by Linda Grant
“What will happen at Christmas?”
“I don’t know. I expect something will turn up, I’m not worried. If I have to I could get a job as a chambermaid in a hotel, they always provide accommodation and it’s bound to be busy at that time of year.”
Grace understood that she was dealing with someone who had an inner toughness that she herself had not, with all her exterior confidence, achieved. But why was the girl so intimidated by her?
“You look like a frightened rabbit, what’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t think I fit in.”
“Why would you want to fit in?”
Andrea considered this question in a new light. “Now you put it like that, I’m not sure. I just don’t want to feel that everyone knows what to do and say and I don’t.”
“I can teach you that stuff.”
“Thank you, I’d appreciate it.”
“You need to throw out your clothes.”
“I can’t afford any new ones.”
“You can borrow mine.”
“I’m too fat.”
“Then I’ll make them for you.”
Grace now sat on the edge of Andrea’s bed, stiff, silent, rocking her body. What she wanted to say was too difficult. It might come out that she regarded herself as a parasite and Andrea as the host, it was a way of interpreting it that Juan, in Ibiza, had pointed out.
“I knew the first time I met you,” she said, “that someone like you would always be all right, that you’d get what you wanted, that you could take care of yourself. And if you could take care of yourself, then you could take care of me. You were that type.”
“But I was practically suicidal.”
“You always say that, but I don’t think you were at all. You were tough. You always have been. You took what you wanted the minute you saw it.”
There had never been affection between them, they did not even kiss each other on the cheek after long absences. But Andrea knew that Grace had taught her to see, she had taught her to walk around with her eyes wide open. She taught her color, form, texture, light and shade, proportion. She was almost entirely her creature from that point of view. Grace had, she once told her, a profound understanding of surfaces. While Andrea was too busy looking past them to the secrets, the things people couldn’t say, what made them tick, Grace didn’t care about any of that.
Her life was like scaffolding, it held her up from the outside.
The pain became very difficult. The nurses came and administered injections but there was always too much time between them. Stephen was permanently on the internet now, looking up anesthesia.
Andrea’s nose seemed very large in her face, it had taken it over. It seemed to Grace to be her biggest feature. The children had been and gone, they were arriving every day to sit with their mother. Max performed little tricks for her on the covers of the bed, he could pull a billiard ball from behind her head. He could do things with the abandoned wigs in the wardrobe that made her feebly laugh. Marianne told her about Janek, she felt that this final unburdening would allow her mother to stop worrying about her.
“It’s all over,” she said. “I hardly think about him anymore, and I’m happy now. We have adopted a new puppy and we thought you’d like to give it a name.”
I am back in a bedsit, Andrea thought. She lived in her bed and was helped to the toilet. Out of the windows the trees were losing their leaves and the sky had assumed a flat gray aspect. She disliked this median season between autumn and winter, Stephen always hated it. The house next door had sold for nearly three million pounds, he said, she had always been right about everything. She had made them rich.
But she could not pay attention.
The room is growing smaller until it’s just her hands on the sheet and the square of pain around them.
“Grace,” she said, lifting a weak hand to the pillow her head rested on.
Grace’s strength was that she had no reverence for life. After a moment, she lifted the pillow and did what Andrea had asked.
Stephen was walking up the stairs. He stopped to straighten a picture. This is how they killed Jesse James, he thought, shot in the back, straightening a picture. When all this is over I’m getting into drugs again, I don’t care what they do to me. You need something for the kind of pain I have.
He opened the door of the bedroom and saw Grace kissing his wife’s cheek and closing her eyes.
“Where has she gone?” he cried. “Where is she?”
The Bonfire
When Andrea had seen her last patient, had found new therapists for the ones who wanted to continue and severed those who were merely dependent on her, habituated to arriving every Friday morning merely to talk over their week, she asked Stephen to burn her notes.
She was at the stage of her illness when she had accepted that there would be no recovery. Her calmness astonished him. She was making meticulous preparations for her own death, while the thought of dying terrified him, of being summarily wiped out, reduced to zero. But she was what she always had been, competent and philosophical. She was exactly like this when they had moved to London, to the squat, and without telling anyone had navigated the complicated buses and gone to the Savoy and found herself a job. It was typical that she should approach death with pragmatism.
She told Grace that she did not want Stephen to be faced with the task of disposing of her clothes. “Please do it for me, the next day would be best,” she had said. “Don’t let Stephen have to look at them in the wardrobe, and make sure you remove the shoes. They bear the imprint of the foot and are practically part of the body. And my makeup, don’t leave anything. I don’t want vestiges. I want to leave memories.”
She had died leaving behind order, in the moments that Stephen had lingered on the stair.
His job was to arrange the funeral, to get the death certificate, to mourn, to comfort his children and then be left struggling on alone, attempting to work out who he was now that he was a single man. This one task of cleanup, of destroying her files, seemed to him to be an odd request, why didn’t one of her therapist friends take it on, but she had insisted that he must do it.
He had rarely entered her consulting room on the second floor. It was her space, painted in a shade of white which she said had the idea rather than the form of lilac in it (he hadn’t understood a word of this). The patients did not talk lying down like in the movies, but sat in a low chair separated from Andrea by a coffee table with one object on it, a box of tissues to weep into. The whole place ran with a river of long-dried-up tears. It depressed him. She spent all day in here. All day. Wearing her expensive jeans and white T-shirts, my uniform, she said, and a cashmere cardigan in winter.
It was, to Stephen, a place of sobs and little joy. Had she ever cured anyone? he once asked her. I’m not a doctor, she replied, curtly. This made him wonder if the whole of her career was simply a long progression of partial failures. How did she measure success? What measurements could you use, where were the studies and experiments that analyzed whether a patient had recovered? But she refused to answer his dogged, pedantic queries. You don’t understand, she said to him. And he didn’t, and lost interest.
She was paid very well, she had no shortage of clients even though she didn’t have a particular specialization, preferring to stay a generalist, dealing with whoever needed her and with whom she struck up an intimacy. She wasn’t right for everyone, she told him; some patients required pushing and others coaxing. She was a coaxer. Some preferred a male therapist, others a woman. It was like starting a relationship that could progress into a temporary marriage. Crazes came and went, eating disorders were a permanent source of income, then childhood sexual abuse and the brief fad for recovered memory. But as far as he understood, the women and fewer men who rang the bell of the house in Canonbury did so because they were merely unhappy.
Well, now he was unhappy. He had not burned the notes when she asked him to, she wasn’t dead yet, why should he? In the back of his
mind was a hope that somehow there could be a recovery, a reprieve. There were always new drugs, new clinical trials, the whole of his career had been focused on the notion of scientific progress.
“If you had lived a hundred years ago,” he once said, when she rashly expressed the view that nothing ever really changes, that we were primally the same people as our cave-dwelling ancestors, with all the same instincts, “your teeth would have rotted from your head by the time you were thirty. You might have died giving birth to Marianne. There was no penicillin when your own parents were kids, so you could have been killed by influenza. And think about the pain, in the past people put up with the most intolerable torture because they didn’t have a simple aspirin, let alone ibuprofen. If you broke your arm, they’d amputate it because they didn’t know how to set bones. Without anesthetic. The people in the past were fatalists, they believed that nothing could change, that God decided everything, they were powerless. We’re completely different. Everything that goes on in our heads is hard-wired to understand that there is the option of change, and change is in our own hands, not some guy on a cloud.”
The horrors of nineteenth-century people, who lived without showers or toothbrushes or tampons or electric light or central heating or airlines, made him weep now. For in a hundred years time, his great-grandchildren would say, “And in the olden days, when a woman got cervical cancer she died!” And a hundred years after that, cancer would be a disease from the history books, like bubonic plague. “And they irradiated them. Shoved chemicals into their systems. It was as barbaric as leeches.”
So he would not burn her patient notes while she was alive because, although improbable, he could not discount the hope that medicine could save her. Two months after her death Stephen built a bonfire in the garden out of wooden boxes he found in the basement, which were from before their time, they might have been from Ralph’s parents’ day, and the furniture from her consulting room, which he broke up with a rented chain saw and carried outside. He was not a man who was good with his hands or had ever built a bookshelf. The feeling of power tools in his hands frightened him, it was usually Andrea who stood on the stepladder and made holes for Rawlplugs.
The weight of the chain saw, carving her blue sofa, felt good. Ergonomically his hands fitted the instrument, it seemed designed for him. He looked around the office. Apart from the armchair, what else could he cut up with it? Once he had started, he thought, he might take down the whole house, beginning with the bed she had died in. He could go completely crazy with that thing and then wreak havoc on the streets. Sometimes he thought he might go to a firing range and learn to shoot a gun, he wanted the experience not just of hitting the target, but the explosion in the barrel, the bullet in midair taking his heart out there with it, zoom.
When he had sliced the rug into spaghetti strips and carried it down to the garden, he opened the filing cabinets with the keys she had instructed him to find in her desk drawer.
The oldest files dated back to the seventies, after they came back from America and he was facing what he regarded as the end of his life, the finality of the voyage on the SS United States, the reverse emigration, marooned forever on the shores of an old continent, the Statue of Liberty behind him, its frozen beacon lighting the paths of others into safe harbor, freedom.
He read a few files. People’s problems are so trivial, he thought. They believe they have difficulties, they don’t. Her earliest patients had been seen at a rented office she shared with three other recently qualified therapists, so he could not put any faces to the details of their quiet or noisy despair. He read her notes, made with a red ballpoint in her neat handwriting with its careful loops: “Worked to death. Needs a holiday.” “Always in control. Always insists she’s right. Heading for major breakdown.” “Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Will get him into trouble if he’s not careful.” “Sexual abuse? Or subconscious?” “Raped on street. Developing general fear of men.” “Possible schizophrenia, refer elsewhere.” “Transference. Get rid.”
He put all of the seventies and all of the eighties into a cardboard box and carried it down to the garden, then went back upstairs to collect the nineties. In some of the files he found cassette recordings; he remembered she had bought a tape recorder so she could listen back to some of her more recalcitrant patients, make detailed notes and discuss them with her supervisor, a woman in Highgate with a pageboy haircut that turned an even and becoming shade of gray as the years passed. She always wore gray, dove gray, steel gray, graphite, anthracite, and turned up at the funeral all in white, the Far East’s color of mourning, she explained.
Andrea herself had gone to be ash in the fire of the crematorium.
The tape recorder was on a shelf, obsolete technology. He had fixed her up with a device which transferred the voice files onto a laptop. After he retired it was his job, every week, to do the technical work of updating her files. He showed her how to listen back to them. After several tries, she got it, but then she became ill and the patients were sent away.
He put a tape in the cassette deck. A moaning woman’s voice was emitted, talking about her useless husband. There was no Andrea there at all, except for some brief, muffled, faraway questions and the sound of the tissue box being moved across the table.
Good God, he thought, she spent all her life listening to this! How could she stand it? The nineties went into a crate. He wasn’t sure what to do with the tapes, it was probably illegal to burn them, releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere, but where else could they go, other than on a landfill site? He had no idea how long a cassette tape would take to corrode.
The final decade of Andrea’s life, and of her career as a psychotherapist, was the one he was most eager to discard. She had been, without either of them knowing it, sick and growing sicker. It was patients and their trivial anxieties that had prevented her from going for a routine screening. Which patient? he had asked her. But she said she couldn’t remember. She knew she had canceled the appointment because someone had rung with a crisis and she had simply forgotten to make a new one, had ignored the slips of paper that came from the doctor, reminding her to call. Some stupid bitch had sat there, droning on about her self-inflicted or imaginary misfortunes, while his wife was being bombarded with disease. If he’d known her name, he would have punched her.
But also in the 2000 files were Grace’s notes. Andrea had instructed him to hand them over to Grace in person. “That is, if she wants them, if not you can burn them with the rest, but it’s up to her. And anything else you find.”
“What else would I find?” he had asked, puzzled.
After her father-in-law had died on the plane crossing the Atlantic, and Stephen had returned home to California to bury him in the plot alongside his mother, Andrea had thought that perhaps she should tell him Si’s secret. She had discussed it with her supervisor. But what, Andrea asked, was the point? Then he would be left with a situation without resolution. The old man had not had the courage to face his own son, and she believed it was best to leave him with the comfort of illusions. Stephen admired his dad. Why should she take that away from him?
So the story was still there, in the files, and she was conscious that he might come across it, and then she too would be gone, unable to help him. She wrote her supervisor’s phone number on the file, and a note: Is briefed. Call if necessary.
Stephen thumbed through the files, pausing at one with his own initials, SN, and inside a tab that said Si Newman. The sheets of paper inside were the notes that Andrea had made during the session, and stapled to them was a more detailed account of what he had told her. He went to the laptop and ran through the sound files.
Having mutilated and destroyed the sofa, he was obliged to sit on a metal upright chair in her office as he heard his father’s voice telling a story to Andrea that neither of them had chosen to reveal to him. Listening to the account of the whacking of his grandfather, his father’s confession that he might be a murderer and was anyway not what he s
eemed, that the stories of his lonely solitary journeys across America were only stories, fictions, lies, Stephen felt… Well, what do I feel? he asked himself. She would have tried to drag this out of me. She’d be nagging away, What do you feel, Stephen? The truth was, nothing, numbness.
When a person loses a sensation in a limb through paralysis and they touch it, it feels like they are touching someone else’s leg, he knew this because he had made a documentary about it. When he probed his emotions now it was as if he was observing, with dispassionate detachment, the rage and hurt and betrayal of a stranger.
Numbness, which was replaced by a spasm of irritation, how dare the old man visit on his own son these outrages? Didn’t he have enough to do, grieving the loss of his beloved wife, and she had indeed turned out to be his beloved, no faking that. Sweet Andrea with the carroty hair, the green velvet dress, the large eyes, the parted lips, the stink of patchouli oil, the blood on the sheets, the love of his life, there had been no other, nor would there be. She had left him alone for perpetuity, he had to deal with that.
Yet he might have never come to England, not applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, or been rejected, might never have got into that stupid scheme of manufacturing tabs of acid and been discovered and sent down. Had he stayed in America he might have avoided the draft by doing his doctorate there and getting successive deferments. Who would he have been if he had stayed in the States? Not the husband of Andrea but of some unknown woman with different unknown children. And that wife would still be alive, he would not have chosen unwittingly a girl with a fatal flaw, a clock ticking inside her, down to her sixtieth birthday and then a black line drawn under.
He felt a spasm of longing for this other wife, the one he had never met and the children they had not had together. The sensation made him feel sick, dizzy with nausea. That she existed, somewhere in America, the girl he would have married had his father not sent him to sea, given him the taste for travel, and sent him off on the SS United States. He wondered who she had married, his girl, and whether they were happy or if he had been a no-good bum who beat her or left her, or if she had been the one who had done the leaving. Had been a two-timing bitch or a career woman who would have left any husband long behind.