The Girl Below (31 page)

“Don’t you feel sad when you tell me that?” he’d ask, dabbing his eyes.

“I don’t know,” I’d say, and I’d really mean it. Often when I talked about my past, I noticed it was easy to articulate the events, but not so easy to feel the emotions that went with them. A lot of the time I felt nothing at all. I told myself it was the falseness of the situation that was restricting me. Arthur was genuinely kind, but I was paying him handsomely to listen, he wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

On and on I talked, until I ran out of saliva, and week after week, Arthur said very little. He was fascinated by my dreams, and got me to recall them in detail at every session, but when I asked what they meant, instead of telling me outright, he’d ask cryptic questions until I came up with my own unsatisfactory explanations. It was like hiring a translator who then refused to interpret the foreign language you didn’t speak.

In one of our early sessions, Arthur asked about my father, and why I’d stayed in New Zealand instead of going back to London, and I had replied, “Because I like it here.”

“Do you?” he said. “You haven’t been very happy.”

“I prefer this to going back to Grandma and all that.”

“All that?”

“Grief, I suppose. London is where Mum died.”

“But ten years is a long time away from your homeland. Were you hoping the situation with your father would change?”

“To begin with, maybe, but not anymore.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Only once since he offered me the check. He tried to give it to me again.”

“Do you regret not taking it?”

“Sometimes.”

“And did you tell him about the list? About being suicidal?”

“I haven’t really talked to him in a while.”

“When did he last call?”

For only the second time in Arthur’s office, I reached for a tissue, and he waited patiently while I used it.

“Not having any family to fall back on,” he said. “That must be very hard.”

His pity rankled, and I sat up straight and blew my nose. His wife and children were playing noisily in the backyard behind the villa—I’d seen them arrive home in their Volvo. What did he know about having no family, about being alone? I had left his office in a snit, but later that night, listening to music in my room, I realized Arthur had only been trying to make me see that I no longer had a valid reason for remaining in New Zealand. I was refusing to accept that I’d never have a prominent place in my father’s life, and it was the only thing that was holding me here.

In another session, from out of the blue, I had recalled how the whole family had been trapped down in the air-raid shelter. I told him about the teeth, about the move across the bunker that I couldn’t account for, and as I was telling him I had the strangest sensation that perhaps it had all happened to a parallel version of myself who shared my experiences but wasn’t me. “Is that normal?” I asked. “To feel like a bystander in your own past?”

“It’s perfectly normal to disconnect from traumatic experiences,” he said. “Do you have any other memories like that?”

“There’s the hand in the cupboard,” I said, and told him about the way it had untied my dresses in a sort of game. Even as I was telling him, I knew he’d have a field day with the implications of a mysterious, meddling hand, and duly, he seized upon it as tremendously significant but wouldn’t say why.

“Do you think it’s a suppressed memory of sexual abuse?” I suggested, half joking.

“Well, do you?” he said, not joking at all.

“The hand was real,” I said. “In fact, I’d stake my life on it.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Arthur, nodding his head. “Have you always believed in things other people can’t see?”

“Only when it comes to men,” I said, surprising myself, and finding it was true. “I see qualities in them that aren’t there. Then I fall in love with my own creation.”

“What a fascinating observation,” said Arthur, making a note with his pencil. He often jotted things down while I talked and told me the reason he finished the hour early was so he could write up his notes before the next patient arrived. Early on, I’d assumed his notes were what I was paying for, that at some future interval, I’d be handed a dossier along with a diagnosis and a cure. When that didn’t happen, I began to feel increasingly duped.

“Have you figured out what’s wrong with me yet?” I asked after three or four months of weekly visits.

“It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid,” said Arthur. “You have to come to your own realization.”

Two weeks later, after a period of no realizations at all, and a bill of almost two thousand dollars, I lost patience and rephrased my question in a less polite way: “You must have worked out by now if I’m fucked in the head?”

Arthur laughed. “Do you really believe that about yourself?”

“You’re never going to tell me, are you?”

He shook his head. “It isn’t for me to say.”

As the weeks dragged on, I grew tired of talking about myself, and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was locked in a game with no end and no rules. Often at the close of an hour I had a sore throat but no insights, though I did notice that on the days I went to see Arthur the list was quieter, more subdued.

Toward the end of summer, I found enough courage to quit my job and book a ticket to London, and once bought, I pinned my hopes on going back there. New Zealand was to blame for making me depressed, and leaving would be the cure. It wasn’t just about what had happened with my father, or with men; the country had a melancholy side. Flip paradise over and all that wide-open space with too few people in it became an echo chamber for your own thoughts. I wanted to go to a city that was noisy and polluted and crowded with people. I thought it would be safer there, that with so many bodies jostling and colliding, I might be able to leap from my skin into someone else’s.

Through the southern-hemisphere autumn I daydreamed of escape, though I failed quite spectacularly to plan any details of the new life I was heading toward. Instead I got carried away with the rightness of it all, the synchronicity of returning to London after exactly a decade.

I didn’t tell my plans to Arthur because I feared he would imply, with pointed questions, that I was running away. Then one morning, after a spell of cold, wintry weather, I arrived for my appointment at his office and Arthur said, “It’s a glorious day. Why don’t we take our session outside?”

“Okay,” I said, surprised and a little unnerved.

We walked the leafy streets around his office, past gabled villas with sweeping driveways and canopied trees, and arrived at a small reserve, open on one side to the road. Arthur laid out a checkered picnic rug, the sort men keep in the back of their cars for romantic dates, and he sat down on it with stiff crossed legs. I tried to copy him, but was wearing a skirt, and ended up in an awkward posture with my legs twisted uncomfortably to one side.

“How have you been this week?” asked Arthur, in the same manner he began all our sessions.

“Fine, I guess.”

He looked at me expectantly, waiting for more, but I said nothing. A woman with a pram and a young child in tow walked past, and she glanced in our direction for a second longer than she needed to. Did she think Arthur was my boyfriend, or, worse, did she realize he was actually my shrink?

“Don’t worry about her,” said Arthur. “Pretend we’re still in my office.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought she was looking at us.”

“Tell me how you’ve been,” said Arthur, fixing me with his kind, sad eyes.

Away from the squishy couch and the box of tissues, his question seemed unnatural, prying, and his voice too loud. I felt exposed.

“Is something wrong?” Arthur’s brow creased with concern and he leaned a fraction closer and placed his hand tentatively on my arm. “You don’t need to feel uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re safe.”

But his words sent panic coursing through me, and I shrank from his touch as though he was diseased. What were we doing together on a picnic rug in a secluded park? Was he coming on to me? I was sure a line had been crossed, and every molecule inside me turned against him. “I don’t like it here,” I said, flatly. “I want to go back to the office.”

“Of course,” said Arthur, immediately getting to his feet. “Wherever you feel more comfortable.” He stood up too quickly, and his papers scattered in a gust of wind. With pathetic flapping movements, he chased them around the small park. I should have helped him but embarrassment paralyzed me, and I turned away, pretended I didn’t know him. On the walk back, I hurried ahead, picking up speed whenever Arthur tried to catch up. Back in the office, he tried to continue the session, but I felt no less uncomfortable and couldn’t shake off the sensation of disgust. “I need to go,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” said Arthur. “It was foolish of me to suggest going to the park.”

His apology made him seem even feebler, and it was all I could do to stay long enough to get out my checkbook and pay him.

“This one’s on the house,” he said, flustered that I was leaving. “We’ve barely had half a session.”

“Good-bye,” I said, quickly, and walked out of his office for the very last time, the only time I’d done so without feeling robbed.

Chapter Twenty

Skyros, 2003

M
y suspicions that Pippa hadn’t summoned me to Skyros wholly to atone for her guilt were confirmed the morning after I arrived when my duties began. She didn’t say as much, but it was obvious they needed an extra pair of hands—women’s hands. In times of sickness and death, women were still expected to cook, clean, and change soiled bedding, whereas men were permitted to invent reasons to be absent. Or they didn’t invent reasons but simply made themselves scarce, as Ari did, a little after nine in the morning, telling Pippa not to worry, that he wouldn’t need lunch—as though by eating out he was somehow doing her a huge favor. I didn’t know where Harold was, and cared even less, but the news that Caleb had also gone off for the day, to the beach, was a blow. I had wanted to talk to him, to attempt to tell him what had happened the night before. Just having to say out loud that I had gone back in time and visited the communal garden would make it seem like a thing that was impossible, and when Caleb laughed and dismissed it as nonsense, I would laugh too and think he was right.

Soiled sheets, at any rate, were a distraction, and directly after breakfast Pippa set me to work in the laundry at a cranky cast-iron washing machine that refused to spin clothes and shuddered off its support blocks in protest. Wet clothes had to be wrung out in a mangle, which is how they ended up if you didn’t feed the garments in at the correct angle and speed. One load took me two hours, and after I’d hung it all out in the sun to dry, my shoulders were almost as bent out of shape as Elena’s. I was sweating too, and cursing under my breath, when Pippa appeared at the end of the clothesline with a glass of iced water. After I had gulped it down, she said Peggy had asked to see me.

“Are you sure she asked for me by name? She always calls me Hillary, and I stopped trying to correct her.”

“Oh yes,” said Pippa, pulling us under the fig tree for shade. “She asked for the young woman who’d read to her so nicely—she remembered your name and also that you had taken a shine to Madeline.”

“I haven’t taken a shine to Madeline. She gives me the creeps.”

Pippa laughed. “It’s probably just another one of her stories. The other day she started going on about a fellow in the village square who had asked for her hand in marriage—I expect she was reliving something that happened years ago. She’s been babbling a lot about her old lovers, especially the gay one.”

“Peggy was a lesbian?”

“God no, but she was in love with a gay man. She probably showed you his photograph on her fantasy wall.”

I recalled the short, effeminate man with the big smile. “The one she calls the love of her life?”

“His name was Lawrence,” said Pippa. “They worked at the same theater. He was a raving queen, but in those days you got arrested for buggery, so they came to an arrangement.”

“You mean she was his beard?”

Pippa nodded. “Something like that. He was fond of her too, maybe not in the same way, but fond enough to get engaged.”

“But they never married?”

“No. It was a very sad business. Just before the wedding, he was arrested in the toilets on Hampstead Heath. He couldn’t face going to court and he hanged himself.”

“That’s so terrible,” I said, and felt that it really was a double tragedy. Not only had the suicide list won but Peggy had lost someone she loved dearly, knowing all the while that she had not been enough for him.

Peggy was dozing when we went in, but she still had her pinkie looped through the handle of a teacup that rested precariously on the counterpane. “Is that really tea?” I whispered, while Pippa tried to unhook Peggy’s finger from the cup without waking her. “She doesn’t normally take it black.”

Pippa shook her head. “I gave in,” she said. “It seemed mean to take away her best chum so near the end. But so as not to offend Elena, I made her pretend it was tea.”

Just then Peggy stirred, and her eyelids flicked open as though she’d had a fright. She stared at us both.

“Suki,” she said, perfectly lucid. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“It took a while, but here I am.” I took her hand, the coldest thing on the island, while Pippa turned to fiddle with the morphine pump. “And I brought all the stuff you asked for—even the fur coat. Your hands are freezing—perhaps you need it after all.”

At the mention of the coat, Peggy’s eyebrows—or at least the tattoos of them—shot up. She put a shaky finger to her lips. “Sshhhhhh. Not now.” She glanced at Pippa, whose back was turned, and gave me a stern look. “Not in front of her.”

I was too busy the rest of the day to think anything more about it. Pippa had me doing odd chores in the kitchen and laundry, and by the time the sky was darkening and she suggested that I go for a walk round the village, I confessed I was too tired to do anything but eat and go to bed. Caleb hadn’t come home yet, but I convinced myself this was a good thing.