Ten minutes after his mention on television, Daniel came downstairs and found Nancy wearing a rope-knitted jersey and appliquÉd jeans. She was sitting on a high stool pinching the bridge of her nose. He studied her from the doorway. She looked older, he thought. The crash had aged her. She was reduced, as if limp and boneless. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying and he could see odd strands of grey hair. Had she had them before? When did she stop dyeing them? Her hair was greasy and unwashed. There were nail scores on her neck where she had been scratching. The varnish on her toenails was chipped. She was confused and forgetful. The doctor had said it would take time.
When the toaster launched two slices of golden bread with a loud clunk, Nancy looked up, saw Daniel and looked down again.
He walked past her and shook some Nurofen from a pot.
‘Headache no better?’ Nancy said, spreading peanut butter and jam on two slices of bread.
‘The same.’ Daniel washed the pills down with a pint of water, refilled his glass from a water filter on the table and drank that as well. Since the crash he had had an unquenchable thirst. ‘You seeing that counsellor again today?’ he said, draining the glass and refilling it.
‘Tom.’
‘First names is it?’
The coffee maker gave a raspy gurgle.
‘You should come with me.’
‘Sit around holding hands and singing kumbaya? No thanks.’ Nancy cut the crusts off the bread and placed the sandwiches in Martha’s Finding Nemo lunch box. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘I could sign up for the crying workshop. Maybe bring Dad along.’
‘He’s a professional therapist.’
‘He’s a charlatan.’ Daniel picked up a corner of a child’s painting and pushed it across to Nancy. ‘Seen what the baby has drawn?’
Nancy turned the painting right way round and held it at arm’s length. Coloured crayon marks showed an island with palm trees and a plane crashing towards the sea. Black smoke trailed behind the plane and flames leaped from its wings. Matchstick passengers with arms raised were hanging out of the windows. Some were falling out of the sky into a blue sea dotted with black shark fins. Nancy stared at it for a moment and blinked. A tear beaded her cheek.
‘Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to …’ Daniel gently extracted the painting from her hand and laid it on the kitchen counter top. ‘Martha was trying to …’
Nancy waved the thought away and swallowed. ‘You haven’t met him.’
‘Haven’t met who?’
‘Tom. How can you say he’s a charlatan?’
‘All counsellors are charlatans.’
Martha walked in and asked: ‘What’s a charlatan?’
‘Someone who preys on the vulnerable and panders to the egotism of the unhappy.’
‘For God’s sake, Daniel. She’s nine.’
‘Martha knows what egotism means, don’t you, darling?’
The child took hold of her father’s hand. Reached for her mother’s. ‘I know what unhappy means,’ she said.
If Tom Cochrane was a charlatan he was a sympathetic one: a Scotsman with kind eyes, handsome, angular features and a mouth that turned up at the corners, even in repose. When Nancy went to see him later that morning, he was wearing a linen jacket over a pale blue shirt, but no tie. Professional, yet casual.
‘My husband thinks you’re a charlatan,’ she said as she lowered herself on to his sofa and, as though for protection, held a cushion over her lap. ‘Are you?’
‘Your husband?’ Tom said in his soft, Morningside accent. He had the counsellor’s habit of answering questions with questions.
‘I thought of him as my husband.’
‘Thought?’
‘Think.’
‘I read about him at the time of the crash. There was a lot in the papers about him.’
‘My mother saved some cuttings. Haven’t read them yet.’
‘You must feel proud.’
Nancy shrugged and began twisting her hair. The fluorescent light above her was humming gently.
‘I think I saw something about him on BBC online today.’ Tom swivelled in his chair so that he was facing a PC covered in yellow Post-it notes. He double-clicked his mouse with a slender finger, paused and clicked again. ‘No, I can’t find it. There was something, though.’
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Nancy said. ‘Is there any point to these sessions?’
‘Do you feel there’s a point?’
‘Daniel says talking constantly about traumatic incidents only makes them worse.’
‘He might be right,’ Tom said.
‘He also said that veterans of the First World War didn’t need counsellors. They coped by repressing their memories.’
‘It doesn’t work for everyone. How have you been feeling?’
Nancy stared at a polystyrene coffee cup on the pine table in front of her. ‘Daniel insists I take my own mug to Starbucks. To save the planet.’
There was a silence that Tom did not attempt to fill.
‘Tearful,’ Nancy continued. ‘I’ve been feeling tearful and … I don’t know … claustrophobic.’
‘That’s normal. The fight or flight mechanism floods the body with adrenalin, heightening the senses. So when you were trapped on the plane it would have been like having one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake.’
‘Will it go away?’
‘The claustrophobia? It takes several weeks for adrenalin levels to return to normal.’
Another silence.
‘I feel angry all the time,’ Nancy said.
‘That’s normal, too. Angry with yourself?’
‘A bit. I felt angry as the plane was going down. I kept thinking, why me? I also felt angry with those passengers who were screaming, because they were disturbing my last moments. Afterwards, when some of them were killed, I felt guilty about having felt angry with them.’ She picked an elastic band up off the floor and began stretching it. ‘I think I felt angry with God. I prayed to him, you know, on the plane.’
‘Thought you were an agnostic.’
‘A Catholic agnostic.’
‘Ah.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just means ah.’
‘Anyway, there was no one there. I had no sense of Him. I cried out for help and God was silent, just as he was silent when the Zyklon B was being tipped into the gas chambers, and silent as the babies were having their heads bashed against the trees in Cambodia, and silent when the Tutsis were being hacked to death by the Hutus.’
‘Have you talked about this with Daniel?’
‘He’s the one I feel angry with the most, though that anger is more like a background whisper. Everything he does annoys me at the moment.’ With her teeth, she worried the fatness of her lower lip, biting on one corner. ‘He keeps smiling all the time. Since the crash. Makes me want to punch him.’
‘Trauma affects people in different ways. If Daniel has been feeling positive it might be survivor’s syndrome … It makes some people feel invincible and godlike. Have you talked about it with him? The crash?’
Nancy shook her head and began breathing more quickly. She could feel loose contours of anger inside her narrowing to a peak. In her hand she repeatedly stretched and released the rubber band, gripping it as tightly as her anger gripped her. ‘After the crash I kept repeating in my head, “Why hast thou forsaken me? Why hast thou forsaken me?”You know, from the Bible.’
‘You felt God had forsaken you?’
‘Daniel.’
‘Daniel felt God had—’
‘No. No … It doesn’t matter.’
‘How has Daniel been feeling?’
‘He gets headaches.’
‘Is he sleeping?’
‘Dunno. I’ve been sleeping in the spare room.’ She held up her slinged arm by way of explanation. ‘Trying to sleep. When I do manage to fall asleep I wake up feeling anxious. Wide awake, with blood pumping in my ears. Can’t s
leep beyond four am.’ She looked around the room. There was a sterility to it which the few books, the DAB radio and the hatstand with the mac hanging from it did nothing to dispel. On a wall opposite the window was a framed medical certificate. ‘You’re a doctor?’
‘Not as such,’ Tom said with a shake of his head. ‘I don’t do this full time. It’s voluntary work. The local authority pay my expenses and provide me with this office. I’m a surveyor in my day job.’
Nancy inspected Tom’s bookcase. There were biographies of Freud and Jung and textbooks on cognitive therapy and behavioural psychology but also, on a lower shelf, some titles that would make Daniel hyperventilate: Alternative Medicine – the Truth; Psychic Energy, Crystal Healing and the Power of Chant; Inner Expansion – Guardian Angels and How to Contact Them. ‘What kind of a therapist are you exactly?’ she asked.
‘The psycho kind.’
The joke reassured her. She smiled.
‘I am a qualified trauma counsellor,’ Tom added. ‘That is my certificate.’ He pointed to the frame on the wall. ‘Those books you were looking at were given to me by patients. A lot of people find that New Age stuff useful, even if it is a placebo.’
Nancy knew that Daniel would argue that ‘New Age stuff ‘ relied on gullibility and superstition, but he didn’t understand why an increasing number of people were turning to it. He didn’t understand that they were unhappy, that they wanted answers, that they wanted placebos – that she, Nancy, the woman he had lived under the same roof with for ten years, wanted a placebo.
She untwisted the top of a bottle of fizzy water, making it hiss angrily. Tom was staring at her. She took a sip from the neck and swirled the bottle round and round absent-mindedly. Bored now.
‘Do you want to see what they do with healing crystals? For fun?’
Nancy shrugged.
‘Lie down then.’
As Tom stood over her, Nancy studied the crystal he was dangling over her chest, intrigued by the way it caught the light. She knew it wouldn’t make any difference physically, but she thought it might make her feel … something, anything, anything other than lost.
*
Enveloped in the dark, wooden panelling of the confessional, his knees cushioned by the prie-dieu in front of him, Wetherby shivered and stared up at the crucifix hanging over the grille. He remained in this position for a full minute, lost in his reflections, in his contemplation of sin.
The priest on the other side of the lattice screen tapped.
‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ the penitent began in a brittle but well-modulated tone, one that, for the priest, evoked the BBC Home Service. ‘It is one week since my last confession.’
‘What is it you wish to confess?’ The voice was gentle, disembodied.
‘I have committed both venial and mortal sins.’ Wetherby placed the gloved palms of his hands together. ‘I also missed mass on Sunday.’
‘On purpose?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Go on.’
‘I suspended an employee, a security guard, even though I knew he was only doing his duty.’
‘Why?’
‘Spite, I suppose … I also blocked the promotion of a colleague, even though he deserved the job.’
‘Now why did you do that?’
‘Because I am a small and envious man, Father.’ As he spoke Wetherby lowered his head and closed his eyes. ‘Because I envy his looks, his hair, his wife, his popularity, his social ease, his decency, his certainty …’
‘Jealousy is a terrible thing,’ the priest interrupted. ‘We must resist it. Is there anything else you wish to confess?’
Wetherby thought.
He thought of the vulnerable students he had seduced over the years. He thought about the envy he felt for the celibacy of Locke, a thinker whose mind had been free from sordid distraction. He thought, too, about how much he resented the appetite for sex he shared with Bertrand Russell, the vile atheist who considered it an immoral duty to sleep with the wives of other men. He hated himself for being more Russell than Locke. He hated himself for being weak. He hated himself. ‘I took advantage of someone who trusts me,’ he said. ‘Someone in my pastoral care.’
‘In what way now?’
Wetherby became overwhelmed, partly with self-pity, partly with a feeling of deep love for his own piety and candour. If anyone deserved to regain the grace of God, he thought, it was he. He longed for it and that longing was enough for him, enough evidence of His existence. ‘Though I was having lustful thoughts about her, I engineered events so that she and I could be alone together.’
‘God understands the weakness of the human spirit.’
‘I then had sex with her.’
There was a silence as the priest weighed this. ‘Is she above the age of consent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you use contraception?’
‘No.’
‘Well, that’s something. Is there more you wish to confess?’
A single tear ran down Wetherby’s sharp cheekbone. It felt cold and ticklish. He sniffed loudly. ‘In my guilt, Father, in my wickedness, I.. .’ He wrung his gloved hands as if washing them. ‘I struck this girl.’ He always enjoyed the formal language he used in confession; he felt cleansed by it. ‘I did not mean to. In the heat of the moment I called her a temptress and struck her across the face with the back of my hand.’
‘These are serious sins,’ the priest said. ‘Have you examined your conscience?’
Wetherby’s words were blurred by the sob he was stifling. ‘Yes, Father. I have. I have. I ask your forgiveness. God’s forgiveness.’
‘Yes, well, the intent of this sacrament is to provide healing for the soul. Are you truly contrite?’
‘Truly, Father.’
‘Then I suggest you see a counsellor. You need to talk about these matters properly and at length. Now you must say the Act of Contrition.’
‘Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum, eaque detestor, quia peccando, non solum poenas a te iuste statutas promeritus sum …’
There was a pause when, thirty seconds later, Wetherby finished and said, ‘Amen.’ The priest cleared his throat again. ‘It’s been a while since I heard that said in Latin. I’m afraid we must do the absolution in English.’ He coughed. ‘God the father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent …’ When he reached the end he coughed again. ‘Say ten Hail Marys, and may the Lord be with you.’
Outside the cathedral, the city was trembling with energy. The sidestepping pedestrians walking through the slush, the chasing sirens, the dull grind of techno music as a pub door opened and closed, the rolling chatter of overland trains arriving at Victoria station, the whistles of the guards, the clatter as the juggler in the beanie hat dropped one of his clubs: all were a comfort to Wetherby. They offered anonymity and sanctuary. He inhaled the cold air deeply, rewrapped his scarf and stood in the great doorway looking for Hai-iki. She was wearing his Crombie overcoat, hunched up with her back to him, feeding crisps to the pigeons. Wetherby walked over, wiped the step and sat down beside her. When she looked up at him he winced. The swelling around her eye had disappeared, but a dark blue circle had appeared instead. He extended a protective arm around her supple waist and said quietly, ‘I have asked for God’s forgiveness, now I ask for yours.’
‘I forgive you.’
He pressed his cold lips to her forehead. ‘Thank you … You know, Evelyn Waugh once said he would be much nastier if he were not a Catholic. I think I fall into that camp. I am sorry. I truly am. It will never happen again.’ He stood up, led the way across the square and raised his arm in the direction of an approaching cab. If we catch this, he thought, I can have her back home and bent over the chaise longue within half an hour. It had been a long time since he had felt so exalted, so alive, so aroused.
*
After picking Martha up from school, Nancy returned home, listened
to four answerphone messages and went up to Daniel’s study to see if he had come back from work early. As she watched him hunched up over his desk – drawing something, she couldn’t make out what – she realized he had not heard her. ‘Is it true?’
He lurched forward guiltily, covering up his drawing.
‘Is it true?’ Nancy repeated.
Daniel turned his chair so that his body was blocking her view of the desk. ‘Did you just say …’ He stopped himself. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘What? What do you think I said?’
‘Shame on you.’
‘I said, “Is it true?” Well, is it?’
‘Is what true?’
‘You’re going to be given an award?’
‘I don’t know. There was a message on the answering machine. Someone from the Mirror wanting a comment.’
‘I heard it. That’s why I asked.’
‘Haven’t been told anything.’ Daniel scraped back his chair, turned over the picture he was drawing and, without making eye contact, brushed past Nancy to get through the doorway.
Nancy did not move, the soft cogs of her mind unable to find a purchase. She was staring at the well-bruised cricket bat propped against his desk. Her sight line rose to take in familiar objects: the bust of Mao wearing a cricket cap, the chess clock, the microscope, the sunglasses, the novelty Father Christmas nailed to a cross that one of Daniel’s students had sent him from Japan, the rugby ball signed by the England team. She took a step farther into the room. The desk had some ornaments she hadn’t seen before, a collection of three turtles. There was a hard rubber one with a flattish shell, a small marble one and a suede one with a nodding head. An empty box distracted her. Chinese writing on the side. Dirty chopsticks sticking out. It had been left on a bookshelf in between a Nick Hornby novel and an untidy stack of science magazines. There was also an empty bottle of German beer and, in the ashtray, a stubbedout joint. Nancy wondered how Daniel could work like this. The untidiness was unbearable. As she walked over to collect the Chinese food carton, she picked up the down-turned picture. It was Martha’s crayon drawing of the crash. Daniel had added a turtle and a man in the sea. The picture had been covering a notebook. After a backward glance at the doorway, Nancy flicked through it. On almost every page there was a sketch of a man with wide-set eyes. In every picture, the man was smiling.
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