‘How are you feeling now?’ Dr Bywater said.
‘Fine,’ said Beth. ‘Not fine,’ she said, hearing herself, and she laughed with inappropriate volume then cringed. Her eyelashes were twitching. She found herself wanting to please the therapist. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m well,’ said Dr Bywater, and continued to look at her, waiting, as ever professional and reserved.
They discussed Fern’s lateness, and Beth’s reactions. ‘I think a central task here is to look at the effect your mother’s absence had on you and your responses and feelings now,’ said Dr Bywater, so gently that Beth’s breathing seemed to align with her words. ‘Start with some facts. Your family in Liverpool. You don’t even give me those – you hide them. Her.’ She touched the side of her neck, the nails catching the light.
‘I can barely bear to think about it.’ Beth paused. She took in a breath. ‘So … my moth— Lizzie, and my father, lived in a small terraced house in South Liverpool. He was a typesetter. She worked part-time. My brother Bill was five years older. I think I was probably an accident.’
‘How would you describe Lizzie?’ said Dr Bywater.
‘She was – she wasn’t your run-of-the-mill working Toxteth – Liverpool – mum. She was … intense, quite highly strung, vivid. She wanted to improve herself, with her reading, theatre-going. The weird thing is, she seemed really loving. But when I thought about it later, she was also a bit distracted, as though she had this internal world that none of her family could penetrate.’
Dr Bywater nodded.
‘I think my father would have known that, compared with him, she lit up a room,’ said Beth. ‘Well. I believed that my mother had gone because I’d somehow pushed her away.’
‘Children believe this,’ said Dr Bywater. ‘Which is the tragedy. Even now you’re choosing to believe the opinion of someone – your mother – who couldn’t fulfil the role she was meant to.’
‘It wasn’t just her fault,’ Beth said, but again she felt heat rising in her. ‘I was terrible to her.’
Dr Bywater said nothing.
‘Worse.’ Beth shook her head. ‘Really, I don’t want you to think I’m just the victim of—’
‘I don’t assume anything. Tell me, tell me if you can, about when she left?’
***
When Lizzie Penn left her family and home, she didn’t say goodbye. Her husband was in the garage and son away at college. She kissed her daughter, seemingly in passing.
‘I love you,’ she said, as she often did.
Then she turned to wave as Beth, just thirteen – hair a stringy, stained gold, large brown eyes like a bushbaby – watched her unthinkingly from her bedroom window.
Beth followed her narrowing figure with her gaze without really seeing it, speculating about what her mother might buy them for tea. Lizzie carried no suitcase, and she left most of her possessions behind in the house, as though shame or determination to erase her past prevented her from taking her belongings.
***
‘What did you feel?’ Dr Bywater’s voice was so even but pliant, it seemed to enclose her listener.
‘I … I … felt like shit, to be honest.’
‘How did feeling shit feel?’
Beth swallowed.
Dr Bywater waited, sympathy visible in her eyes.
‘I – wanted to kill myself, frankly. A junior suicide! Yes, the runty little kid that I was considered it.’
She had wanted to shoot herself. Not on the day of the leaving, when Lizzie didn’t come back for supper after all, and Beth’s father had knocked on her bedroom door to try to explain what he really couldn’t; but just over a week later, when she thought about it as she sat with him in continuing near-silence while he tried, tried so hard to make life normal. Her older brother was away in Brighton, and it was so boring and empty and sad and strange, just her and her father – forever, forever; waiting; no-taste food, clumsiness, kindness, attempts at conversation; the disbelief now stained with realisation – and she thought of the guns at the amusement arcade, and wondered whether she could put a pellet in herself.
***
‘You’ve had a life-changing loss at a very young age,’ said Dr Bywater. ‘It wouldn’t be surprising if this affected the way you feel about your daughter. Overprotective, compensating. All these triggers may make you feel she’s abandoning you, when she’s not.’
Beth nodded.
‘Here, you will never be abandoned,’ she said, and Beth instinctively wanted to be held by her, then brushed the thought away.
She glanced at the clock. They had run past the hour. She wanted to stay in this fortress for the rest of the day, floating until morning on the voice’s slide from lightness to depth.
EIGHT
Just who was the therapist, then, with her consultant status and her unknown life? With her measured but odd lapwing voice that you had to follow up and down, the accent that seemed as glaringly anachronistic as the enunciations of a British film star of the 1930s, incongruous with her occasional use of jargon? Beth didn’t know. She had no idea. All that could be ascertained was her gentle nature. A determination to unearth facts took hold. She could tell – though a layer of liberal Londonese coated her – that Dr Tamara Bywater was privileged at some level, probably privately educated. She wasn’t the suburban social worker that some of her colleagues appeared to be.
She tried to think of ways to ask Sol to ask David Aarons, the psychoanalyst friend he sometimes met for pre-work breakfast after the gym, but the implausibility of Sol gruffly questioning the manly David about his own feelings for his patients made her want to laugh.
‘Ask David if he knows anything about Dr Tamara Bywater?’ she blurted.
Sol looked up from the tripod he was collapsing. ‘The psychologist? He’s an analyst.’
‘Married to a psychologist. Dr – Bywater is a trained psychotherapist as well. When do you see him for breakfast?’
‘Likely Thursday. Isn’t it unethical for you to be told personal information about her?’
‘Probably,’ said Beth cheerfully.
Fern came into the room, ignored her, and looked through the snacks drawer.
‘Hello, girl whom I haven’t seen all day,’ said Beth, and bent over her. Fern’s shoulders tightened perceptibly at Beth’s voice.
‘Holy shit,’ said Fern, lifting only her head for a kiss. ‘Do you have to use that proper-proper language all the time? Posh speak.’
Beth snorted.
Fern turned. Beth swallowed. The thoughts crowded in, the catastrophising that Dr Bywater talked about: a repulsive stream of them.
***
Beth now often heard the voice of Dr Bywater advising her as she taught at The Dairy. Her classes were relaxed sessions in which pupils played with the astonishingly lavish quantities of materials at their disposal: canvases which they saw fit to slash and smear and literally urinate on for supposedly outrageous experiments that were roughly identical each year, along with manga horrors, videos of body parts and Banksy rip-offs. The school technician would stretch and prime her own canvases for her, however, and she always slipped him some cash.
Beth’s studio mate and old college friend Killian messaged and suggested a drink in Covent Garden, where he had a job for the season as a set painter. Sol would meet Fern at school from football club, and so she agreed.
It was unexpectedly pleasant to find herself in a more tourist-filled part of London, a novelty that reminded her of her Slade days when all areas were there to explore before later dismissal. The crowds surged through the convivial chaos around the Piazza, and then Beth jolted as Dr Bywater descended from a taxi with a man. This time, it was her. Beth saw the dark hair, the familiar body, her pulse catching her off-guard at the vision of her therapist out in the world, yet she wore high heels, a tight black dress and a cropped furry jacket that clouded above it. Beth caught just a glimpse of waist, of bottom encased in clinging fabric, before the opera-milling crowds swallowed her with her
companion, and of course it couldn’t be Dr Bywater. Beth knew that the sensibly attired therapist would never drape herself in a foxy dress over a man. This was what she had done with Lizzie Penn for so many years, strangers transformed by her delusions. She hadn’t even seen the woman from the taxi’s face. Please, she thought weakly. Please don’t start again.
***
Beth had always looked for her mother everywhere, all over Dingle, along the Cazzy, and Crosby Beach, on the sandbanks, the park, in case she was there, visiting her half-brother in Liverpool, so often spotting her thin back, her short hair, her ballerina walk. A mirage.
One day, sitting on her school bus in Liverpool, Beth had been so certain she had spotted Lizzie that she had leaped out. There was her mother in her green-blue coat, her hair a little longer, and Beth tore over to her, tripped on the pavement, fell, picked herself up and called out, and it took moments of delay for her to understand that the face was different, a different face on her mother’s body, in almost her mother’s coat. It was only later that she realised she had cut her knee so deeply it had needed four stitches, her father taking her to the hospital that evening, and she had a faint scar even now.
She started to go to the Metropolitan Cathedral and stared at the Mary to make herself cry, and she felt better afterwards, but she knew her father wouldn’t like her to do that, so she bought a postcard of her instead, which reminded her of her mother. She started her periods there, right there in Paddy’s Wigwam, searching frantically for a toilet, and she could never tell her father. Ellie’s mother, Mrs Playbourne, advised him instead on what to do, and there was always a pile of bulky towels in a high-up cupboard, before Ellie started sharing her tampon supply.
***
Beth went to the studio. She had unpacked all her materials in something approaching joy, immediately at home in the new workplace: an affordable, old-style warehouse in a corner of North London that was still resisting gentrification. She loved its camaraderie, its paint-covered dripping taps and concrete floor, its leaky roof with skylights, and even the cold air that made the artists crowd round the heaters moaning companionably. She talked to Jack Dorian less than most of the others in the building, who tended to wander into each other’s spaces, borrow materials, work late into the night. She cursed herself for not telling Sol at the beginning that Jack was a member of their group.
***
Back at Little Canal Street, the cheek-singeing heat of the wood burner was tunnelled with a draught, its furnace smell overlaying canal scent, and there, on the first floor’s balcony, was Sol, with his tripod and camera, the door left open as ever, his body fuzzy in the sodium glare of the street on the other side. Beth paused and watched him. She wanted Dr Bywater to see her house, her husband. It had been a series of miracles that he was here at all, the married American who had had to travel fortnightly to the States to see his son, postponing property purchase and much else.
‘Hon, come here, I want to show you something,’ he said, turning and breaking into a smile, an expression that somehow combined pleasure with pride in the person he bestowed it upon, a blessing among his poker faces and frowns of concentration. ‘Look at the shadows on the moon through the telephoto.’ He rested his arm on her as he showed her, cupping her shoulder. ‘Let’s eat. You get pasta tonight. Penne all’Amatriciana. All’Amatriciana all’Solomone. Steel yourself.’
‘Yum,’ she said. ‘This will be my break. I’ve got to finish two greetings cards tonight.’
‘You’re working hard,’ said Sol.
‘Only at the crap. Oh and you got me flowers! So lovely. Thank you.’
‘Welcome. Money-making crap. Mice isn’t crap.’
‘Well …’ Something shadowed the corner of her vision. ‘Thank you.’ She looked behind her.
‘That man. Boy,’ she said, dropping her voice and nodding at the towpath with its sepia blur of railings and bushes.
Sol held her and glanced towards the canal. ‘Bet … Let’s eat.’
‘Are you seeing David in the morning?’ she said, in an abrupt change of subject.
‘Uh. No? Thursday. Why?’
‘Nothing.’
He pushed her into a chair, kissed the top of her head and tossed a tea towel into the air as he picked up the pan with his other hand.
‘Pretty deft,’ he said.
‘You plonker.’
‘Ha. You going to the studio tomorrow?’
‘Uh. Yes. I have to tell you something,’ she said in a rush. She cringed. ‘I mean, I don’t know why I said it like that.’
‘Huh?’
‘With a preface. Kind of. I’m talking nonsense. Jack Dorian. The Jackass. He’s part of the studio lot. Renters.’
‘He is?’ said Sol.
‘Yes.’ Her heart raced.
‘So why don’t I know that?’ Sol was stationary. His expression froze. ‘How long ago was it you moved studios?’
‘I—’
‘He’s always been there?’
‘Yes. I—’
‘That is crazy.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘You told me some of them – Killian, Lars, Anna, that lot? Right?’
‘Yes, but – it doesn’t mean anything he’s there. I barely speak to him.’
‘Well, that is unlikely if you’re sharing a space.’
‘How many years have I only seen Jack from a distance at PVs?’ said Beth. ‘Years and years.’ She was aware her smile was stiffly wide, her eyes too open, a blush rising up her face.
‘I’m well aware you’re drawn to crazies.’
‘Yes, some of my boyfriends turned out to be on the nutty side. So who did I marry?’
Sol said nothing.
‘You. Thank God,’ Beth blurted. ‘One does usually grow out of an attraction to the wrong sorts of people.’
‘I wouldn’t really fucking care about this,’ said Sol. ‘That guy’s a schmuck. I’d never be so dumb as to think you’d … But now I do fucking care because you omitted to tell me you’re seeing him every day.’
He shook his head slightly, his eyes hidden behind his glasses, shrugged.
‘If you’d told me from the get-go, it would have been no big deal.’
‘Ah, you’d have made your jibes.’
‘Sure. Jackass jokes. The Jackass merits them more than any of your other exes. The Jackass is a major jackass.’
She snorted.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘Uh huh.’
He was silent. She bit her lip, pressing her teeth into it to mark off the moments until he stopped.
‘There is something,’ he said. ‘Something going on? I think so. Some kind of distraction?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
The Tuesday appointment at St Peter’s had become the focus of Beth’s week, the monsters in her head sedated.
She had begun to look for a thank-you gift for Dr Bywater, scanning various websites until Sol asked her what she was doing.
‘A present for Ellie,’ she said, clenching at her own lie.
‘Did you know?’ Fern said, slamming her bag on the table. ‘Everyone else is allowed to take literally hours to get home without their slave owners going crazy?’ She stared at Beth, maintaining the stare.
‘They are not! They’re twelve and thirteen.’
‘You are straight-up wrong!’
‘Well, Fern, perhaps they didn’t return so late that their parents had to call the police,’ said Beth. ‘You will be supervised, and basically grounded, until we can trust you again.’
‘That’s correct,’ said Sol.
Fern grabbed a cereal bar. ‘My grandma came to me in a dream,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said Beth. She pressed her nails inside each other, hurting herself. ‘You mean—’
Fern waited. ‘Yes. She was beautiful, like in those photos of her as a girl. Where is she?’
‘You know … Oma is in Rhode Island.’
‘Holy crap,’ said Fern, converting her amuseme
nt into a sneer.
Beth smiled, and rubbed Fern’s shoulder as she passed.
‘She’s still alive, isn’t she?’
‘Uh? … Yes,’ said Beth, and coughed. She poured water and gargled. ‘We’d tell you if not.’
‘So where is she?’
‘You know, Liverpool. Just outside.’
‘So why don’t we ever see her?’ said Fern. ‘When we see Grandad. She might be lonely. Just because you don’t like her.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Basically, you did. I understand that. People not liking their mothers,’ she said, giving a strange bright smile. ‘But we literally never see Granny Penn!’
‘She’s not called that!’ Beth began to laugh, her eyes suddenly wet. ‘I can picture her shuddering at that. Ferny, you know why … we don’t have a relationship.’ She took another swig of water. ‘Why I don’t see her. Oh, my throat’s … I’m really really sorry if that deprives you – you—’
‘God, Mum. Don’t gulp like that. It’s disgusting. Are you OK? You sound like you swallowed a hairbrush.’
‘It feels like a bee.’ She gargled. ‘At least you visit your Oma every year. How many other girls your age get to go to America every year?’
Fern gazed at Beth, then shut her mouth. ‘Properly obvious. The toddler distraction technique,’ she said. She narrowed her eyes. ‘I think I’ll go out with Dad after school. He said we could go for pizza.’
‘Oh—’ said Beth. ‘OK.’
Fern stood and turned. ‘Dad, by the way, understands that I’m not a baby.’
‘Fern,’ said Beth, taking her shoulder.
‘Oh my God,’ said Fern, and shrugged her off with a violent movement. ‘Just leave me alone. You are honestly crazy? God. Get a life.’
***
My mother is an angel of lipstick and paintbrush cleaner, Fern had written in a school essay only the year before.
The Seduction Page 6
