Infidelity (29 page)

We walked on in silence, my head a tumult of questions, contradictions, possibilities, doubts and cold, cold fear . . . Where would Sarah be in a month? Where would
we
be, she and I? How could I ever contemplate returning to Australia without her, even for a visit? Why would I go so soon, if there were even a sliver of a chance she might come with me? (What joy there would be in that, I thought – how proud of her I would be!) Why wouldn't I stay in London for as long as it took for her to regain her old certainty, for us to be together again – or even for Perry's situation to have become clearer? On the other hand, if things were not to be quickly resolved, I wondered if spending a few weeks back home might help restore my equilibrium.

‘Jelly, I –'

‘Good God, don't try to respond on the spot. Don't say a word. I'm simply planting a seed, what? Ponder it. Could be a big opportunity for you to do something out there. Could be nothing. First thing is for us to fly out there, get on the ground and size up the situation.'

‘I could certainly think about helping you with the recce.'

‘The world can't freeze while Sar works out what to do next. Remember what I said – if it's beyond your control, and it is, you can only await developments. But that doesn't mean sit on your hands. You still have a life to get on with. Brutal? Sure. Sometimes brutal is best. Don't wallow, Tom. It ill becomes any of us to wallow, what?'

At the next corner, Jelly said: ‘I have to see my tailor. Yes, believe it or not, I have a tailor. I'll leave you here. Go and buy yourself a decent fucking shirt on the way back.'

39

B
ack in the genteel surroundings of the Roslyn Gardens dining room, I was being questioned by Elizabeth about Sarah's retreat to Littleton.

‘I'm afraid things have rather come unstuck,' was all I felt prepared to say.

That was the palest possible shadow of the truth, but I didn't know how else to respond to Elizabeth's question. I didn't think it was up to me to give her chapter and verse. If Sarah had decided not to tell her own mother she'd had an abortion, who was I to barge in, even if I was – had once been – the father-to-be?

‘Sarah does this type of thing,' Elizabeth said. ‘Full on. No restraint, to the point of . . . I don't know . . .'

‘Recklessness?'

‘Precisely. Recklessness. Then, out of the blue,
brakes on!
'

‘There's so much history I don't know.'

‘Try not to look so stricken, Tom. I know you're carrying a torch for my Sarah, and what mother wouldn't want a decent fellow like you to sweep her daughter off her feet?'

‘I hardly seem to have done that.'

‘Let's wait and see, shall we? Up until a week ago, I could hardly get her to talk about anything but you. All roads seemed to lead us to Tom. It was a trifle embarrassing, actually.'

‘I quite like the sound of that.'

‘Of course you do – you're a man. But what goes up must come down, Tom, especially where Sarah is concerned.'

I had taken Elizabeth's willingness to speak so frankly about Sarah as a compliment. I wondered if it might also have been a sign of just how deeply the unresolved issues between mother and daughter ran. Each spoke about the other in almost equal measures of affection and exasperation. But any glimpse Elizabeth could offer me – any clue to the state of Sarah's heart – was welcome. I was a man sorely in need of answers.

‘May I ask you something?' I said.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows.

‘When you were telling me about Sarah having to play the corporate wife for the client visits to Whitman House – the girls, and so on – I wondered whether you . . . well, you seemed rather more distressed . . . I just wasn't sure your disquiet was entirely warranted by the situation, distasteful as it was. I mean, you did imply Sarah was a mere bystander, I think. I suppose I wondered if there was more . . . Is this terribly unfair of me? To raise this again?'

Elizabeth looked steadily at me and remained silent for some minutes. I saw in her face some of the darkness I had glimpsed in Sarah's at our very first meeting. We sipped our wine and she took another mouthful of her salad before responding.

‘I only
know
what I told you. Sarah was pretty tight-lipped about it, once she'd given me the bare bones. But having watched her rough passage through adolescence, I found it distressingly easy to imagine how things at the House of Whitman might have got out of hand – perhaps been rather more lurid, rather
looser
,
than she ever admitted to me. Sarah is not built for the role of bystander. I think that's all I care to say.'

‘Her adolescence?' I was breaking all my own rules, pushing Elizabeth further than she wanted to go, but I was desperate for any pieces of this jigsaw I could lay my hands on.

‘Wild. What would you expect? Straight out of the textbook of absent father syndrome. I had the usual symbolic fights with her over the length of her school tunic and the colour of her hair, when we both knew the real battleground was sex – specifically, how to keep her from becoming pregnant. I'm being far too frank, Tom. But you did ask.' She sighed.

‘I assume you succeeded.'

‘As far as I know. But it was tough going, and there were a couple of periods when we were very far apart – once in adolescence and again when she was a student.'

‘When you say far apart . . .'

‘Oh, the wall of silence. At least she was still living at home the first time. The second time was especially painful – she was in college – her friends became her family, and I simply didn't see her for six months. Hardly spoke to her on the phone. But these things pass . . .'

Elizabeth lapsed into private recollection and I tried to concentrate on my food.

Eventually she said: ‘She went wild over religion, too. There was more than a bit of overlap, in fact. I think a lot of adolescents confuse spirituality and sexuality – don't you, Tom? Or is it just that churchgoing covers all that steaminess in a cloak of respectability?'

‘It's a murky area, I agree. It was for me. The boundaries do become blurred. If you're brought up in a religiously charged atmosphere, you're never quite sure where those ecstatic surges are coming from, I guess. Or where to put them.'

‘Quite. I was never one of those mothers who got into a tight little huddle with other mothers, so I never really knew how Sarah compared. But I know it was an awful thing to feel as if my beautiful daughter was in danger of becoming a tart. Awful. I suspect lots of mothers go through it. I used to wonder if the girls at private schools were different – we were never well enough off to find out. But I suspect it was just the same. Perhaps dressed up differently. Different accent. I do remember overhearing some rather toffy women at a charity lunch where I was waiting on tables trying to work out how to explain to their teenage daughters that oral sex was still sex. I remember wishing that was my greatest challenge.'

I noticed, again, that Elizabeth's face bore the signs of strain common to parents who have worried their way through the process of raising difficult children.

Sarah had once told me her mother was in her mid-thirties when Sarah was born – old for a first-time mother in that era, when she would already have been adjusting to the prospect of being regarded as a spinster. Though Elizabeth had been deliberately vague about the chronology, Sarah had always suspected the fleeting marriage to the Rat of Kent was the result of an unplanned pregnancy that must have been a shocking thing for Elizabeth and her family to deal with. So perhaps Elizabeth had had her own reasons for fearing the outcome of Sarah's torrid adolescence. Looking at her, in her late-seventies, it was hard to visualise her having been impulsive enough to become pregnant to a tourist. But it was easy to imagine how determined she must have been that her only daughter should not make the same kind of mistake.

‘We both know Sarah can be impetuous,' I said. ‘I've loved that about her from the start. Even she admits she's reckless. But you said she also has a history of switching off.'

‘Oh, she dropped boys as abruptly as she fell for them. And she was always falling for them. It was the same with religion – all on, or all off. I'm afraid she has what they call form, Tom. Try not to feel too special – this rushing off to Littleton is not about you. I'd be pretty sure about that.'

I was still unable to judge whether or not Elizabeth knew about the termination, but I was certain I shouldn't be the one to tell her. (It was possible she had never been told about the earlier pregnancy and miscarriage that had so traumatised Sarah and very probably been the catalyst for one of the wall-of-silence periods.)

If Elizabeth was thinking I had fallen into some kind of painful trap and she was trying to ease me out of it, she was failing spectacularly. Hearing some of the history of a teenage girl I had only known as a forty-four-year-old, my devotion to Sarah was undiminished though perhaps a little more clear-eyed. Love always starts in the present and has to work its way back through the loved one's history, right to the beginning, seeking validation.

‘Time for a walk, I think, Tom, don't you? We've had rather enough candid snaps from the Sarah album.'

‘Elizabeth, you need to understand that nothing you've told me –'

‘Oh, I know you're besotted. I acknowledge that. I hope you don't doubt I'm utterly devoted to her myself. She's broken my heart several times over, but she is still the daughter I clung to when everything else was collapsing around me. And the joys outweigh the sorrows a million to one. Always have. Almost always. Well, ten to one, anyway.'

As I pushed Elizabeth's wheelchair out the door of Roslyn Gardens and along the footpath, she said: ‘I think we might make this a regular date, Tom. What do you say? At least while Sarah is missing in action.'

‘That would suit me very nicely,' I replied, feeling there were no other straws to clutch at.

40

O
nce the organisational die was cast at Blair, I had felt free to call Selena and accept her invitation to Friday drinks with her colleagues.

‘Lovely,' she had said. ‘I should warn you – they're your fan club.'

‘Fan club?'

‘Oh yes. Hail to Tom! Liberator of psychologists!'

‘Well, if the revamp has made them feel like that, I'm delighted.'

‘Most of them still hanker after clinical work, though. They'll be hounding you for dispatches from the front line.'

We met in the pub on Charing Cross Road where I had met Fox on the Monday after Sarah's termination. This time, the place was packed with Friday-nighters acting as if they'd been let out of prison. Only two of Selena's usual group could make it and, having interviewed both of them during my research, I felt as if I knew them better than I actually did.

(That was sometimes a problem with clinical work, too. You always felt as if you knew everything worth knowing about a client when, in fact, you only knew what they chose to tell you, and they mainly told you the bad news, which is why you should never ask a psychotherapist for a snapshot of society – their version will be as lopsided as a journalist's. My occasional, accidental encounters with clients in the ‘real world' were often surprising – there they were in the supermarket, wheeling a trolley full of mundane stuff and queuing with everyone else at the checkout, dazed as sheep, or walking hand in hand down the street with an apparently benign partner I'd been led to think of as monstrous.)

Conversation was almost impossible in that hot and rowdy pub, and though I was far from being the oldest person in the bar, the twenty-year gap between me and those three women felt like a chasm. I was also wondering if I was suffering mild hearing loss, to say nothing of an underdeveloped tolerance for alcohol – they were quaffing two drinks to every one of mine.

‘I'm determined to do something worthwhile with my degree. Ooh, does that sound incredibly naff?' That was Lucy, dark eyes twinkling with intelligence and a hint of mischief. She was hoping to enhance her life by fleeing Blair, and wanted me to endorse her plan.

Flora, perched atop hazardously high heels, tossed her blonde ponytail and looked earnestly at me through rimless glasses. ‘Do you think we're being hopelessly romantic about this? I mean, you've been there. My dad says every job has its tedious side, but counselling – it must be way more rewarding than the stuff we're churning out at Blair.'

I gazed into my drink and wondered where to start. Of course I had found clinical work rewarding. I had also found it frustrating, discouraging, depressing and occasionally baffling. There had been times when I wondered if I could face another irrational phobia, another helpless addiction, another disgruntled spouse seeking my tacit approval for some adventure doomed to end in humiliation and remorse, another embittered divorcee who had dismissed her husband in the name of liberation – or in the name of nothing more than a wild-goose chase – only to find herself plagued by loneliness and regret and the testy disapproval of her puzzled offspring. Should I have confessed how often I had wanted to declare that forgiveness is the greatest of the therapies – especially for the one hurt or wronged – and that withholding it is quite possibly a risk factor for some of our most debilitating diseases?

Those, of course, were the reasons why counselling might never have been the right path for me, though I felt a pleasure almost like ecstasy whenever I watched some of my clients break though to a recognition of who they really were.

I didn't want to discourage these eager women if they were drawn to clinical psychology as a vocation. I admire counsellors almost as much as I admire primary-school teachers, and the way the world is going, I know they will be in even heavier demand in the future than the past. Who has time, anymore, to give the sustained, slow-motion comfort and support to their friends and families that a paid therapist can offer?

But I didn't want Lucy or Flora – or Selena – to fall for the idea that joining society's breakdown gangs – doctors, dentists, social workers, lawyers, counsellors – was any more noble than many other ways of earning a living. I had often felt that a common mistake made by people in the so-called helping professions was to adopt an elitist view of their work and to assume that all other occupations were more venal or pointless than theirs.

‘There are lots of ways for psychologists to do something useful with their lives,' I said, straining to be heard above the background racket, and feeling sure this was not the right place for a serious discussion of the meaning of work. ‘Counselling is certainly one of them – and there are lots of ways of doing that, too. You don't have to rent a room and hang out your shingle. You can work in schools, prisons, hospitals, corporations, all kinds of places. Whichever route you take, you need to realise you're heading into a life filled with other people's problems. It can get you down. It got me down, I must admit.'

‘But really worthwhile, just the same,' said Flora, clinging to her wish for it to be so.

‘Absolutely. It's easy to overestimate your influence, though. The truth is, therapists can do very little if the client doesn't really get what the process is about, and many don't. The client has to be in the mood to do some hard work.'

‘In the mood?' Lucy wasn't at all comfortable with that.

‘Right place, right time, right attitude . . .'

‘Doesn't that depend on which type of therapy you're into?' she wanted to know, and I was picking her as a potential cognitive behavioural therapist. Everything about Lucy said
quick!
Somehow I couldn't see her settling into the long haul of psychoanalysis – either as client or therapist. Even my own brand of reflective listening would have moved too slowly for Lucy. She would be a rapid-results operator, was my guess. (Good match for the kind of work we were doing at Blair.)

‘Some clients would like a prescription, GP-style,' I said. ‘But we're bystanders, most of us, while they do the heavy lifting. We touch their lives pretty lightly, as we should. A nudge here, a smile or a nod there, a sympathetic murmur of encouragement or reassurance. The main thing is to be present for them – really present. Right there in the moment with them. Our undivided attention is our great therapeutic gift to our clients. Of course that's valuable, but maybe no more valuable than the therapeutic work done by many other people – loving friends, in particular. But lots of people do therapeutic work – stand-up comedians, screenwriters, broadcasters, even patient shop assistants and helpful bank tellers. Doesn't any relationship have the potential to be therapeutic?'

‘But isn't there something especially valuable about clinical psych?' Lucy was preparing to be disappointed in me.

‘
Especially
valuable? I honestly don't know. Sensitive managers who consult with their staff can be especially valuable. So can tradesmen who listen attentively to their clients' tales of woe while they work, or bus drivers who cheerfully wait for someone who's running late and don't complain about an awkward pram.'

‘What – courtesy? Are you saying that's as valuable as counselling?' Flora was clearly wondering if her ears were deceiving her.

‘All I'm saying is, these are the kind of things that reassure people they're being taken seriously, and it's the old story – an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. Anyway, what's more valuable than . . . well, than the things Blair is doing?'

‘Really?' Lucy clearly thought I was kidding, but I was perfectly serious. Our job at Blair was to help people get a clearer sense of direction; point out the pathways that might get them to where they wanted to be; gently steer them away from errors of judgement about their own capacities, or aptitudes; help them join their own dots.

‘This is good work,' I said, warming to my theme. ‘This is noble work. Recruitment touches many lives.'

I was not sure how much of this could be heard, or whether any of it was making sense to these eager, well-intentioned young women. Selena, I sensed, was beginning to get it.

I drained my glass and offered to buy another round for the three of them, making it clear my own time was up.

‘What about forensic?' asked Flora, still resisting the idea that what she was already doing might actually be as good as it got.

‘That's good work, too,' I said, ‘though it's fashionable now, thanks to television, and therefore hard to get into. Look, it's all good work. Don't get me wrong – counselling is a wonderful thing to do if that's what you're cut out for, even if you've only got ten years of it in you.'

I pointed to my ears to show I had had all I could take of the noise.

‘Hey, thanks,' they chorused, only Selena smiling, and I was off, out into a mild spring evening.