‘I want it to be just like it was before,’ she insisted. ‘I shall lie on the chaise-longue and you will sit beside me at my head. I’ll look out of the window and see the line of cherry trees. And the little light on your recorder will throw a red glow on the wall when it’s a cloudy day.’
My God! Such recall. Such needs. Impossible to resist. Dr Denton knew he had no choice but to capitulate totally. ‘Yes. You shall have all of that, Georgiana.’
He asked her to make a further appointment on her way out. As she reached the door, she turned. She did something she had never done before. She asked him a question about himself. She asked him if he was married.
He told her that he was not, that he had never been married. She nodded and seemed satisfied. When she left him she was looking far more composed than her, her therapist, now felt. He sat down at his desk and ran the audio cassette tape back to its starting point. He pressed the play button and leaned back in his chair.
In the room beyond, Celia, brimming with anticipation and curiosity, waited for Dr Denton to bring her the tape of the interview which she would then transcribe onto the word processor. Usually he brought tapes through straight away. But to her disappointment this did not happen.
When she slipped in with the cup of coffee she always offered her employer at this time of the morning, she noticed that he was in the act of dropping a cassette into his personal brief case, with its secret locking code.
Georgiana looked forward to her visits to Dr Denton with all the excitement and eagerness of a child anticipating a visit to the Christmas pantomime. She sensed that she was on the brink of some great discovery.
Towards the end of the fourth appointment she told Dr Denton about this strong intuition and asked him what he thought it meant.
‘Only you have the key to answer that question,’ he said. He looked along the line of her body, tracing every known and admired hollow and curve. Today she wore an oatmeal Chanel-style suit with a cream blouse. It struck him that one could truly love a woman who was so perfectly beautiful. Whatever truly loving meant.
She smiled. ‘You love to tantalize,’ she said.
‘By not answering your questions?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does that make you angry with me?’
‘Maybe. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ve ever felt angry with you,’ she added.
‘You have one more session remaining of the five we planned, Georgiana. Are you any nearer finding out what it was you were searching for?’
‘No.’ A shadow passed over her face. ‘I need you to give me more time.’
‘Do you want to talk about your young lovers?’ Dr Denton would certainly like her to talk about them some more. Her descriptions of the various encounters had, quite frankly, pitched him to dizzy heights of vicarious satisfaction.
‘No.’ She frowned, concentrating hard.
He waited. The red light glowed.
Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, dazed as though in a trance. ‘I thought I wanted Saul back. I dreamed about him at nights. After I had been with those young men, I often dreamed of Saul.’
‘You dreamed of making love with him?’
‘No! Never that. I couldn’t! No. I still couldn’t.’ Tears brimmed in her eyes, sliding across her cheeks, making a glistening trail.
Dr Denton placed his hand over hers. ‘There’s no need to be afraid, Georgiana. You will never have to make love again with Saul if you don’t want to.’
‘I was afraid of Saul,’ she said. ‘I was terrified.’ Little pants and gulps accompanied the words.
‘Yes.’ Go on, go on – you’re getting there. Nearly, nearly.
‘He never hurt me. He never shouted.’ Her head turned slowly. ‘I was so afraid.’
‘You felt that Saul had total control over you. Total control of your feelings.’
‘Yes.’
‘He did that to you through the power of his will.’
‘Yes.’
‘Saul is a very powerful man. An exceptional man.’
‘He swallowed me up into his thoughts and beliefs. He covered me with his body and went deep inside me. Pushing and pushing. I felt as if I was suffocating. And then I must give him a child.’
‘Ah, yes. Giving Xavier a child! But you were terrified of having a child, weren’t you, Georgiana? Of swelling up and becoming ugly. Of getting lumpy veins and stretch marks. And suffering pain. All of that was horrible to contemplate.’
‘Yes. Oh, yes.’
‘All of those things made you afraid, Georgiana. But most of all was your terror that Saul was swallowing you up and crushing you. That is why you couldn’t enjoy sex with him. Why you could never enjoy sex with him, not even now. Even after your good times with those young men.’
‘No, I couldn’t.’ She gave a long sigh as though the words had brought great relief.
‘The young men were good for you because they were in your power. You had control over them.’
He permitted a long pause. He wondered if he had gone too fast for her. It was seldom helpful to heap on too much painful insight all at once.
‘Georgiana,’ he said, calling her gently back from her reverie. ‘In the past you used to be terrified of losing Saul because you thought that without him you would lose everything.’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘You thought that without him you would have nothing. If you could not have a child, and you could not keep Saul then you would be nothing.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you know that isn’t true any more. You don’t need Saul any more.’
‘No.’
‘Georgiana, listen to me. Listen!’ He touched her shoulder. The glaze over her blue eyes softened and the brightness returned.
‘Tell me the truth,’ he commanded softly. ‘Was the real reason for your coming back to talk to me a wish to get Saul back? Did you lie to me before?’ He knew he was straying from the impartial professional to the personal.
‘I did believe I wanted to get Saul back. I’d always believed that.’ She breathed a sigh of huge weariness. ‘I couldn’t let him go.’
‘No, you couldn’t let him go. But that is a very different thing from wanting him back.’ Firm now – the professional clinician speaking.
‘I’m growing old,’ she said after a time, taking him by surprise.
‘You’re still a very beautiful woman.’
‘Yes. I think I always will be. But I’m alone, all alone.’ She turned to him in appeal. ‘I’m so frightened.’
Dr Denton found himself stabbed with feeling – an unusual and quite pleasant sensation. He felt himself drawn once more to Georgiana Xavier. They were suited. Emotionally they were compatible. Denton knew himself to be a man lacking in deep emotions. He had never felt the huge surges which stirred other people in connection with books, poetry and music. He had never been moved to tears by a great symphony, a sublime painting or an immortal sculpture.
It was perhaps the act of sex which had been the prime emotional experience of his life. Sex with a procession of discreet, married mistresses who had their own lives to lead and would never make passionate demands or psychological claims on him. They had left him free to devote himself to the furthering of his career and the accumulation of money and a comfortable life-style.
He was by no means a cruel or heartless man. The misery of his clients had often jarred his feelings and wearied his spirit. But he had never found himself on the brink of some desperate personal crisis or breakdown as he had seen happen to a disturbingly high proportion of his colleagues in the helping professions.
Georgiana was shallow, self-centred and basically still a child, emotionally. Yet she was not vicious - she had little calculation in her nature and virtually no malice. Even when pushed to the limits of her limited endurance she had not been prepared to commit a violent act.
Georgiana, in fact, was most pleasingly bland. Like him she preferred the even keel to the pitching and tossing between soa
ring heights and plunging depths. And like him she was alone, being propelled relentlessly into a cold future.
He took a tissue from his box on the desk and gently blotted her damp cheeks. Reassuring her that he would not be long, he went into the reception office and left Celia in no doubt that she had most certainly earned the bonus of finishing work early for once in return for all the times she had stayed late.
As Celia closed the front door behind her Dr Denton returned to the couch, sat behind Georgiana’s head and then leaned down to press his lips on hers.
She sighed. She arched her back and her hips burrowed against the leather of the couch in a languid, inviting manner. Dr Denton placed a hand on her waist, stroking her for a while, before transferring his attentions to the smooth globes of her knees and the long sweep of her inner thigh.
All the time he was talking to her. Rhythmic, soft phrases; words of praise, comfort and reassurance. Over and over, soft, caressing, tender words. He invited her to send her mind down a sweet-smelling grassy staircase. Long flights of steps leading further and further down. Deeper and deeper into a walled garden filled with cream lilies and purple iris.
‘So still, so peaceful,’ he whispered to her, his hand moving slowly upwards.
Georgiana felt herself lapped in a wonderful sensation of security. There was too, a sense of all this having happened before. And it was then that the flash of realization came to her. This was the key; the means to unlock the mystery of her presentiment. Dr Denton himself was the key. He, the person, the man.
She opened her eyes and stared up at him as he climbed onto the couch and straddled her hips. She held out her arms to him and then clasped them around his waist. She murmured in pleasure.
As Dr Denton entered her with gentle authority, he thought about the cottage in the little village in Cornwall. The scene of Georgiana’s childhood idyll – and of her ultimate humiliation and rejection. He could smell once again the curious blend of Georgiana’s lily-of-the-valley fragrance and the sour earthy smell of vomited baby food and soiled baby clothing.
In his mind’s eye he saw Xavier erupting grimly from the cottage clasping his child against him. How Xavier had hated his wife on that day.
He saw the limp Georgiana stretched out on the bed. A woman who had blotted out the horror of her fall from grace through a momentary flight into denial and unconsciousness, a state a lay person would call madness.
And he, Dr Denton, had taken it on himself to initiate the start of the healing process through the hypnotic suggestiveness of his caressing voice. He had spoken to her of the beauty of the sexual act, of the way it could offer pleasure and consolation. He had reassured her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that there would be no brutal invasion, no pain, no risk of any kind – and no guilt.
Slowly and tenderly he had continued his treatment with the application of techniques more physical than talking. In time he had slipped inside the covers with her, slipped softly inside her body.
He had set her on the road to recovery.
Now, as he thrust into Georgiana all these years later, he reminded himself that there were certain secrets which must never be shared, not even between a doctor and his patient.
CHAPTER 33
Roland Grant had mailed Tara with the full details of the nominations for Jupiter Music Award whilst she was at the ski lodge in Salzburg. She had looked through the names of the other short-listed artists and been surprised to see one which instantly conjured up old memories. That of Bruno Cornwell.
Bruno was up for an award for best newcomer of the year with a disc of his newly formed choir, The Renaissance, performing fifteenth and sixteenth-century church music for unaccompanied voices.
On returning to England, Tara had bought a copy of the disc and listened to it whilst she was driving, music and speed always seeming to blend together so well. She was enchanted by what she heard. There were just ten voices, five male, five female. They blended together in a unity of sound which had breathtaking purity and stark ethereal beauty.
According to the accompanying notes on the CD cover Bruno Cornwell had spent a number of years digging out yellowed and fusty-smelling manuscripts in the music libraries of London, Florence, Venice and Paris. Motets and anthems that had been written centuries ago to be sung in Europe’s great cathedrals and monasteries for the glory of God.
In forming his choir Bruno had taken the unusual step of including mature female voices for the higher register parts, moving away from the traditional practice of using boy trebles or counter tenor singers. Tara judged that a shrewd move. The female singers he had chosen had many qualities in common with those of a boy treble – all the clarity and purity, but with no trace of distortion in the fortissimo high notes. And of course with female sopranos he was not going to lose sleep wondering which young boy’s voice was going to break next.
As Tara listened she became convinced that the sound produced by this mixed sex adult choir was not only unusual but most pleasing and innovative. Most other directors of early music had chosen to stick with authenticity and exclude female singers as a matter of course.
‘Well done, Bruno,’ she kept saying to herself, smiling as the music permeated the car. And what a master-stroke to choose William Cornish’s Salve Regina as the initial track. It was a perfect hook into the rest of the album; a work of sonorous and dramatic splendour with a hefty dash of Tudor flamboyance.
Listening later on to the ringing and jubilant Sing Joyfully by William Byrd, Tara guessed that Bruno could have a runaway best seller on his hands. She saw the disc leaping up the classical music charges and sitting perched there for quite a while.
She thought of Bruno with a warm rush of affection, as she noted in the short biography on the cover that he was not yet a professional musician, but juggled his interest in early vocal church music with a full time career as a barrister.
Oh yes, she could well imagine. Good old Bruno, still fulfilling his parents’ fond ambition. She wondered if he would have to make a change now that his disc had shot from shadowy obscurity into the spotlight.
She played the recording to Saul who listened with intent interest. ‘What do you think?’
‘Remarkable,’ he said carefully, giving nothing away.
‘You don’t really like it, do you?’
‘A little thin-blooded for my taste.’
‘The music?’
‘No, no. The music is wonderful.’
‘The ensemble then?’
‘Five men and five women?’ He arched his eyebrows. ‘It’s not even a cricket team.’
‘Whereas you,’ Tara said laughing, ‘prefer a small army under your baton. Eighty plus in the orchestra, a choir of hundreds…’
‘Quite.’
For a moment she thought he was going to relax, let his guard slip and laugh at himself. The smile that had flickered faded and stilled. He moved to the piano and began to play some stark, sombre Ravel.
Tara listened spellbound. She closed her eyes for a moment and let the sound enfold her. Opening them again she looked at Saul’s face, drawn once again into the enchantment of those carved, impartial features.
So far away, Alessandra had said.
As Tara watched him now, his gaze directed straight ahead of him, his hands moving with silent command over the keys, it struck her that every day he was moving further. Further and further away.
Now it was June and the hall was filling steadily as Tara, Saul and a proud, faintly embarrassed Alessandra arrived for the award ceremony. They progressed through the throng of guests, smiling greetings, acknowledging congratulations.
Saul, having previously decreed that this was to be Tara’s night, placed himself discreetly a step behind his consort and declined to allow the flow of adulation washing over Tara to be deflected in his own direction.
Tara, her adrenalin surging in response to all this enthusiastic recognition of her achievement, looked up at him from time to time, aching with fresh love and a
strange yearning.
She gazed around her, curious to identify Bruno but failing to see anyone remotely resembling the portrait in her memory. And then the figure of a bear-like man, balding, bespectacled and constantly smiling caught her attention. She stared hard. The man turned, and instantly recognized her. Detaching himself from the throng he came forward to greet her.
The two former lovers looked into each other’s faces. There was a brief mutual stab of regret: recollections of a youth and innocence long ago vanished. There had been something precious and shared for a time but they had moved away from each other and gone down separate paths.
Tara looked at Bruno and saw that he was successful, prosperous and confident. And happy too, she judged. There was a strong emanation of well-being and content from those good-natured features.
She stretched up and put her arms around him, hugging him close, pressing a light kiss on his cheek. As she pulled back her glance was drawn to the woman at his side who was observing this affectionate reunion with the indulgent smile of a wife entirely confident of her husband’s love and loyalty.
‘Tara, meet Caroline,’ said Bruno, his face warm and animated as he drew his wife forward.
Caroline wore a full-skirted dress of mulberry taffeta: sweetheart neckline, leg-of-mutton sleeves and a demure pearl necklace. Like Bruno her waistline was spreading in anticipation of the creeping onset of middle age.
Tara in her clinging ankle-length scarlet gown, daringly slit up one side to mid thigh, wondered if she herself was in danger of looking like mutton dressed as lamb. She would have to consult Alessandra about it later.
Conversation began to flow: laughing mutual congratulations, general music talk.
Bruno looked beyond Tara and registered the presence of Saul Xavier. Tall and gaunt, the skin pulled tight over those sword-like features, Xavier struck Bruno as a man little altered by time. Except that possibly the great Maestro was even more terrifying and compelling than before.
Xavier shook Bruno’s hand warmly. ‘Many congratulations on the nomination. And to think I’d once imagined I was setting a young man on the road to the timpani section in some provincial orchestra,’ he commented drily. ‘Just look at you now – fame and fortune!’
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