He smiled a small smile that suddenly made him look very young. ‘It’s not unusual to find oneself in two minds at once.
‘Or three or four,’ Leo muttered.
‘That too. Would you like to lie down?’ he asked after another protracted pause. ‘It sometimes makes things easier. Just tell me anything that comes into your mind.’
Bastard, Leo thought. ‘I don’t want to lie down.’
‘That’s fine, too.’
‘The thing is I’m not sure I’m in the right place.’
‘What would the right place be?’
She shrugged.
‘You can always come two or three times and decide after that if this is a right place. See if this is the kind of conversation that suits you.’
‘Conversation?’ Leo’s voice rose in contestatory zeal. ‘Surely that implies that two people are talking?’
‘Aren’t we?’
She didn’t answer.
‘You assume that analysts or therapists or whatever you choose to call us don’t talk back?’
‘My stepfather…’ she stumbled. She hadn’t intended to say that, but now she felt impelled to finish. ‘My stepfather…he’s an analyst… he doesn’t talk back.’
He waited for her to go on and when she didn’t, urged her. ‘Tell me about him.’
She waved her hand. ‘He’s irrelevant.’
‘Except that he doesn’t talk back.’
‘Professionally. Otherwise he talks non-stop.’
Daniel watched her avert the grin that had leapt to her face, saw it settle into a scowl. He couldn’t quite locate the source of the discomfort she provoked in him. It wasn’t just the opening lie. ‘Perhaps we’re as different as our patients are,’ he ventured.
She studied him mutely.
‘Have you ever been in any kind of therapy before?’
Her hair flew with the violence of her denial.
‘Well, it’s up to you whether we go on. We may not suit each other. You can always shop around.’
‘Shop? What would I be shopping for? Mangoes, apples, prickly pears? Is there a job description for the ideal analyst? Something like “great listener, perfectly tolerant, highly intuitive. Wise and wonderful. All problems cured.”’
Daniel let himself laugh. ‘Oh no and certainly not the last. Not with me.’
‘So what do you offer?’
‘You’d need to tell me first what you’re looking for. Maybe, just maybe, I can help you understand something. Your relationships…’
‘I hate that word.’
‘Find another.’
‘It all sounds a bit iffy, this work you do.’
‘It can be. But there are other people you can see. Many others. I can give you some names.’ He rose abruptly and strode towards the desk at the far end of the room.
‘No, no.’ Leo’s voice was suddenly soft with loss. ‘I didn’t mean any of that. I don’t know what got into me. I… I’d like to stay, to give it a try.’ She waited for him to turn back towards her and when he did so, she added, ‘You were recommended to me by a friend. A good friend. Isabel Morgan. I trust her.’ She studied him carefully. Did she imagine the tension in his face, the slight shiftiness? ‘You remember her, of course,’ she said firmly, then paused at her choice of words. It came to her that remembering already conjured up a death. She shivered.
‘Would it relax you to lie down?’
‘You do know Isabel Morgan?’
‘I really can’t talk to anybody about other patients,’ he said gently.
‘I’m worried about her.’
Daniel had a sudden sense of the atmosphere around him lightening. Before it had been thick, clotted with suspicion which cast him into a dubious role. Did she always treat strangers that way, attesting first of all to her own greater knowledge? Maybe that’s what the lie had been about. A confirmation of her own greater authority.
He watched her recline, slip her shoes off with a neat, dutiful gesture and tuck her toes against the edge of the sofa. The posture gave her an air of fragility. It was hard to believe that Isabel had indeed sent her to him. If so, the gift could only be a poison chalice. Perhaps for both of them.
‘I’m very worried about her.’ She turned her face to him, resting it on her hand. Wary eyes examined him.
‘And you’re worried about your daughter.’
‘Yes. No.’ Flustered by the sudden analogy, Leo protested. ‘That’s not the same. Not at all the same.’ There was no link between Becca and Isabel. Of that she was certain. He was deflecting her. He knew something. She would have to play the game.
She turned away from him and looked up at the ceiling. It needed a coat of paint. To her side the books climbed up too high and hid the moulding which emerged again above the door in a dusty geometry of stems and leaves.
‘What is the worry like?’ The voice now seemed to come from some indistinguishable point behind her.
‘What is the worry like?’ she repeated in a murmur. Her lids felt heavy. She let them droop. ‘The worry… It’s like a dog preying at me. A large-toothed gargoyle attacking my throat so that I can’t breathe freely. Or see. It looms there, just at my head, yapping. Blocks my vision.’
‘But it’s smaller than you?’
‘Smaller, yes.’ Leo mused. ‘But I can’t see round it.’
‘It blocks your vision.’
‘While it’s yapping, the plane stays up.’
‘The plane stays up?’
‘Yes.’
It was her worry which had kept the plane up all the way to England. Not the engines. Just the constant vigilant worry that it would plunge, that one of the wings would burst into flame, that it would collide with another plane, that one of the windows would shatter and they would all be siphoned out like so much dust into the void. Worry acting like homeopathic magic. She felt that on every flight. Everyone felt like that. The energy of two hundred people worrying in unison made jet travel possible.
How odd, this lying here thinking in non-sequiters. Not thinking, it was too stupid for that, but just letting musings float amidst long watery silences. Yet in the presence of another. A stranger. Where was he?
The voice came in, just on time, as if he could read her thoughts. ‘So the worry keeps you up. Keeps you going?’
‘Maybe,’ she murmured, not quite sure what he meant.
‘Your worrying about your daughter keeps you up, keeps you going?’
Leo lurched up to confront him. ‘Are you saying I worry for my own benefit?’
He sat there, perfectly still. There were no spectacles now and his eyes looked very dark, at once piercing and expressionless. It took too long for him to respond, so she repeated her question which was also an accusation. At last he replied with slow enunciation.
‘In this room, Leonora, you say. I don’t say. Though sometimes, I repeat.’
She couldn’t think of a retort, so she looked at the books behind him. The spine of a Raymond Chandler she recognised leapt out at her. There were more beside it and next to them a whole long row of detective novels. ‘You have a taste for murder,’ she said, a hint of menace in her voice.
He let her comment hang. At last he said, ‘Following up clues is part of my work. But I’m afraid our time is up.’
‘Really? Already.’
‘You were late.’
Something in her snapped. ‘You’re very smug.’
‘So you won’t be coming back?’
She slipped her feet blindly into her shoes. She hadn’t found out anything. Nothing concrete. ‘My friend Isabel,’ she began.
He cut her off, ‘It’s time. I’m sorry.’
‘I want to come back. Tomorrow.’
He shook his head.
His hair was too long. Isabel had been right.
‘Wednesday. At the same time, if you like. And Friday. After that, you can tell me whether you want to go on. You can leave your address on the hall table.’
‘For the bill?’
&n
bsp; He nodded. ‘I charge 40 pounds a session.’
He turned towards his desk.
Leo knew she had been dismissed. She grabbed her coat from the chair. She couldn’t let him just get away with it like that. ‘Isabel has disappeared,’ she declared, her tone as incisive as a punishing schoolmistress. ‘We have to find her. Do you know where she is?’
He veered towards her. There was a sudden passion in his face. It transformed him, gave him a menacing edge. But his voice was still even. ‘I don’t. I’m sorry. I told the police. If that’s what you’re here for, there’s nothing I can do for you.’
Leo raced down the first flight of stairs, then paused at the landing. She didn’t believe him. No. She walked slowly down the next flight. As she took a pad from her bag and ripped a sheet of paper out, she heard a dialling tone, the beep, beep of a number being punched out. On impulse she opened the front door and slammed it hard. Quietly she crept back up to the landing and listened.
‘Paola. It’s Daniel Lukas. Give me a ring. After nine, if you can.’
She heard a click and after a moment. The resonant tones of a full-bodied soprano filled the house. Leo took a deep breath, tiptoed down the stairs, and with a glance over her shoulder opened a door at the bottom. It gave onto a room not unlike the one she had left, in its shape and assortment of sofas and tables. But here there were pictures on the wall, oils in wild fauve colours, all of them it seemed at a first glance by the same artist. At the garden end beneath the bay window, stood a desk and next to it, an old-fashioned metal filing cabinet. The sight of it set up an irresistible temptation.
One step towards it and the music had stopped. From behind her she heard voices. She retraced her steps and as quietly as she could opened the external door. A young woman and a child were coming up the short flight of stairs. She nodded at them. The small boy stared at her from eyes so wide they dwarfed his thin face. She tried a smile which found none in return and raced towards the high street. A piping voice followed her. ‘Who is she? Who is she?’
***
As she turned the corner, Leo wondered who indeed she was. A woman who lied, who blatantly broke into the privacy of others, whose palms were sweaty despite the chill of the afternoon wind. A woman who couldn’t reconstruct much of what she had said or had been said to her in the last hour, as if Alzheimer’s had suddenly kicked in with a vengeance. Funny that.
Without noticing she had made a decision, she found herself in the café at the top of the hill. She ordered a cappuccino from a spiky-haired, foreign waitress and reached for her pack of cigarettes. She was smoking far too much, more than she would ever dare permit herself in New York. She inhaled deeply and watched the smoke curl into a little cloud just above her head. Like one of the bubbles in her strip. ‘He knows something,’ she wrote into it.
Of that much, if nothing else, she was certain. Daniel Lukas was certainly hiding something about Isabel. It had been evident in the guilty passion of the face he had turned on her. Whatever resources of duplicity it cost, she would find out what it was.
As for the rest, little in the session had gone as she had anticipated. She had imagined a barrage of psychobabble or near total silence. There had been neither. Nor was there any talk of sex. Instead, it now came back to her, there had been a condemnation of her worrying. Just like Jeff. She had only used the worry about Becca as a banal opening gambit and he had used it to hit her in the face. What was the point of paying a shrink if all one got in return was the reiteration of a former husband’s blame? But never mind that. She wasn’t there for herself.
Leo sipped the coffee which was satisfyingly strong and reached into her bag. She pushed aside the small packet she had bought in Tottenham Court Road that morning, a tiny recorder that would play back Isabel’s tapes. She would do that tonight. Now she took out her pad. An unevenly ripped sheet reminded her that she had failed to leave Daniel Lukas her address. Better perhaps. It might have been unwise to give him Isabel’s and the New York one would have raised another kind of suspicion.
For a moment she found herself wondering whether Daniel Lukas dealt with children as well as adults. The small boy with the vast eyes must have been his next patient. Such sadness in that delicate face. She hoped he would treat the child less abrasively than he had dealt with her.
She leafed through to the action list she had made on the weekend, just after she had finally got hold of Hamish Macgregor. The man had been aggressively rude, effing here, there, and everywhere, telling her he fucking well didn’t know where fucking Isabel had got herself and who the fuck cared, and that she had better stop leaving fucking messages for him. In this cursing diatribe, she had read all the signs of a jilted lover. But what did jilted lovers who sounded tipsy at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon do to the women who had jilted them? It was this chilling thought that had decided her. She had rung the police again. This time she got through to PC Collins who was surprisingly solicitous. Maybe the bristle-haired youth behaved better when he didn’t have a superior there in front of whom to play tough guy.
Leo had told him about Hamish Macgregor. She had also told him about Isabel’s use of the pseudonym, Iris Morgenstern, and how some man from Origen had followed her back to London from Oxfordshire. For some reason she didn’t tell him about Christopher Norfolk and how he had left the apartment on Friday morning before she had woken up, taking all of Isabel’s letters from the gene tech companies with him. Nor had he yet returned.
PC Collins had listened to her narrative, interspersing only a few questions here and there. At its end, he said he and PC Drew would come round and see her again. She was grateful for that.
It was perhaps the minor triumph which had emboldened her to go upstairs and seek out Mike Newson. She wanted to talk to him again about Hamish Macgregor. But her ringing had produced a woman instead, a brunette with a pixyish face and a warm smile who had ushered her in and instantly offered coffee.
‘Mike’s away for a few days,’ she had said. ‘We never quite manage to be in the same place at the same time. Probably why we get on so well.’
Leo had answered her grin with one of her own and looked round the loft in amazement. It was a symphony in hi-tech with shiny tables and tubular furniture and a vast black and white blow-up of a surreal New York skyline on one wall. A curving aluminium staircase led up to a roof-top floor overarched by a bubble of glass.
‘He’s pretty good at décor, too.’ Rosie Tanner had introduced herself as she ground beans in a curving aluminium cylinder. ‘You’re Isabel’s friend, I know.’
They had chatted and for the first time, Leo felt that someone shared her concern. ‘I tell you what,’ Rosie had offered. ‘If Isabel’s not back by whenever it is she was due to return from the States, that’s when we really have to start worrying. She’d never leave that Beast of hers for a day longer in the kennels than promised. She loves that cat. She thinks it understands her when she speaks and knows what she’s thinking when she’s silent.’
Leo ordered a bottle of mineral water and lit a second cigarette. However sensible Rosie’s words, they did little to still the apprehension which mounted in her with each passing day. To do nothing but wait, she felt certain, was to invite the worst. When she had asked Rosie about how Isabel had been over the weeks before her disappearance, Rosie had confided that Isabel hadn’t been at her best. ‘I’m sure it was to do with her mother’s death. Two years ago, when my father went, I was right over the edge, not that I realized until later. Maybe Isabel decided to go East, rather than West. To Australia I mean. To revisit childhood sites, to sort herself out.’
Leo had pondered this possibility for the length of the weekend and had tried it out on the two friends of Isabel’s she had met. The first, an anthropologist at London University, had told her he was certain Isabel was fine. When he had last seen her, a month ago it must have been, time moved so fast these days, Isabel had had the look of secretive excitement about her which meant she was hot on the trail of so
mething or other. No, he didn’t know what. Isabel wouldn’t divulge and they had spent most of the time talking about his own last trip to Papua New Guinea. There had been no mention of her making a visit to Sydney.
The second friend, a fellow journalist had shown a little more disquiet. She confided that she thought Isabel had been at something of a loose end, since the book on childhood had come out; really since she had given up her regular column. Books were fine and well, she said, with a touch of acid in her voice, but someone with Isabel’s gift for people, shouldn’t be forced to be on her own for too long.
‘You think she felt lonely,’ Leo had asked softly. ‘Was there no one in her life?’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean that. There’s always someone in Isabel’s life.’
‘Any idea who?’
The women shook her head. ‘No. She was being a little cagey when I last saw her. No one special I imagine. And we spent most of our time talking about Buddhism of all things. Maybe she’s gone and holed up in a monastery.’
‘Without telling anyone?’
‘She probably told someone - that shrink of hers for a start.’
‘You don’t think she might have gone back to Australia for a second visit?’
‘To see her Aunt, you mean?’
‘Maybe.’
The woman shrugged. ‘She wasn’t long back when I last saw her. But it’s possible. She was certainly fretting about her. I know that. A little angry with her about something, too. But she wouldn’t talk.’
Leo had stayed up into the small hours hoping that Christopher Norfolk would return so that she could grill him about Isabel’s aunt and get her phone number. It surprised her how little she in fact knew about the life of the woman who was her closest friend. But then, if the situations were reversed, Isabel wouldn’t have Leo’s everyday points of reference either - her mother’s number, her editor’s… Life was like that, all parcelled up. And the Atlantic was a big ocean.
When Norfolk didn’t turn up, Leo had resorted to the letters of condolence from Australia, found one with a telephone printed on it and dialled it straight away. There had been no reply on any of the occasions she had tried.
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