***
The hospital was on its last legs. Mops in buckets and the odd stepladder stood propped in corridors, taped-off areas appearing with no explanation, and the stains on the sections of paint – rust, parchment, drifts of white – could have been anything: pus; mould spores; infected blood. Yet, to Beth, St Peter’s was becoming a home-from-home. She made her way to the psychology department, jittery with unexpected excitement in all her anxiety. There was a patient in the waiting room who looked up when Dr Bywater arrived, following her with his eyes.
‘How have you been this week?’ asked Dr Bywater.
‘Uh … Not so good,’ Beth said brightly. Her face possessed an unslept wanness. She looked up at Dr Bywater, with her inscrutability.
Beth’s breathing slowed. The air seemed more relaxed, the time slower, the atmosphere like a bath or bed before sleep in the restorative tranquillity it afforded. Dr Bywater talked in her level tones about abandonment schemas and contradictory evidence, her measured concern somehow supremely feminine.
‘Remember, Fern will have been going through what Freud called the latency stage, an independent age. And your painful early experiences will predispose you to anxiety about this. They set off these automatic negative thoughts.’
‘Oh,’ said Beth. ‘I see.’
‘Let’s look at the fact that you’re a kind, selfless parent. That you have a long-term relationship,’ said Dr Bywater after a while.
Beth took this in, then nodded. ‘I … But I feel my roles – artist, mother – are going.’
‘How about your role as a wife?’
Beth cringed. ‘Oh God. I don’t think of that as a role. I don’t identify myself by that.’
‘But it’s important. How are things with him?’
Beth paused. ‘You keep asking that. OK, maybe you were right that I should focus on this more.’
‘Relationships take work.’
‘I’m sure that’s right, but I hate that notion,’ said Beth. ‘They should just be. Spontaneous, themselves. Yes, there are compromises, pride swallowing, minefield dodging, trying to avoid endless irritation – but don’t you hate the idea of relationship “work”?’
‘Secretly, yes,’ said Dr Bywater.
Beth heard her with a delay. She laughed. ‘You would be my friend, in real life,’ she said spontaneously. She blushed.
Dr Bywater nodded slightly, and Beth thought she detected a fleeting expression of recognition in her, but she said nothing. The therapist looked at her lap, and Beth watched her hair falling over her face in slow segments. It was no longer partly held back by the clip, and she looked less demure.
‘Do you practise all this? This “mindfulness”.’ Beth smiled. ‘Which is not a word.’
‘Of course,’ Dr Bywater said.
‘Always?’
‘It informs the way I live. It’s almost second nature after a while.’
‘It makes you … wise,’ said Beth, and felt embarrassed.
‘It makes me calmer.’ Dr Bywater tilted one eyebrow.
‘Do you need calming? I can’t imagine that.’
‘Perhaps more than you may imagine.’
‘Do you ever totally – lose it?’ said Beth, almost laughing again at the sensation of pushing boundaries.
But Dr Bywater would tell her nothing. It seemed to Beth like a game, such ritual non-disclosure: impolite, power-imbalanced. She imagined herself able to make cracks in the surface of another, less contained therapist, but not this one.
‘I suspect Fern may be in an unwise situation, if you say she is,’ she said. ‘Remember to trust your maternal instincts, which will be the strongest of all.’
‘Oh … you seem to understand,’ said Beth, the tears that were now emerging more easily in her appointments prickling her eyelids. ‘You’re the only one.’
‘I understand you.’
Beth breathed deeply. She couldn’t catch Dr Bywater’s eye.
Dr Bywater looked straight at Beth. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Anyway, so—’
Beth glanced at the clock. ‘It’s time to go,’ she said. ‘But how are you? It feels rude not even asking how you are in a session. Or anything. You’re married, right? Do you have children?’
Dr Bywater continued to look ahead, not changing her expression. ‘It’s not really relevant,’ she said. She touched her neck, lightly, with her fingertips. ‘This isn’t about me. It’s your hour, Beth.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Beth with an expression of mock-despair.
‘Are you uncomfortable with the attention on you? Unaccustomed?’
‘Well yes. But …’ Beth saw that they had gone thirteen minutes over the hour. ‘I’ll trick you into a revelation!’ she said.
She glanced down as she stood. In the shadows under Dr Bywater’s desk, there seemed to be the very high heel of a shoe lying on its side, but she was uncertain. Beth looked at the other corner of the room as though examining it, then returned her focus to the space beneath the desk until she could make it out. She was still not sure, the possible matching shoe beside it making a less determinate shape. High heels seemed entirely unlikely: she was discomfited in a way she couldn’t pin down. Later, she often pictured that shadow under the desk.
No Caller ID was ringing as she approached the main hospital exit. She snatched at the phone, her heart racing. The call stopped. Sefton Park came back to Beth, and then the place she usually succeeded in compartmentalising: the nature reserve in East London.
‘Mum,’ she said. ‘God.’
***
‘Did you ask David?’ Beth asked Sol when he came home. He had been in the House of Commons, shooting a series of political portraits in context, the change it represented from his normal work preoccupying him.
‘Ask David what?’ said Sol. ‘What was I supposed to—’
‘You know. Has he – Well, Sofia’s a psychologist. So, I—’
‘Huh, your therapy. This psychologist of yours.’ He cleared his throat. ‘David steers away from patients knowing the first thing about him. I guess that’s more analysis. He said – I don’t know, something anodyne. Like, yeah, she gets high patient approval. Is senior. So I guess you’re lucky to have her.’
A smile spread across Beth’s face, and she prevented her eyes widening.
‘Good. Anything else?’
Sol shook his head. ‘He was reluctant to talk about her. I got the feeling he was keeping something back, maybe, but was just being professional. It’d be Sofia who knows her. We’re always beat by the time we get to breakfast. Circuit training last week.’
She nodded. She could hear Fern and a friend talking loudly on FaceTime upstairs. Sol was writing something on his phone.
Laurie arrived to stay the night, and Beth wandered over to the canal window, the Mary-Lou unlit. One of the neighbours from a narrowboat further towards Battlebridge Basin came past, recognisable in the dark only because of his hair in a bun, and then she saw Tamara Bywater again. Her heart gunned; she was momentarily light-headed. There was a woman out there, on the other side of the canal on the towpath, and her hair seemed, in the night, to be brown and hanging below her shoulders, her slimness and walk Dr Bywater’s, and, instinctively, Beth wanted to run to her, to embrace her, because clearly now the longing to meet was mutual; but her clothes, after all, were wrong: a leather jacket over tight trousers. The woman walked up and down on the towpath opposite the house, as if in thought, and Beth began to open the window to call, but she had gone.
Then, as she had known she would sometime soon, her world increasingly seen through Tamara Bywater’s imagined vision, she pulled out a pile of cuttings from their drawer in her tiny office extension looking out on to what remained of a balcony with its struggling honeysuckle; tipped them on the desk; and an old Vogue flopped on to the chair in all its treasured, several-copies-kept shininess, an obvious tool for masochistic prodding. She found the double-page spread. She longed for Tamara to see it.
‘Elizabeth Penn’s Ghost Walks promise to ha
unt us through the decades. Her finely wrought evocations of memory and desire have inspired tears and acclaim in equal measure. The Gavron’s hot ticket. At the Turin, 3100 Broadway from May 21. Portrait: the artist with daughter Fern in her studio.’
The one small reproduction of an oil from the series jolted her back to a different time, a different place, to the pain of the earliest search for her mother. If it haunted others, it haunted her. She could never look for long at those paintings that had established her name.
Fern laughed straight at the camera, a toddler with a shiny monkey fringe gripping her mother’s neck with both arms in a moment of semi-hysteria, the passage of rage and glee always animating her face with a rapidity that made Beth want to laugh. She was only two and a half in that photograph. Beth would have paid for a resurgence of that sweet need.
She herself looked like a slim, blessed mother with a hit show and a promise of a bigger future. She would have assumed at that point that Fern would love her always; that she would have another child; that she would be harmonious with Sol; and that she would manage not to dwell on her own mother again. She had been made up with sculpted cheeks, dark eyelids and lashes so the drama was her eyes, the light golds and browns and muddied reds of her hair that could descend into strands of fawn and mouse, styled to catch the light in a display of youth, hiding the ears, and God, she was once almost beautiful, she thought for the first time with certainty. Again, she summoned Tamara Bywater. What excuse could she manufacture to bring the magazine in? She gazed with pride and pain at herself in her early thirties, as though staring at someone else. She hadn’t lost it by then, the girl-woman radiance of one’s twenties merely refined by the exchange of flesh for bone, the skin glow still there for a couple more years, the slender exposed arms. She should have been only happy with their lives.
In Beth’s childhood, Lizzie had borrowed Vogue from a woman she met at her part-time receptionist’s job. What if Lizzie had been reading Vogue in later years, and stumbled across this glossed vision of her own daughter: mother, artist, London resident? If she had, it hadn’t been enough. Even this. Nothing Beth did could impress her, or bring her to her. Nothing. She had to remember that.
She put the magazine back. Her old postcard of the Virgin Mary from the Catholic cathedral was in that drawer, kept safe yet hidden, and she dreaded seeing it, just as a little part of her wanted to glimpse it; just as she dreaded contact from No Caller ID, yet its absence wounded anew.
She and Sol argued, bickering before they went to bed. She expected him to cuddle her as they sat propped with the laptop and she tried to ease the clenching of her back against the bed head. He didn’t. Resolutely, she talked with a semblance of normality, but the tension took time to subside.
In the eventual calm, she teased him; he rubbed her neck; she accused him of farting and made exaggerated sounds of disgust.
‘Shut up now, I want to watch,’ he said. ‘Stop being silly.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ she said.
‘I am six and a half years older than you,’ he said in the monotone of a repeated phrase in her ear, then kissed it.
‘God, Dad, you’re ancient.’
‘Watch.’
Sol was staring at the screen. Was this it? Was this now the shape of her life: this domesticity, even normality; a state she had always feared was impossible for her to attain? Recently rattled, she hoped with a superstitious fervour that it would remain this way; and yet, even now, an old drift of fantasy bobbed through the reality, almost every reverie charged with some non-specific glow of romance and desire. Her mind drifted to her next session with the therapist. ‘Is there a wildness in me that can’t be satisfied by this?’ she asked her.
Sol shifted, and contorted his body to worry at a horn of dry skin on his foot.
She played back conversations from the therapy sessions, her responses rearranged with more wit and wisdom so that their dialogue was poised somewhere between a West End farce and a moving confessional. She devised entertaining phrases she could use the following week, clothes she could combine. The shrink clocked what she wore: of that, she was certain. Somehow, with Jack Dorian and with Dr Bywater, she instantly felt more attractive, although she found her idle fantasies about Jack had abated.
‘What are you thinking about?’ said Sol.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, honey. Nothing looks pretty interesting.’
NINE
Beth woke early on Tuesday morning. She planned her clothes for the therapist.
‘Dad!’ said Fern. Sol had hurried back to the house in his gym clothes to see her before she left.
‘Just caught you, babycakes,’ he said, and he pretended to swing her in the air as he had done when she was smaller, staggering and making her giggle. Beth smiled. Dr Bywater, who was increasingly residing in her head, was somehow watching this endearing family scene.
‘You’ve nearly given yourself a heart attack to get back in time?’ said Fern.
‘I’d do anything for my favourite daughter in the world,’ he said, as he often did.
‘Your only daughter, numpty face.’
‘And so? You’d still be my favourite if I had a thousand daughters.’
Beth, watching, remembered other moments between them over the years.
‘I’ll keep them for you,’ Sol had once said when Beth was combing head lice caught at school from a six-year-old Fern’s hair, and Fern was crying over their wriggling destinies.
‘Where?’ she had sobbed.
‘In my beard,’ he had said solemnly, and picked one up.
‘I would follow you to the ends of the earth to be your daddy,’ he said often, and he said it again now, setting her on her feet and miming exhaustion from tossing her into the air.
‘And by the way,’ he said, ‘I will challenge any arsehole who mistreats you to a duel. I’ve got to change. I’m schvitzing like a pig.’
‘Ew,’ said Fern, but she still allowed his parting hug. ‘Why are you so dressed?’ she asked Beth.
‘Am I?’
‘Like, yes? For a bunch of snooty kids?’
Beth laughed. ‘I’ve got to go. Bye, darling,’ she said, making herself not lean over to kiss Fern, to hug her. She turned from her, as was required, and busied herself by making a call as she put on her coat to leave.
Fern said nothing. There was a hesitation, as though she were reflexively offering her cheek for a kiss. ‘Mum …’ she said, but Beth was already closing the door and, though she heard Fern, she stood on her tiptoes in the hall in indecision, then forced herself not to return.
***
The office at St Peter’s was a world down a passage: a house of dreams in the escape from reality it created. Was this what it was like to visit a geisha, a guru? That shivering, heightened calm?
‘She your girl crush?’ asked Ellie on the phone, after Beth and Dr Bywater had chatted a little at the end of a session, a sense of affinity colouring the formality.
‘Ahaha.’
And at the next session, there was no sign at all of anything that could be construed as approval. Dr Bywater closed the session on time; she was gracious, understated, professional.
‘Forget what I told you about the shrink,’ Beth said to Ellie, cringing. ‘I’m just a fuckwit.’
Lizzie’s face came to her, uncharmed. The shame of hubris. Again and again. A ball in her throat. The old rejection. She fought it. Where was No Caller ID?
***
‘David!’ Beth said, drawing in a sharp breath that made her say his name in a croak when she saw David Aarons with Sol in their gym clothes.
‘My patient cancelled,’ he said, kissing her and pouring her tea.
‘A proper beard!’ said Beth. ‘Makes you look like a shrink.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Honey,’ said Sol. ‘What was it you wanted to ask David? About Dr whatshername. Darn coffee’s two shots. Bowater.’
‘Bywater,’ sai
d Beth. Blood ran up her neck.
David’s face stiffened. ‘Sol asked me about this. There’s not much I can say.’
‘There must be something you can tell me! Sofia must mention her? It’s maddening to know nothing about the person in front of you. I’m so curious now.’
‘Do you know about transference?’ said David, then looked up at her with an awkward smile.
‘Kind of,’ said Beth. The blush returned. She scrabbled for her phone.
‘It’s about projection,’ he said. ‘Well handled, it’s a useful tool, but—’
‘The redirection of feelings and desires, and especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood, towards a new object …’ she read out loud.
‘Bet, you don’t need to be reading a Wiki stub to a senior analyst,’ said Sol, and Beth started to laugh.
‘Sorry!’ she said. ‘And what about countertransference?’
David paused.
‘So do you get the hots for your patients, Dr Aarons?’ Beth swept on in a kamikaze manner, embarrassment fuelling daring. ‘One of those actresses I’m suspecting come to you? A stray Hampstead cougar?’
‘Bet!’ said Sol, but there was laughter in his voice. ‘Only you.’
‘Countertransference is a response to transference,’ said David.
‘Yes, but sometimes it must not be, right?’
‘Yes, and then the therapist must exercise control, consult their supervisor. Or cause great damage. And probably get themselves struck off.’ The taciturn David glanced at her.
Beth opened her mouth. ‘I— She’s nice,’ she said in a small voice. ‘We seem to get on really well. She’s—’
‘The therapeutic relationship is vital,’ said David in the serious tone he always used when talking about work, ‘but she’s meant to challenge you. Make things uncomfortable for you at times.’
‘Oh yes, she does that too,’ said Beth, but her voice was light. ‘Sofia knows her well?’ she blurted.
David hesitated. ‘“Colleagues’ responses are not always the same as patients’,” he says enigmatically. And with that,’ he said, ‘the analyst now maintains a professional silence. Boundaries.’
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