The Seduction

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Thank you.’ Beth looked at her lap to avoid the clock. Magic would make the hands freeze.

  ‘We have an intimacy here.’ Dr Bywater’s forehead was tense. ‘It can be a useful work tool, but this— So I need to say again, this isn’t how I should talk to patients.’

  Beth’s smile grew. The air was thin. She was on top of the mountain.

  ‘Excellent,’ she said.

  ‘Beth.’ Dr Bywater shook her head.

  ‘I just have to say. I owe you so much. My sanity,’ said Beth, her throat contracting. Sol had disappeared. The clock had stopped.

  ‘You’re lovely. I think sometimes I become … a bit unboundaried with you. That’s all.’ Dr Bywater shrugged. She raised one eyebrow, her mouth self-conscious. ‘We really do need to explore the transference issues.’

  ‘A phenomenon characterised by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another, Wikipedia. Transference,’ said Beth in a dull drone. ‘One definition of—’

  ‘Oh, this is hopeless!’ said Dr Bywater, burying her head. She lifted it. She shook her hair back. She laughed.

  ‘Futile. Quit while you’re ahead, Doctor.’

  ‘See,’ she said. ‘You’re seductive. You wear me down – you’re so engaged, you get me talking.’

  Beth hesitated. She steadied her delivery. ‘Excellent,’ she said again, more emphatically.

  ‘All right,’ said Dr Bywater. She widened her eyes. She flung her arms open. ‘I’ve tried. I’ve tried. I’ve done my moral duty. Now I think I’m going to tear up every page in the rule book.’

  ‘That rule book is pulp anyway.’ Beth looked at her phone, put it back in her bag and rose.

  Dr Bywater laughed. She stood up and they wavered for moments that seemed to be as slow-moving and large-grained as an old film, and there were further hesitations in dragonfly jerks, in dips and retreats, before they wrapped their arms around each other and hugged, and then they both laughed to soften the moment.

  ‘I – I feel I must just offer you a final choice, though,’ said Dr Bywater, suddenly serious. ‘Either I can – pull back. Stop talking to you like this. And carry on being your therapist. But much – much more distanced. Or we can – I think I’m prepared to – we can meet outside. We can be friends. We can talk properly. Equally, if you’d like to—’

  ‘We will meet!’ said Beth.

  Tamara Bywater hesitated. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ve … I feel like I’ve been coming to the end of the therapy, really, anyway. How weird and wonderful it would be to see you in a café, a gallery, a real-life location where normal people meet. Do you exist in these places?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a real live person. Flaws. Weaknesses. But … You know you will have to keep this quiet. There are rules. You know, don’t you?’

  ‘OK. I know.’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The clock had disappeared. An excess of triumph, so heady it was hard to define, was surging through Beth. It was reminiscent of experiences from long before that she couldn’t quite identify: some sensation of coming top in her class, of pleasing her tutor, or something less concrete. She felt, in that moment, exquisite happiness, the kind of joy that was so raw and nerve-tingling, and yet so pure, it belonged to youth.

  ‘It really is against the code of behaviour. If someone heard, they might put in a complaint against me.’ Tamara Bywater pulled a face. ‘I’m acknowledging a friendship that has formed with someone like-minded who is far from mentally ill, but one rule covers all …’

  ‘Who would I tell? Your boss? Sol—’

  ‘Partners of my patients sometimes misunderstand—’

  ‘I—’ They interrupted each other. ‘No, OK. Partners of patients sometimes what?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘They misunderstand their partners’ feelings.’

  ‘You need my mobile number.’ Beth stood. ‘Look what I have yours under – “Shrink”!’

  ‘No longer appropriate,’ said Tamara.

  Hello, ex-shrink. x, Beth texted her. She allowed herself to look round at the clock. ‘Shit! Really shit.’

  Tamara laughed at the time. ‘You must go now, I know. Go! Hurry!’

  Beth bolted out of there, trying to call Sol, but went straight to voicemail. Sorry sorry sorry, she texted, her hand shaking in the cold. Got caught. In what? Dr Bywater had delayed the start of their session by an hour? It would have to be that. Lying was becoming normal. There v v soon. Really really sorry.

  ***

  She sent a hasty text to Ellie. It was all fucking true.

  TWELVE

  Beth dashed from Tamara’s house. She took off her high heels and ran along the pavement. The bare trees were a swirl, yet picked out in precise light when she looked at them, her feet skimming, merely obeying her heartbeat, the cold making her cough as she caught her breath. Vertiginous swoop after swoop of disbelief came to her as she moved. There was no answer from Sol by the time she rocketed into the Tube. The lift on its way up seemed like a preposterous obstacle, so she galloped down the stairs, nearly falling twice in the heels she had put back on.

  She changed trains, urging on the Central line, thanking it when it came in two minutes. She bolted into the gallery, whipping out a mirror to check the sweating state of herself, and paused in the commotion of the foyer.

  ‘He’s just left,’ said Killian.

  ‘What?’

  Killian shrugged. ‘He doesn’t like this kind of malarkey, does he?’

  Beth ran towards the cloakrooms. She tore back to the entrance, thick with press and guests. Jack Dorian was just arriving, and she waved. ‘Sol!’ she called randomly.

  A head turned near the door. She ran towards it, lost it, stumbled and saw him again, his back a leap of familiarity. He was typing something into his phone.

  ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I’m really sorry. Don’t be cross, don’t be cross.’ She fought for breath. ‘Sorry, darling.’

  He turned, his face drawn in and private, and she sensed in that moment what it would be to lose him, really lose him in a way that had never entered her musings, and it made her open her mouth. She saw him through a new lens, a telescope the wrong way round, as though he were a man with a life of his own. Not hers. Not with her. It was always that strange effect which encapsulated that moment for her.

  ‘God,’ she said in a squeak.

  His mouth was straight, exactly as she had predicted it, the eyes unseeable.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she gabbled. She took his shoulders.

  He stood motionless, then moved to one side. ‘I’m just leaving,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. No. Sol. This is ridiculous. Don’t leave.’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘We’re going back in. We’re going back in. Give me your coat.’

  He paused. Uncharacteristic confusion passed over his face, resolving into resistance.

  ‘I really don’t want to,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, grabbing his arm. ‘It was the shrink’s. The appointment—’ Somehow, she couldn’t lie. ‘It started – no, it went on. I’ve run here as fast as I could. Please.’

  He paused again, his iciness overlaying a more worrying drift of sadness. ‘That was your choice.’

  ‘Please. I want to be here with you more than anything. I love you. You idiot. You’re a pain in the arse, but – but, so am I. I know I can be. No, you’re not. I need to see you. I want to see you. Let’s go back in.’

  He gazed at her.

  ‘Look, I’m covered in sweat!’ She lifted one arm and pretended to press herself against his nose, laughing to smash the mood.

  He smiled faintly. ‘You smell.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She laughed with relief. ‘I’d better go and chuck some soap and water under my pits,’ she said. ‘But then you might stomp off like a grizzly old bear.’

  ‘You push it sometimes, Bet.’

  ‘You love it,’ she said reflexively, and
immediately knew that this was now the wrong approach to take.

  ‘You know that?’ she thought he said, but she was running to the cloakroom. She looked at herself in the mirror as though she were an alien being: disordered, chosen.

  ***

  Sol was talking, head bowed, to Aranxto’s tiny brother in a gesture of independence. Beth mimicked shooting herself to Killian who rolled his eyes, then she struggled through the crowd to find drinks. Tamara Bywater was there like a reflection in water, overlaying all else.

  Beth could never do what Aranxto did: his self-excoriating explorations of the inner workings of his own fantasies, his childhood, his rectum. A fountain installation of his penis, moulded in crystal glass, the water bathed in different-coloured lights at different times of the day and entitled Mood, had just sold for almost a million dollars, while a film of him cutting his thigh showed on a loop at MoMA. Should she, too, finally try the conceptual route, that usually female preserve of self-harm and the confessional? It would be an entirely cynical move, she knew.

  She took Sol’s arm. He resisted for a few seconds, ignoring her, then nodded at Aranxto’s brother and followed Beth through the squash of press, models on such exaggerated heels they hovered inches above him, until they found a place among all the hubbub beneath a neon piece no one was looking at. They were photographed. Beth looked up at the flash, but she and Sol were merely civilians invisible to the gawkers as Aranxto processed to that end of the gallery with some of his cohort.

  ‘I owe you the most grovelling apologies,’ she said. ‘I realise I was maybe an hour late—’

  ‘An hour and nineteen.’ He winced as a camera flashed right by him, and turned to avoid more. They were jostled by the crowds. ‘Don’t tell me now,’ he said, stiffly.

  Jack Dorian was standing nearby, talking into a journalist’s phone. Sol ignored him.

  ‘What is happening?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I told you. You’re on some kind of a high. As well as low. Most times high. Look at you right now. Jesus, Bet.’

  Beth paused. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said, trying to be truthful.

  He nodded, solemnly. ‘On edge, excited. You’re telling the shrink all about it?’

  ‘What?’ She looked at him. ‘Oh, God. I know that face.’

  Beth took him into her arms with an appearance of confidence. The elation of Tamara Bywater rose then tipped. Sol. A punch of loss. People left her. Her mother in Sefton Park. Anger, yet guilt. All dark, dark, shining dark. And the shrink, Tamara Bywater, her fragrance, her skills. Beth’s knees were unsteady.

  ‘I love you,’ she said rapidly to Sol, as though shouting through the fog. Tamara smiled at her.

  He didn’t react. ‘Don’t jerk me around like this because I don’t know if I can—’

  There was a rising clamour. Success and money were out in force, and Beth and Sol were pulled into a crowd. Beth smiled as she steadied herself on Sol’s shoulder, leaning into him to whisper an observation into his ear, and there were several flashes around them, press and gallery photographers circling the artist and friends.

  ‘You appear to be very willing now to go to her. You’re telling her in confidence whatever is going on?’

  Beth frowned. ‘No,’ she said.

  He exhaled through his nose. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Really, just about you and Fern, and Lizzie.’

  She looked steadily at him. Her heart was thumping hard.

  ‘I’m concerned she’s not the best person to be—’

  Beth swallowed, caught saliva in her throat, her words tangling. ‘Well if a professional psychologist isn’t, who is?’

  ‘Another therapist, maybe?’

  ‘Where’s all this coming from?’

  ‘I think Sofia is concerned.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I guess …’ He touched his temple. ‘She doesn’t like her.’

  Beth began to laugh.

  ‘That sounds dumb, doesn’t it?’ said Sol. ‘I’ll find out more details. This was a passing remark.’

  Aranxto came past, shrugging into a snakeskin jacket. Sol tilted his head towards him. ‘You always need a bit of excess,’ he said to Beth.

  ‘Do I?’ she said, arching her back, directing the expression in her eyes at the ceiling instead of him. All was possible now. She could bring Tamara to the next private view, Tamara who was fascinated. She could introduce her to Aranxto, that week even.

  ‘You – you, Bet – are attracted to extremes. It’s just you don’t notice it. Your tolerance for oddballs is off the scale.’

  She laughed. ‘If you say so. Most of my good friends are sane. You mean the outer circle.’

  Aranxto was posing poker-faced amidst cheers in front of a wall projection of the infamous glass penis, and in the commotion, Sol came closer to her. There was the faintest twist to his mouth. Then, wordlessly, they hugged each other. He put his arms around her and looked into her pupils so intently, her forehead resting on his, that they were in a cave of owl eyes.

  ‘He is unfortunately developing tosserish elements,’ she said into his ear.

  ‘Developing? I love you too, Bet. Make life easier for us. Please.’

  You make life easier for us, she thought, and would have retorted aloud on any other occasion, but with great effort she stopped herself. She kept close to his neck, her radiance hard to hide.

  ‘The secret life of Elizabeth Ellen Penn,’ said Sol, and, though she laughed, he wasn’t smiling.

  ***

  In the night, Beth felt as though she had drunk caffeine after MSG, or taken coke, her heart rate rocketing. Worries about Sol’s conversations subsided as the puerile triumph she felt coursed through her, Tamara’s Bywater’s words and gestures played and replayed. In the early hours of the morning, the elation started to become stained with panic. No more shrink’s appointments. Just like that. She was dry-mouthed. She got up, peed, downed a glass of water and then another. Tamara loomed, leaning towards her, giant and distorted. The princess looked down from her throne and winked straight at the lowly Beth in the crowd.

  She couldn’t sleep.

  She had wilfully lost her therapist. The prop of her sessions, kicked away. She should have kept her, not agreed to some half-hatched notion of friendship, in which there was a now undeniable flirtatious component that she couldn’t process, and that unsettled her even as it electrified her. The sweat ran down her chest in cold streaks.

  But in the panic, a new path opened, queasy, night-covered: a tunnel on a roller coaster. She would meet her. She would finally assuage her curiosity and encounter the real Tamara Bywater. An almost bilious excitement snaked through her.

  Still she couldn’t sleep.

  The shrink leered, her image skewed, but there she was, and there was Lizzie. The image of her mother in a hospital bed. Lizzie quoted poems at Beth, once known in childhood and now grappled for, and Beth tried to shake her off, like a succubus.

  ***

  At seven in the morning, Tamara Bywater slapped into Beth’s thoughts in a shock of disbelief.

  She went to the studio as the only way to escape her distraction, the tentative paintings coming to her – rivers in which gills and hair were emerging – and she had an uneasy awareness of her phone, because no text had yet arrived from the shrink. From Tamara. It sounded fraudulent. Dr Bywater had possibly changed her mind. Beth shuddered and glanced at the time. It was not yet ten and it was a Saturday. Tamara would be in her husband’s arms in Kennington, shoes strewn somewhere on the floor, a chance for quick sex before she ran down barefooted to make her children breakfast.

  Hi ex-shrink. Let’s meet!, Beth wrote, cringed, deleted it. Somehow she had to wait, to prove she wasn’t a stalker. She worked, then bussed back to make lunch. Fern’s music drifted down from her bedroom. Smoke from the Mary-Lou was covering the air, like a thin layer of hessian, and beautiful scuzzy girls, middle-aged women in military jackets and men in steel-capped
boots disappeared inside or crouched on the roof, smoking by log piles and dead geraniums. All afternoon, Beth jumped at texts.

  ***

  Beth kissed Fern that night, hair squeaking shampoo dampness, the clamped face turned from her. She chirruped at Fern’s coldness, and suddenly she felt old and simply unable to communicate. She hesitated by the door to try again, but Fern’s back was facing her and she forced herself not to. Such counterintuitive restraint made her almost dizzy with effort.

  ‘You, like, always stare out of the window,’ said Fern suddenly, just as she was about to leave.

  ‘What?’

  ‘So, why are you like this to people? Mum?’

  ‘Darling,’ said Beth, walking back over to her. ‘What? You’ve said this before. What do you mean?’

  ‘Yes. So basically, you – you don’t speak to your own mother, and now you don’t speak to …’

  ‘Who?’

  Beth waited. But Fern had turned with a rapid movement and buried her face in her pillow.

  ‘Who? Baby? What—’

  ‘Me,’ said Fern, possibly, into the pillow, but she would say nothing more, however gently she was asked.

  Sol was downstairs editing his photos on his computer. He and Beth cleared the house, approached the pile of paperwork sliding over the table and began one of several washes. She put on some Pachelbel and gazed and gazed out at the canal, as though Tamara Bywater were likely to be strolling along the towpath, and sometimes she thought she saw a man there, but the twists beneath the choke of plant life were indistinct. Where was she? Beth felt alone. Aged thirteen, she had wondered whether she could follow the Mersey to its source by hitching a lift with one of the tug pilots, who would ask no questions, then continue down canals, crossing the country by waterways to find her mother with her boyfriend.

  There was no message all weekend. She could discuss the unexpected grief at her session, she thought, and then she remembered.

  ***

  Where was Tamara?

  Beth went to The Dairy and taught the Lower Fourth in the gloriously large Art Three, goading time-wasters through their expensive installations. Having sought mechanical advice from the DT department, she helped a boy she liked solve a problem with an outsized sculpture, and goaded the class to finish their projects before the Christmas holidays..