The Seduction

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Can you describe him? What does he do?’

  The therapist’s voice dulled her like a tranquilliser. Despite her resistance, Beth found herself breathing more slowly.

  ‘Oh, Sol. Reportage. News photography. He’s always busy. He’s good, kind, all integrity. Benignly impatient, I think of him as … um … quite grumpy. Eccentric even. But romantic. He buys flowers, arranges dates … He also irritates me stupid sometimes, but he’s … well, he’s lovely.’

  Beth took a breath, shrugged. ‘I find him interesting, still. American. He’s lived here for years. Um … he had to fight a big custody case to keep access to his son by a previous marriage, but he was completely determined to see him. I love it he’s such a good father. To both of them.’

  The therapist nodded.

  ‘He’s infuriatingly self-contained.’ Beth paused, and smiled. ‘I want to shake him to get a reaction, sometimes. Determined underneath it all. Otherwise I think I’d get bored. But it does mean we argue. Quite often.’

  Dr Bywater said nothing.

  ‘So I don’t get it,’ said Beth suddenly. ‘Why aren’t I more of an obvious mess? Everyone except Sol thinks I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re high-functioning.’

  ‘Oh …’ said Beth. ‘That’s a thing?’

  ‘It is perfectly possible, while suffering very real pain inside. But outsiders will largely just see the woman, mother, the acclaimed artist you are.’

  Beth paused. ‘How do you know that? The last bit.’

  Dr Bywater hesitated. ‘I do. If you’re acclaimed, then I and others would know about it.’

  ‘Have you been googling me?’

  ‘I don’t spy on my patients,’ she said somewhat stiffly.

  ‘Sorry.’ Beth paused again. ‘I never feel successful. Anyway,’ she said rapidly, ‘so, Fern. She’s been coming home a bit late from school. She’s evasive. Almost hiding from me. She needs to grow up, I know that, to separate.’ She swallowed. ‘But my instincts tell me that something else is going on. Sol disagrees. He’s impatient about it, unusually …’ She shrugged, pulled a tolerant face. ‘So here I am.’

  ‘And you’re not taking this seriously?’

  ‘Fern, very. Sol?’

  ‘Yes. Does it make you worried about your relationship?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Beth, feeling her cheek. ‘I actually rarely worry about him, weirdly. About the only thing I don’t. And he’d never, ever even consider leaving Fern. The opposite! We’ve been together a decade and a half. Almost. He wouldn’t really leave or anything.’

  Tugboats were hooting in the distance.

  ‘You sound certain.’

  ‘He’s just gone all strict and uptight because he’s worried about me. I know him.’

  Dr Bywater nodded, handed Beth some worksheets with explanations, then they talked more generally until the hour was up.

  ‘Do you think I should worry?’ said Beth suddenly, frowning and poking her head back round the door before she closed it.

  Dr Bywater smiled. ‘We can talk next time,’ she said.

  ***

  Beth walked through the waiting room on her way out, the pair of psychologists she glimpsed in the department’s corridors pale as moles who never saw the light of day. As she headed towards the lifts, instantly lost in a labyrinth of passages and double doors, the daubs on the walls – the sugary pointillism, the Impressionism and mask-like portraits – stimulated the only flicker of professional confidence she had experienced in weeks.

  The morning was torpid as she emerged on to the walkway beside the hospital. St Peter’s cast a shadow even in the sluggish light. It was an eerie hulk of a building: a Victorian anachronism that appeared to have worked its way down into the bank of the Thames, sinking beside that slow-seeming, rapid brown river with its currents of diesel and tar, its albatross apparitions in the mists. There in the shadows was her mother Lizzie. Just as an image of her had been on the Dingle shore in Liverpool, or later on Gower Street when Beth had studied at the Slade. And since the voice on a phone in August, a more accurate version had returned in fleshy detail: a high-smelling ghost, human crevices and veins, pores and throat clearings, unwashed hair and sudden words. ‘I love you, I love you, Bethy,’ she said into her ear.

  Unexpectedly shaken by the therapy session, Beth sent Fern a funny photo, then walked to Blackfriars tube, towards her bread-and-butter job goading rich kids through their art exams. The river was choppily metallic, a raw air stirring it, and as she had so often done over the years, she pictured herself riding it: jumping on a raft to sail the restless flow, race over waves to a far horizon. The sense of something missing, of a wilder existence, was there in fragments between real life. Jack Dorian was there, seducing her. She was storming the rapids to infinity, flung through a waterfall, flying, soaring, fucking.

  She laughed at Fern’s answering meme then hurried to the school where she taught. A colleague had put herself out to accommodate the appointments, disguised as physiotherapy for her neck, but she already dreaded returning to the hospital, could not picture herself walking back into that department and being made to talk about her mother.

  ***

  How Beth had loved Lizzie Penn – the feel of her, the smell of her – dressing gown and slept-in staleness, shampoo and scalp, the strange adult sourness of coffee. Her mother had loved her, Beth knew. At ten, almost eleven, Beth was beginning to shrug away some of her mother’s embraces; to dismiss her with a wave outside school; to spurn offers of reading, preferring to have friends over to snigger-whisper at tea. Had those stirrings of independence caused Lizzie to spot a glimmer of a different life?

  A blind now seemed to come down over Beth’s mind, unrolling with a clattering rush. She couldn’t think about her. She wouldn’t, until the next therapy appointment.

  FIVE

  ‘Mum! What the hell?’ Fern burst out the moment Beth returned from work, struggled over to the table with some equipment and glanced at her daughter’s phone, which lit up with a message. Heat hit her neck.

  ‘Hello, Fern!’ Beth said brightly, and kissed her. She put her bags down, wriggled out of her coat and scarf. ‘Can you just give me two minutes? I’m bursting for the loo.’

  She locked herself in the bathroom and took a breath, savouring the moment of silence before trouble. She pictured the Snapchat message she had glimpsed. Baby when am I see you again?

  She hadn’t caught a name.

  ‘Why are you looking at my phone?’ demanded Fern, the moment Beth emerged.

  ‘What? Darling?’

  ‘Don’t deny it!’ said Fern, a repressed trembling tightening her voice. ‘I’ve told you and Dad, like, about a million times not to.’

  ‘I did—’ began Beth. ‘I only glanced down as a message came up. Not intentionally.’

  ‘You saw it, right?’

  Beth paused.

  ‘Holy crap!’

  You’re seeing a boy? Beth so nearly said.

  Beth looked at Fern. She was like a drawing in a novel last seen in childhood. Marianne Dreams. Precise lines, pencil hair strands, faintly tilted large eyes.

  She caught her breath. ‘Who sent it to you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘Do I have to ask you basically a trillion times not to ask questions?’

  Beth waited. ‘But still … who is calling you “baby”?’

  Fern reddened. She bit her lip and looked mutinous.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Someone I know. Like, a friend. Obviously.’

  Fern gazed at her then gave a small shrug. Beth pushed through her resistance and hugged her, and in so doing, she detected that same trace of a smell, of eucalyptus or lavender or some other essential oil. ‘What is that?’ she was about to ask, but it was so faint, she swallowed another question that Fern was likely to rebuff.

  Fern looked at the floor. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ she said suddenly, and her face was flushed. ‘I just lost it a bit. Reading my Sna
pchat was a dick move. But …’ She shrugged.

  Then she giggled and put her arms round her mother’s neck, and Beth called her names, and somewhat awkwardly, they ran through the house trying to tickle each other, as they had when Fern was much younger, with self-conscious screams.

  ***

  ‘So what was the therapy like?’ said Sol in the morning.

  ‘Oh,’ said Beth, hanging up washing. ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘What’s Dr Whatshername like?’

  Beth shrugged. ‘She’s quite nice, ordinary-seeming. Very focused, though. I’m not sure what the point of it all is entirely.’

  ‘Ha! You want immediate brilliance and fireworks? Some – virtuoso performance? So like you, Bet …’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sol, glancing at her.

  ‘You know me – and my faults – too well.’

  ‘Please,’ said Beth to Fern, who stood in the kitchen spooning cereal with one hand, milk wobbling, while brushing her hair with the other. ‘Come straight home after school. OK?’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ said Fern, then suddenly she reached up and kissed her, and yet she was slightly late home the next day after school, and later the day after, and politely evasive, adopting her innocent face.

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’ said Beth to Sol on the third day. ‘She could have been back twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘She’s thirteen.’

  ‘Just. It’s becoming darker in the afternoons.’

  ‘She’s a teenager, hon.’

  Beth bit her lip.

  ***

  For Beth, the next weeks of sleep-deprived nights and unsatisfactory work, the first few therapy sessions, seeing her old friends Ellie and Aranxto from Liverpool between work and childcare, Fern’s intermittent lateness from school, all merged together in a run of normal stresses and deadlines. The mortgage was too big. They needed Sol’s ex-wife to marry someone else; she needed to have another hit show, but it sometimes felt as though Ghost Walks, the series that had made her name, would be impossible to better, or even to match, and she was busy sorting the move to her new studio. September became October, and No Caller ID didn’t ring again. The relief was overlaid with the age-old rejection, which filled her with irritation.

  ‘You know, it’s weird, but the Jackass—’ she began, assigning her ex-boyfriend and future studio mate Jack Dorian the name Sol used, to please or appease him.

  ‘Yeah, the Jackass,’ said Sol, interrupting. ‘Fern found an old Metro with a picture of him the other day and said, “Who is Jack Dorian?” You been talking about your paramour to her?’

  ‘Former less-than-paramour. Er, no,’ said Beth. ‘But, anyway—’

  She reddened, dropped her gaze. He caught it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“But”. You were going to say—’

  ‘Oh, I – the people in the studio, he’s—’

  Her phone began to ring. No Caller ID. Her heart bulleted. She hesitated before answering. She cleared her throat. ‘Hello?’ she said. There was a pause. ‘Hello,’ she said again, overlapping a marketing recording. She punched at the Off button. ‘Fuck off,’ she hissed.

  She gathered her breath by gazing through the window from behind the big table with its clutter of homework and spilt wax, lens caps and memory cards. Leaves were rocking lazily against a sketched sky, sliding off-course with tugs of wind. She and Fern had collected last flowerings and berries from the canal side and Camley Street, and they stood in a jar whose water surface was greying and contracting. She shook it. The snake-brown wrinkles of the canal disturbed her now and, for the first time, she viewed the houseboats as little capsules of danger. That oily, insistent slow flow that backed their house, trees hunched over its surface, and perhaps a different threat existed now that the illusion of womanhood overlaid the child Fern was. The choke of nettle and branch beyond the bridges, fenced off in clumps of neglect behind the towpath.

  It had been her choice; her fault that they had moved from their flat in London Fields to this ill-defined area between Camden, Kentish Town and St Pancras. Had the Regent’s Canal somehow reminded her, without her knowing it, of the Mersey? Some slimy echo of the area referred to by her mother as the Cast Iron Shore, where she had once walked?

  Her mother had twisted for one wave of her hand, while Beth had watched her from her desk in the unquestioning certainty of her love, that scene with its blithe ignorance always returning to her later. Over time, she learned to call her Lizzie. She refused to refer to her as Mum, Mam, her mother.

  She looked towards the towpath opposite, with its occasional jouncing of bicycle light, figures slipping through the shadows.

  The therapist was out there, near the bridge. Beth stared. But of course she wasn’t.

  Traffic was a smudge from the other side of the house, the rumbling of buses a slight vibration. Here was silence, and bats, and shouts of longboat revellers at dusk or after pub hours. She wanted to stay here forever. This house, this life, these people.

  ‘Why’s that boy standing still?’ said Beth, pointing at a young man in a hoodie. ‘I think he’s looking up here. Isn’t he? What if it’s because of—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Um. You know. Fern?’

  ‘Hon! We cannot see where this guy is looking.’

  ‘She gets these Snapchat messages—’

  ‘Of course she does. You’d be anxious if she didn’t. Right?’ he said. ‘Quit this crazy stressing.’

  ‘Yes. Oh,’ she said, as her phone rang. ‘It’s Aranxto. Darl, I need to tell you about Jack Dor—’

  ‘Answer,’ said Sol dismissively, and went to the table for more paperwork.

  She hesitated. ‘Hi, Aranxto.’

  ‘Bethy, hi.’

  ‘Hi! Weirdly, I just said Jack’s name,’ she said, with deliberate effort.

  ‘Dorian?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at Sol and smiled.

  ‘Your best-ever shag, right?’ he said. Beth pressed the phone hard to her ear, wandering away. ‘‘Mr Skilful hands … thrusting, strong shoulders. You a leetle bit hot between the thighs?’

  ‘No. No,’ she said lightly.

  ‘You know the ex-wife lives quite near?’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I get it. I’ll shut up,’ he said. ‘You got a moment?’

  ‘Yes. Please! Take me from bills and forms.’

  ‘Yeah. But listen, Bethy,’ said Aranxto, his voice dropping. ‘Just quickly.’

  ‘What? Tell me.’

  ‘I saw Mrs – I don’t know what to call … I saw your mum.’

  ‘What?’ said Beth. Her heart clattered painfully against her chest. Sol looked up. ‘What? Where? How?’ She sat down. Her hand was trembling.

  ‘Liverpool. I was back home at the weekend. Bootle.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that at the PV?’

  ‘Didn’t want to spoil the atmos.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Yes. God. I don’t think I want to hear this.’

  Sol’s eyebrows raised in enquiry. She shook her head slightly. He placed his hand on her back.

  Aranxto was momentarily silent. ‘OK—’

  ‘What? What? I don’t think I can hear this,’ she said again. ‘But then I’ll go mad, wondering. Why did you see her?’

  ‘I bumped into her.’

  ‘On the street?’

  ‘Yes. Bethy-Boop. She just said she missed you. That’s all.’

  Beth tried to steady her breath.

  ‘I kind of pitied the old hag, to be frank,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not, is it?’ said Beth. ‘It’s never that’s all with her.’

  ‘Detective-brain as ever. She just said she wished she could see you. That’s really all.’

  ‘Well she can’t,’ Beth snapped.

  ‘Whoah. I know,’ said Aranxto. ‘I’m putting my hands in the air, babe.’

  ***

  ‘Talk to your therapist,’ said Sol the
next morning.

  ‘Bossy. I bloody do.’

  ‘About—’

  ‘I know. I will. I will. Hi, Fern.’

  As Fern arrived in the kitchen, her Snapchat alert sounded, now recognised by Beth, and Fern ignored her phone.

  ‘I’d just like to know – what do you do when you’re late home from school?’

  Fern looked down. Beth turned swiftly to Sol and widened her eyes.

  ‘Just chat and hang out and shit like that.’

  Fern pressed her forehead against Beth’s so her eyes were bigger, darker. They maintained the pose until Beth surrendered.

  ‘You always win!’ she said.

  Her phone rang and she pulled it from her bag. No Caller ID.

  ‘Hello?’ she said in a small voice, her heartbeat betraying the anticipation she had denied, but there was silence again.

  ‘Piss off,’ she said impatiently, but only as she terminated the call did she realise that there was a different quality to the silence, an alive hesitation and not the prefatory blank of a machine. Had there been breath, even? Sefton Park returned to her.

  ‘Mum!’ said Fern.

  ‘What’s wrong, hon?’ said Sol.

  Beth opened her mouth. She couldn’t speak. ‘Nothing,’ she said, and she stood very still. Dr Bywater, she thought. She needed to talk to her.

  Could Dr Bywater be the one to help? There was so much that seemed impossible to unearth. First, she would have to tell her about Sefton Park: her mother’s face, entirely unexpectedly, in a first-floor window. And who was Dr Bywater in real life? Beth had started to become curious.

  At ten to nine, she took the urban slope of a walk from the Tube down to the river, the dampness of Thames silt creeping up from Blackfriars. Strands of Lizzie were down here now, after years of fading. It was not just the river; it was not just recent events; it was Dr Bywater. Not probing with scalpels to peel her mind, but skilfully drawing Lizzie out: a flash of an expression at the head of her bed in the dawn.

  St Peter’s was several floors of turreted brick, with no courtyard to light its warrens of round-edged plaster so stained and pitted that it was easy to picture rats scuttling into its cavities from the river, cockroaches clinging to the catering trolleys. It was soon to amalgamate with a similar institution to create some gleaming new complex that might dupe the electorate into not noticing that yet another hospital had closed. Psychology Outpatients was an entirely NHS-run department, the twitching and the high-smelling mingling with the suited and the mildly neurotic.