by Don Boyd
“You have a young friend waiting for you upstairs.”
The bar had a spiral staircase, which led up to the toilets and a tiny private room with a couple of tables. Elvira’s eyes told Margot that she was somewhat irritated by this intrusion into their cosy friendship.
“A friend? Not many people know that I come here.”
“I will bring up your solo and orange juice.”
Margot noticed that the two priests who were also habitués of Elvira’s emporium were arguing. She smiled and climbed the staircase to find Tilly sitting forlornly positioned so that she could watch the customers coming into the bar from the balcony, which overlooked it. She jumped up immediately and threw herself at Margot and held her for an unnecessarily long time. Margot was bemused but she noticed that Tilly had unusually dark shadows around her eyes and was clearly distracted.
“I thought I was seeing you tomorrow?”
“I know, Margot! I know you are strict about this, and I am so, so sorry but I can’t wait. I had no other person to see. I have to talk to you. I can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“You could have ‘phoned.”
“I couldn’t take the risk of missing you. I’ve seen you skip through your messages.”
Margot laughed. Her answering machine drove her crazy at times.
“I always pick up my messages. Especially important ones from clients like you.”
Elvira arrived with Margot’s breakfast, and another cup of Americano for Tilly, who smiled appreciatively.
“How did you know that I came here so early?”
“Paolo knew, somehow.”
“Why is he not here with you? In all the time I have known you, I have never seen you on your own.”
Tilly paused. Her eyes welled up, she was fighting back tears. She sipped at her black coffee.
“He has told me that he doesn’t want to see you anymore. He said that if he comes back to you he only wants to come alone. Separately. And he said he always hated the feeling that you were learning things about me he didn’t know. Sitting outside your room, waiting in the corridor.”
“If?”
There was a quiet desperation about the way that Tilly was talking. Margot had always known that the day would arrive when the uneasy nature of counselling these two lovers at the same time would cause problems. Margot’s professional relationship with Tilly’s boyfriend had been excellent and he had always been very friendly whenever they met socially. In the spirit of guardianship, Archie had occasionally invited Tilly and Paolo to their apartment, not just as an extension of a longstanding friendship with Tilly’s parents, but because he and Margot loved their company. Their natural enthusiasm for life was infectious and they always brought along some kind of entertainment as their charming way of ‘singing for their supper’, either a couple of scenes from a Shakespearean play which Paolo had used his considerable talents to distort into a Catalan fantasy of his own, or some Catalan love songs Tilly had learnt. She had a particularly beautiful voice. But except for these idylls, and the occasional sightings at ex-patriot functions like the one at The Arts, Margot had managed to restrict her work as their therapist to the twice weekly meetings. They would come together but see her separately – a condition she had insisted on from the start which they had been thrilled about – and although much of the work was very raw and emotionally charged, they had never indicated that they wanted to change this. They came together, saw her privately – sometimes Paolo would go outside into the square below but Tilly always stayed in the corridor reading Margot’s movie magazines – and when Paolo emerged, they would leave hand in hand. They had only broken that arrangement once.
“Have you had a fight with Paolo?”
Tilly had tied her long red curls into a bunch behind her shoulders. She had teenage freckles and incandescently blue eyes. Her beautiful face, now exposed and streaming with tears, was silently begging Margot to help her out of her misery. Her adolescent vulnerability had obliterated any vestige of the professional rigour which Margot might have used to delay giving Tilly all the help she so obviously needed away from her studio.
“We never fight, as you know. But we argue. Usually we come to some agreement to be different. We like to have different opinions.”
Margot had heard this a thousand times before. Paolo and Tilly adored each other, of that there was no question. But they had different temperaments and were never afraid to voice their opinions to each other, very vigorously and occasionally for hours on end.
“But last night after the party at the Arts, we went down to the square in front of the cathedral to dance and he seemed different. Robert danced with me which made him jealous and then he disappeared for an hour… he wouldn’t tell me where he had gone.”
Margot remembered the graphic stories they had both so earnestly told each other about their adolescent sexual experiences. Every detail had been scrutinised as if their brains had been under some hypersensitive neurological microscope. But she had also remembered that momentary feeling that Tilly had been with Robert that morning in Las Ramblas.
“We have always had two rules. No secrets. No lies.”
“We all have secrets, Tilly. You know that. We need a secret or two…”
There was a pause. Tilly sipped her coffee.
“Paolo was… Paolo wanted me to… I was angry. He had been hiding something…”
She hesitated. Margot took her hands.
“Paolo is one of life’s treasures, Tilly. If I had met him when I was your age, I would have fallen in love with him too. I would have trusted him. I would have wanted him forever, but I wouldn’t have wanted him to be put on any pedestal. And that is what is so refreshing about your relationship. It has developed so that you both can be individuals. Very special people with your own way of going about the world. With love and respect for each other at a level that is quite rare. I so hope that this is not in jeopardy because of me?”
Tilly didn’t really take much of this in. She was pre-occupied.
“We have never argued about you before. We only told you things that both of us were happy to tell each other. Yeah, and of course there are things we have kept to ourselves. Our own secrets…”
Margot was trying to work out where all of this was leading. She knew it was not strictly connected to her professional relationship with Tilly and Paolo, but Tilly was obviously holding back. She seemed almost frightened. Anxious.
“…but Paolo, Paolo had one very big secret. We now both have this big secret. Dark. Weird. He wants me to be part of his past…”
Tilly suddenly broke off and, switching her mood, lurched over to a straw bag which had been hanging over the chair at the neighbouring table.
“Oh my God! I totally forgot to give Archie his book yesterday. I’ve brought it for you to give to him. He sent me a rose on Sunday morning. I always give him a book on St. George’s Day.”
Margot couldn’t help laughing – Archie only ever sent one rose out and she was used to Tilly’s charming ability to deflect her anxieties or discomforts with a convenient, completely irrelevant diversion.
“He would have had a sleepless night worrying about it.”
Tilly rummaged through her bag and produced a slim, dog-eared paperback. She kissed it and gave it to Margot. It was a volume of Catalan love songs.
“This is my only copy. It was the first gift I received from Paolo. I know all these songs now by heart, words and melodies. I want Archie to learn them too, and then on my birthday, I want him to sing them to you. They are just as lovely as those fabulous Neruda poems he gave Paolo last year… I think Archie loves Paolo as much as I do!”
And with that Tilly suddenly stood up, kissed Margot affectionately, and flew down the spiral staircase. Margot was flabbergasted. She sprung up and watched her from the balcony. Just as she was going out of the make-shift, multi-coloured and beaded curtain which masqueraded as the door, she spun around to blow a kiss to Elvira. For some strange reason she was wearing a
long, flimsy black coat which became caught up in the beads. One of the priests rushed up to help her untangle it. With an unforgettable smile she shook his hand gratefully and called up to the balcony as she left the bar.
“See you tomorrow!”
The priest glanced up at Margot and rejoined his colleague. Margot stood there, leaning on the balustrade for a moment or two, and then left the bar as quickly as she could without seeming rude to Elvira.
She hurried down the tiny streets of the Barri Gothic, crossed the square in front of the eleventh century Cathedral, wound her way almost impatiently through a couple of alleyways and reached a set of large, wooden gates. She squeezed through the tiny door and ran to a narrow interior staircase and her consulting room which overlooked the faded grandeur of the Plaça de Reial.
Maybe I am a sort of Madame, running a psychological brothel. Take Robert, for example. Tall, thin-haired and with a face which is a cross between a bloodhound and an ostrich. This distinguished, intelligent man has been known to hide during the lunch hour under the desks in the open plan office of the Catalan newspaper where he works, blubbing his eyes out. He never tells anybody why he is so unhappy and yet he spends an hour a week describing his complicated and perverse sexual proclivities to me – particularly in the context of his cloistered childhood in Oxford where his parents had the dubious privilege to play out their lives negotiating the eccentricities of antiquated academia. (I had made the mistake of telling him once about my PhD thesis at Chicago which explored the treatment of sexual perversions; this had piqued his desire to tell me much more about himself than I had ever wanted to know!) Giggling like a naughty schoolboy, he recounts the duplicitous and mendacious manoeuvres of his love life, which revolve around at least three unsuspecting mistresses. There is his bored divorcee, recovering from her marriage. His ambitious young work colleague in love with his Englishness. And finally there is his man-eating, teenaged English language student who targeted him specifically to initiate her into the rituals of sado-masochistic sex – she caught him emerging from a brothel one afternoon after school and realised, opportunistically, that there was more he could teach her than iambic pentameters. (Tilly perhaps – God forbid!). He pours out all of this to me (prurience doesn’t have a comfortable definition in my dictionary), in the full knowledge that he also enjoys a weekly game of squash with my husband, his best friend. As if this perverse need to advertise to me that his omnifrenic existence isn’t enough for him to survive comfortably, he is almost religious about joining us at our Sunday brunch rituals with Stella, his wife of twenty years, who flies in most weekends, from London where she works as an investment banker.
I can always recognise his polite, slightly guilty cough as he winds his way up the ancient staircase that leads to my office. His throat clears and his warped mind switches into a completely different universe as soon as his angular frame settles in front of me.
Margot’s studio apartment was split into three areas. She looked around at every corner of the studio, a ritual she practiced every morning. She liked her patients to absorb the layout with the similar comfortable familiarity that they might in the favourite room of their own home. She walked down the narrow corridor which had one small stool with a side table covered with film and gardening magazines. This reception area had one rather eccentric abstract Escher drawing on the wall, and led to a small but very modern, fashionable shower room with a toilet and a bidet. She noticed that the soap was depleted and replaced it with a new bar from the stash in the closet. Off this arterial corridor, and directly opposite the entrance, was an oak door leading to a small office area with a large window overlooking the square. In the centre of the room was a beautiful old desk cluttered with the inevitable laptop computer and telephone. Without sitting in the perfunctory office chair, she pressed the answer phone – only one hurried message from Tilly. Behind the desk, in the far corner, sat an old-fashioned Dickensian armchair and against the wall was a sofa-bed decorated with a floral rug which she unravelled and neatly arranged around the black velvet cushions. Next to the sofa-bed was a very modern corner bookshelf and on the walls were some exquisite David Hockney illustrations, Grimms Fairy Tales. She straightened the largest of them. Rumplestiltskin.
Checking her watch, she then walked out of the office area through a beautiful patterned Linda Bruce fabric, which acted as a makeshift partitioning curtain, and into her consulting area which was affectionately referred to by Archie as the Priest Hole. This area was sparse. White walls. A Charles Eames chair. In the other corner, a black velvet chaise-longue ominously decorating the latticed French window which led out onto a balcony – no doubt reserved for those patients brave enough to go beyond the fifty minute, twice weekly shrink’s hour. And of course, next to the comfortable orange ‘patient’s armchair’, was that staple of every self-respecting modern therapist, the square box of tissues discreetly propped on a tiny glass side table. She rearranged the box – it had to appear fresh and unused. One last glance around the studio and she settled into the Eames.
Robert was more than a little dishevelled that morning. He, like Tilly, had turned the St George’s Day party into a saga that had lasted through the night. The rims around his eyes were swollen and his face was sweating. His breath stank of stale cigarettes and alcohol as he bent down to kiss Margot before stumbling away from her and, quite uncharacteristically, lying down on the couch instead of sitting in the armchair which was his preferred resting place in the room he affectionately called, ‘Margot’s Lair.’
“I am not going to fall asleep on you, I promise…”
Margot waited. She liked her clients to set the agenda. But Robert was still a little drunk, certainly hung-over, and she would normally have been very reluctant to carry on with him in such a state, but the nature of their friendship demanded that she stuck with him for at least a beat or two.
“…and I don’t think that you are going to fall asleep on me this morning either,” he continued.
She resisted reminding him that it was barely ten o’clock and that she had never once in her entire career even so much as dozed off. However, seemingly irrelevant asides, innocuous observations and the most trivial of chit-chat were often building blocks for her more incisive analysis. Especially with Robert. His stories were very rarely boring – he had the journalist’s knack of being able to spin quite a yarn, so whatever he had in store that morning, Margot was preparing to provide him with as much of her insight as she could muster.
“I have never needed one of these here before,” he said, as he wiped his sweat from his forehead with one of the tissues. It was true. Although Robert was known to blub like a baby at the drop of a hat, he had never once cried in Margot’s consulting room.
“Last night I did something I am deeply ashamed about… I deliberately set out to see if I could seduce Tilly… and if I failed to seduce Tilly, I was going to try to seduce Paolo… as it is, I didn’t seduce either of them but I caused the most appalling fight between them… And then I behaved very badly indeed.”
Margot laughed. “Robert, you are slurring your words. What made you imagine for one tiny second that either of them would have found you even remotely attractive enough to have succeeded?”
Margot was now very anxious that she had failed to understand how desperately Tilly had needed to talk to her earlier. She had often talked about Robert, and although she thought he was funny and attractive to be with, she had never for a moment thought he was sexually alluring. As much as clients hide and disguise the truth, Margot was absolutely sure that the only man that Tilly had eyes for, physically, was Paolo. Much more worrying, was their fight.
“What kind of fight, Robert?”
“She kissed me and told me that she found me… attractive, irresistible!”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Well, perhaps I am exaggerating… a little. She did allow me to kiss her, and I told her that I found her irresistible!”
The conversation had
moved away from being in any shape or form a session of therapy.
“Margot, you are supposed to be helping me here. Not giving me a hard time.”
Margot was gentle.
“I can’t treat you that easily like this, Robert. You’re still drunk. I just can’t take you seriously. Why don’t you go home? We’re supposed to be seeing each other tonight at the opera. We can talk then.”
She desperately wanted to question him in order to shed some light on her conversation with Tilly, but she knew she couldn’t do that and expect a truthful answer. She waited again. Robert began to whimper like a child. She continued to wait.
“I have never seen Paolo in such a horrible mood. He screamed at her. We were in that square in front of the Cathedral where they hold the dancing. Tilly was a little tipsy and she kept telling me that Paolo had betrayed her. She said that he had lied to her.”
“Betrayed her?”
“He hadn’t told her about an old lover. I think that she was flirting with me to pay him back. It was all very childish. They are so young. And being in love when you are that young is always a nightmare! I was in love with Stella when I was his age but I am not in love with her now. I think that I am in love with you, Margot, and I did such a stupid thing last night. I told Tilly how much I love you…”
“I don’t think you were telling Tilly anything she didn’t know, Robert… and I am sure that she took it all with a pinch of salt.”
Margot knew now that she would have to send Robert home. He was too drunk to be properly coherent. Thankfully, Robert did the job for her.