by Caro Fraser
When she rang Anthony’s chambers, Rachel knew that there was a good chance that Anthony would already be tied up on the dates on which she had intended to travel. He was very popular and in court a good deal. But no, he was free, Mr Slee told her, consulting Anthony’s diary. ‘He’s got a summons on the twenty-third, but I’ve been trying to move that back, anyway. I think he should be fine from the twenty-third to the twenty-sixth.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Rachel unenthusiastically. Already various small fancies and fears were playing around in her mind. She detested having to feel like this, the bunched-up, nervous dread of something – nothing – that loomed ahead of her. Oh, stop it! she told herself. It’s only a business trip. He’s probably lost interest completely after last time, and just as well if he has. It was a ghastly mistake, and I should have known better. ‘Do you think I might speak to Mr Cross?’ she asked. She might as well tell him herself, so that he didn’t hear from his clerk and get the wrong end of the stick, imagine that she had somehow engineered it. That was the last thing she wanted.
‘Hold on, I’ll put you through,’ said Mr Slee.
Anthony was not quite sure what he thought of it all, when Rachel told him.
‘I told Mr Nikolaos that it was quite unnecessary for you to go,’ Rachel said in distant tones, ‘but he seems to think it imperative that you inspect the evidence for yourself, for some reason.’
Anthony leant back in his chair and fixed his eyes on the glow of the gas fire. ‘Didn’t you tell him that it’s all down to the surveyor? I’m no technical expert.’
‘Of course I did,’ said Rachel shortly. He caught the tone of her voice. She doesn’t want me to go, he thought. He wondered whether he really wanted to go either, after all that daft business at her flat. Not that he intended to let such an incident repeat itself, but they might be uncomfortable company for one another. The ghost of that Saturday evening would hang between them. At that moment David came into the room and made ‘coffee?’ signals at him. Anthony nodded, then tipped his chair forward. He rather fancied a couple of days away from London in freezing November, he decided. Only business, after all. Nothing more.
‘Well, I suppose if your client insists, and if William says I’m free …’
‘Yes, apparently you are,’ replied Rachel, just preventing herself from adding ‘more’s the pity’. She mustn’t let her irritability get the better of her. After all, it was her own stupid hang-ups which were to blame. Not him. Not Mr Nikolaos, either. Anyone else would treat this as a run-of-the-mill business trip. ‘You’ll have to get a visa,’ she added, ‘but I think they can rush these things through. Here, I’ve got the details somewhere …’ She pulled her diary towards her.
As he took down the address of the Indian High Commission, Anthony’s mind strayed beyond the business aspect of this trip to its further possibilities. Maybe being away with her, alone with her, would help. Help her to get rid of whatever problems she had. Whatever he had been telling himself since that Saturday night, he had to acknowledge that he was in love with her, and where there was love, there had to be hope.
‘Will you book the tickets for me?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I assume you’ve got all the timetables and stuff.’
‘Yes,’ replied Rachel. ‘And I’ll book the hotel.’ The hotel. Just the thought of that jolted her.
‘Fine. If you don’t mind doing all that, then …’ He wondered what to say next. She sounded so uptight about the whole thing. ‘It should be fun,’ he added.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it should be.’ As she hung up, she told herself that that was the right way to look at it. He wouldn’t try – no, not after last time. He’d said ‘fun’, and that just meant a good time. A good time? She rubbed at her temples with her hands. She knew what Anthony’s idea of a good time inevitably led to. Oh, let it alone, she told herself. You can’t go on getting paranoid about these things. But she knew it was getting worse every time she saw him. She was slipping further and further. She hesitated a moment before picking up the phone again and making an appointment for the following evening with Dr Michaels.
Dr Michaels’ office was an unpretentious, rectangular and rather narrow room, decorated in pastel greens that reminded Rachel of school. The contents of the room, too, from the watercolour of a canal at a barge lock to the row of four cactus plants on the windowsill, bore the same stamp of impersonality, as did Dr Michaels herself. It was as though everything had been placed in the room – desk, chairs, bookshelf, little rug, cacti, picture and window blind – to turn it into a representation of a room, a pretend room. Rachel often felt, as she sat talking to Dr Michaels, as though she were in some silent theatre, her back to the audience. She imagined Dr Michaels walking onto the stage earlier, prepared in her role as the squat, comfortable Jewish psychoanalyst, sitting down, waiting for Rachel to make her entrance. Then Rachel would come in through the door and the play would begin.
It was generally the same one-hour play, but with varying scripts. Sometimes its mood was dictated by the way in which the streets of Earl’s Court affected Rachel on her walk to this room. Sometimes she found the crowds, the multiplicity of nationalities and their transitory quality quite enervating, and she would be glad of her sense of isolation and remoteness, even though it was for that sense of separation that she sought Dr Michaels’ help. At other times, especially if the weather was fine, the same streets and the same people would exhilarate her, make her determined to cope with and conquer her problems, so that she could share and saunter in their sunshine without any secrets.
Today she had come by car, and the walk from the parking meter had been bleak and wet; she had turned into Culver Gardens and walked with a sense of futility towards the tall grey building which housed Dr Michaels’ green room. It seemed to have become purely habitual, this business of visiting Dr Michaels. There was no longer anything she could do to help Rachel. It even seemed to Rachel that Dr Michaels’ broad, impassive face conveyed the same message: I can listen, but can give you no more hope. She has heard all this a hundred, a thousand times before, thought Rachel. And not just from me. A vision flashed through her mind of all the little one-hour playlets performed in this room. Rachel wondered whether, in any one of them, Dr Michaels ever leant forward, her customarily deadpan gaze lighting up with excitement, and said, ‘I think I have the answer!’ As though any analyst ever could. Maybe it will be today, in my play, thought Rachel.
But they were into the second half-hour and Dr Michaels had evinced no sign of possessing a miracle cure. They seemed to be covering old ground. But then, what else was there in Rachel’s life, but dead ground? Doesn’t she ever get bored? wondered Rachel. But why should she? She is earning money just by nodding and listening.
‘It’s not just a question of rationalising it,’ Rachel was saying. ‘I can do that. I can go over events and face them, in the way you taught me, and I can say – “Look, there is your explanation. Now deal with the problem.” But it seems very artificial. I don’t really need to go through all that. It’s just mind games.’
‘What do you mean when you say you don’t need to go through it?’ asked Dr Michaels. Her face bore no look of curiosity. It was a pale, round face, not pretty, but with a heavy intelligence, framed with dark hair in short, springy curls. She looked back now at Rachel, who wondered, as she often wondered, whether the other woman resented Rachel’s slender prettiness, of which she felt inordinately conscious when in Dr Michaels’ muscular, plain presence. But Dr Michaels gave nothing away.
‘I mean—’ Rachel hesitated. ‘I mean that when it comes to—when I have a good reason for wanting to confront and get rid of my fears, my ability to rationalise it all fails me. Or rather, it doesn’t help me.’
Dr Michaels shifted her position slightly and rested her jaw on the fingers of one pudgy hand. Rachel noticed that she was wearing a bracelet of carved bone. It looked so incongruous, so little like an article of adornment, that Rachel was quite struck by the thought of Dr Michaels
putting the bracelet on in the morning as she dressed, perhaps admiring it on her plump wrist. Perhaps some man had given it to her – Dr Michaels wore no wedding ring – out of love. Rachel found it difficult to think of Dr Michaels as a woman like herself.
‘You mean, when you are with a man,’ said Dr Michaels. It was not a question, not a statement – more in the line of a helpful hint.
‘Yes,’ said Rachel. Her mind flew to Anthony, and to the strength of his detaining grasp as they had struggled, absurdly, that Saturday night. She felt her muscles tighten suddenly at the recollection. ‘Yes. You see, there is this one person in particular.’ Rachel paused. Dr Michaels looked at her, waiting, not waiting, her expression inert. ‘I know that I’m very much attracted to him.’
‘You know that you are, or you feel that you are?’
This was an interesting question. The play had taken a new tack. ‘I – I must feel that I am, surely, if I know that I am?’ replied Rachel, considering this. Dr Michaels said nothing. ‘I know that I am, in that he’s the kind of man – the kind of man that I think I would like. That I do like. Well, he’s not so much a man, more a boy, really. Then again … But he’s very good-looking, he’s very nice—’ She stopped and smiled. ‘That sounds trite, I know, but he really is … nice. That’s the only word to describe him. He’s intelligent, and he’s fun to be with, and I know that he’s very much attracted to me …’ Rachel wondered if she was becoming too detailed, bringing Anthony too much to life.
‘He sounds very nice,’ said Dr Michaels, and smiled suddenly. Rachel had never heard Dr Michaels speak jokingly before. What kind of man do you like? she wondered, as she watched Dr Michaels’ thoughtful gaze straying towards the window. Some large, loving bear of a fellow psychoanalyst, Rachel imagined, someone who makes love to you every which way five times a night. The thought of Dr Michaels in the frantic flesh. Rachel smiled. She’s probably a lot luckier than I am, she thought. But then, any woman is. It’s only Dr Michaels who knows it.
‘Yes. So, of course, I feel attracted to him. Or know I am, whichever you like. I just can’t respond to him in the way I want to. Or he wants me to.’
‘You see,’ replied Dr Michaels, ‘what I meant about the difference between feeling and knowing is that you must be careful to distinguish between someone for whom you feel a real sexual attraction, and someone who simply represents that which you perceive is – or should be – desirable.’
‘But how would you know?’ asked Rachel in bewilderment. ‘How would you ever know?’
‘I think, in your case, that it may make all the difference, ultimately. I don’t believe your problems are to do with men, as such. We have been over all of this. Your father is not all men. The man who attacked you does not represent all men. It is a question of approach. Instead of regarding sex as a barrier to closer intimacy with someone, you should let it follow the intimacy, the closeness. But you must be careful to distinguish between the kind of inchoate attraction which you feel you must tackle as the answer to the problem, and those emotions which are’ – Dr Michaels hesitated – ‘more enabling. Which give you scope to respond.’
‘I see,’ murmured Rachel, dimly perceiving some truth in this. ‘But the question still remains – how would I know the difference? Do you mean that because I can’t respond to this man, I can’t really be attracted to him? That there’s some sort of Mr Right waiting out there?’ Rachel gestured with a quizzical smile in the general direction of Earl’s Court station.
Dr Michaels smiled and looked down, fingering her bracelet, slowly revolving it on her wrist; Rachel noticed that the hairs on Dr Michaels’ wrists were coarse and grew almost to the backs of her hands. ‘I’m not saying that. It may be that you’re very much attracted to him, but that this anxiety to resolve your fears sets up as a barrier between you. But you see, I think of you as someone who would respond very positively to the right person, to the right approach. I don’t really think you’re as afraid of it all as you might imagine. You say that this boy – or man – is good-looking, intelligent, funny. Fine. As we said, he sounds very nice. Does he turn you on?’
Rachel was struck by how curious this phrase sounded in Dr Michaels’ mouth. Turn me on. She imagined Dr Michaels being turned on. Rachel suddenly realised that a lot of men might find Dr Michaels a very sexy woman. Potent. Powerful.
She stared at Dr Michaels for a moment, wondering what the answer to this was. ‘I don’t think,’ she replied at last, ‘that I know what this is like. How could I possibly know? I’ve only ever been used.’
‘I believe, in spite of what you think, that you are capable of normal sexual response. I think you would know.’ Dr Michaels, shorn of her sensible skirt and oatmeal sweater, of her bone bracelet, beneath the bedclothes, face down. Dr Michaels in her other life. How many lovers? A wild Jewish wanton, all her carefully contained desires unleashed.
Would I? wondered Rachel. ‘Would I?’ she said.
Dr Michaels stopped playing with her bracelet and glanced at her watch. She looked up at Rachel. ‘Stop concentrating on this young man as a focus of your anxieties. Can you speak to him about any of the things in your past?’
Rachel shook her head. ‘I couldn’t. It’s too much of a burden. Besides …’ She turned her head to glance out of the window. It had stopped raining. She wondered if she’d get a ticket. She’d only had enough change for fifty minutes on the meter. ‘I don’t think it would help. I think it might just confuse him. Worry him. He’s very young. It might just – turn him off. There you are.’ She smiled and looked back at Dr Michaels.
‘Perhaps it says something about the nature of your attraction to him – that you feel you can’t tell him. I think it would indicate a lot if you met some man to whom you felt you could talk about all this.’
‘I have to go on a business trip with him,’ said Rachel. She looked back at the window, at the little pots of cacti. ‘In two weeks’ time.’
‘Well, don’t look upon everything as a test. There are things you enjoy about this relationship. Try to nourish them. And if you can’t explain the past to him, simply tell him that you need to keep everything on a platonic footing for the present. Feel less threatened. Just let it develop, take it for what it is. Not every man has to be seen as such, you know.’
Rachel smiled at this. ‘I know. It’s just that they all expect to be.’
‘So enjoy the trip. Enjoy being with him. But get things clear and unequivocal. I have no real anxieties for you, you know, Rachel.’
I like it when she uses my name, thought Rachel. It makes me feel a little more special, not just another hour-long slot in her working day. I wonder if she ever thinks of me when she’s not working? Rachel gazed at the square, capable hands with their plump fingers, envisaged her chopping, preparing, cooking, making food for her lover for them both to eat before they fell to their passion. She makes me feel thin and spare and dry, while she looks rich and full and—But why should I think this? Maybe all is not wonderful for her. Not all doctors are healthy, just because they cure others. But I have to believe her to be so. She has to be what I am not.
‘Haven’t you?’ she asked.
‘I think we fought through the worst of it long ago. No, it’s just a question of understanding your emotions and motives a little better. Try not to confuse the significance of relationships.’ She looked at her watch again.
‘I know. Time to go,’ said Rachel. She stood up and slipped her coat on, lifting her dark hair clear of the collar. ‘Thank you, Dr Michaels.’
‘I hope I can be of help from time to time.’
‘Maybe I should come more often,’ murmured Rachel, thinking back hopefully to the days when time spent with Dr Michaels had been the warm haven of the week.
‘I don’t think you need regular therapy, Rachel. I think there are still difficulties, but—’
‘Better to confront them as real issues in real life, yes? I am trying, believe me.’
She went out into the gathe
ring gloom of late afternoon, seeing in her mind’s eye the rectangular stage of Dr Michaels’ room, perhaps the props requiring a little rearranging before the entrance of the next character, with Dr Michaels sitting there patiently, unmoving, waiting for another life to pass before her eyes.
CHAPTER TEN
Although they spoke once or twice on the phone in the intervening days, Rachel did not see Anthony until the evening of their flight. She checked in, bought a magazine and a paperback, and sat down in the coffee lounge where they had agreed to meet. It was ten o’clock, and the flight was at eleven. Already the terminal had a sleepy, deserted air about it; the duty-free shops were closing down, a couple of vacant cleaners pushed their wide duster mops around the shining floors, and only a handful of travellers dotted the lounge. Rachel drank her coffee and tried to concentrate on her magazine, but time was slipping by and still Anthony had not appeared. When the flight was called at ten-thirty she felt a squeeze of alarm at the thought that he might miss it, that she might have to make this trip alone. She realised that she had gradually become accustomed to the thought of travelling with him; it would be lonely otherwise.
Deciding she could wait no longer, Rachel picked up her hand luggage and made her way to the gate, yawning. She had had a long day and already felt weary at the thought of the eight-hour flight. Where on earth could Anthony have got to? She continued to scan the faces of the passengers trickling into the departure lounge, and it was only when the flight was about to board that she saw him hurrying up to the desk. The sight of his tall figure relieved and cheered her.