by Tammy Cohen
‘But what about your plans? You felt you were really making a difference at The Meadows. Remember we sat down together and made a list of all the people you felt you could help?’
That was better. Laura felt mollified. But then Annabel spoiled it by asking whether Laura felt she had a commitment problem. She reminded her of how, before she got so into yoga, she’d devoted her spare time to studying Eastern philosophy and before that meditation. And now the hypnotherapy as well.
‘That was your idea!’
Laura was cross. She was sure the hypnotherapy had been Annabel’s suggestion, and now she was being made to feel flighty. Anyway, what was wrong with diversifying? As far as Laura was concerned, life was like papier mâché: you layered it on, one piece over another, one experience over the next, blessing upon blessing, until you had something richly textured and vibrant.
‘All I mean is that perhaps it’s time to stick at something. Honour your commitments.’
She sounded so stern. It was all right for Annabel. She’d never be able to understand how people like Laura, who’d grown up the way she did, might feel they were incapable of stability, might even feel unworthy of it. But now Annabel surprised her by saying:
‘Do you think there might be an element of self-sabotage? That when people start to like and appreciate you too much, you feel you don’t deserve it?’
That was the thing about Annabel. You thought she didn’t really get it, and then she said something so astute it took your breath away.
‘Can I use your loo?’
Annabel hesitated for a moment before replying. ‘Of course.’
Outside in the narrow hallway, the smell of cake was almost overpowering. There was a guest loo under the stairs, always spotlessly clean but so tiny one felt as if one was in a tiled coffin, so Laura ignored it and crept up the stairs instead, past a row of framed academic certificates. Upstairs, she padded along the landing, glad she’d removed her boots in the living room. The first doorway on the left was ajar and she peeped in. A pale green painted bedroom with a neatly made-up double bed. There was a cream duvet cover on the bed and a pair of tan sheepskin slippers tucked underneath it. Nothing to give anything away about the person who lived and slept here, whose head dreamed on that smoothly blank pillow.
Dissatisfied, she pushed open the door on the right of the landing. Annabel’s study. A bookcase running along the nearside wall was packed with well-thumbed academic books, while, directly opposite, a white desk sat underneath the single, mean window. Like everything else in this strange little house, the desk was clear of clutter, boasting only an open laptop, with a document up on the screen.
Well. No harm in looking, was there?
Treading as lightly as she could, Laura crossed the room to get a better look at what seemed to be a title page.
The Power of …
‘What are you doing in here?’
Annabel snapped the laptop shut like a clam. She’d come up so silently Laura hadn’t heard a thing. Why was she creeping around like that?
‘I just thought I’d use the upstairs bathroom. More private.’
Annabel folded her arms. For a short person, she could look very forbidding.
‘We’ve talked about this.’
Laura’s mouth felt dry, but she made herself sound confident. ‘Well. If it’s that much of a problem for you, I’ll use the one downstairs.’
She turned around and started down the stairs.
‘Laura!’
Annabel’s voice sounded loud and sharp. Laura stopped but didn’t turn around.
‘Laura,’ Annabel resumed, moderating her voice so it more resembled her usual, measured tone. ‘We’ve had this conversation before. Why do you find it so hard to respect boundaries. My house. My life. They’re off limits.’
‘I thought we were friends.’
Laura was aware of the whine in her voice but unable to stop it. Straight ahead of her, above the academic degrees, in her direct line of sight, was a small, framed photograph she’d missed before, of Annabel as a younger woman, holding hands with a small blonde girl with similar, flat features. A lump formed in Laura’s throat so it hurt to swallow.
‘That’s just it, though, Laura, isn’t it? I’m not your friend. Or your mother. I’m your psychotherapist.’
48
Hannah
‘You’re crazy.’
My heart has stopped its violent thudding, but I am still short of breath and wired up on adrenaline. My nerves feel like needles.
Drew is crazy.
Ever since he burst into Laura’s office, where I’d been trying to hide from him, he’s been telling me stuff. Crazy stuff. He says he knows everything there is to know about The Meadows. He says people don’t notice him because he’s unobtrusive and they say things they might not otherwise have said.
Also, he’s set up tiny videocams in the communal rooms that film continuously, though, obviously, none of the footage can be used without permission. He started going through the film from the art room yesterday. And though you couldn’t see into Laura’s office, you could still pick up voices.
You could hear the things Laura said to Sofia, when she was still alive. And to Charlie.
And to me.
‘It’s the hypnosis. First she makes you feel calm and comfortable. Then she takes you deeper. Then she talks about how there’s a wonderful, peaceful place where all is light and love. You’re all so special, she tells you. You deserve a safe place when the world gets too dark. Then, when you are completely relaxed and zoned out, she tells you how to get there.’
‘Where?’
I am standing behind the armchair where I normally sit, putting it between me and Drew. My fingers pick at the tartan throw like they are tapping out a message in code.
‘To the safe place. To the place you all want to be. To the light. With Charlie, it was by cutting herself. Except Laura didn’t put it like that. She told her it was rubbing a massage point on her wrist, to release endorphins. Using something sharp. The sharper the better, she said. Charlie would know when she found something. Pain was release, she told her. She would find the most unimaginable peace, she said. With Sofia, it was different. She told Sofia she could fly.’
That’s when I say it.
‘You’re crazy.’
But Drew acts as if I haven’t spoken. ‘She told Sofia she would find this beautiful place once she was weightless. That she only had to believe she could fly in order for it to be true. And with you, it was headlights. The lights would guide you home, she said. Follow the light.’
He is in front of the door, blocking my exit. The windowless room feels like it is closing in on me.
‘She gave you triggers,’ he continues. ‘Certain things that would set you off in search of the safe place. A sense of being overwhelmed. Feeling claustrophobic or hemmed in. Too many demands being placed on you. Fear of the future. Dry mouth. Sweaty palms. Trigger, trigger, trigger.’
I have a flashback to standing on the side of the road in the drizzle with Stella. And that moment of painful clarity where I’d wondered for the first time how much it would end up costing me to stay with a husband who’d never fully acknowledged his own culpability. Right after that is when I’d looked at the lorry. Follow the light.
‘Your visit to Laura yesterday was on the tape too,’ Drew says.
There is not air enough in the room for the two of us. I feel light-headed, breathing in his exhaled breath. And violated. Drew is like a thief, rubbing grubby hands through things he has no right to. Those one-to-one sessions with Laura are where I have been most honest, laid myself most bare. And to know that Drew has listened to everything feels horribly exposing.
‘She was talking to you about water, Hannah. Not like the first sessions, which were about traffic and how car headlights could guide you home. This time she told you your safe place was deep under the water. Deep. Deep. Deep. She must have said the word about a hundred times.’
Something d
arts like an eel through the murk of my mind, a memory that slips from my grasp as soon as I touch it. Drew sees something in my face.
‘You remember, don’t you? You know I’m telling the truth.’
But now the door opens, flooding the dimly lit room suddenly with light.
‘Greetings,’ says Laura.
She is smiling, but there is an alertness about her that makes me wonder just how long she has been standing behind the door and how much she has heard.
‘Sorry.’ Drew’s voice is hardly more than a mutter. ‘I’ll be off now.’
He pushes past Laura without looking at either of us, and I should be relieved that he has gone, yet fear is tattooing itself in tiny pricks across my skin.
What is it I am not remembering? I curse last night’s sleeping pill, with its morning-after fog.
‘Is everything all right, Hannah?’
This is where I should tell her what Drew said, give her the chance to explain, to deny, to label him a fantasist.
‘It’s fine, Laura. We were just chatting. We came in here because it was quiet. You don’t mind, do you?’
The words come from some part of me that seems separate from the rest. As I’m speaking, I’m edging round the chair towards the open door.
Suddenly, two things happen at once. Laura steps towards me just as Odelle appears in the doorway.
‘Here you are, Laura. Did you forget you said you’d help me with my clay head? The mouth is all wrong.’
She glares at me as if I am intruding. Gratefully, I push past her. ‘I’ll leave you two to it.’
My heart feels as if it has come loose from its moorings and is ricocheting off the inside of my ribs, and my head is full of questions I can’t answer.
In the hallway I hesitate for a moment under the shimmering glass chandelier. The earl eyes me coldly from the oil painting on the far wall. Then I press the exit button by the front entrance, yank open the door and begin to run.
49
Corinne
Pulling into the car park, with the gravel crunching under the wheels of her car, Corinne’s chest was tight and painful, as if someone was sewing tiny stitches across the breadth of it.
As soon as she’d registered the import of what she’d discovered – namely that Laura Whittaker had a very good reason for wanting revenge on Dr Roberts – she’d tried to get hold of Hannah on The Meadows office phone, sitting rigid with tension while Bridget Ashworth went off to find her.
Please let her be safe. Please let her be safe.
But the longer the clinic manager was away from the phone, the more convinced Corinne became that something was wrong. And when Bridget did finally get back on the line to tell Corinne, in a tone soaked in disapproval, that Hannah seemed to have left the premises without letting anyone know or signing herself out in the ‘special book’, Corinne was already out of the door before she’d finished her sentence.
All the way there, she’d repeated her new mantra.
Please let her be safe. Please let her be safe.
Pulling into a space, Corinne cast her eye around the car park, feeling a soft sag of relief at the sight of Laura’s bubblegum-pink car. Wherever Hannah had disappeared to, at least she wasn’t with her. Thank God.
Inside, she all but threw her bag at Joni, who was sitting on the reception desk.
‘Someone’s in a hurry,’ said Joni, raising her already artificially arched eyebrows. She searched through the bag with what felt to Corinne like exaggerated thoroughness.
By the time Corinne reached the art room a balloon of tension had inflated inside her and was threatening to burst. Through the open doorway she saw that Laura was taking an art-therapy session. One of the patients, the woman who had only recently been admitted, was sitting on a striped deckchair, staring fixedly ahead as if in a dentist’s waiting room, while the others worked on their drawings with sticks of charcoal.
Blindfold.
‘Corinne! Do come in. I expect I’d better explain what we’re doing. The ladies spent a good while studying Katy here before I put the blindfolds on, so they know roughly where the lines and curves should be. This exercise is about memory and interpretation and the things our minds hold on to.’
‘Hannah?’
Corinne didn’t trust herself to say more.
Laura frowned, wrinkling her nose and tilting her head to one side.
‘I’m afraid Hannah isn’t here, Corinne. She was here about half an hour ago, but she didn’t come back, which is unusual. She normally never misses a class.’
Laura’s brown eyes were melting chocolate pools of empathy and, suddenly, Corinne found herself doubting everything she’d just learned. You could tell, couldn’t you, if someone was pretending to be something they weren’t? Once you knew what you were looking for, anyway. Yet everything about Laura screamed sincerity.
‘Help!’ The high-pitched cry caused Corinne’s nerves, already stretched as tight as snare-drum skin, to snap.
Over on the far side of the room, near the window, Frannie was struggling with her blindfold, clearly in the grip of a sudden panic. As she stumbled, she knocked over her easel, sending it crashing to the ground.
‘Oh my God!’ cried Odelle, turning her face towards the source of the racket. ‘What’s happening?’
Laura hurried over to comfort the now semi-hysterical Frannie, and Corinne took the opportunity to slip out of the room. Every single cell and tissue fibre of her body strained to find her daughter and take her home.
She hurried up the stairs and along the corridor towards Dr Roberts’ office.
‘Excuse me! He’s actually with someone at the moment,’ Bridget Ashworth called out as Corinne passed the tiny admin office, but Corinne ignored her.
At Roberts’ door, she knocked, and paused briefly before throwing it open and marching inside, only to stop short when she saw that Roberts was indeed not alone.
And the person with him was Danny.
‘Corinne.’ Danny was the first to recover. ‘I’m just having a progress update from Oliver.’
Oliver?
‘Oliver is strongly of the belief that Hannah is not yet well enough to come home, and I have to tell you I agree.’
‘Where is she? Where’s Hannah?’
The two men exchanged a glance and an almost imperceptible shrug that ignited a spark of rage inside Corinne.
Dr Roberts spoke. ‘Hannah seems to have taken herself off somewhere without notifying anyone or following procedures. Now, I appreciate she’s a woman who knows her own mind and needs to assert her independence, but to me there are still question marks over this and some of her other recent behaviour.’
Question marks? The arrogance of him.
‘I know who you are.’
‘What?’
Roberts was caught off guard, his default smile frozen on to his face even while his eyes were clouding with confusion.
‘How have you got away with it all this time? This criminal reinvention of yourself?’
‘I’m afraid, Mrs Harris, I don’t know what you’re—’
‘William Kingsley.’
The name was lobbed into the room like a live grenade and, for a split second, the three of them watched it in silence.
‘Corinne, I really don’t know what—’ Danny began, but Roberts cut across him.
‘I see you’ve been checking up on me.’
His voice was higher and tighter than normal, but still infuriatingly measured. He went on:
‘Many professional people, medical staff included, change their names for one reason or another. I expect you changed your name when you were married. It’s not unheard of.’
Danny turned his chair so he could see Corinne more easily and glanced from one to the other, his dark eyebrows furrowed.
‘Are you honestly saying you didn’t change your name and your medical specialty because two women wrongly went to jail on your account?’
Still Roberts remained calm, but at the top of his ch
eeks a network of burst capillaries burned a pattern of red lace into his skin.
‘I still have faith I made the right judgement in those cases, Mrs Harris. And I had solid personal reasons for wanting to dissociate myself from my past. None of which have any bearing on my subsequent decision to retrain in psychiatry or my ability to do my job. I have an excellent reputation in this field, as you know, or you’d never have entrusted your daughter to us.’
‘So it won’t bother you to learn that the daughter of one of the women whose lives you destroyed is currently a paid member of your staff?’
Now she had him. Now he lost his loose-limbed, laid-back, stuck-on-smile demeanour and sat up straight, both his feet, in their leather brogues, flat on the floor.
Danny noticed the change, the question writing itself all over his face as he gazed at Roberts.
‘Will someone please tell me what’s going on?’
‘Laura Whittaker,’ Corinne said, still addressing herself directly to Roberts, ‘is the daughter of Barbara Phillips, one of the women you helped put away for two years.’
She turned her eyes towards Danny.
‘Barbara tried to kill herself a few years after she was released and hasn’t been able to walk or talk or feed herself since. You could say Laura has grounds for bearing a grudge.’
‘You can’t seriously be saying …’
Roberts was on his feet. Now that the poise he wore like a Savile Row suit had been ripped away, he seemed sagging and older, his face collapsed, as if its customary smile was all that had been holding it up.
‘You know she hypnotizes them?’ said Danny, finally recovering himself.
‘I know that’s one of her areas, but I can assure you Laura Whittaker has never been given leave to practise hypnotherapy at The Meadows.’
‘She might never have been given leave, but that hasn’t stopped her bloody well doing it,’ said Corinne. ‘She’s done them all. Charlie, Sofia, Hannah. Do you think that’s a coincidence?’
‘Are you suggesting she hypnotizes them to harm themselves? You know that would never work, don’t you? Hypnosis can’t persuade someone to do something against their will. That’s not how the human psyche works.’