The Seduction

by Joanna Briscoe

  Beth talked, and Dr Bywater held Beth’s gaze and smiled, a trapeze of a smile, suspending her. Beth was certain at that moment that the affinity between them was so overt, she relaxed. It was there to play with. She began to make Dr Bywater laugh.

  She tried to focus. She shifted in her seat. ‘But let’s talk about something other than my boring psyche for a while,’ she said.

  ‘Beth, I would love to talk to you about other things. You brighten my day – but you are here for therapy.’

  Beth suppressed a smile. ‘How can a fuck-up like me brighten your day?’

  ‘You do,’ she said, looking down with a shake of her head. ‘You – you said,’ she said swiftly, ‘you told me that after all that searching, you did see your mother?’

  Beth took a breath. The scene returned to her with sickening lucidity. ‘Yes,’ she said, and she was back at TJ Hughes’ department store, at Christmas, in Liverpool.

  ***

  After so many imaginary sightings, there in TJ’s, when Beth was almost fourteen, she had seen her mother. There she was, as she appeared to her most weeks, and for Beth there was the fear that, despite the shock of familiarity, this couldn’t be her, and she would soon, as ever, reveal herself to be a woman in the crowd with an imagined mother’s face.

  Beth caught her breath. A tremendous surge of relief rose in her chest, and then she was running, running to her, clawing at her. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ she cried, though she had never called her that before. She threw herself at her, butting her, clinging hard so that Lizzie’s face twisted in pain before she knew what was happening. Snot, saliva, tears ran down Beth’s face; she had to clasp her mother forcibly, keep her. The nightmare fell away, like a torrent of water. She clenched her arm. She clung to the cloth of her coat so abruptly that Lizzie swayed a little.

  ‘Bethy!’ shouted her father.

  A hand was on her shoulder.

  ‘No!’ screamed Beth. People had cleared a circle around them, and were watching, separate bubbles of exclamation rising to her ears. She clung to Lizzie, her mother’s tears meeting her own as she kissed Beth’s head and said, ‘No, Bethy, calmly, Bethy.’

  ‘Come home,’ said Gordon to Beth, and he sounded angrier than she had ever heard him. He took her hand.

  Lizzie looked shocked, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

  ‘Mum!’ said Beth.

  ‘Let me talk to her,’ said Lizzie, and by this time, there was a store guard between them, asking questions and telling them to be quiet.

  ‘Mum!’ screamed Beth, with such force that, even in the uproar, people jumped and made sounds of disapproval, and in that moment of confusion, her father dragged her away.

  ‘Bethy! Bethy! Gordon!’ called Lizzie, but the guard was beside her, and her voice was weak through the crowd. ‘Come back,’ she shouted.

  ‘You—’ shouted Gordon. ‘If you’ve gone, stay away.’

  Lizzie hesitated. She shook her head. Tears were slanting down her cheeks, distorting her features into something Beth had never seen before. She waited for her mother to run to her.

  Lizzie stood there, the tears red-pocketing her face, hesitated again on one foot, the people around watching her, and still she stood there.

  ***

  ‘She didn’t come after me,’ Beth said. ‘That was the last time I talked to her during my childhood.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Dr Bywater, and as Beth looked up, she could see, to her surprise, a shininess to her eyes in the low light.

  They were silent. Beth’s breathing was shallow. She sat with her head bowed.

  ‘You know, don’t you,’ said Dr Bywater, ‘that whatever profound damage caused this behaviour, she was at fault. Not you. None of this was your fault.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t I? Remember that self-punishing introject of yours. It seems to me, there is nothing terrible that you ever did to her,’ she said. ‘Is there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beth said. A rush of shame hit her, all these years later.

  She waited.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So,’ said Dr Bywater gently. ‘Can you describe what it was like without her?’

  ‘Well.’ Beth gazed at the ceiling. ‘Dad was good to me. He is a kind, lovely man. But we couldn’t talk. Excruciating near-silence.’ The wobble of last river light through the blinds tightened into bright focus. ‘It’s very very odd, really, being female but brought up without a woman.’

  ‘Poor child,’ said Dr Bywater unexpectedly.

  Beth fixed her gaze at a spot on the wall. She blinked.

  ‘Beth,’ said Dr Bywater. She stretched a hand briefly towards her arm, hovered over it, then pulled back.

  Beth put her face into her hands, and cried. She wanted, so much, for the therapist to hold her, but instead she made a sympathetic sound and sat very still.

  ‘You experienced a huge loss of the idealised parent,’ said Dr Bywater. ‘So you punish yourself.’ A hurry of seagulls momentarily drowned her little wartime RADA voice. ‘But perhaps punishing yourself feels safer than loss of control. Protects you from the worse pain beneath it, lends a sense of agency. These are more defences you use.’

  ‘What are yours?’ said Beth, looking up, her face wet.

  ‘I think it will be a long time before I can tell you that,’ she said with a dimpled flash of a smile. She hesitated.

  ‘Oh?’

  Dr Bywater looked down; she was silent. ‘Listen,’ she said. The sounds of professionals speaking passed, muted, behind the consulting-room door. She glanced to one side. ‘Sometimes I wish – I think, I wish …’ she said in a rush. She stopped. She opened her hands. ‘When you leave the office, I often think – I wish I could be her friend.’

  Beth swallowed. ‘Well, can’t you?’ Her voice emerged quietly.

  ‘I shouldn’t even be talking about this to you,’ said Dr Bywater, and a pained expression passed over her face. It made her look older, a touch of ugliness visible in the moment she screwed up her features. ‘I have to be wary of an enactment.’

  ‘An enactment? When we finish therapy, then we can be friends!’ Beth said brightly, but it sounded simplistic.

  Dr Bywater shook her head, smiling slightly. ‘My governing body … There are rules about that. You have to wait at least two years and, even then, it’s not advisable. In the meantime, I’ve answered your email, suggesting an appointment time.’

  ‘Oh! Thank you so much. I’m so grateful. It’s – really helping,’ said Beth self-consciously. ‘It’s time,’ she said, and rose.

  Dr Bywater’s hair fell forward on her face as she stood up after her and leaned towards her, reassuringly. Beth suddenly pictured herself kissing her, and jolted; almost hugged her instead, pulled herself back, blushed, expressed heartfelt thanks, barely able to look at her, and left.

  ***

  As soon as she was outside, Beth positioned herself where the hospital was hidden, and looked at her phone. Tamara Bywater’s email was formal. She had a Kennington postcode. Kennington was interesting and unexpected. It brought the thrill of illicit knowledge; the trophies of the amateur hunter.

  The river was tumbling grey with black, with a watchfulness to the air, a stray bird sound pulsing vibrato from the trees on the bank. Beth walked on, then ran over the bridge still smiling, the river and sky anointed for her, the world of others humdrum, knowing as she now did this soaring well-being, this power.

  ***

  ‘She wants to be my friend …’ Beth murmured into Ellie’s voicemail. ‘Call me back.’

  ‘So I seem,’ she said, rashly calling Aranxto, ‘to have developed a ridiculous schoolgirl crush on my therapist.’

  He barked in delight. ‘I thought the shrink was a chick?’

  ‘She is.’

  He let out a bellow of laughter.

  ‘A chick with a dick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Since when have you been a muff mun
cher, babe?’

  ‘I know. I know. I’m supposed to have this thing called transference. But it’s a proper fascination. I can barely make a decision without her. God, Aranxto, it’s actually a bit like being in love! You do not fucking tell anyone!’

  Aranxto giggled, followed by Beth.

  ‘Don’t think you’re much of a lezzer, Bethy,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know. And she isn’t either. Does it matter, you gay dinosaur? Given we’re all meant to be flexible now? There’s even a LGBT plus whatever club at Fern’s school.’

  ‘Imagine that in our time. I could have got it off with Rob Smith in the gym showers after all. Instead of being beaten up as a poof. Happy days.’

  ‘Yes, Aranxto. So we’re back on to you, are we?’

  ‘When are we ever not, my dear? When am I to meet your girlfriend?’

  ‘Ha ha. Just imagine. Oh my God.’

  ***

  Fern walked straight out of the room as soon as Beth arrived home. She tried to clear the table.

  ‘Honey.’ Sol caught her expression. ‘How she’s being is really hurtful, right?’

  Beth steadied her breathing. ‘I try not to let it. But … what am I doing wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, Bet. Come here.’ They hugged. She drew in the clean, showered smell of him.

  ‘I always feared maybe I can’t mother because of – well, I don’t have a role model, do I?’

  ‘For sure. But you could not have been a more loving mother to her.’

  She opened her mouth. She swallowed a tightness in her throat. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The most caring, considerate, affectionate mother. You glow with that love for her, Bet. And fun as well. She’s lucky to have been born your daughter.’

  Beth exhaled, and pressed her eyes against his shoulder. ‘Thank you. That is kind of you to say.’

  ‘Just true.’

  She nibbled his shirt. She kissed him. ‘Then what’s changed? Gone wrong?’

  He shook his head. ‘Her age.’

  ‘She’s very young for this. I can suddenly do nothing right. Usually fifteen-ish when they reject you. Sixteen.’

  Sol was silent.

  ‘Sol? I know you. The way you breathed in through your nose.’

  He made a small sound, as though to speak.

  ‘What?’ said Beth.

  ‘Detective Penn misses nothing? Presently … just now … you are kind of distracted,’ he said.

  ‘Am I?’ she said, and she loosened herself. ‘What do you mean?’ She turned from him.

  ‘It’s as though your mind’s elsewhere. You don’t sleep, but then you seem … yes, distracted. But happier, right?’

  ‘I don’t know … I’m really feeling much, much better somehow.’

  ‘More than that, honey. Hyped.’

  ‘Really?’ Beth laughed slightly, with a hectic flavour, so she buried her head in his neck.

  They hugged for a while, and then he took out his phone and put his glasses on his head as he wrote.

  ‘What are you writing?’ she said.

  He put his phone away.

  ***

  Searing excitement over Dr Bywater was alternated with the familiar nagging question over whether Lizzie would call her again.

  Almost two decades after Beth had last seen her mother at the department store in Liverpool, but before she had given birth to Fern, Lizzie had written to her via her gallery, requesting to see her.

  ‘I’m pretty much thinking you should do this,’ Sol had said.

  ‘What?’ said Beth.

  Sol, who had lived with her then for three years, lifted her hair and kissed her head. ‘Maybe just one chance? I suspect mental health problems …’ he said gently.

  Beth took a sharp breath. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s kind of clear, isn’t it? Given her behaviour. Likely deep depression?’

  ‘When do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, from the get-go.’

  Beth stood there, and the world began to change. ‘Oh, God.’ He carried on holding her. ‘I never thought about it,’ she said.

  Three months later, she waited for her mother to arrive at the Gavron gallery.

  ‘She would be so fucking proud,’ said Sol, having finally persuaded Beth to respond to Lizzie’s request by inviting her to the private view for her first solo exhibition.

  ‘You think?’ said Beth, raising her eyes.

  ‘I do think. With no proof, I grant. Hey, Bet, we can hide her there. Spike her drink if it comes to that. She’ll be one among a whole bunch of people.’

  Her first solo exhibition was, at some level, the moment she had worked towards all her life. She barely felt it: it was a scene that came back to her later, as though she stood outside herself as a camera, looking down from the light tracks on the ceiling, or through the window on to a swirl that seemed a luminous blue or ultraviolet to her afterwards, a substance that she swam through, yet the only sensation she remembered was the waiting: an ever-stretching thread of anticipation that grew thin and then wore out, and finally snapped. Her other memories of the night were based on the gallery’s photographs, so she became the person in them, dressed and celebrated and surrounded by her work, professionals, partner, friends, and not her mother. Once again, Lizzie wasn’t there.

  She had met a new man that week, according to Beth’s brother.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Beth, the only time she could speak about it.

  ‘That’s it for sure,’ said Sol, nodding. ‘I’m so damn sorry.’

  ELEVEN

  It was almost time to cross London to find Dr Bywater for Beth’s first private session. She finished some work. She was now, at last, working, spasmodically, haphazardly. Tamara Bywater had given her that impetus. In painting alla prima in her larger studio, and making her hand move regardless of the result, she had started to inch herself through a barrier, and she had just begun to capture something that had eluded her in all her cosy, despairing procrastination. The banks hulked, forming from the river’s contents: fungal growths, slums, coal-slimed like the alleys of home had been, and there was death in all except the slim shake of growing light, travelling to the sea, the unknown.

  The face – so suddenly, like an apparition – looking out over Sefton Park.

  ***

  Beth walked briskly from the Tube through the dying November afternoon, and got there just on the hour. Cleaver Square, with its age and cramped elegance, was a surprise: different from its north-of-the-river equivalents, more squat and dark-bricked, so she caught just the tiniest flavour of parts of Liverpool as she came off the square to the little street where Dr Tamara Bywater lived, in which the flat-fronted Georgian houses were dollish versions of the great Bloomsbury terraces she sometimes walked by. Here was stunted grandeur, a London still draped in gas lamp, cobble, horse.

  She was about to see where she lived, for the first time. Number 13 was at the end of a row, with hellebore-filled window boxes and a front door painted a phthalo green that contrasted with the sooted brown of the bricks. Beth walked the few steps up to it to ring the bell and half-believed that no one would be there. She looked down at the area, where she thought she glimpsed movement behind the bars.

  She waited. Her heart seemed to thump loudly. This felt like all she wanted: to be waiting, dressed up, exquisitely alert, about to see Tamara Bywater.

  It was four on a Friday. The husband, giver of the wedding ring, whoever he was, would be out. The children – she was bound to have children; she would be a lovely mother: the sweetest, most comforting soulmate – might be inside, or imminently returning from school; or older, possibly. They must adore her.

  ‘Beth,’ said Dr Bywater, opening the door, and her expression was less guarded than in the clinical context of St Peter’s. The smile enhanced the hint of off-centredness to her eyes.

  She looked different. For a moment, Beth wondered whether she had got the wrong day, and Dr Bywater wasn’t working. She was dressed more vividly t
han Beth had ever seen her in the hospital, yet in a more relaxed fashion, in slim trousers, and a patterned top, a necklace that was bolder than the silver jewellery of St Peter’s, and her hair had an emphatic bounce to its layers. She was wearing more make-up than Beth had ever noticed on her.

  ‘Might some sectioned lunatic at St Peter’s pull you to his stretcher at the incitement of rouge?’ Beth said, amusing herself, trying to stop herself saying it, but forging ahead and then blushing, though Dr Bywater laughed.

  ‘Come through,’ she said, and she guided Beth along a narrow hallway covered in a storm of paintings that Beth longed to study, rooms of miniature Georgian proportions in saturated colours leading off it: a cube of a sitting room in apple green with a pink lamp, an old French chandelier, a vast foxed mirror, again French in appearance; a portrait that Beth realised, with a start of recognition after passing, was of Tamara Bywater herself. She paused, tempted to stretch her body back to look at it.

  ‘It’s – well, it’s a beautiful house. So much interesting stuff. All this colour! Not what I thought …’

  Dr Bywater’s mouth twitched. ‘Yes, I probably appear as though I should live in a library. Or a health centre.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that!’

  She was led down a staircase that was unusually narrow for London, like a ship’s to its galley, its walls silver, the metallic paint coating uneven plaster that glowed through the stairwell. Dr Bywater turned at the bottom, and raised one eyebrow, amusement still hovering over her mouth.

  This was not what Beth had anticipated at all, only the house’s smallness, its touches of economy, predicted. She had thought it would be more restrained and sensible, more ecru and white, with New Age touches, the odd bamboo object – the Mexican thingamabobs of Lolita. Not these convulsions of pigment, this throb of colour and cranny off a South London square. Though it spread further back and was less tall, it resembled her own house in its confusion of angles and its small rooms, a fact that was both disconcerting and pleasing, but the colours, Beth admitted with a pang of inadequacy, were better, bolder. An unexpected artistic eye was behind it.

  They walked through a kitchen towards the back of the stunted warren, a run of quarry tiles leading past a narrow paved garden, the angle of the roof making her move to one side.