Leo sifted through the letters in the silver mesh tray once more. There was nothing from Dr. Holmes, other than the bill she had already seen. This was now some four weeks old. Surely, if anything had been wrong, Isabel would have returned to see the doctor and another bill would have arrived.
With an irritated gesture, Leo tore open the last envelope. It produced another invitation to a book launch. She was about to toss it away, when she noticed the title of the book. Scar Tissue. Could that be linked to an illness Isabel was hiding? Leo positioned the card on the shelf above the desk and looked around her at a loss. She needed to think, she told herself. She also needed air and food, or she wouldn’t see the day out. She pulled on trousers and a black tee-shirt, dabbed some colour on her lips and jacket in hand, made for the door.
At its base, she noticed a card and picked it up. Isabel’s neighbour, despite his shiftiness, had been as good as his word. Hamish Macgregor, Builder and Decorator, was now someone with two phone numbers. She retraced her steps and at a guess, dialled the mobile number first. A woman’s computerised voice came on even before a dial tone to say that this number was temporarily not in use. The second number produced another woman’s voice, this time asking for messages. Leo left one.
Crisp sunlight fell across the narrow street, illuminating the rutted parking lot which now held a smattering of vehicles behind its fence of wire mesh. A biker ripped round the corner. Dust and paper lifted in his wake, a minor tornado of sound and smoke. Leo quickened her steps. She turned into a narrow lane and found herself on a main road clogged with traffic. Scaffolding made a meccano set of the building opposite. A vast, fluttering banner announced a new luxury development. The city was changing before her eyes. She jay-walked between cars, following a dimly remembered geography which led her into the small square of a cemetery. She raced through it, superstitiously averting her eyes from the lichen-shrouded tombstones. Isabel had told her she adored sitting on one of the benches here, found a kind of peace amidst the silent inhabitants.
At the far end of the square, just where the iron gate opened onto the street, stood a triangular yellow placard, ‘Witnesses wanted’. Leo paused to read the full text. A murder had taken place here between midnight and one o’clock on the night of April 19.
Vertigo attacked her. Buildings reeled towards the gutter. She clung to a rail and forced herself to breathe deeply. Each breath brought a vision – a knife piercing soft flesh, a bullet propelled through frangible bone. She was assailed by a sense of the aching fragility of the human body, a carapace so permeable that it was a wonder it could sustain life at all. She watched gleaming chrome and metal hurtle down the street and wished for its safer skin. For herself. For Isabel. Then, as if she had to take charge of some incompetent child, she ordered herself to reach in her bag, to jot down the number advertised on the sign, to walk, to locate a telephone.
There was a pub opposite. It looked friendly enough with its hanging boxes of ivy and primula. The door yielded to her push, but a voice from behind the counter brayed out a ‘Sorry, not open yet.’
Leo explained that she was in search of a phone, found herself explaining much more than that.
‘Knifing, it was,’ the bartender announced with a gleam in his eye. ‘Knew the bloke. Came here regular, he did. Stinking business. If I’d a been here that night, t’wouldn’t have happened.’ He prodded the air with a beefy fist, his belly quivering with each move. ‘Hey, you OK duck? You gone all white.’
‘A bloke?’ Leo mouthed.
‘Ya. Lived in the Peabody flats just down Dufferin Street. You need a drink, duck, I can see it.’
‘I’m all right. Thanks. Thank-you very much.’ With an attempt at a smile, Leo let herself out into the cool air. She reprimanded herself. Her leap to wild conclusions was not helping Isabel one jot. She needed to stay calm, to think herself into Isabel’s world and skin. What was it like to be in Isabel’s skin?
Imperceptibly, as she walked past the stretch of brown brick Peabody flats the pubkeeper had mentioned, she felt her gait changing. Her steps grew longer, her bag swung from her shoulder in more pronounced a fashion. Her chin was high and every few moments, she flung what felt like a heavy mane back from her face.
The market materialised sooner than she had anticipated it. Two rows of stalls, selling cheap tapes and kitchenware, Nike tracksuits and children’s clothes, jostled with the fruit and veg merchants and backed on to an assortment of shops, the look of which she had assumed London had long left behind. There were tiny tailoring establishments, purveyors of dusty electrical wares, a Hoover repair shop sporting two worn uprights in its window. Brighter premises were dotted amidst these - an organic butcher, his produce laid out in a manner to rival the French; an acupuncturist; a florist whose bouquets were only a little more vibrant than his earthenware pots.
Isabel wouldn’t resist, Leo told herself as she made her first purchase. The silky white tulips with their velvet centres would cheer her and force her to think of life rather than death. Never mind the impracticality of carrying them as she did the rest of her shopping.
‘Some nice tomatoes for you, love?’ A crinkle-faced women looked up at her with a gap-toothed smile.
Leo nodded, bought a lettuce as well, and apples and bananas, crossed to the other side and found her nostrils attacked by a pungent aroma. She looked behind a stall and saw the fish and chip shop, its gleaming counter already half-hidden by a queue of customers. Isabel had dragged Becca and her here over Christmas. She had vaunted the establishment: ‘This is the real thing,’ she had told them. ‘No better chips in the whole of London. I promise. And we can eat out or in.’ It was so crowded they had eaten in the street, picking their fat chips and cod out of cones of oily paper, the high reek of vinegar mounting in their nostrils. ‘Yummy,’ Becca had confirmed.
Leo stood in the queue. As she heard the voice of the waiter, she suddenly recognised him. Isabel and he had had a long conversation about the best fish of the day when they were last here. She remembered because of the incongruity of the man’s accent. He was Italian. Enrico, the name came to her.
She greeted him when her turn came, ordered sole and chips, and then asked, ‘Have you by any chance seen my friend, Isabel?’ she gestured above her head to convey size, though she didn’t need to.
‘La bellissima Signora Isabella. Non, not today, not this week. Not the last. She tell me she going to the country. She break my heart.’ He clutched his chest with a tenor’s enthusiasm.
‘The country? What country?’
‘The country side, maybe. I don’t know. She back soon I hope.’ He gave her a lavish smile with her fish, offered a wink and greeted the next customer.
Juggling provisions with her early lunch, Leo tried to fit this new bit of information into one of the many scenarios she had scripted for Isabel. The country could mean one of those rural addresses on the letterheads of the gene tech companies.
She was about to turn back into Dufferin Street when she noticed a supermarket tucked under the eaves of an outcrop of the Barbican. Coffee. She had to get some real coffee.
In the event coffee turned into a trolley load of groceries which filled four large shopping bags. She barely managed to heave them out of the store. The sight of a taxi pulling up just in front made her think her luck might be changing. She tried to signal to it. In the process one of the plastic bags gave and oranges, coffee, bread and butter tumbled onto the pavement, rolled off the kerb.
‘Here, let me help you.’ A man bent to her side. He had a neat beard, lightly flecked with grey and smoky eyes, which twinkled slightly. A pleasant Indian face. ‘I have asked the taxi to wait,’ he said formally and bowed with just an inflection of the torso as he helped her into the cab.
Leo waved her thanks again from the window. Funny. That must mark the first time she had instantly liked a man with a beard. It was a rank prejudice and one she recognised. In her strip, all the most odious males sported beards. She loved drawing them.
Her stepfather wore a beard, a neat little triangle of an affair - to make him look like Freud, she imagined, though that was where the similarity stopped. It only succeeded in making him look pompous. The shrink he had sent her to in that first year of her adolescent return to Manhattan, had sported one as well, a vile little goatee which moved with his mouth like a hairy afterthought. The new parental couple had insisted that seeing someone would do her good. Because she was so rebellious. And so uncommunicative. Delayed effects of insufficient mourning, she had overheard her stepfather diagnose on the telephone. To the shrink they were sending her to, she imagined.
She had sat in a vast leather armchair for four times fifty minutes and doodled sullenly as Dr Weiss tried to elicit speech from her. After that, she had refused to return. The price was that she had to smile at dinner. Producing a rictus was marginally less painful than sitting in that overstuffed chair.
The aegis of the new parental couple brought with it a tyranny of meanings. She lived an over-examined life. ‘Why’s’ hovered around her every move like so many vigilantes. If she refused soup and chose to dig into meat, it was because she was angry and wanted to bite at something, perhaps bite off the maternal breast or newly paternal penis. If she didn’t feel like dinner or breakfast, she was denying mother love. If she suddenly decided not to go to a party or on a date, was it because she was worried about her femininity or frightened of sex? And when she lost a trifle, an earring or a pen, was she trying to bury her father all over again? The why’s spiralled madly at every turn transforming simple acts or changes of mood into matter of major significance. No wonder she had escaped at the first opportunity.
She could never understand why Isabel had gotten involved in the whole analytic business. It wasn’t that Leo was blind to some of the merits of talking cures - not latterly, in any case not for people who were really in deep trouble. She had read a bit and imbibed more. You couldn’t help that in New York, certainly not in the circles in which she moved, let alone at the family dinner table. A good number of her friends had spent years on the couch looking for an impossible cure for the human condition. Chat was fine, but all that fashionable claptrap about linking present difficulties to amnesiac moments of infancy, all those good and bad breasts and sexual perversions to do with seeing Nanny’s knickers, and worse these days, all those multiple personalities who grew out of daily rites of suggestion, it really didn’t wash. Life dealt you a hand and you played it. Unless you were Woody Allen and could make comedy out of it, there was no point going to a know-it-all shrink who after months or years would pinpoint parents to blame. Just blame them yourself, if you felt so inclined, and get on with it. It was cheaper and wasted less time.
Leo had said all this and more to Isabel when they had talked about it way back when Isabel had decided psychotherapy was what she needed. ‘They’re technicians of the normal,’ Leo had argued. ‘They knock up a little rickety scaffolding of explanation, twist a screw of memory here and there, slap on some feel-good whitewash to bolster your self esteem, and bingo, you have a cosy little suburban house of the sexualised self, with no gables or dusty attics or wonderful detail.
‘You’re talking fifties,’ was all Isabel had replied to that. ‘Or maybe just American. I’m learning things. I’m curious. It’s a little neutral space, a tiny sanctuary in which to think all the bad thoughts. And knowledge can’t be bad. Particularly if you’ve had a mother as wilfully blind as mine. One who spent a period of her life in and out of institutions.’ Isabel had rolled her eyes and laughed and changed the subject. So Leo hadn’t probed.
What she had wanted to say, was that whatever her origins, Isabel seemed to her the least likely person to need or benefit from analysis. She had never struck Leo as a brooding, introspective soul. On the contrary, she was a woman of action. No sooner did Isabel express an idea or a plan, than it took shape in the real world. She was always on the move. Or writing. And she certainly lacked neither lovers nor work. Nor friends to talk to. Leo for one.
It was their differences, she sometimes thought, which had brought them together. Where Leo was quiet, Isabel was a riot of activity. Where Leo, whatever her working success, had somehow stumbled into a traditional path of husband and child, Isabel was a thoroughly modern, independent woman, afraid of nothing. Where Leo had had a grand total of four lovers, and the first three hardly qualified as that, Isabel’s came and went with an abundant fluidity which occasionally struck Leo as careless. It was as if Isabel were impervious to the notion of couples. Maybe that was what Leo loved about her. She was a free spirit, immune to the social pressures which posited a coupled or familial happy-ever-after. It wasn’t merely that she lived alone - so many women did that now; it was that she didn’t even seem to dream that pervasive, left-over dream which was love and marriage.
Over the years, Leo had begun to think that with men, Isabel must be a person she hardly knew. But then, the intimacies of others were always mysterious. Could a man really be the reason behind Isabel’s disappearance? A man like Hamish Macgregor who had engaged her in some sadistic rite which had gone awry. They were all the rage in Manhattan these days. Or a man like her analyst? Shrinks, lore had it, were always prising patients away from their nearest and dearest.
‘It’s not that bad, dearie.’ The cab-driver’s voice penetrated her reverie. ‘The sun’s shining. You’ve got all the necessary. Wipe your eyes and I’ll help you in with your groceries.’
Leo hadn’t realized she was weeping.
‘No, Mrs. Holland. Nothing.’ Sergeant Drew’s voice grew formal with irritation, her consonants more pronounced as she mimicked some superior Metropolitan chief. ‘Let me repeat it again. Unless we have proof of foul play, we cannot demand that a mental health practitioner breach patient confidentiality. He says he hasn’t seen her for a while. He knows nothing of her whereabouts.’
‘He could be lying.’
‘He could be. We have no way of knowing. But for the moment, that’s all there is to it. We’ve found no matches for Miss Morgan in accident records. The doctor you had us ring assured us that nothing was amiss as far as he knew. There’s nothing more we can do for the time being. We’ll call you if anything comes up. We’re very busy here. Goodbye.’
‘But -’
The line went dead in Leo’s hand.
She put the receiver down with a clatter and paced the room. The tense ferocity of a caged creature defined her movements. On her third circuit, she paused to rearrange the spiky tulips. They decided her. Whatever he said to the police, Daniel Lukas would know things. Important things. Seeing him would help her know too. It was also something to do. This helpless waiting had become unbearable.
Yet if she approached him forthrightly, she would hardly succeed where the police had failed. The iron gate of patient confidentiality would come down with a clatter. She had to try a different tack.
On a rough guess, he probably started seeing patients at 7 in the morning and allowing a ten minute break between sessions, she should be able to reach him at five to the hour. In precisely seven minutes.
Leo poured herself a glass of mineral water, lit one of the exorbitantly expensive cigarettes she had purchased at the supermarket. She doodled. Isabel’s face emerged from the tip of her pen, eye’s cast down, pensive. Her lips weren’t generous enough. Leo scrunched the piece of paper and marched to the phone.
The same mechanised voice answered. She steeled herself, waited for the beep and left a message. ‘This is Leonora Gould,’ she stumbled as her stepfather’s name found its way to her lips. She hadn’t known she was going to use it. Yet it might help. She rushed on, ‘I’d like to make an appointment with you.’ She left Isabel’s number, hoping that he wouldn’t recognise it. And if he did, that would have its purposes too.
She was standing on the top step of the ladder to reach down another of Isabel’s boxfiles, when the phone rang. She scrambled for it. Her estimate of Dr. Lukas’s schedule had only been out by some five minutes. She put on
her coolest voice.
‘Hello.’
‘Mom. It’s me. Sorry I wasn’t here when you phoned yesterday. Are you OK? Has Isabel turned up? What’s the weather like?’ Becca’s voice raced over distance, warming her. She sounded both incredibly grown-up and the same mile-a-minute chatterbox she had always been.
‘I’m fine darling. And you? Are you managing to study?
‘Not much.’
‘But you’re having a good time?’
‘Terrific. Dad took us to Green’s yesterday. And shopping for CD’s. I bought a ton. And early tomorrow we’re going riding up in the hills…’
Leo listened, offered a few reassuring words. When she put the receiver down, she was seized by a sensation of pure longing. She knew with vivid clarity that if Becca were here with her she wouldn’t feel so fractured, so close to an edge which gave way only to darkness.
After Jeff’s departure, none of her fears about Becca succumbing to misery or launching into full scale teenage rebellion had materialised. They had handled the separation well, if nothing else. Both had explained to her that these things happened, neither were particularly at fault. People just grew apart.
Leo hadn’t let the lawyers talk her into vengeful divorce proceedings, whatever Jeff’s ostensible guilt. She insisted, above their clamouring voices, that the only agreement she wanted was that Jeff leave them the family apartment and pay for Becca’s education. She wanted no alimony for herself. She only wanted to be free of him. She earned enough. And Becca and she had grown closer with his absence, sharing outings, movies, gossip about friends, even clothes. It was as if Becca felt Leo’s inevitable loneliness and wanted somehow to make up for it. Not too much, Leo hoped. No, not too much, since she hadn’t decided to go to college in New York, but in California. Leo had encouraged her, dreading the possibility of retroactive resentment. Perhaps she also sensed that if she sought her closeness she would be as likely to get a merciful stay of execution from a ravenous tiger as she would from the good young woman who was her daughter.
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