actress’s from an earlier era, and Beth followed its swoops and clambers even as the content of the speech made her stiffen. The heater blanketed tatters of river traffic below.

  ‘“Issues”? I’m allergic to some of this therapy language. At least you don’t say “issues around”,’ said Beth. She winced, hearing her own tones. ‘OK. I’m sorry. I seem to be going into my direct, un-English mode that I’ve been warned about. So …’ She blushed a little. ‘My anxiety. But I’m not sure this is the route …’ She looked around the room. ‘It’s funny. I thought I’d be getting a man. I think I assumed. That is very prejudiced of me.’

  ‘Perhaps it makes you uncomfortable, seeing a woman.’

  ‘No. No, of course not.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Well,’ Beth blurted, ‘I think actually I kind of pictured myself sparring with a trained-up male in a cheap suit while bristling at his sexism.’

  Dr Bywater’s mouth twitched minutely.

  ‘You see, you might penetrate some of my attempts at concealment more easily than a man,’ said Beth.

  Dr Bywater nodded. ‘Stay with your feelings about this,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to use defences such as humour here.’ She continued to gaze at Beth with an understanding smile, clearly aware that there was prevarication occurring; and a longer silence followed.

  A picture of Fern as a toddler flashed in front of Beth, the skin scent, the milky need. A click of her throat was audible.

  ‘I worry that something is happening with Fern that’s perhaps beyond all the changes of adolescence,’ said Beth. ‘But my – what does one say? Partner. Yuk. Sol. He is not worried at all. So it leaves me feeling paranoid.’