***
So began Beth’s period of incarceration in Tamara Bywater’s spare room. Her cynicism was tempered by the sight of Tamara propped on a spread of hair on pillows and, once Angus had left, a kind of hectic clinging that only dipped intermittently into her old evasions. ‘This is our honeymoon,’ she said on various occasions in a croak, ‘and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for both of us that it should be like this. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
For all her drama, she seemed to be trying to hide the agony of her throat. Nursemaid and nanny, Beth fell quickly into a routine of soothing her; she cooked for her, contacted her doctor, talked to her, stroking her forehead as she spoke, and Tamara smiled and talked back, their conversation finally more fluent. On the first afternoon, Beth found herself collecting the younger daughter Francesca from her activities centre, armed with a note of permission from her mother.
‘Fern,’ she muttered as she accompanied the scowler back home. She FaceTimed Fern that evening, sitting with her back close to a wall, but Fern would not pick up. Neither did Sol. Please, she messaged him. Let’s talk.
***
The centre of activity was the spare bedroom at the back of the house, which Tamara claimed was cooler than her own, and there she had stationed herself under fans in the middle of the small double bed, with no suggestion that Beth would share it after a day’s ministrations. From time to time she begged for visits from her girls, yet she was distinctly less aware of them in general than Beth would have expected, hours passing with no mention of them followed by a sudden desire for their presence. Miriam floated in and out of the house at will, keeping largely to her bedroom when at home, while Francesca either hovered when back from her summer school or was glued to her mother’s iPad.
‘I don’t think you realise,’ said Tamara, looking at Beth intensely, ‘Francesca is a problem child. Only Angus can handle her. I’m so hurt by her, but I worry about her all the time.’
‘How awful,’ said Beth, her voice insincere even to her own ears. ‘What about her sister?’
Tamara ran her hand down Beth’s arm, Beth’s nerves rippling with a delay. ‘Miriam. Oh, she’s angelic. Really. Her birth mother’s a raging bitch, but we’ve largely had custody of her, been … she and I, more like sisters. She borrows my clothes all the time; I give her jewellery. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
Beth said nothing, in loyalty to Fern. She stroked Tamara’s forehead, and was asked to summon Francesca to say goodnight.
Angus repeatedly offered to fly back. ‘No, no, I don’t want him,’ Tamara hissed. ‘This is our chance to be together.’ And then she and Beth would start conversations of little consequence yet seemingly of vast significance, their mutual amusement and affinity pulling them on and on into the night, Beth’s curiosity about Tamara’s past and present never satisfied – while the girls haunted the house. After two days, Angus intervened from Switzerland and sent the girls to his mother.
There was still no call or message from Sol. Beth emailed him, asking him when he wanted to speak, and frequently contacted Fern, who once sent back an email. Beth opened it with shaking hands. I’m OK was all it said.
TWENTY-ONE
Beth continued to message Fern every day, and called her mobile, but Fern cut her dead. Some of her WhatsApp messages were read while others were ignored, and she repeatedly affirmed her love, or sent her observations, pictures, jokes, emojis. Sol told her little beyond occasional reports on Fern’s well-being.
Tamara’s excitement about Beth’s forthcoming show at the Gavron continued as a theme, her conviction of Beth’s genius now apparently confirmed as she maintained that her fame would outstrip Aranxto’s and refused to hear Beth’s informed denials.
They had entered a period of confinement, a fevered exile in which normal life barely existed and there was no past or future but a spot of time punctuated only by contact with America; and yet when Beth crept from Tamara’s bedside, she never knew who would greet her the next day. It seemed that she woke to find a different Tamara every morning. Tamara was a more changeable creature than anyone she had ever encountered, one whose fresh certainties and enthusiasms took Beth along hairpin bends that she could only attempt to negotiate, yet left her bewildered. Tamara entered people’s psyches, poured peace upon them with the inner contentment that seemed to radiate from her. Then suddenly she herself would fall into despair, or agitation, or announce the need to retreat from the world. It was still intermittently impossible to stimulate her interest, and Beth found herself dancing round her as her courtier.
Despite much conjecture, the hidden meanings behind Tamara’s varying behaviours were difficult to ascertain, each conclusion evaporating. ‘Oh Angus calls me a free radical,’ said Tamara with a shrug that discouraged further talk. Yet the rewards to such challenges were indispensable for reasons that were hard to fathom.
***
Time was passing, and Beth delayed thinking about her ticket to Newport, while no longer able to deny that Sol was avoiding her. Tamara remained where she was. ‘This is always the sickness chamber,’ she said. ‘The traffic can’t grate at my nerves here. Anyway, we can’t be in my room – I must have a little sensitivity to Angus.’
‘How often do you shag each other, then?’ said Beth flippantly, then laughed, to protect herself.
‘Oh my darling, our sex life pretty much died years ago. He’s a good man, but …’
Beth looked into the bedroom only once while Tamara slept, easing the doorknob with burglar’s stealth to be greeted by traces of incense and old candle smoke, but the curtains were closed and, though she fumbled, she could find no light switch, and only the hulking outline of the Bywater bed was visible.
‘What kind of a honeymoon is this?’ said Tamara again with a blurry smile from her pillows, tilting Beth’s chin and holding her close to her gaze. ‘In a nunnery. A sanatorium. I am so sorry. When I’m better, where shall we go? Where shall we be, you and I?’
And so in conversations that nagged Beth with their more hyperbolic echoes of those with Sol in the early days, yet kept her from America and reality, they played at houses, castles, hideaways, because there was no space in that room of suffering for the intrusion of practicalities. Tamara spun tales for Beth, and Beth joined in, any obscure observation that fired through her mind returned to her in shinier form. ‘You are the most brilliant creature I’ve ever met,’ Tamara said to her. Then in the morning, there would be a force field around the room, the chill palpable as Tamara frowned at her laptop in glasses in a partial return to work.
‘What are you doing?’ said Beth into the frost. She frequently failed at such times to modulate her voice.
‘Admin. Distressed patients. Reports. Quotes.’ Tamara spoke, barely moving her mouth above the rapid typing.
‘You email your patients?’
Tamara sighed. ‘I don’t think you understand quite how senior the job is and therefore how busy I am, Beth. Lots of people rely on me being there for them. This work never stops.’
Beth picked up Tamara’s plate, leaning over her shoulder to skim her inbox. Tamara fired off replies at top speed, issuing advice, consolation, encouragement in a matter of seconds, and yet Beth knew how each sentence would be clung to for salvation. She herself had been too fearful and bound by etiquette. Yet there were hordes out there clamouring for Dr Bywater’s tossed-off insights, as though she were a deity who could confer bliss on those who craved it. In her guise of wise doctor, she was oblivious to Beth.
‘Where is this from?’ Beth would ask, picking up an object, an item of clothing, a small antique. ‘A patient gave it to me. Sweet,’ Tamara would say. Or, ‘A patient gave it to me, I think.’
‘You think?’
‘They usually give me presents at the end. The appreciative ones. It’s hard to remember.’
And Beth listened with the latest confirmation that Tamara’s ambivalence was all her own fault. Then, when she arrived later with breakfast, Tamara would embra
ce her as though she hadn’t seen her for days, pulling her to her, kissing her long and cool on the mouth.
Soon after her bouts of emailing, Tamara would fall asleep and Beth would leave for some hours to go to Little Canal Street or to her studio to work and to call her family, Fern unavailable, and Sol increasingly absent. On her return, Beth sometimes found Tamara crying alone in bed with tangled hair as she sipped from a cup in an old silk garment, a glitter to her despair. ‘I thought you’d left me. Don’t do that again,’ she said. ‘You won’t really leave here, will you?’
Beth paused. She opened her mouth. Tamara sat there, looking terrified.
‘You helped me,’ said Beth, and suddenly she wanted to cry. ‘Now it’s my turn to rescue you.’
The next time Beth came into the room, Tamara was rubbing some cream on her skin with such focus in a small mirror that she barely looked up, then just as Beth was leaving she flashed her the warmest smile, and she had coloured her mouth for the first time in days. It flicked on a primitive switch of desire.
Beth leaned across the bed, but Tamara would barely kiss her. There was a smallness to her mouth, a reluctance to commit herself. You could hold this creature in your lap and its eyes transfix you, and then it would just wander off, or hurt with all its sharpnesses. Tamara’s power lay in the fact that she didn’t essentially care. She could do without.
It became slowly apparent that the majority of conversations turned into discussions about Tamara, but Tamara confided her problems in Beth, engaging her in her dilemmas, and when Beth arrived, after circuitous rumination, at some solution, Tamara was rewardingly delighted. ‘You understand me more than anyone in my life ever has,’ she said.
The next time Beth approached the room, Tamara was talking in an animated fashion that softened into the tones recalled from the consulting room, and as she entered, Tamara became more businesslike.
‘Who was that?’
‘Oh, an ex-patient.’
‘I thought that wasn’t allowed?’
‘He’s a silly boy. He needs all the help he can get,’ she said, and busied herself with the papers on her bed.
‘But—’
‘Perhaps you should get back to Sol,’ said Tamara, bending over her computer later in the day. ‘Is it fair to deprive you of him?’
‘What?’ Beth barked.
‘I am thinking only of you.’
‘For a start he’s in America, and my flight’s not yet, and secondly – and the main thing – I’m—I’m here, for God’s sake,’ she said, and slammed the door and left the house, but Tamara called her back later and she was semi-naked on the bed, with a sushi takeaway on trays that she had spread all over the covers for them and five different teas for Beth to taste. Beth delivered a list of her grievances, Tamara apologised, and then they embraced, but touching her further would clearly have been an assault on her feverish state.
‘You don’t know what it’s like to be left like this. You’re here right now, in my room. If you left again, the pain would be unbearable. Beth. Darling.’
‘I do,’ said Beth. ‘I know what it is to be left. To be so near someone, but they don’t want you.’
‘What do you mean?’
Beth paused. She swallowed.
‘Go on.’
‘One day, after my mother had left me and moved away from Liverpool, I saw her face …’
Tamara listened, stroking, holding her.
‘Why have you never told me this before?’ she said at the end of the story.
‘I couldn’t.’
‘But, darling, it doesn’t make sense,’ said Tamara. ‘Does it? She must have had a motive for being there.’ And for the first time since she had terminated therapy, Tamara was the Dr Bywater of old, her mind untangling the inexplicable and ordering it into patterns.
‘But she was right there,’ said Beth. ‘And she didn’t come to me. Didn’t want to see me.’
‘That isn’t logical,’ said Tamara, twisting a strand of Beth’s hair. ‘It seems likely that she was thwarted.’
‘But—’ Beth frowned.
‘Where was your father?’
‘At home, as usual.’
‘He didn’t know she was there?’ said Tamara in her gentle voice, stroking Beth’s forehead. ‘You couldn’t say anything, I suppose.’
‘I really doubt it. No. Mentioning her name would be like stabbing him.’
‘But, darling,’ said Tamara, coughing lightly, and running her fingers through Beth’s, ‘she was trying to see you. It couldn’t have been unintentional. She was holding you in mind, if not in body. Sometimes, simple proximity is all we have. Sometimes it’s a transitional object.’
‘She didn’t even come down after she heard my voice. She really didn’t want to see me.’
‘You silly one. Then why would she be there? In a flat on her own? Your brother had gone; she had run away from your father. She wanted to protect her Beth. To keep an eye on you, at least, even if there was some reason she couldn’t be with you.’
‘Really?’ Beth murmured, and hot sore tears had started to spread. ‘But. She just stood there at the department store when I saw her. TJ’s.’
Tamara paused. ‘She could have been stronger.’
‘She should have.’
‘Are you sure there wasn’t more?’ Dr Bywater was speaking softly into her ear, skimming her breast. ‘How do you know she didn’t talk to your father, for instance?’
‘Well, I really don’t think she did.’
‘Would he have told you?’
‘No …’
‘Infidelity counted then, as a reason for divorce. Marital abandonment … He’d have had rights, in the circumstances.’
‘I suppose …?’
‘Beth, I doubt any mother would accept the loss of her child so easily. Especially if she put herself there. You were a child. You wouldn’t know everything. Are you sure she didn’t fight to see you? To have custody of you even? Your father would never have told you that.’
A kiss on her neck.
‘You think?’
‘For sure.’
Beth looked into Tamara’s eyes.
‘Thank you for this,’ she said.
***
The next time Beth returned from a morning of work at her studio, Tamara was in the kitchen in her drooping antique tea gown, hair caught in a chopstick, with an adolescent perching on a stool opposite her. His hand trembled as he drank one of her perfumed teas. Beth backed out, and worked on the mosaic, knowing herself to be a fool.
‘You hadn’t told me about him,’ she said once the eager teenager had departed.
‘Oh, I didn’t even think to. Mick,’ said Tamara.
‘Who is he?’
‘I know – knew – his mother.’
‘He thinks he’s in love with you.’
‘He’s eighteen! Don’t be ridiculous.’
There was a knock on the door. Beth hesitated, then rose to open it.
‘By the way, darling,’ said Tamara. ‘You mustn’t ever let a tall, blondy, red-haired man through the door. He usually wears a suit. Late thirties. Very convincing.’
‘Who?’
‘He was an NHS patient but he found out where I live, and he thinks I can cure him. Just say I’m not in and close the door.’
‘He fancies you, you mean.’
‘Oh, who knows.’
‘So that’s your stalker,’ said Beth grimly.
‘No, no, he’s online. Do you want some of this nail varnish?’
Beth barely glanced at it, and with an open show of impatience she went to answer the door at a second knock, and it was the jasmine-cutting neighbour, who looked at her with undisguised hostility.
‘Oh, Duncan, such a relief you’re here!’ said Tamara, and picked up his hand with a weak gesture to kiss it. ‘You see, I’m ill. And Beth’s brilliant, been helping me so much, but she’s the arty type. I doubt she can fix a dishwasher drain or whatever the problem is.’
‘T
hank you, Tamara,’ said Beth.
‘Let me have a look,’ said Duncan.
‘I want to see your work on the mosaic,’ Tamara murmured to Beth.
‘You know – you know –’ said Beth in the passage, ‘I am a fucking idiot. Let’s face it. I presented myself to you in a gesture of high romance, and I’ve ended up trotting off to summer school and clearing up bin juice.’
Tamara’s laughter carolled through the consulting room. ‘I love the way you speak sometimes!’ she said.
‘It’s not meant to be funny.’
Tamara took her hand. ‘Show me the mosaic.’
They walked to the yard quite openly entwined, and Tamara was full of praise; then she talked with tenderness to a neighbour who appeared, a young woman with a pile of washing, and Beth watched, apparently no longer there.
‘Come, Beth,’ said Tamara, taking her by the arm, and they kissed in the consulting room.
‘You know, I actually will have to think about Newport,’ said Beth. ‘My ticket’s Tuesday at dawn.’
Tamara paused momentarily. ‘I think it’s time to seduce you,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘And why not? The time is ripe. You never caught my lurgy. Which is a wonder for us.’
‘Oh,’ said Beth uselessly. ‘Yes.’ She held the doorframe.
‘Tomorrow night … I will be so much better by tomorrow night. Isn’t that phrase full of promise? Tomorrow night,’ she murmured.
‘Yes.’
‘So. Go out this evening, see some friends,’ said Tamara, running little kisses over Beth’s face. ‘You need a break.’
Beth stiffened. She hesitated. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But would you be all right if I did?’
‘I’m beginning to recover, I think.’
‘Well, I could do some work then; I’m behind on the last paintings,’ she said, and Tamara didn’t demur. ‘I need to get some more old childhood river photos Aranxto has found.’
The Seduction Page 21