He pointed towards the curve in the desk. A computer was planted on it next to hers. ‘We hacks have to communicate with the home front, lady. You’ve heard about time zones. It’s a good one down under.’
Leo looked at his screen which showed an e-mail program.
‘And by the way,’ he tapped his pocket. ‘Isabel and I often share research.’
‘Do you now? Is that secret sharing again? Or do you indulge in above board forms too?’
He laughed as she turned on her heel, then called after her, ‘Hey Holland Leo. You’ve worried me. And I don’t like the look of the new books our mutual friend has acquired. Tomorrow I’ll do some ringing round. Truce, remember?’
Leo’s mind was far from truce. In the morning, she would check to see what materials he had taken. She had a hunch what they would relate to. It occurred to her that he could easily have been sent here by the likes of Origen, or one of its kin, to erase any tracks which might prove contact with Isabel. And his keys could all too easily have come from her - against her will.
As her eyes closed, images of terror played over her lids. She saw a barefoot Isabel striding across a field, breaking into that easy run of hers, her hair swinging. And then suddenly, she crumpled and fell. She struggled to rise, but an invisible force held her down, as if she were paralysed, her limbs helpless. A beetle nibbled at her toes from which a thin stream of blood oozed. Like in that dream Leo had come across in the box file. A dream Isabel might have recounted to her analyst.
Was it because she felt herself cracking, that she imagined a breakdown for Isabel?
Shivering, Leo pulled the duvet up to her face and thought of the man behind the name, Daniel Lukas.
PART TWO
NOTES TOWARDS A CASE HISTORY (I)
The beginning was simple enough.
She arrived punctually. Her eyes roved over the objects and prints in the room. Moved so avidly that she seemed to be taking mnemonic snapshots of them for some private collection. Her dress was carmine, tight at the waist and then flouncing into an abundance of skirt. I had the impression that she had imagined me as a Fifties Hollywood host or a casting director on a production of Carmen. Her tangle of streaked blonde hair was a centre of activity, stroked and prodded by fingers, tossed to show off a profile sometimes delicate, sometimes strong. The gestures didn’t feel like nervousness, more a kind of exhilaration. When the chocolate eyes landed on me in slow examination, I realized that perhaps it was I who was intended as the camera.
She didn’t wait for me to begin.
‘You don’t have to explain the rules,’ she said. ‘I know them.’ She smiled the kind of smile that told me she’d break them in any case. ‘And I prefer lying down.’
There was a flurry of smooth, unstockinged legs as she stretched out on the couch. High-heeled sandals fell to the floor, ankles arched.
She turned back to glance at me just as I positioned myself on the chair behind her. I still hadn’t done more than nod at her entrance.
‘Oh and by the way,’ she said, her face a display of petulant innocence. ‘I always end up by seducing my analysts - or therapists - or whatever you all are.’
I had heard the challenge before, but never put quite so forthrightly and quite so soon. The love of the patient for the analyst is, after all, one of the foundation stones of our profession, the very meat of what we set out to work on. Its occurrence has nothing at all to do with our individual charms, as plentiful or few as these may be. The old man of Berggasse commented on it all often enough. Transference love, he called it, and wrote a whole paper about how we could go about managing it.
So I was tempted to let her challenge pass until we knew each other a little better, but she was still looking up at me, waiting for a response and I found myself saying, ‘Do you think that’s because we don’t resist you enough or don’t hold you enough?’
It took me a while to realize that for her the resistance and the holding were the same.
For now she laughed, with a touch of wickedness rather than humour.
‘That’s too complicated. It’s because you all enjoy it so much.’
In retrospect, I probably should have ended it right then and there. Rather than wait for her to end it when it was already too late. But I was intrigued. Patients, after all, can bring their own quota of boredom, the obsessional ones in particular. I know. I’ve been one. And she, let’s call her Anna, promised to be anything but boring. She worked in the development section of a television production company. I judged her to be about thirty-five, an attractive woman, who was well acquainted with her own appeal. Well acquainted with the experience of therapy, too, it seemed. For her the sexually repressed had all already been spoken, as well as acted out, I imagined. Or so she certainly wanted me to imagine. We have travelled a long way in this century from Freud’s wonderful hysterics. His geography of our fantasies and needs both fits and no longer quite fits.
‘Do you see yourself as a bringer of pleasure?’ I asked.
She laughed that laugh again and turned to stretch back on the couch.
‘Pleasure? Let me tell you some stories…
****
In the first months of our meetings, Anna told me stories. Nothing but stories. A mirrored labyrinth of stories. I listened. I tried to deduce patterns, follow a string which would lead me to her. She sometimes appeared in these stories, but they were principally about others. Nor could I tell whether they were invented or embellished fragments of her own experience. Not that that mattered: fiction and truth on the couch are, after all, often inseparable. The links and ruptures in the speaking provide most of the cues for our work. If analysis is in some measure a confrontation with the life-inhibiting secrets we like or need to keep from ourselves, then it is in these links and ruptures that the secrets begin to peek through.
At first Anna’s web of story felt seamless. Like a latter day Scheherezade, she entranced me. It wasn’t the useful trance which attends the best therapies, a kind of receptive lulling of the active mind so that one can become the patient. A lulling which is attended by a roving alertness, a readiness to pounce on clues. (The image that always comes to my mind is of a big cat lolling in the sunshine, yet vigilant to the slightest stir in the bush.) No. Anna’s magic was such that I was enchanted: I had physically to shake myself to recall that I was at work and meant, at least partly, to be in charge of the evolution of a narrative.
Sometimes, by the end of a session, I would feel that like some fateful Arachne she had spun a web in which only I was destined to be trapped.
She had a way with words, and tone and pacing. On occasion, she would choose to sit in the armchair, rather than recline. I didn’t stop her, as perhaps I should have. I thought that the change of posture might induce her to communicate in the more immediate way of other patients and tell me something of her everyday life, her family. It didn’t. It was as if she had assumed Freud’s own impatience with polite preambles and little nothings and was telling me that we both already knew that she had a father and a mother and needed to hurry on to get to more substantial puzzles.
From the chair, as she talked, she would watch me. I could feel her weaving her effects in response to the slightest movement of my features.
****
The word ‘pleasure’ had sparked her first story and I had thought, given her demeanour and what had come before, that she would tell me something overt about her sexual life. I was wrong.
Instead she told me about a home she had once worked in. A home for disturbed youngsters. The home stood at the summit of a dirt road at the edge of an unnamed town. Like some ancient monastery, it was constructed out of great blocks of moulded limestone. Sparse twiglets of trees sprouted unevenly from vast urns in its gloomy inner courtyard. Around that on the ground level were the common rooms where the young people were bustled into occupational therapies: they shaped wet, clammy clay into freakish forms, splashed paint wildly onto paper, wove rugs out of rags. In the high-ceilinged
refectory, they sat on benches at long tables and ate food that was always tinged with grey. There was brown-grey and green-grey and white-grey. The greyness usurped any other definition. But everyone ate and everyone was occupied. Except one boy.
He was about fourteen, a thin stick of a lad with a cap of brown hair and large empty eyes. He didn’t speak. He moved docilely enough, if one took his arm and led him. And if a spoon was brought to his mouth, he would eventually open it. Otherwise he simply sat, as impervious to the life around him as the stone out of which the home was hewn. Everyone had ceased to pay attention to him. No one greeted him or addressed him. He was simply there like the walls, a silent fixture amidst the cacophony of the house.
Anna took an interest in him. She greeted him at her arrival and talked to him. She told him about the weather and about the progress of the flowers and vegetables in the small neighbouring garden. She told him about elections and about earthquakes in distant places. She behaved as if he could understand every word, though he never responded with sign or language. And every night, before she left, she said ‘Goodbye, sweet dreams.’
On her final evening at the home, after her goodbye, she added that she wouldn’t be coming back. This was the last goodbye.
The boy sat there, as impassive as ever. With a wave, she repeated her goodbye and turned away. It was then that she felt fingers, as soft and light as silk, encircle her wrist.
The length of Anna’s pause at this juncture suggested that she had come to the end of something and was waiting for a response from me.
‘So perhaps you’re telling me that for you pleasure lies in caring for others?’ I began mildly.
‘Certainly not!’ she scoffed.
The resistance was good, so I pushed a little further. ‘Its opposite then. You take a sadistic pleasure in charming a helpless boy. Your attention woke him into life and then you left him.’
She sat up and gave me an enigmatic smile. Then she pulled a watch out of her pocket. It’s strap didn’t seem to be broken, but she didn’t wear it around her wrist. She looked at it. ‘Three minutes to go. I like to leave a little early. You can keep the change.’ And with that she was off.
At first, though her manner of departure had made me just a little uncomfortable, I thought we had made an excellent start. Only later did it come to me, when I tried to urge her to return to what she had told me about the boy and the home, that this story like so many of its subsequent fellows had been pre-packaged for my consumption. It was in its own way already a case history. Eventually she insisted that she had invented the whole episode.
She was teasing me with the very material of my profession.
It took me a while to begin to see that words, stories, were her form of resistance. For a talking cure to unravel that poses a not insignificant challenge. I didn’t mind. I thought I was equal to the detective work.
But for months, I did my sleuthing in the wrong place. It was as if Anna inhabited the perimeters of the coast, while I was searching the heartland. Gradually I realized that all the real analytic clues lay in the very fact that she told stories. Or they occurred in the frame, the perimeter - the moments before she lay down or as she was getting up, the arrangement or disarrangement of appointments, the modes of payment. She had a passion for counting out notes in front of me, in the semblance of an afterthought, but so that I could feel dirtied by the transaction. Not for her the usual anonymity of the cheque book.
For too long, though I took all this into account, I let myself be entertained by what happened within the frame.
Analysis, after all, largely attempts to enable the patient to give a fuller, more satisfying account of her life. One she can live with and love with. One which incorporates what we experience as tragedy and loss. It is, at least on the surface about content. Anna reminded me otherwise.
5
The creak and squeal of taxi brakes alerted Daniel Lukas to the time. He placed his pen into the fold of his notebook, tucked both into the top drawer of his desk and stood up to stretch his legs. Through the window, he could see the woman emerging from the cab. He drew back quickly as she looked up at the house.
From the other end of the long narrow room, the sweep of Waterlow Park was visible. Morning drizzle had emptied the tennis courts. But the plump sticky buds of the chestnuts were busy unfurling into a lime green too bright for the surrounding greyness. In the distance, the rounded bulk of the South Downs loomed surprisingly close, brought nearer by the needle sharp towers which now pierced the low London sky.
At the far edge of his garden amidst the snowy spiraea, he spied the black and white markings of the ball Robbie had lost over the weekend. He had cried hot five-year-old tears over the loss, too many of them. Daniel had hugged him and consoled him, but had not discouraged the tears. Every little loss brought the big one in its train and the boy needed to cry. Still, he would be pleased this afternoon to be able to return the ball to him. Not all losses were final.
The bell still hadn’t rung. Had his new patient decided not to turn up after all, frightened away at the threshold? He swallowed his irritation and turned back towards the front of the house. Yes, there she was, walking down the street, her russet coat ballooning in the wind. He picked up the book about forensic psychology he was reviewing and immersed himself in its dense pages. When the bell rang again, he wondered for a moment whether he shouldn’t bother to answer it, but knew that would probably only mean delay and more telephone tag, and he had promised himself that he would take on the next new patient who approached him. Too many months had passed in a torpor which teetered dangerously on the brink of despair.
‘It’s on the third floor,’ he said evenly into the ansaphone.
He heard her running lightly up the carpeted staircase. Running up so as not to run away. She was a little breathless when she reached the open door, her cheeks flushed from wind and effort.
‘Leonora Gould, hello.’ He ushered her in with a neutral smile.
She gave him a forthright stare of assessment, then looked everywhere but at him as she took off her coat. Beneath it she was wearing a well cut black jacket and trousers. The jacket was buttoned right up to the neck. Its nun-like severity contrasted with the girlish face and the slight tousle of her hair. An attractive woman who didn’t altogether want to be.
‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t get a taxi and then I took the Northern Line towards Edgeware instead of High Barnet and had to retrace my steps to Camden Town.
‘Oh.’ The blatant lie took him aback.
He showed her to the sofa which doubled as a couch
She looked at it as if it might swallow her up, then poised herself at its very edge, her hands clasped neatly on her knees. She had an air of controlled agitation. He could feel her wanting to move, to examine, and restraining herself.
He perched on the chair opposite her. ‘Tell me what’s brought you here,’ he said after a moment in which it became clear she was now lost for speech.
‘I… I’m worried about my daughter. You see… she’s left home now. For college. In California. I live in New York. I’m only visiting here. For work. I’m an illustrator. Doing well, really. Except for this worry.’
Leo tried to remember the mixture of truths and half-truths and lies she had so carefully prepared as an opening gambit. But they no longer quite made sense. The place had confused her. It conformed to none of her expectations. There was no receptionist, no waiting room, no double doors to allow for patient privacy. The carpet on the stairs was threadbare. And up here, the walls were lined with books which spilled over onto the floor, heaved on every available surface. There were none of the carefully placed objects or prints which decorated her stepfather’s pristine consulting room, objects to inspire the unleashing of the so-called unconscious. There was no armchair positioned in front of an authoritative desk. Nor was there even a proper couch, sign and symbol of the profession. The room was simply an ordinary sitting room.
Maybe Daniel Lukas wasn�
�t a professional at all. He certainly wasn’t the man she had glimpsed on the street and prepared herself to meet. Or was he? The hair could be the same though there was more grey peeping through its darkness, and the face was more deeply marked, somehow older. If she were to draw him now, his principal features would be the wide brow, the spectacles resting on an aquiline jut of a nose. Above them the eyes were disconcertingly direct, poised in a bedside manner of kindliness. Maybe it was the serious dark blue suit and the nondescript tie that made the difference. These were slightly shabby too. The white shirt beneath was badly ironed, the collar frayed. And he looked so stiff sitting there, waiting, none of the causal gallop of the streets.
‘Yes…’ he made an encouraging sound.
‘Where was I?
‘You’re only visiting here. And worrying.’
‘Yes. I think I’d like to come for a few sessions. Maybe more. I don’t know. While I’m here.’
‘Do you see someone regularly in New York?’
‘Oh no!’ The vehement staccato of her voice took her by surprise. She tried to make up for its weight of condemnation, but no formula came to her.
‘That’s all right then.’ He relaxed into the sofa, waited for her to go on.
Her own silence baffled her. Like treacle, it spread through the room, seeped into the cracks in the floor boards, covered her in its stickiness, then hardened round her as she sought the right words.
He broke through it. He didn’t play by the rules.
‘I know it can feel a bit strange talking to someone you don’t know. It’s always difficult. But try and tell me something more about what made you come. Is there a specific problem?’
His voice was so softly engaging that again she couldn’t find an answer. She examined her hands for what felt like too long. The knuckles were white. She looked up from them abruptly and met his eyes. They were watchful. She nodded vigorously and then without knowing why, shook her head in self-contradiction. ‘There is and there isn’t,’ she said at last.
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