Becoming Tess

by H K Thompson

  In some ways it was like therapy. There were moments, she knew, when insight came unexpectedly like the sudden appearance of something true on the face of a sculpture. There was often no warning, just the coming together of fragments, of things already said or felt, of memories, of utterly mysterious connections somewhere deep in the brain and the heart when suddenly something changes. Some quality of fear, aggression, or anxiety may fade perceptibly. The client may be more compassionate because they have understood something inside themselves that they may have rejected for years. So much of what we say is of no importance at all and we forget how to say the things that are important, if we ever knew in the first place, she thought. And how very bad we are at listening, at actually hearing what someone is trying to say. And how agonising it is not to be heard.

  Evelyn’s episode of circumspection came to a close as she looked down at the laden coffee table and saw that the soup still in her dish had congealed, that she had been lost in thought and that she wanted a cup of tea. As she went through the motions of her life that afternoon she found herself reflecting on her clients. She didn’t try to banish these thoughts from her mind but knew it to be part of the winding-down process, part of letting go, part of re-engaging with her life as a whole and the Christmas and New Year that would be spent, for the next few days at least, unaffected by her work. She would put the difficulties of the new year that she knew would come to the back of her mind. This time was for her.

  *

  For Tess Christmas gave way to the wait for the new year, for some indication of when the Board meeting would take place, when she knew her future wouldbe decided. And she found herself remembering that her story had appeared in one or two of the national dailies. It had, in fact, been one of the newspapers that had informed her mother of what had happened, of Tess taking Rachel’s body to the Police Station. Later, when her mother had found out where Tess had been sent, she had sent her a card from Southend, a picture postcard of the pier, informing her that she had read about her and wanting to know the ins and outs of this shocking story.

  Tess, newly arrived at Wellbridge House, had felt assailed by her mother’s complaining and totally inappropriate message and the picture of the pier on the reverse and had wanted to hear nothing more from her. She had told Mark that she wanted no contact with her mother and asked him to intercept any phone calls or letters. Some weeks later, feeling more on an even keel, she had amended her request, strong enough again to withstand her mother’s complaints and manipulations. Her mother subsequently sent her one or two letters, covering most of the paper with protests about the refusal of Tess to receive her communications after her arrival.

  At Wellbridge House she felt protected from the threat that Irene posed to her sanity and as she became stronger, she found that she could withstand the convoluted emotional world that her mother inhabited without feeling an inevitable sense of disturbance and panic, a mounting feeling of anxiety that made her feel afraid and then despairing and then the worst feeling of all, of not wanting to live.

  Tess was aware that a gap in her therapy meant that she’d been able to reflect in an unhurried way about past events and how she had changed as a result of them. She saw it as a valuable time. So she stopped marking time and began to enjoy the time of gentle reflection, a time when she put together some of the pieces and built a longer view of the recent past. When she did that she found that her more distant history fell into place, the picture of her life became more complete. She began to feel more coherent and that gave her a growing confidence about what she could achieve in the time she had at the unit, in the sessions she had left with Evelyn.

  Chapter 15

  Evelyn Doyle walked into Wellbridge House on the morning of 4th January unexpectedly looking forward to resuming her work there. By the time she had asked her third “Have a good Christmas and New Year?” she arrived at the door of the general office and walked in with a brief courtesy knock. Mona was sitting at her desk, working through a pile of paper that had accumulated during the holiday. She, too, had taken two weeks off.

  “Have a good Christmas?” Evelyn asked.

  Yes thanks. You?”

  “Fine. I had a good rest.”

  Mona began searching for a piece of paper in one of her piles, found it and held it out to Evelyn.

  “There’s a date for the Board meeting. Tess Dawson is third on the agenda. It’s tomorrow at lunchtime, specially for you. Not much notice, I know.”

  “Thanks for arranging that. In fact, I don’t have a session until 3.30pm, unless I’m mistaken.” She pulled out her diary from her bag. “No, I’m right. So I won’t feel I have to rush. Good. See you later.”

  She left the office on her way to her first session of the day. She felt ready for anything and was not perturbed by how little time she had to prepare for the Board.

  *

  Tess’s session time came round fast and Tess was awaiting her morning appointment with impatience. The next part of her story had been growing inside her and now she needed to get it off her chest. She walked slowly up the stairs from the ground floor hallway remembering the time when she had climbed the stairs in the grip of panic, scarcely able even to breathe; how her legs had felt as if they would collapse under her and she had frozen there, clinging to the banister, unable to move, unable to call out, unable even to return to the ground floor. She had been able to muster some courage and practically crawl up the last few steps to the landing and then to the door. She remembered pausing at the door, gripping the doorknob and almost falling into the room. There she had found Evelyn waiting, a calm presence, focused and patiently waiting for her. She had smiled as Tess had entered feeling distraught and afraid and in the grip of something inexplicable.

  Now, not so many weeks later, Tess felt composed and intent on her mission. Nothing would distract her from her story. She rarely experienced her panics anymore, and had developed some mastery over the anxiety that had always been such a constant presence in her life. She checked her watch and waited a minute at the top of the stairs until the hour was reached and opened the door. She said hello to Evelyn, who smiled in acknowledgement, and sat down, eyes on the rug, concentrating on what she was about to say. After a few minutes she spoke.

  “I was on my way back down the Glasnant Road when we stopped before Christmas. I was shaken by what Stephen had done, the way he’d attacked me. I was shocked but I was feeling a bit better. I felt I had some power. He’d not got the better of me for the first time in my life. I was elated by that. I’d not fully realised that something important and new had happened at the time. It slowly filtered through overnight.

  When I got back into the town it was getting on for teatime and it was getting very cold. The sun had nearly gone and the light was beginning to fade. I looked around for somewhere to have something to eat and drink and found a small wholefoody sort of cafe and had some cake and tea. My nerves were starting to calm down by then and the food and hot tea helped. The woman who served me was very pleasant and quite chatty and I said I’d been up towards Carningli, walking. I didn’t say anything else. She asked me if this was my first time in the area and I said, yes it was and I found it very beautiful. She told me she’d moved from Essex to get away from the urban sprawl and the suburban encroachment of the countryside. She liked Newport very much, especially being by the sea. She said that was the only part of Essex she liked, being near the sea. She said she found it spiritually nourishing and I said that I could understand that.

  I went back to the hotel. I said hello to Carol in the kitchen, and to Geoff who was standing in the hallway as I went in, took a newspaper from the lounge and went upstairs to my room. As soon as I got into the room I went into the bathroom and turned on the bath taps. I was desperate to have a bath and wash away the dirt from the cottage, in fact to wash away the whole experience of being there. I took my clothes off. I needed to wash them and change into something clean. I got into the bath, sinking under the hot water. I can re
member letting out this huge sigh of relief and breathing in a great breath of air, filling my lungs with something clean and moist. It was almost as if I was washing away some horrible imprint that being in the cottage with him had left on me. In fact, that’s exactly what I was doing. Cleansing myself, inside and out. It felt as if I was undergoing some ancient purification and healing ritual. I lay there in the soft water for ages, until it was only warm and I was wrinkled. When I got out of the bath I was hot, heated to the core. I realised how cold I’d been and how I’d got even more chilled coming down the hill but probably more by being in that dank cottage. There was no warmth there. It was damp. Impossible to make it warm. When I thought of it I shuddered.

  I wrapped myself up in a white dressing gown hanging on the bathroom door and got into the bed and pulled the duvet up and read the paper to distract me, I suppose. I read some articles then realised I couldn’t remember a word I’d read so I put the paper down, turned out the light and closed my eyes. I can remember drifting away and the next thing I knew I was waking with a dream of Hafod Fach receding from my mind and leaving me feeling rigid with fear. The cottage and my brother had left some sort of dirty indelible mark on me and I felt very vulnerable. It was a horrible feeling. I began to be afraid that it would never leave me, that it had infected me permanently in some way, but then I remembered that I’d actually felt a different fear that day, one that didn’t overwhelm me. I thought then, Evelyn, that the fear I woke up with was what I’d felt when I was young and powerless. It wasn’t the fear that I’d felt that afternoon. It was different. I was different.” She paused, perhaps, waiting for a response.

  Evelyn said: “I think you’re right about that. Your unconscious is still sometimes in thrall to childhood memories of helplessness, powerlessness and the fear of a child. What you discovered at the cottage was that you could feel fear that you could master and that you are no longer powerless and helpless with it.”

  Tess said “mm” and continued:

  “I got up and put the news on the TV while I got dressed. I was feeling very hungry by that time and I wanted to be ready for dinner at seven o’clock. At seven on the dot I went downstairs and Sian greeted me at the bottom of the stairs and took me to my table. The food there was so good I stopped worrying about the budget I had for the trip and chose what I fancied from the menu. And I had some wine to go with it. There was a little bit of revenge there because I was spending my mother’s money and I’d never had the chance to do that before.”

  Tess smiled at the thought and continued.

  “Sian asked me if I’d had a good day and I told her I’d been up past Carningli as the day had been so fine. She said it must have been cold and then went to fetch the coffee. I sat in the lounge and read another paper and then I went up to bed. There were only two other people staying.

  Whilst I’d been having dinner I’d been able to forget about the meeting with my brother. I knew it was waiting to come back as soon as I was alone again and, sure enough, I started to think about it as I sat in the armchair thinking about whether to put the TV on again and watch something to take my mind off it. In the end I decided not to distract myself and to think about what had happened, about the state he was in, the effect it had had on me, even my dream when I came back. Ever since my mother had contacted me and asked me to go I’d struggled with how stupid I was to do it, knowing how it might affect me. But what I’d proved to myself that afternoon was that I could handle it, I could handle my brother who had only ever done harm to me, who’d only ever hurt me and played with my head.

  I found myself thinking about how impossible it seemed that I’d overcome something so old and embedded in me and I realised, Evelyn, that my life could be different, that I could perhaps achieve something for myself rather than just languish in the half-life that I’d lived, trying to keep out of situations that might be difficult, avoiding relationships with other people whilst seeming to be open to them, friendly and compliant, trying hard not to be myself, in fact. Because underneath that pretence I was afraid of life so I withdrew from it in case things happened to me that might be frightening and painful. I was so easily afraid. Not too many years ago I was terrified at the thought of going off a footpath when I went for a walk. I thought I would stray into the unknown and I would never get out, I would be lost. It was awful.

  Evelyn, I was afraid of everything and I was afraid of what was inside me. It was as if some inexplicable terror lived right in the centre of me and it controlled everything I did. It was like an illness and I felt as if I would never get better from it. In the end I would die of fright. It would destroy me. What it meant was that I wasn’t really alive. I was so afraid I could take no risks at all. I could never approach people for friendship or companionship so I became more and more isolated and alone and more and more afraid. There was no one, only me, completely unequipped to cope with a world that I didn’t understand at all. It was like a foreign country where everyone spoke a foreign language I didn’t understand. All I could do was keep body and soul just about together and hope that things would get better. But really I was frozen so it was no wonder it was my mother making me feel obligated to go and see Stephen that propelled me into action. Perhaps she did me a good turn and perhaps my not being able to stand up to her was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Sometimes the way forward comes from unexpected places, from where we would never expect it to come and from the most regressed parts of ourselves.”

  “You mean something child-like and frightened?”

  Evelyn nodded and said, yes. Tess continued:

  “So I began to feel more bold and it occurred to me that my job there wasn’t done yet. I began to feel angry at the way Stephen had behaved and that he wasn’t strong. He was smaller than I remembered him and I felt angry that he’d attacked me. I can remember getting up from the chair in the hotel room and walking to the window and looking out at the darkness and thinking that I wanted to take him to task for what he’d done. But I also thought that he couldn’t be all bad, that he had to be suffering, living like that, being in the state he was in. After the anger came something closer to compassion, even empathy. He had had the same background that I’d had but his path had been so different. Then I wavered between compassion and judgement of him and I remember thinking that there must be something there, some small light in his darkness and cold.

  It was like with my mother, Evelyn, I was looking for a sign of some kind of humanity, for a way in to reach him. Now, looking back, I think I was foolishly open, absurdly idealistic. But what I was thinking led me to plan to go back to see him and confront him about the way he had behaved towards me. I became determined to see him again, to overcome that irrational child-like fear for good and face him just to prove to myself that I was in control, that I wasn’t a frightened child any more. I had to prove something to myself, you see. I’ve thought later that it probably wasn’t really about compassion at all. It was more like some pride in me, vanity even. I remember feeling suddenly determined. So I decided to go there again the next day.

  Given that I’d decided to go back, I slept very well that night. I was tired from what had happened and I had walked further than I had in ages. I didn’t wake until quite late, about nine o’clock, and I went down to find that I was the only one at breakfast. The others had gone. Geoff was on duty in the dining room and he asked me, had I had a good day yesterday, the weather had been so nice, and I said I had. He asked me whether I’d had a bump because there was a red patch on my cheek bone where Stephen had caught me, and I said I’d banged myself on a tree branch in the woods.

  Over breakfast I was thinking about the decision I’d made the evening before, about going to see Stephen to confront him about what he’d done to me. I felt my stomach somersault with anxiety and I think a little excitement. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was a strong, physical feeling and some of it felt different from what I usually feel when I’m going to do something that’s s
cary. I had no plan for when I would go and I can remember feeling a vague reluctance. I didn’t fight it, Evelyn.

  I wandered down to the estuary along the path I’d been down when I arrived. It was sunny and cold again and there was a wind off the sea that cut through me. It woke me up and I walked along the footpath to the harbour. The wires from the boat riggings were banging against the masts in the wind. It was a familiar sound now and I could feel the salt air in my nose clearing my head. It looked beautiful in the sunshine.

  I found a cafe that, unbelievably, was open in February! I sat in the sunshine looking out to sea and drank a cappuccino. Everything seemed vivid and alive. I suppose I felt vivid and alive. I felt different. I felt brave and in control and set on my next step. I stayed at the cafe. I felt in no hurry to go up the hill. I doubted that Stephen got up in the morning and I wanted to see him when he was dressed and compos mentis and that would be more likely at the end of the day than the beginning, I was sure of that.

  I decided over lunch that I’d take the car up the hill; I’d drive so I wasn’t tired from the climb. I could park it further up the road, past the entrance to Hafod Fach. I could spend more time in the sun around the sea and the river estuary that way. At about 2.30pm I set off back to the hotel, told Carol I’d be back for dinner and fetched the car from the car park. I drove up through the town onto the Glasnant Road and up the hill, past the phone box on the left, and eventually past the entrance to the cottage and down the dip alongside the dry stone wall and the pines. There was a gated entrance to the pine plantation on the right. The gate had seen better days and its broken-down state meant that I could pull right off the road where the car wouldn’t be seen from the entrance to the cottage drive, hidden by the wall and the trees.