by Tammy Cohen
‘But she thinks she’s leaving this week.’
Roberts shook his head.
‘That’s not advisable. Not until we’re sure she’s not a danger to herself. I’m very much hoping she’ll agree to stay a little while longer but, if not, I do have the authority, under the Mental Health Act, to seek a short-term compulsory order to keep her here, just while we reassure ourselves there won’t be any repeat incidents.’
Corinne left Dr Roberts’ office with that now all too familiar sense of being out of sync with the world.
‘Mum! Where have you been? I saw you drive in ages ago.’
Hannah must have been sitting by the window in the day room watching for her. She looked flushed as she jumped up from the sofa to greet Corinne, as if it was too warm in the room. Corinne felt sick, thinking about Hannah stepping off the kerb like that. There was no way she could tell her about the baby now.
‘Dr Roberts wanted to talk to me. About the lorry. Darling, what happened? Are you OK?’
Hannah made a pffff noise, as if it was an irrelevance that didn’t merit discussion.
Stella was sitting on the other end of the sofa, and her presence elicited conflicting emotions in Corinne. According to Roberts, she’d saved Hannah’s life. Yet there was still no explanation for why she was here, with a new face and a new identity.
‘I believe thanks are in order,’ she said, groaning inwardly at the sound of her pompous voice.
Stella flapped her hand in a dismissive gesture.
‘I need to talk to you, Mum. It’s really important. Shall we go for a walk?’
Before Corinne could reply, Hannah had grabbed her arm and was bundling her into the hallway with that enormous crystal chandelier overhead.
‘But it’s cold,’ Corinne protested feebly. Hannah ignored her, pressing the green release button so they could exit through the little-used front door, dragging her mother with her. To Corinne’s surprise, Stella followed them out. She expected Hannah to make some sort of excuse to Stella, about needing to have a private chat, but her daughter seemed in no hurry to shake her off.
‘I also have something I need to discuss with you, Hannah, but I’ll save it for when you’re stronger,’ she said, when they’d followed the gravel path around the building to the smoking bench in the rose garden.
To her surprise, Hannah didn’t pick her up on that word ‘stronger’; in fact, she hardly seemed to have registered anything Corinne had said.
‘Mum,’ she said, before they’d even sat down, ‘you mustn’t listen to Roberts. He’s not what he seems.’
Hannah was gazing intently at Corinne, as if she was supposed to know what she was talking about.
‘Is this to do with what we talked about before,’ asked Corinne, with a subtle nod in Stella’s direction.
‘No. Not Westbridge House. Nothing to do with that.’
Immediately, Corinne felt wrong-footed. So Hannah had already confronted Stella about Westbridge House and her past dealings with Roberts. Then what was all this about?
‘His name wasn’t always Oliver Roberts.’ Hannah was almost tripping over her own words in her hurry to get them out. ‘It used to be William Kingsley. William Robert Kingsley. He was a neurologist who testified against two women accused of shaking their babies to death. Largely because of him, both of them were jailed, but they were released in the mid-1990s, when it was proved that the babies were far more likely to have died from complications resulting from illness or infection.’
Corinne was struggling to keep up.
‘Are you saying he was struck off and then changed his name and continued practising medicine? Because surely that’s illegal?’
Sitting on the bench, with her arms wrapped around her knees for warmth, Stella started giggling.
‘I always think it’s so funny when people say “practising medicine”,’ she said. ‘As if it’s a hobby.’
‘He wasn’t struck off, Mum,’ said Hannah, impatiently. ‘But he was publicly discredited. He must have thought it was easier to start again under a different name, in a different branch of medicine, without any question marks hanging over his reputation. You know how ambitious he is. That’s probably what led him to volunteer himself as an expert in those cases in the first place. Wanting to make a name for himself as quickly as he could.’
Corinne could imagine it. The young Roberts. Handsome, charismatic and impatient to prove himself. Becoming known as an expert in a highly controversial, headline-making field would have seemed like an excellent shortcut to fame and glory.
‘Oh, those poor women. Can you even imagine it – losing your baby, and then being accused of killing it yourself?’
As soon as she’d said it, Corinne wished it unsaid. Wasn’t that just what had happened to Hannah? The baby had been real to her, and she’d lost her. Of course she could imagine it.
‘Do you think the other patients ought to know his background?’ asked Corinne. ‘I mean, I thought full transparency was one of the cornerstones of public life these days.’
Hannah put a finger sideways into her mouth and sucked on the nail. It was a new gesture since her arrival at The Meadows, and it made the muscles in Corinne’s chest constrict. She remembered how Roberts had called Hannah ‘vulnerable’ and she fought an urge to knock the finger out of her daughter’s mouth, to force her back to the Hannah she used to be.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hannah slowly, as if thinking aloud. ‘If there seems to be anything dodgy in Roberts’ past, chances are the families will lose confidence. That means some of the parents, like Odelle’s and Frannie’s, will almost certainly pull them out of here.’
‘Which is a good thing, isn’t it?’ Corinne persisted. ‘You’ve always thought there was something not right about the way Sofia and Charlie died. Now here’s a chance to raise the alarm and find out exactly what’s been happening. I mean, it’s not as if Roberts has an unblemished track record since switching to psychiatry. Look at what happened to Stella.’
It was the first time she’d alluded directly to the fact that she knew about Stella’s past connection to Roberts, and for a moment she was worried she might have overstepped the mark. But Stella merely fixed her with those stretched blue eyes and said nothing.
‘I don’t know, Mum, I feel really torn,’ said Hannah. ‘On the one hand, I do want everyone to know what kind of man Roberts really is – how ambitious and self-serving. But not until I know what’s going to happen to the patients and staff here if he has to resign. People like Frannie and Odelle are so settled here. Everyone knows their stories. If the clinic closes down, it will be a huge wrench for them. And what about Dr Chakraborty, and Darren and Laura? I’d hate for them all to lose their jobs because of me.’
‘You’re not seriously suggesting we do nothing?’
‘No. At the very least, the trustees of the clinic deserve to know about Roberts’ background. But I’d prefer to hold off for a bit until we find out exactly what it’s going to mean for everyone. I mean, it’s not as if any of us in here are in any immediate danger from him. And the clinic does get results. You said so yourself. That’s why you chose it.’
‘Yes, but …’
Corinne stopped herself saying what she wanted to say, which was to ask where the results were for Hannah herself? Why her daughter, having seemed so much more herself, had stepped off a kerb in front of a lorry. Where was the quick fix she’d been so convinced they would find?
‘I’m worried about you,’ she said instead. ‘I want to keep you safe, and I don’t know if you are safe in here.’
She debated telling Hannah what Roberts had said about her being detained there against her will but, just as she was about to speak, the back door to the clinic was thrown open.
‘There you are! I’ve been looking for you two everywhere. Why on earth are you standing out here in the cold?’
Laura was hopping from foot to foot in a blue-and-white stripy jumper, her short black hair spiky with rain.
‘Hello, Hannah’s mum!’ she called out in a sing-song voice, before adding, ‘Hannah, how about we go inside for our session now, hey? It’s bloody well freezing out here.’
Corinne considered all the things she had still not told Hannah – about Steffie and the baby, and the secrets and lies with which her daughter’s husband had coated his life.
‘But Hannah, darling, I was hoping we’d be able to chat.’
‘Later, Mum. I’ll call you from the office phone.’
After they’d gone, Corinne and Stella gazed at one another. Stella had two spots of pink colour in her cheeks, like an old-fashioned doll.
‘I expect you’ll be taking Hannah away?’ she said. ‘The people I love always seem to be leaving me.’
‘You need to get away from here too, Stella.’
Corinne waited for the inevitable question – ‘But where would I go?’ – and wondered how she would answer it.
So she was nonplussed when Stella raised those artificially blue eyes to her and asked something quite different.
‘But who would I be?’
44
Hannah
‘Smaller. Tighter. Tuck in those arms and heads.’
We are on mats in the dance studio, trying to make ourselves disappear.
‘Now, slowly, slowly, start growing,’ says Grace. ‘First the tips of your fingers, then your wrists and elbows, your toes, the soles of your feet. Feel yourselves expanding. Stretch out your arms, your legs, unfurl every single vertebra in turn, make your necks as long as a giraffe’s. Raise up the top of your heads as if someone is pulling on a string from above. Feel how tall you are. Give yourselves permission to get bigger, to take up more space. Take a deep breath and repeat after me, “I contain multitudes.”’
‘I contain multitudes,’ we all mutter, our arms outstretched, necks craning.
I feel myself grow lighter. Since Mum’s visit yesterday, when I told her about William Kingsley, my mind has been too churned up to relax. When I was with Laura afterwards she asked me to imagine I was on a riverbank in autumn with a gentle breeze blowing through the trees and causing coloured leaves to fall to the ground. ‘Pick one up,’ she told me. ‘Feel its texture, stroke it against your cheek. Note how it’s cool and damp against your skin. Now place it gently in the river and watch it float downstream. Pick up another one and put that too into the water. And another. Now imagine that each leaf contains a negative thought or memory. Watch them drift away.’ Though I tried to focus on what she was saying, tried putting Oliver Roberts on a leaf and watching him drift away, I couldn’t rid myself of the tight knot of dread in the pit of my stomach.
But today, standing on my mat, stretching every bit of me to accommodate my multitudes, I feel a sense of release. Normally, I run a mile from this sort of stuff. Megan once got dragged off to a breathing workshop by a new-agey friend of hers, and we laughed about it for days. ‘I’m so much better at breathing than you,’ she’d tell me. ‘I’m a trained breather.’ But I want to get better. I want to get out of here. I’ll do as much growing and unfurling as it takes. When Danny comes tonight I’m going to tell him I’m coming home. I’m ready. And if he doesn’t like it, that’s too bad. I know he got hurt, and I’m truly sorry. But I don’t think he was hurt as much as I was.
I know Stella will wait around for me after the class, but I want to be on my own. I want to make this sense of wellbeing last just a little bit longer. Not that I’m nervous of Stella any more. But I am sad for her. I don’t know how she can be made whole again.
So I say I need the loo and dash out across the rose garden and round the back of the old building and in past the reception desk. I’m heading for the Mindfulness Area and the sanctuary of the egg chair but, through the glass window in the door that separates reception from the rest of the building, I see the route is blocked by Justin and Drew, who are talking to Dr Chakraborty. Justin has his back to me and doesn’t notice me but, on the far side of him, Drew raises his head from his viewfinder and stares at me through the glass. He is wearing a red jumper, against which his skin appears pale and grey. From this distance his eyes are like deep black holes, and I stop dead. Usually, Drew’s face is an impassive blank, but now he twists his mouth into an expression I cannot read and which makes the skin on my arms break out in icy bumps, and I turn around and hurry back outside.
It’s pleasant out here now there’s a let-up in the rain, and the air has a freshness that I gulp down.
Conscious that the others will soon be spilling out from the dance studio, I head the other way, crunching over the gravel car park. There’s a path that runs down from it, bordered by bushes, through which I get glimpses of the lawn on one side and the flower garden on the other. It leads to the vegetable plot, where, twice a week, Inès, the horticulture therapist with the lazy eye and the aged Jack Russell that always makes me think of Mum’s dear departed Madge, comes to show us how to make mulch and check leaves for diseases.
I don’t have much of a clue about gardening, but there is something therapeutic about getting your hands dirty and seeing things grow out of bare soil.
I go into the shed where we keep the tools. It’s small, about two metres by three, and crammed with rakes and brushes and twine and shovels and things about whose function I have no clue. Selecting a small trowel and a pair of heavy-duty green gloves which are too big for my hands, I make my way back outside. Someone has left an empty sack by the door, and I grab it on the way out to preserve the knees of my jeans.
Most of the weeds come up easily, as if they weren’t really growing at all, just passing the time. But some are really deeply entrenched and I have to dig my trowel into the earth underneath to loosen them.
While I’m doing this, I think of Danny. I have loved him since the moment I first saw him, and yet, can I say, hand on heart, that I have been happy with him? We have had moments of happiness, sure. Perfect days, like in that Lou Reed song. Perfect weeks even, staying in a beach bungalow in Thailand or holed up in a city neither of us knows, finding hidden treasure in the backstreet bars, staying up all night drinking unfamiliar drinks with strangers who become friends before the first glass is drained.
‘But Hannah, if you can’t be happy on holiday, God help you,’ Becs said once, when I came back from a holiday in the early days of our relationship radiating contentment. ‘It’s how you are when you’re home and arguing over who overfilled the food recycling bag that really counts.’
She was right. When the rows started, following the miscarriage and the IVF, we never addressed what was happening. We each hid more and more of ourselves from the other.
How else to explain her?
Steffie.
At the thought of her I start jabbing the sharp end of my trowel into the soil like I am prospecting for oil.
She came after him. It’s what I always tell myself.
And yet women like Steffie don’t do anything unless they’re assured of success.
What do you expect? You lied to him. The accusatory voice in my head is never far away. But before I can crumble, another, unfamiliar voice pipes up.
He lied first.
I sit back abruptly on my heels contemplating this new voice and this new truth.
He lied first.
Three small words that change everything.
As I sit there pondering what it means, I become conscious of an uncomfortable prickling on my back. It’s not warm here in the garden and I haven’t got a coat, but this is different to feeling cold because I’m outside and underdressed.
This feels like being watched.
I whip my head around and scan past the flower garden to the car park and the back entrance of the clinic.
Nothing.
I turn back to my digging, but the feeling of being observed doesn’t go away.
Once more, I turn around and, this time, I catch sight of a blur of movement behind the row of bushes that flank the path.
Red movement.
I scramb
le to my feet, my blood noisy in my ears. I don’t know why I’m afraid of Drew, but I am. There is something about the cameraman loitering around our lives at the clinic, recording God knows what, that makes me feel as if a dampness has crept into my soul and is slowly spreading.
He is still shielded from sight by the bushes and I bolt for the shelter of the shed. Hidden behind it, I wait until he steps into the vegetable garden before dashing across the path and cutting diagonally across the lawn. The wet grass soon soaks my canvas shoes and I curse the lack of laces that makes running an impossibility. My breath is tearing from me in painful strips. When I get out of here, I will get fit. I will take up jogging. Join a gym. I will.
Glancing behind me, I see that Drew has spotted me and is coming up behind. I’m still anxious, but also embarrassed. He must know now that I am trying to avoid him. As I near the clinic, intending to go around the building and in through the front, I remember that the front door will be locked from the outside, so I change direction, cutting back through the car park towards the back entrance. Joni is on reception. ‘Drew was looking for you,’ she says, her strips of eyebrow travelling up her forehead when she sees the state of my shoes.
Inside, I think about going up to my room, but then imagine him coming up to find me and decide instead to go to the place I feel safest.
The art room is empty, save for the row of clay busts we’ve been working on. They’re supposed to be representations of ourselves, and Stella has changed the nose on hers so many times that, yesterday, it fell off completely, which made us laugh a lot. Today, though, the busts are watching me steadily as I cross the room, towards Laura’s little office at the back. The door is closed and I feel sure she’s in there. Already, I anticipate the warmth from the fan heater, my fingers closing around the mug of tea she’ll make me, the way we’ll giggle when I ask her to hide me from Drew.
But before I’ve even fully opened the door I know the office is empty. There’s no scent of jasmine, no waft of heat. I step inside, and close the door behind me.