The Seduction

by Joanna Briscoe

  In her office, Dr Bywater rested her eyes on Beth with a seemingly limitless supply of understanding. Beth’s breathing slowed. There was a rare stillness that settled over her in Dr Bywater’s presence. She looked at the therapist with her indeterminate-coloured eyes.

  Who was she? she wondered again. Why did this culture accept – in fact encourage – this custom of dumping its innermost secrets on a stranger? Beth knew only that she was calm and considerate and that such tranquillity must be natural to her. She was probably, Beth thought, on the dull side in real life: too serene and sensible; even possibly faintly New Age in her interests, immersed as she was in the public-health sector. Then she remembered Sol castigating her for such categorisations.

  Dr Bywater sat very slightly forward in her chair and she looked directly at Beth. There was a pale caramel evenness to her skin that enhanced the impression she gave of self-containment, only broken by the tiredness beneath her eyes. Her hair was a dark brown with slight waves, but which was held back on top with a clip that lent her a conventional appearance, flattening it to her scalp while the rest fell just past her shoulders.

  Her skin contrasted with both the hair and large, oddly coloured eyes – primarily a smudged grey, or dark blue – so that her colouring was noticeable, almost dissonant, like children’s artwork with features drawn boldly on paper: here the spikes of lashes, here the black irises, the upper lip full but not defined. Her nose was authoritative in its size and its faintly imperious angle, her occasional frown drawing wrinkles at its top. Her teeth had a small gap in the middle, her greeting smile incongruously large, her features otherwise self-possessed; and there was an aspect to her look in repose that could verge on sadness.

  The therapist looked a few years older than Beth. She wore a gold band on her wedding finger, not plain, but scalloped, and her surname was possibly her married name, as it seemed too English. There was something of old East Europe to her; of sepia photographs at Ellis Island, soul, suffering. Her nails were more decorative than the rest of her: long and oval, catching the light when she touched her neck.

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Beth. ‘I’m really not bad. I’m coping.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Dr Bywater softly, ‘you’re struggling against tears.’

  Beth tried to slow her breathing. The clock ticked.

  ‘You don’t think about yourself. You are too busy worrying about everyone else.’

  Her voice was the softest confection. Beth absorbed the peace of it, playing back the words themselves with a delay. She wanted to stay there on that NHS chair, and be soothed, and smoothed, and straightened, in the one time during the hectic week that was all for herself.

  Lizzie came with the nights. Without doubt, the ghost was risen, the husks of memory animated. Elizabeth Bridget Penn had resembled a boyish dancer at times, with her narrowness and her light strides across a room, that small face with its large mouth that widened at the cheekbones. Sometimes she had looked like Rudolf Nureyev, with a Slavic cast to her face, the cropped trousers in the style of Audrey Hepburn.

  ‘You don’t talk about your mother. She will come in good time, but the more we repress troubling memories, the more power we give them.’

  What’s all this first-person-plural talk? Beth wanted to say, but she stopped herself, suddenly certain that behind the inscrutability and lack of judgement lay kindness.

  A double-stalked Mad Men-style lamp that was clearly the therapist’s own cast its glow on a regulation table. The chairs were low with squeaking surfaces and scuffed blond arms, the resulting informal sitting position encouraging confession, along with the prop-like tissues which seemed to imply that weeping was expected.

  ‘I hope you and your partner are more in agreement about therapy, and about Fern,’ said Dr Bywater into the silence. ‘How is it?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Beth. ‘OK. A few ups and downs. He thinks I’m halfway crazy when it comes to Fern and independence, danger, etc., and I’m irritated that he’s oblivious, and then there’s tension, unspoken, or explosive short rows.’

  Dr Bywater seemed to be waiting for something more.

  ‘So everything is OK then?’

  Beth laughed. ‘Oh God. If I play that back …’

  Dr Bywater was silent.

  ‘With Fern,’ said Beth, ‘things seem to be changing too quickly. It’s natural, I know – but there’s some other element to it. I think? And I’m anxious that maybe I can’t mother her properly because of my own mother—’ She stopped abruptly.

  Dr Bywater waited.

  Beth allowed the silence.

  ‘Why is that?’

  Beth shook her head and swallowed, audibly.

  ‘So I wonder,’ said Dr Bywater eventually in her swooping voice, ‘if there’s something we could explore about your mother.’

  ‘Of course there’s something about my mother,’ said Beth sharply. ‘What would you lot do without mothers? Go out of business. Bankrupt. OK, I’m being rude. I apologise. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Then tell me about your father,’ said Dr Bywater in the same calm tones, so Beth ran through rudimentary facts about Gordon Penn – his impoverished childhood, his work as a typesetter, his love for her mother, his quiet morality – until she tailed off.

  Dr Bywater handed her some more worksheets. Automatic Thought. Feeling. Challenge. Columns in which to note thought processes and add to a data log. Her nails lightly caught the back of Beth’s fingers as she passed her the papers. Beth blinked.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Dr Bywater. ‘Could we make your appointments later in the day, by the way?’

  Beth paused. She nodded. Her hand still felt the movement of nails. ‘Yes. That would be easier for me too.’

  ‘Was there anything else that brought you here? That you’re ready to approach,’ said Dr Bywater without looking up.

  Beth hesitated. She turned her eyes to the ceiling, and there was a rocking feeling in her head. She tried to take a deeper breath. She gazed at her lap before lifting her head. The urge to confess rose up, flickered, and disappeared.

  The therapist gazed impassively at her.

  ‘Your mother—’ she said again, softly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Beth abruptly. She looked at the wall. Her throat constricted.

  ‘Where is she? She doesn’t really appear. In the room—’

  ‘I find it so hard to – talk about her.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk,’ said Dr Bywater so gently that Beth could think only of water flowing. She sat and let the speech trickle over her, and she tried to breathe normally. ‘We could just see what happens.’

  Beth nodded. She looked away. She shuddered. ‘Look. What can I say? I can’t even speak.’

  ‘Beth,’ said Dr Bywater. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. Try to regulate yourself, and we can talk.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no point,’ said Beth into her hands. ‘I was always a bit of a fuck-up. Flawed, I mean. What’s going to change there? It’s hard to explain how much.’

  ‘What proof do you have?’ said Dr Bywater, her tones so soothing, they seemed like a voice in a dream.

  ‘My mother left.’

  There was a silence.

  Dr Bywater looked into Beth’s eyes, and in that space Beth bathed for long, stretched seconds. She floated. It was warm there, and it held her.

  ‘Left?’ said Dr Bywater, hardly moving her lips.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Did she—’

  ‘Left home when I was thirteen.’

  ‘And your father brought you up?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  Dr Bywater nodded, still keeping her eyes on her, her mouth softening into a look of deep sympathy. She smiled at her, and finally, Beth cried, weeping in front of her without stopping, as she hadn’t done for years.

  SIX

  ‘So how was it today?’ said Sol.

  ‘Good,’ said Beth. She was googling Dr Tamara Bywater at that moment. ‘She said, implied, I should be worried
about you. Me and you …’

  ‘Did she?’ He paused. ‘That is surprising.’

  She frowned at her phone. The search returned only a few professional results.

  ‘Should I be?’ she said. ‘About “us”, I mean? Yuk. This all sounds such a cliché. Sol … Well?’

  He paused again. He turned to her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

  ***

  Jack Dorian strode towards Beth as she arrived at the vast shared spaces of the new studio, her crates following. ‘Bethy-Boop!’ he called, Aranxto’s nickname for her sitting uncomfortably with him.

  ‘Jack!’ she said. Jackass, she almost said instead.

  He wore a smeared sweatshirt which, along with his wide-shouldered boy looks and somewhat spiky hair, seemed to stage an awkward protest against ageing that was not appealing, but when he hugged Beth in greeting, merely the smell of him – oil paint, neck skin – released a twist of pheromones that she was not expecting.

  She opened her mouth. She hesitated. ‘Oh my God, I love it here,’ she said, gesturing too expansively. ‘Why did I spend so long working on my own?’

  ‘Wait till it freezes,’ said her old college friend Killian.

  ‘We all huddle up,’ said Jack.

  Beth blushed, then blushed for blushing.

  ‘Over geriatric paraffin heaters,’ said Killian.

  ‘I completely love that,’ said Beth. ‘It reminds me of camping. Of adventures.’

  ‘Adventures. You like those, I believe,’ said Jack.

  ‘Ha ha,’ said Beth. ‘Oh, my man-with-a-van is arriving!’ she said, burying her head in a text.

  ***

  The weather had tightened into early bruised skies, leaves spiralling to huddle on the towpath, and Fern was later from school as the term progressed. The sound of her Snapchat was ever-present, until she muted it and then constantly glanced at the screen.

  ‘Where’s Fern?’ said Beth one evening in late October.

  Sol’s son Laurie came into the room, and she flung her arms around him. He would still permit her expressions of affection, whereas Sol’s manly back slaps were restricted. Music blared; milk boiled over. At nearly eighteen, Laurie was towering over his father, and Beth smiled at his new height, stopped herself commenting, and put her hand on his arm.

  ‘Can you stay?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice lower over the years in increments that seemed to be both natural and acquired.

  ‘Oh brilliant. Let’s get some Chinese, then.’

  An image of Dr Bywater came to her, approving of her mothering. She suppressed a smile.

  ‘So where’s Fern?’

  ‘With her friend,’ said Sol, studying images on his camera.

  ‘Which friend? You were having her.’

  ‘Her friend Jemma. Just now. You just missed her.’

  ‘But it’s dark! Anyway, I don’t understand how she has met this girl.’

  ‘She lives round the corner, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Where round the corner?’ Her voice wobbled.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ he said, in the tone that flicked tension into the air.

  ‘For God’s sake, Sol.’

  ‘I was travelling all over town at her age,’ said Laurie, leaning over Sol’s camera and shaking his head at an image.

  ‘You’re a boy,’ said Beth.

  ‘Last time I looked.’

  Sol snorted.

  ‘I’m going. I’m going to find her.’ Beth grabbed her coat again. ‘She wasn’t going to go out tonight.’

  ‘She just decided now,’ said Sol, his glasses on his head, his eyes betraying strain that was normally masked.

  ‘I’m actually really pissed off with you,’ said Beth. ‘It’s – it’s disrespectful, as well as dangerous. You know, I’m sick of you implying I’m neurotic about this.’ She paused. The therapist’s words went through her mind, and she echoed them: ‘You’re not respecting my instincts. I’m her mother.’

  She saw Sol putting his head in his hands as she hurried from the room, feeling his gaze on her back and resisting it, then ran down the stairs to an unseasonal roar of cold behind the door. The street lamp’s glow on the alley that led to the small section of canal bank on their side was weak, devolving into darkness, the path empty, only the girl who always hummed on her bike shooting by, her light wobbling as she passed. The owners of the Mary-Lou, the houseboat illegally moored almost opposite their house and periodically banished by the police, were smoking in battered donkey jackets on their roof, breath indistinguishable from smoke. The smell on Fern’s hair came back to Beth, and then a trace of a memory seemed to spill into the corner of her mind; she chased it, certainty meeting confusion, and it was not what she had expected. It was elusive.

  She texted Fern, her thumbs stiff in the cold, but there was no answer. ‘Shit,’ she muttered.

  Beth stared and, strangely, she had the distinct thought that Dr Tamara Bywater was on the other shore. Then the woman who might have been her lifted her hand, and Beth made a sound, of pleasure, almost of odd relief. There was a half-wave, or was it a rearrangement of hair? The woman turned around, and walked away from the canal, and of course, thought Beth in embarrassment, it could be anyone of a similar slimness and hair length, but she stared, still, through the darkness, longing for her counsel.

  She started to ring Fern, then stopped, blocked her own number so Fern would pick up, waited, called again, and Fern answered, hesitantly. She pulled her coat tighter.

  ‘Come here right now,’ Beth said, and when Fern arrived, she was indignant and vulnerable in turn.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Mum. It’s fine. Don’t flip your shit like this.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Just – outside,’ said Fern. ‘With Jemma.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of the lying,’ snapped Beth. She felt a sadistic, uneasy pleasure rise in her as she began, belatedly, to issue rules and threaten punishments.

  Fern stared at her, her mouth an obstinate wobbling.

  ‘But Jemma’s lonely, she’s – it’s really really sad, how it is at her school, teased and stuff – and she’s nice.’

  Beth opened her mouth. ‘Fern. You are so kind and thoughtful, but you don’t have to take on every waif and stray. Not everyone’s your responsibility. What is this smell?’

  ‘Uh?’ Fern shook her head slowly, appraising Beth as though she felt sorry for her. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Fern, you don’t speak like this! What, is this new teen talk? Be yourself. I am now coming with you when you go out in the evenings, and accompanying you to Jemma’s door.’

  ‘God’s sake! Mum! You are – mad. Like, legitimately crazy. I just can’t believe it! You think I’m a baby. Literally. Literally a baby. Oh my God. It’s like … you just want to cuddle me and guard me literally all the time.’

  ‘I’m just trying to look after you,’ said Beth. ‘Be – nice to you.’

  ‘Well you’re too nice.’

  ‘You’d rather I ignored you a bit? Didn’t hug you, tuck you in, do … read the bedtime novels?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right,’ said Beth. She took a deep breath. ‘OK.’ The emptying world tilted. ‘OK. You can go home now.’

  ‘On my own?’

  ‘Yes. Text as soon as you’re there.’

  Fern hesitated, then marched up the bridge steps, and Beth watched her back with its swinging hair. It was as though the love of her life had just left her. But of course, Fern was the love of her life, and she was leaving her, as was natural. Beth lowered her head and pulled at the skin of her temples.

  ***

  She waited for Fern’s text, slumped against the wall, shivering; she knew that it was ill-advised to allow a thirteen-year-old to walk along the bridge and down two and a half streets to home, but she thought, Go on then. Court danger, and superstition will save you.
Twelve years or so. Was that all you had of your child before they didn’t want or need you any more?

  Had she got it wrong and overdone it, stifling her daughter with childish things: the old-fashioned standards of infancy, the books and kites and canal trips and picnics? An Orlando version of a childhood: seaside holidays, tree climbing in London Fields, Woodland Happy Families. Smothering as the opposite of abandonment? But she had taken Fern to films and museums as well, to café breakfasts with friends before school, the girls giggling and cheeky with shyness. ‘My friends love you,’ Fern had always said, simply. ‘I have the kindest mother in the world,’ she had said at other times.

  Fern had always enjoyed accompanying Beth to vintage clothes shops in Islington and Crouch End to find the 1940s dresses and jackets that Beth loved, and which fitted her well. Her ‘old Hollywood film clothes’, Fern had called them then. Lately she had screwed up her nose. ‘They are so not in fashion, Mum,’ she said. ‘And those old gross places smell like mildew.’

  Beth now looked across at the canal, could barely detect its ropes of movement, and felt the momentary temptation to curl up, lean forward and roll in. She sat very still. She was suddenly back crouching under the stairs, alone aged thirteen, body taut with a silent scream as what her mother had done sank in for the first time.

  Where was her mother? The voice on the phone. She wished she could see you. But she didn’t, did she? She hadn’t tried again.

  A helicopter was circling Camden, then another. There was a sound from the water. If she painted now, she would use an umber layer, traces of celadon green beneath washes to capture the undertow, the fish reek in the cold, the towpath a floating trail beside it. But she couldn’t paint. Would the new studio help?

  The text from Fern came: Home.

  Beth exhaled the tension that she didn’t know was compressing her chest.

  She couldn’t imagine preparing a canvas. She couldn’t imagine ever confidently mothering Fern again. She couldn’t imagine a home life without growing marital tension and the neurotic flickerings of fear.