I nod, sipping my wine. I notice how her hair needs washing, how everything about her seems to droop.
“He’s a strange guy, really,” she says. “You know that thing that happens — that the better you get to know a person, the
weirder they start to seem?”
“I know what you mean,” I tell her.
She gets out a pack of cigarettes, flicks at her lighter.
I put my hand on hers. “Nicky, whatever happened to giving up?”
“That was then,” she says. “Anyway, I’m going to give up again. Really.” Seeing my face, she smiles ruefully. She’s mocking
herself, but I can tell it’s an effort: Tonight she trails a kind of sadness around like a scent of dying flowers. “Look,
I know it’s pathetic, OK? It’s just to get me through this bit.”
She blows out smoke. There’s jazz over the sound system, Ella Fitzgerald, that voice like a skein of silk. We listen for a
moment.
“And you, Cat?” she asks. “How’s it going?”
I shrug; I don’t say anything.
“Hey.” She leans toward me across the table, as though she’s only just seen me properly. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?
Daisy? Richard?”
“Richard,” I tell her, but a little reluctantly.
“Oh, Cat. Want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know.” It’s as though to talk about it would be to make it real: something you couldn’t turn back from. “Sorry.”
She looks at me warily. “It’s probably just a bad patch,” she says. “Everyone has bad patches. It must be so tough with Daisy
ill and everything.”
She waits for a moment, watching me, to see if I want to say more. I shake my head a little.
“Cat, any time you want to talk … Well, you know that.”
“Thanks,” I say.
She fills my glass to the brim. By the way, she says, she’d been meaning to tell me — someone at Praxis knows this totally
brilliant homeopath. Would I like his number? I take it down, but only because it would seem impolite to refuse.
We eat toasted chicken sandwiches and listen to Ella Fitzgerald singing, “Into each life some rain must fall,” but somehow
it’s hard to keep the conversation going, and at ten she says she’s sorry but she feels so terribly tired and she really ought
to get home.
The lights are off in the house: Richard must be in bed already. I think that maybe tonight I’ll stay up for a while, try
lying down really late to see if that helps me sleep through. I’ll sit downstairs and watch
Newsnight
and some predictable thriller, and only go to bed when I’m almost falling asleep.
But when I go into the kitchen to get a drink of water, a hot smell of whiskey hits me. I turn on the light.
He’s slumped at the table. In front of him there is a nearly empty bottle of Glenfiddich.
“Richard. What the hell are you doing?”
He looks up slowly, as though his head is heavy.
“Would you mind terribly turning off the light?” he says. His speech is careful, slurred.
For a moment I don’t do anything.
“Turn the fucking light off.”
I do as he says, but I switch on the light in the cooker hood.
“Richard, for God’s sake. What’s happened? Are the girls OK? Is Daisy asleep?”
He looks at me with his eyes half open. In the thin light, his eyelids look swollen, as though he’s suffered some injury.
“It’s always,” he says carefully, “the girls. The bloody girls. What about me? Do I count anymore? Do I? Or is it just the
bloody girls?”
I sit at the table beside him.
“Of course.” I put my hand on his. “Of course you count. It’s just that it’s all such a strain, with Daisy ill and everything.…”
He ignores me.
“There’s something I want to know. Do I have a place in your fucking universe, Catriona? Do I mean anything?”
“You know you do. Don’t be an idiot.” It’s the way I might speak to a child: light, encouraging. “You know that. Don’t be
silly.”
“Do I count at all?” he asks again. The words are difficult, amorphous things he struggles to master. “Sometimes I wonder.
Whether I count at all.”
“Richard, you’ve drunk too much. Come to bed now.”
He shakes his head, too many times.
“I don’t know that I do,” he says. “I don’t know that I do count.”
“Richard — you’re only saying these things because you’re drunk.…” I touch his hand to soften what I’m saying.
He slowly lifts his head: He’s looking at me, the gleam of the cooker hood light reflecting in his eyes. “Sometimes …” he
says. “Sometimes I wonder what happened to that girl. The girl I saw in the garden under the … the … You know, that tree thing,”
he says.
“You mean the catalpa tree?”
He nods, but his face is dreamy, unfocused. “The girl under the tree. The girl with the sun in her hair. Whatever happened
to her?”
“Richard, you need to sleep.”
He pours more whiskey. Some of it misses the glass; I just let this happen.
“I liked you like that,” he says. “That beautiful girl. I want to know what fucking happened. Where she fucking went …” His
voice fades.
“Everyone changes,” I tell him, reaching for soothing platitudes to calm him. “That’s life. People change, move on. Of course
I’m different than when I was twenty-three.”
But he’s in his own world, seeing his own vision. I have no sense that he hears a word I say.
He drinks more whiskey. I wonder how on earth I am going to get him to bed. Perhaps I could just leave him here, in the hope
that he will sober up and go upstairs eventually. But I don’t want the girls to see him like this.
He puts down the glass, with too much noise, and reaches his hand to my face.
“You know, you’re beautiful,” he says. “You’re very beautiful.” He’s looking at me as though he’s only just really seen me.
He runs his hand down the hair at the side of my face with a kind of residual tenderness. “Still beautiful. But you’re not
like you used to be. You’re not that girl anymore.…” He leans toward me as though he is sharing a secret, something dark and
private. His eyes are clouded, troubled. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, Catriona, you must realize that. But sometimes
I don’t bloody know what I want.…” There’s a weird incongruence between the banality of this and the intimate intensity of
the way he says it. “Sometimes I just don’t fucking know what I want.”
“Never mind,” I say.
“That girl,” he says. “The girl with the sun in her hair.” Separating out the words, as though he’s speaking a language he’s
only just learned. “I want to know what fucking happened.”
There’s a sound in his voice like a sob. Someone different looks out of his eyes: someone with such a sense of deprivation,
I hate this, hate the easy tears that alcohol induces. He makes me think of my mother.
“Richard, people change. That’s how it is. Just come to bed now.”
There’s impatience in my voice, perhaps; at last he seems to hear me.
“Bed,” he says. “That is a very good idea. What good ideas you have, Catriona.”
He reaches out and starts to unbutton my shirt with one hand, pushing his hand straight inside my bra, clutching blindly at
me like a boy.
I take his hand between both of mine.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I tell him.
He follows me, stumbling a little on the steps, grabbing at the banister. I close the bedroom door behind us with a quick
rush of relief.
He comes across to me as I’m pulling the curtains, and starts to take off my clothes. He’s impatient, there’s heat in his
eyes, his fingers are clumsy, eager. Undressing each other in the middle of the room feels daring, strange. Not like the way
we usually make love, in bed under the duvet, by the forgiving light of the bedside lamp. More like when we were first together,
when it was all shot through with a sense of danger, when he used to dominate me and want to deck me out in bangles and silver
chains. Maybe he feels this too; he’s holding my wrists together behind my back. I feel a flicker of the old excitement.
“I’d like to …” he starts to say. “Cat, what I’d really like.…”
And then he seems to give up, to slump. He collapses onto the bed, pulls me beside him. He still has his shirt on. He rolls
on top of me, slides straight into me — he’s very heavy, he presses down on me, his muscles are too relaxed. The whiskey on
his breath is all over my face.
He thrusts a few times.
“Fuck,” he says.
I feel his erection soften.
“You’ve just drunk too much,” I tell him. “Let’s go to sleep now.”
He rolls off me. He lies with his back to me and is instantly asleep.
I pull the duvet up over him and go to check on Daisy.
Next morning, he is full of apologies. He’s binned the rest of the whiskey; he promises he’ll never have it in the house again.
He’s afraid he was thoroughly pathetic and he hopes I’ll just forget it. I tell him, Never mind, you just got a bit emotional
— I mean, we’re both so stressed, with everything that’s happening … He uses a lot of mouthwash before he goes to work.
When I go up to the attic, I find that he has put the air bed away and the sheets he used are in the laundry basket. I feel
a profound gratitude, thinking that maybe things will be all right now, that his drunkenness has in some obscure way healed
the rift between us.
S
HE’S WEARING A TROUSER SUIT
. She looks harder, older, today — definite, as though there is a black line drawn all round her. Next to her I am messy and
unsure.
She leans back in her chair. She has a folder on her knee.
“Thank you both for coming in,” she says.
It’s our last session, I tell myself: It’s just an hour; I only have to get through.
“Now, since I saw you last, I’ve been discussing Daisy’s case with Dr. McGuire, and I want to share our conclusions with you,”
she says. I notice that she doesn’t turn on her cassette recorder. “I’m going to, as it were, set out my stall, then you can
come back to me.”
Richard nods.
I wonder why she feels the need of this elaborate preamble.
Her green eyes move across our faces.
“We believe,” she says, “and, as I say, we’ve talked this through together as a team.… We believe that some time out from
the family would be useful for Daisy.…” I open my mouth: She silences me with her hand. “That that would enable us to comprehend
more fully just what is happening here.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell her.
“What we’re talking about here is a spell for Daisy as an inpatient, for assessment,” she says.
I feel a warm surge of relief that Daisy’s illness at last will he properly investigated.
“OK. Well, good. I think she needs that.” My mind is racing ahead, making lists and plans. Sinead can go to Sara’s; Daisy
will need new pajamas, she wouldn’t want to appear in public in her animal ones; and we’ll both have to get slippers, they
insist on slippers in hospital, I remember that from when Daisy was born; and we’ll need some drawing paper and all her fairy-tale
books.… “And I could stay with her, couldn’t I? They let you stay with your child now, don’t they?”
“That’s true on a medical pediatric ward,” she says. “But, you see, that isn’t quite what we’re talking about here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“As you know,” says Jane Watson, her voice as sleek as silk, “we do have concerns about Daisy and just what is going on. So
it would be more a case of following up on the psychological side of things and seeing just what happens to Daisy’s illness
when she’s away from the family.”
For a moment I can’t process this — it doesn’t seem to make sense. But Richard is murmuring agreement beside me.
“Now, as you may know,” she says, “I have some beds at an inpatient unit for children and young people. The Jennifer Norton
Unit. It’s quite an easy journey from where you are. And that’s where I’d like to admit her.”
I recognize the name. For a moment I can’t remember where I heard it, then I think of Dr. Carey’s uninvited visit. But I can’t
recall what she said, remember just the smell of dead fox and my feeling of unease.
“But surely that’s psychiatric.”
She gives me a little frown. “It’s a unit where we have the space and time to look at psychological problems,” she says smoothly.
“It’s time out from the family, time out from some of the pressures in these young people’s lives.”
Fear is rising in me. “And I could stay with her?”
“I’m afraid we don’t have the facilities for that,” she says. “And in a way it would defeat the purpose of the assessment.
Which, as I say, is about time out from the young person’s normal environment. But you’d of course be able to visit weekly.”
“
Weekly?
She’s only eight, for Chrissake.”
Richard puts his hand on my wrist. I move my arm away.
“And how long would this be for, exactly?” I ask.
“Obviously, there’s a settling-in process,” she says. She’s looking at Richard, enlisting his support. “We need to get to
know her, and she needs to get to know us.”
Richard nods. “Of course,” he says. His voice bland and reasonable, keeping everything calm.
“And we would certainly need some weeks to do a full assessment.”
“Weeks? But she’s ill,” I say. “What would happen about her illness — who would look after her?”
She smiles at me, that shiny, practiced smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.
“I really don’t think you need to worry,” she says. “As I say, we’ve got a very good staff ratio. And you don’t need to worry
about her schoolwork, either. At the Jennifer Norton we’re fortunate to have two full-time teachers and an occupational therapy
department — you can rest assured she won’t get behind.… So, any more questions about what I’ve said so far?”
But Richard is shaking his head, and I cannot speak.
“Let me tell you a little more about the unit.” She’s moving forward carefully, as though examining every word she says. “We
do have quite a mixture of children. We have some girls with anorexia, for instance. Obviously, these are all children with
troubles of one sort or another — and where it’s been decided that for whatever reason a period away from their families would
be beneficial. But, as I say, the staff ratio is excellent — virtually one-to-one.”