by Tim Lott
– Don’t start this.
– Don’t start what?
– This. Grilling me.
– I’m not grilling you, Alex. I’m just asking you.
– Why has everything got to have a reason? I just did it. I just wanted things to be a little less predictable, is all.
– Is that it?
– What are you suggesting? That I’m some kind of weirdo like –
– Like me?
– I didn’t say that.
– I don’t think you’re a weirdo, Alex. But I do think you’re lonely. I understand that.
– I’m not lonely. I’ve got a wife, a family, friends.
– That’s fine, then. How could you be lonely with all that?
– Exactly.
– You should go home now, Alex.
Dr Seymour stares at her blankly, then gets shakily to his feet, swaying.
– OK. I’ll go. It’s been… peculiar.
– Come back next Saturday. I’ll be in the shop. OK?
– Sherry, I –
– Goodbye, Alex. And one thing before you go…
Dr Seymour stands up uncertainly and moves towards the door. She reaches into a drawer under the table she is sitting next to.
– Would you like a cigarette? A lovely full-strength Marlboro Red.
She takes out the packet, withdraws one, lights it and inhales deeply. Dr Seymour hesitates, then smiles.
– No thanks.
She nods, as if it is the answer she expected.
– No pressure. Maybe next time.
– Maybe.
Dr Seymour gives a small wave, and the camera watches him leave the apartment. Then Sherry Thomas reaches for a switch. The recording cuts off.
Interview with Barbara Shilling
You have observed that Sherry Thomas had psychopathic tendencies…
I pointed out that she has some of the characteristic personality traits of psychopaths, which is not quite the same thing.
Was she a voyeur, then?
Again, this has a specific psychological meaning. And although her behaviour displayed aspects of voyeurism it was not necessarily typical. Voyeurs are typically male and younger than her. Like most voyeurs, she was deficient in her relationships with the opposite sex. Voyeuristic activity fulfils a sense of adventure and participation missing in ‘real’ life. The subject is usually introverted, timid, over-controlled and socially isolated. Again, Sherry only partly fitted the bill. But she did have a fear of failure and of losing control, which was typical. She often told me that she had a sense of being unable to control events in the real world.
Are there people who study this?
Certainly. Simpson and Weiner, for instance, contend that voyeurism is not simply about sex. Voyeurs, they say, are stimulated or satisfied by covert observation of many kinds. The main thing is that people are being watched in secret. It gives the voyeur a sense of power. But at the same time, like any compulsion, it leaves the sufferer feeling empty and hopeless. As an alcoholic needs more and more alcohol, the voyeur needs to witness deeper and deeper secrets, you might say.
It’s almost a national trait, now.
Yes, or a national sickness.
At an individual level, is it treatable?
That much is dubious. Some have tried to treat it with anti-obsessive-compulsive disorder medication, such as fluoxetine or paroxetine, and have reported limited success.
Did you try these out with Sherry?
I am not a psychiatrist. I cannot write prescriptions.
Of course. Tell me… Last time I came to see you, you said that Sherry talked to you about Dr Seymour.
I can’t be sure it was Dr Seymour, but she did say that someone had come into her life who was very special. She never used his name.
Was she in love with him?
It’s hard to say. Sherry, typically, was always having crushes that ended in disappointment. It seems that Dr Seymour was just one disappointment too many. Clearly she was excited that she’d found someone else to share her obsessions, although she didn’t talk to me about it in specific terms.
What did she say?
Only that a man had come into her shop who seemed kind, and who seemed to understand her. She mentioned that he had helped her with her headaches, which were a constant source of suffering for her.
Were they rooted in any physical ailment?
I don’t think so. I would feel pretty sure that they were entirely psychosomatic, although that didn’t make them any the less painful. She seemed to find Dr Seymour a soothing presence. At the same time, she was also irrationally infuriated by him.
Why?
I think the simple fact that he had a family, a life that was at least superficially successful, tormented her. All the things he had and she had never had and felt she never could have. I think she came to hate his wife, for no other reason than that she was his wife. Underneath all her charm, she was deeply angry.
Was she angry with Dr Seymour?
She seems to have been at the very end. Or, rather, she was angry with everything – herself, her past, her abusers, those she thought of as having abandoned her – and Dr Seymour provided a conduit, a symbol, if you like, for that anger.
How did you try to help her during your sessions together?
By listening, mainly. By being non-judgemental. By helping her to clarify her thoughts. I never tried to suggest solutions to her. One of the first things you learn as a therapist is that you can’t solve people’s problems for them, but you can persuade them to look at them more honestly, and perhaps help to break destructive patterns of habitual thought.
Did you have any success?
[Drily] Apparently not.
OK. I put that badly. Did she feel you were helping her?
I don’t know. To be honest, I think therapy was simply another of her addictions, and a strategy for assuaging her loneliness. I don’t know if she changed her thinking as a result of coming to see me.
Was there any part of you that was unsurprised when you read what had happened with her and Dr Seymour in the newspapers?
Hindsight is distorting. Now it’s happened, I can imagine I must have seen it coming a long way off. But before it happened, I thought she was just another unhappy person, trying to survive in a world she found unfriendly and bewildering.
Did she have any insight into her own condition, if condition it was?
Again, hard to say. But she did say to me once that she felt as if she was always in a speeding motor-car. She knew she was going to crash but she was frightened to stop the car. Or perhaps she said she didn’t know where the brake was.
Interview with Samantha Seymour
How did viewing the video of your husband at Sherry Thomas’s flat make you feel?
Sick.
Because of the sex?
There wasn’t any sex. There was only masturbation. And that’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it? Watching from a distance and getting off on it.
So that part didn’t bother you?
I found it absurd. Amusing. Pathetic.
But it wasn’t that which made you feel sick?
If they had had sex, it would almost have been better. But to sit there in front of him… It’s so cold. It wasn’t even sexual – at least, not for her. Her pleasure was in his humiliation. Although, of course, poor Alex didn’t realize he was being humiliated. He would have thought it was erotic. Because he didn’t understand.
What was it that he ‘didn’t understand’?
I know what went through Alex’s head while this was going on. He would have thought that he hadn’t betrayed me because they hadn’t kissed, hadn’t touched, hadn’t had sex. He didn’t understand betrayal. He didn’t understand power. She did. And that was what excited her.
What was the betrayal, then?
The secrets, of course. So much more intimate than sex. Secret film from the inside of our house. Conversations between us. Family secrets, bonds, codes. Our
problems and challenges, our negotiations. The fabric of our lives. She stole those. She came into our house and we didn’t even know it. It’s so foul.
But you said before that you didn’t blame Alex.
Not in the same way I blame her. Because Alex was just foolish. He thought that this was a kind of innocent fun that would spice up his middle-aged life. He didn’t understand that when someone has an affair it isn’t the sex that hurts most but the secrets. It’s the idea that someone is alone with the person you thought was yours and giving them knowledge that you thought belonged to you alone. The exclusion in that is terrible. Far more terrible than the sex. She knew that. She got off on it.
What do you think of their discussion about you and Mark Pengelly?
Unbelievably insulting.
Because nothing happened between you and Mark?
You’ve seen the rest of the tapes. Why do you need to ask me that? We’ve had this conversation anyway.
I know. I had to pay for it. With my own confession.
So that and the rest of the tapes don’t convince you?
Up to a point. All the same, it would be helpful in laying this matter to rest if Mr Pengelly would talk to me. But he won’t.
That’s his decision.
You haven’t discussed it with him, then?
Whether I have or not, I can’t control him. If he chooses not to speak to you that’s his affair. You’ve seen the tapes. I’ve answered your question about Mark and me. The matter is at an end.
All right. Let me ask you something else. What was your sex life like with Alex? I mean, before it dried up.
In what respect?
Was it normal? Regular? Satisfactory?
Mind your own business.
It’s relevant.
I don’t see how.
Because I need to understand what drove Alex towards Sherry Thomas. And there was obviously a sexual element to their relationship, even though they didn’t make contact.
You would think that.
I just want to know if –
You want this so you can sell the tabloid rights – because you get the fees from newspaper serializations. It’s a commercial decision. All that ‘understanding’ line. It’s a ruse.
There’s something in what you say. It is somewhat prurient. It does increase the value of the serialization. But it’s not only that. I do want to know. It may be key. It may not. But I can’t tell unless you speak to me about it.
OK.
Just like that?
With a little more quid pro quo Yes.
Oh, come on. I’ve paid that price. I’ve done what you asked.
You keep asking for more. Why shouldn’t I?
No. No, I won’t do it.
Then I won’t answer your question. If you want me to be a whore for the tabloids, you can sign up to the brothel.
The tabloids wouldn’t be interested in me.
No. But the broadsheets might. And I’m interested, which is the main thing. I’m interested in you being authentic. You give me all this about being honest, about the truth, about opening up, but you guard yourself ferociously, like all writers.
You wanting me to humiliate myself isn’t about quid pro quo. It’s about cruelty.
Isn’t this whole matter about cruelty of one kind or another?
Why should you punish me? You asked me to do the book, after all.
I don’t see why my family should be the only ones who suffer for this project, do you?
Is there a limit to the suffering you demand?
Is there a limit to the suffering you demand?
What do you want me to talk about? I haven’t got a limitless supply of dirty secrets.
I don’t know. Why don’t you think about it?
Author’s Note: I realized, at this point, that the further down the road I went with the book the more I was putting myself into Samantha Seymour’s power. The more time and effort I invested in it, the harder it was to deny any requests to put myself on the line. It had not occurred to me that she would ask me to reveal myself again, especially as I had told her the first time how excruciating I had found the experience. This was naïve – in fact, it was dawning on me that I had been naïve about my subject all along.
I was beginning to suspect that my pain in telling the story about my uncle had encouraged her desire to push me in the ‘confessional’ direction rather than the reverse. After all, asking her about her sex life with Alex was not such a terrible intrusion on her privacy – not in comparison to all the other humiliations she had suffered. Or perhaps that was the point: it was the last corner of her life that she wished to remain private.
But I suspected that there was something not merely symbolic in forcing me to dredge up painful secrets but retributional. It occurred to me that Samantha Seymour wanted revenge for something she had openly solicited in the first place – the book. Although she accepted that it was necessary, both to raise funds for the Seymour Institute and to set the record straight about her husband, she disliked the whole process, and had decided to use me, her collaborator, as a scapegoat.
Whether or not my analysis was correct hardly matters. The fact was that she had me over a barrel – even more so than before. The further I went with the project, the more time and effort I expended on it, the higher the price she could extract from me for its continuance. I tried to explain to her that she was exposing other, innocent people. She pointed out that the exposure of innocents was what all this was about.
So I agreed, reluctantly, to recount something else I found shameful – and not only shameful; the telling would almost certainly destroy an existing and rather fragile family relationship. But even as I spun the narrative, my mind worked to find some way out of the dilemma into which she had cast me. Apart from anything else, it damaged the style of the book. Who, when buying a volume about the Seymour Tapes, would want to read the confessions of a minor writer? Samantha Seymour was not only hanging my dirty laundry out to dry, she was compromising the integrity of the final product.
Nevertheless, for the time being I acceded to her request. I simply hoped that she wouldn’t continue to push the stakes higher – but I also worried that the game, like Dr Seymour and Sherry Thomas’s game of spying, was addictive for her.
If you read The Scent of Dried Roses then you’ll know I once had a difficult relationship with my older brother.
I do remember that, yes. You hated him.
Well, the way I saw it, Jeff hated me.
Because when you were born you were sick and your mother spent three months in hospital with you and didn’t see your brother at all.
That’s my take on it. Jeff thought, and still thinks, differently. In his memory there was never a problem between us. Anyway, the hostility between us, for a long time it never went away. He moved abroad when he was in his late teens, first to France, then Québec.
Where did he end up?
In America, in Louisiana. He married a woman much younger than him. She was very pretty. The first time I saw her I was very attracted to her.
When was that?
In the mid-1980s. I was chronically depressed at the time. It was 1984, I think. I spent the summer touring America by myself, thinking it was going to be romantic and exciting, but I was lonely and homesick. Anyway, after a few weeks I ended up going to visit Jeff and his wife.
Although he was welcoming, things were bad between them. The air was thick with tension. It felt like things were always about to topple over into an argument. They divorced eventually, but at this point the marriage was in its death throes. It was sad to watch. I felt bad for him. And yet, in my depression, an ugly part of me was pleased that things weren’t going too well. The melancholic secretly hates the happiness of others. Also, we’ve always been terribly competitive. Anyway, I stayed for about ten days.
The thing is, Monique and I got on well. We had a rapport, a shared sense of humour, and sometimes, it seemed to me – at least in my deranged state – that
we were more like a couple than her and Jeff. This, I sensed, was painful for him, yet I did nothing to discourage it. In fact, I sometimes think we were in a conspiracy to hurt him. She was routinely cruel and dismissive about him, and when we were alone together, she used to make snide remarks about him, and criticize him. I didn’t join in, but I didn’t defend him either. I was secretly pleased that we were forming a bond. It felt like a kind of triumph over Jeff. Even as I felt this, I was ashamed too.
Author’s Note: There is now a long pause.
That’s it? That’s your story? You’re going to have to do better…
Just give me a minute. I’m fighting a strong impulse to get up and walk out of here.
That makes two of us.
OK. The two nights before I left, well, Jeff was busy doing something, and Monique and I went down to the local music club, Tipitinas. We danced and drank and had a great time. When we left, it was a hot night and we couldn’t find a cab so we started walking back together. We were leaning against each other, giggling and flirting, I guess. Then we found a cab and fell into the back. The driver was kind of wild and swung round corners, and every time he did it, we fell across each other. About the third time it happened, I felt that she wanted me to kiss her. So I did.
And?
She kissed me back. Then, suddenly, we were in this passionate embrace. By the time the car was approaching where they lived we were all over each other. Monique got the car to stop a block away and we found a park bench and carried on.
Did you have sex?
No. But it was unquestionably sexual. We – touched each other. Intimately. This went on for about twenty minutes. Then I sobered up enough to realize that Jeff must be wondering when we’d get home. We walked the block or so back to their house. When we got there, I could see him through the window. And I could see that he’d been crying, that he was in a desperate condition. Not because he dreamed that anything had happened between me and Monique, but because his marriage was ending. I had never seen my brother cry before, and it came as a tremendous shock. I felt such love for him, and such bottomless shame for what I had done.
And then?
We just walked into the house as if nothing had happened. Jeff pretended he was fine, we sat up watching TV, and thirty-six hours later I had gone. Jeff and Monique divorced a few months later. I never said anything to him, and I never spoke to Monique again. But the betrayal of that night has been with me always.