by Tammy Cohen
‘But some of the cases were genuine?’
‘Of course. In fact, I’d say probably all of them were. Do you know how hard it is for someone to own up to something like this? Secrets they’ve been carrying around their whole lives? Secrets that make them feel grubby and unclean?’
There was something about Geraldine Buckley’s intensity that set the cogs in Corinne’s mind whirring and made her wonder about the demons in Geraldine’s own past that had led her to seek obliteration at the bottom of a bottle.
‘Professor Dunmore became something of an expert on the subject of FMS and how to treat it. So, not surprisingly, we started to see young women, and a couple of men too, persuaded into attending the clinic by relatives who wanted, for whatever reason, to be told that the abuse never happened, that it was just a fantasy that had been planted in the patient’s head.’
‘And they were all treated by Professor Dunmore?’
‘Or Oliver Roberts.’
‘And what happened?’
‘One of the women killed herself, leaving a note explicitly blaming Dunmore for negating what had happened to her. It caused a big public scandal. Afterwards, some of the other women who’d been treated at the clinic threatened a class action, although that didn’t come to anything. In the end, Dunmore had to resign and was later struck off. Roberts stayed on a few months after that, but he didn’t get on with Dunmore’s replacement and he got a job somewhere else. And a short while later I was dismissed.’
‘So Roberts himself was never implicated?’
‘No. The General Medical Council decided Dunmore was a domineering figure and the rest of the staff couldn’t be blamed for following the ethos of the clinic. There was a rumour that Roberts turned on his mentor in interviews with the investigators and gave them the evidence they needed to force a resignation, in return for complete exoneration for himself, though he always vehemently denied it.’
‘And you took the files because—’
‘Because I was so angry and so screwed up I thought I could blackmail them into giving me my job back, or sue them for unfair dismissal and use the files to show what a shit company they were. And also …’
‘Also?’
‘I felt a responsibility to those women. The ones who’d had their stories disbelieved. There were still rumours of a class action and I wanted their case notes to be safe.’
Corinne was trying to work out what it all meant – whether, indeed, it meant anything. She couldn’t see a connection between what had happened at Westbridge House and the deaths at The Meadows, but still those cold pricks of unease on her back told her there was something here worth pursuing. She took a deep breath.
‘Is there any chance I could take a look at the files in the cabinet?’
Her eyes sought out Geraldine’s and she held her gaze, hoping that the other woman would see that, even if she wasn’t telling the truth about being a journalist, her motives were pure. ‘Oliver Roberts currently heads up a psychiatric clinic where he has charge of fifteen vulnerable women. I need to make sure he is fit for the job.’
A shadow flitted across Geraldine’s pale eyes that looked like they’d been washed and wrung out one too many times – and Corinne held her breath, half expecting a refusal.
‘OK,’ said Geraldine.
28
Laura
Annabel’s head and upper body were framed in the little window on the first floor of her house. From her admittedly sketchy knowledge of the upstairs, Laura knew she’d be at the desk in her office, working. Her face was lit up from below by the glare of an Anglepoise lamp and Laura could just make out the top part of her open laptop screen.
It was cold outside and Laura shivered in her thin jumper. She’d abandoned her orange coat in the car, thinking it might stand out too much in the gathering dusk. But now she was regretting the lack of it.
She cast another longing look up at the cheerfully lit window. Would it be so awful if she just walked up and rang the doorbell? She could come up with an excuse. Her yoga class wasn’t a million miles away from here. She could pretend she’d been driving back and decided to make a spur-of-the-moment detour. She rehearsed it in her head. I was desperate for a wee and I just thought, Why not call in at Annabel’s? You don’t mind, do you?
Breezy. Relaxed. Normal.
But on the road next to Annabel’s, her courage had failed her. She remembered the last time she’d done that, ringing on Annabel’s neat white door one Sunday morning with a bag of freshly baked pastries she’d picked up from the chic bakery near her flat. ‘Bought these to take to a friend’s, but she cancelled at the last minute, so I thought I’d bring them round here and force you to share them with me,’ she’d said. But Annabel hadn’t even let her through the door. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a good time,’ she’d said, looking embarrassed and awkward. ‘I have company.’ But when Laura had looked in through the slatted blinds of Annabel’s living-room window on her way back to the car, the room was empty.
Suddenly mindful of that, Laura had pulled up her VW before getting to Annabel’s road and sat with the engine idling, trying to decide what to do, until a young woman with a buggy had tapped on her window and apologetically told her it wasn’t really legal to do that any more. ‘Bad for the environment. Urban pollution.’
So then she’d parked up properly and walked the rest of the way on foot: one of the disadvantages of having such an immediately identifiable car.
There was a house on the other side of the road from Annabel’s and slightly further down that had a tree in the front garden with low branches that reached over the wall and overhung the pavement. Laura was hovering in the shadow of that tree, pretending to read something on her phone. But really she was watching Annabel’s face as she concentrated on whatever she was writing.
She felt a stab of irrational jealousy towards whatever it was that was so holding Annabel’s attention. There was so much Laura wanted to discuss with her. She wanted to tell her about Hannah and how she felt she was making real progress in gaining her trust. That last session, when Hannah had described her trip to A&E and the nightmare of her fantasy world ripping apart at the seams, had been a real breakthrough. Annabel would want to be told that, surely? And to hear all the rest of her news?
Still something held her back.
Laura’s eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t fair. She was so giving of herself. Never with any expectation of something in return. To her patients. To her mother. And yes, to Annabel too. She’d always gone along with everything Annabel suggested. Always accepted she knew best. So why must Laura find herself always on the outside looking in?
A siren sounded in the distance, and Annabel glanced up. For a moment, Laura held her breath as the older woman’s widely spaced eyes seemed to look in her direction. Here I am. Please see me.
The siren grew fainter and Annabel turned back to her computer. Cold was causing a pain in Laura’s lower back and one of her toes was cramping. Yet still she remained under the cover of the tree, gazing up at the yellow-lit rectangle across the street.
29
Hannah
I worry I am losing it.
The rabbit no one remembers delivering to my room, the baby no one admits to drawing in my colouring book. Dr Chakraborty made a point of asking everyone about it in Evening Group yesterday, but they all denied knowing anything. He tried pressing again, until Frannie burst into tears. ‘You’re making me feel guilty and I haven’t done anything,’ she said. So then he moved on to something else. But I spent the rest of the session looking from face to face, thinking, Was it you?
It’s getting harder to remember the person I used to be.
Dr Roberts is taking Group this morning, and he wants me to carry on talking about Danny. He wants to dig him of me out like he is coring an apple.
‘But it was Hannah’s turn last time,’ says Odelle.
Odelle is keen to talk more about her family. They’re her favourite topic of conversation. Her mot
her used to be a professional violinist and, according to Odelle, was a renowned beauty. Her father is a scientist. She likes to list the various pressures they put her under, the different ways she felt she didn’t match up. She catalogues her weight loss during her adolescent years with a connoisseur’s lingering appreciation. We’ve heard it all before but still I prefer to hear about Odelle’s high-achieving parents and the brother who rowed for Cambridge and who used to call her La Porchetta, meaning ‘little pig’, which was the name of the local Italian restaurant but which she now blames for kick-starting her body issues, than to have to dig away at the scab that is Danny. But Dr Roberts is adamant.
‘You know the golden rule of Group, Odelle. That there are no rules. I feel Hannah is making progress and I think that progress might be held up if we break, so we’re just going to push on through until it comes to a natural end. This is a safe space for her to talk around things, and you guys are a vital part in her recovery, just as she is in yours.’
He turns to me. His right ankle is hooked over his left knee so the hem of his grey wool suit trousers rides up, revealing a dashing scarlet sock and a glimpse of tanned calf. Where’s he been to get that tan in March? I wonder. Behind my head, I hear a clicking noise and know that Drew and Justin have begun filming. I don’t know why they’re bothering. I’ve decided I’m not going to let them use any footage of me when they’re done. I’ve told Justin that, and he just nodded. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, in that infuriating puppy-dog way of his. Joni thinks we’re his last chance. She says his last project bombed and the BBC executive who commissioned this one said it has to come good or he’ll find himself out in the boondocks. I didn’t ask her how she knew this. Joni has a gold medal in eavesdropping.
‘So Hannah, I’d like to talk a bit about how Danny reacted when he found out about the pseudocyesis. You’d gone into the hospital after a fall and then the physician checking you said there was no baby. I imagine that was a shock for him, after all those weeks of doctor’s appointments.’
How to describe it? That look in his eyes. Incomprehension that gave way to grief and then to a rage that took us both by surprise.
‘I thought I was going to be a dad!’ he yelled at me, his face so close to mine I could have reached out my tongue and licked it. I knew what he was thinking. He thought he’d made two women pregnant, and he’d chosen me over Steffie, my baby over hers. And ended up with nothing.
The senior doctor in the hospital had told him it wasn’t my fault, that I was as much a victim of my own mendacious body as he was. She had a glossy black plait that hung over one shoulder like the fat strap of a bag. She was calm and kind and, afterwards, I was grateful for that, but she’d never seen a case like mine before and there was a wariness in her huge, dark eyes, as if she felt out of her depth.
‘Once we were referred to the psychiatric ward, he calmed down. Probably only because I was so hysterical myself by then. It felt like a death, you see. It felt like my baby had died.’
I’m saying this for the benefit of the others, explaining myself to them.
‘Even though you’d made her up?’
Judith, of course. She likes to imagine she has a reputation for straight speaking but, actually, she just enjoys the confrontation.
Roberts raises his eyebrows. ‘We’ve been through this many times, Judith. The baby was as real to Hannah as if it had been actually there, growing inside her. That’s how her body became convinced it was pregnant.’
‘Her body wasn’t the one that told lies about going for scans.’
‘Judith!’
The warning is unmissable and Judith sits back in her seat. But her expression is that of someone who’s just won a small victory. Next to Judith, directly facing me, Nina is drumming her fingers insistently against her chair leg, a sign she could be in the early stages of an upward swing.
‘It’s bollocks, though, isn’t it?’ she says to no one in particular. ‘Bollocksy, bollocksy bollocks.’
She nods her head as she speaks and her dangly yellow earrings quiver like miniature suns.
‘If you don’t mind, Nina,’ says Roberts.
She darts her eyes around the circle. ‘That told me,’ she says, and gives a short bark of laughter.
‘Can you tell us a bit about what it was like in the psych ward on that first night, Hannah?’ Roberts says, turning his attention back to me. ‘What state were you in?’
‘I was beside myself. I think I scared Danny to death. He kept looking at me as if he didn’t recognize me. By then my mum was there and, even though she was scared too, she was doing that thing she always does of trying to talk through a bad situation, as if she can reason it into becoming something else. “OK, so Hannah has this condition, which I’m going to research when I get home, but in the meantime let’s see if I’ve got this straight.”’
I’m saying this in my mum’s voice, and it’s quite convincing, because Stella starts to giggle behind her hand.
‘Did Danny’s parents come to the hospital?’
I shake my head.
‘He called them himself to tell them, later that night.’
I don’t describe how, when he came back from making the call, he was so white he was almost translucent or how he told me his mother had howled like a fox in pain. Or how I haven’t seen either of his parents since, although they did send a ‘get well soon’ card, written in his dad’s neat, sloping hand.
‘Hannah, do you feel you deserve Danny’s forgiveness?’
The question is like a punch.
‘I lied to him.’
‘But the lies were buried in a part of your psyche so well hidden you didn’t even know it was there.’
I stare at my feet in my tatty, laceless Converse shoes and wonder what happened to the woman I was when I bought them two years ago.
‘Let me ask you another question,’ says Dr Roberts, and I brace myself.
‘Do you think Danny deserves your forgiveness?’
‘For what?’
There is a silence as everyone holds their breath.
‘For Steffie. For all the lies he told you.’
‘The two things are not connected.’
Judith snorts with laughter.
‘Get real,’ she says.
After lunch, Stella and I walk the fifteen minutes to the local high street and sit in Costa Coffee and drink cappuccinos from cups bigger than my own head. Even though Dr Roberts still thinks I have a way to go, he has agreed that, after nearly eleven weeks in the clinic, I should start getting used to being in the real world again. So I am allowed out, as long as I sign myself back into the clinic after no more than an hour. Stella, on the other hand, isn’t supposed to leave the clinic grounds and expose herself to such pernicious influences as the magazine rack in the local supermarket, with its row upon row of perfect, airbrushed bodies and faces. But Stella does what Stella wants. She is no longer sectioned. No one can stop her leaving.
‘I just hate the way he keeps on making me relive it,’ I say.
‘Maybe he just gets a kick out of seeing you suffer.’
We all complain about Roberts from time to time, but Stella is extra critical.
We sit for a while in ill-tempered silence and I can feel the eyes of the other customers on us. Stella is wearing a soft cashmere jumper in baby yellow that clings to her body like a layer of fur. Her pale blonde hair is piled up on her head in a kind of beehive and her full lips are the colour of blood. In Barnet, north London, on a Tuesday afternoon she is as exotic as it gets.
‘Tell me about what happened with the ex. The writer who was so much older than you. How come he ended up accusing you of harassment?’
If Stella is taken aback by my sudden change of subject, she doesn’t show it.
‘I think I freaked him out. I was only twenty, and I didn’t want it to be over. I kind of stalked him.’
‘Kind of?’
That breathy little-girl giggle.
‘I did. Stalk him. And his w
ife.’
‘Stella!’
‘And his daughter.’
‘Hang on. I thought he was only in his thirties, so his daughter—’
‘Was still at primary school. I think that’s what finally made him confess to his wife, when I turned up at his daughter’s Nativity play. I waved to him across the hall.’
I’m hit by the dead weight of all the things I don’t know.
‘My stepfather sorted it out so I didn’t have to go to court. That’s when I did my first stint in a happy farm.’
‘And after that, you had your first op?’
‘Don’t be silly, Hannah. I had my first op at fourteen in the States. My nose. My mum gave me the surgery as a birthday present. Afterwards, she sat on the edge of my bed and said, “Are you happy now?” Like that was all it took.’
Stella has froth all around her lips because of the cappuccino, and when she smiles her red, lipsticked mouth looks like a hole a person could fall into and never get out.
30
Corinne
The kitchen table was strewn with papers. Corinne hadn’t taken all the files, of course, but even the relatively small number that Geraldine Buckley had grudgingly allowed her to borrow were enough to cover the entirety of the scratched wood surface.
And still she hadn’t come up with anything that cast Dr Roberts in any substantially different light.
True, three of his female patients had threatened to join the class action against the clinic. But it was Professor Dunmore’s philosophy and leadership that were in question. Roberts and the other junior psychiatrist who worked in the clinic were only following guidelines set by their boss. The official investigation, with which Roberts had fully cooperated, had wholly exonerated them.