When Daddy Comes Home (22 page)

T
he first time she met the psychiatrist for her weekly sessions, Antoinette had viewed him with suspicion. Her defences were firmly in place, for she expected him to be another authoritative male who would try and force his interpretation of her childhood on to her. Instead she had found a casually dressed man in his late thirties whose warm smile instantly allayed her fears. He asked her questions, then – unlike the senior doctors she had met in the psychiatric ward – he sat back and waited for her answers.

This doctor made it clear that she did not have to give him details of her past – those he could imagine for himself, he told her. What he wanted instead was to understand the effect it had had on her and what had led up to her being so ill. He asked her to tell him what help she needed to prepare for the future. He further reassured her that if at any time she felt uncomfortable, she could tell him. That was the strategy he wanted to take with her, he had said. Then he put her even more at ease by asking if she was happy with his assessment of her counselling plan. By showing he respected her and what she wanted, he won Antoinette over completely.

In her sessions with him, true to his word, he never once asked her about the reason she had been transferred and never
asked one intrusive question about the abuse. Instead, the psychiatrist questioned her about the time she had been at college and seemed more interested in her achievements at school than in her abuse.

He brought up the subject of her work in the hospital and asked if she wanted to work with the mentally ill. ‘Sister has told me that you are very good with the old people on the dementia ward. You could get training for that if it is something that interests you.’

‘I like them so it’s not really difficult. Anyway, it gets me out of the ward and gives me something to do.’ She thought for a moment. ‘No. That’s not really what I want. Anyway –’ she grinned ‘– I would end up not knowing which people were the patients and which ones weren’t.’

Like the nurses, he was trying to lead her into a conversation where she might tell him what she really wanted to do in the future. But the thought of leaving frightened her and she did not feel ready to face it.

That day he told her, ‘You are almost better, Antoinette, and we want to find a way of helping you leave here. Think about it and we will talk some more in a few days.’

But, unknown to either doctor or patient, there was very little time left. Events outside their control were conspiring to force her to make the decision of whether she wanted to spend her life behind the high brick walls of the hospital or face the outside world again.

The first sign of any change in her routine was a week later, when the ward sister sent for her at a time she was due to go to work. When Antoinette entered the office, the sister closed the door firmly behind her.

‘You’re not going to the dementia unit today,’ she began. ‘Your doctor wants to see you. He has something important to discuss with you.’ She paused, then leant across the desk to emphasize the importance of her next words. ‘Antoinette, do you remember what I said to you when you first came to this ward?’

‘Yes. You told me that there are many sad stories in here.’

‘And what else did I tell you?’ Then, not waiting for her answer, she replied for her. ‘That you could be one of my success stories. I want you to remember that when you go to see the doctor.’

A few minutes later Antoinette was sitting in the psychiatrist’s office, looking at him aghast. He had dropped his bombshell.

‘Your parents are having you sectioned on Tuesday,’ he told her calmly. ‘That’s four days from now.’

He told her that he had discussed the situation with the ward sister before giving her this advance warning. His career could be on the line if it came to the attention of the hospital authorities that a patient had been informed of a decision taken both by senior administrators and the parents of a minor but he thought that Antoinette was worth it.

‘You have to understand what your future could be if you allow this to happen. At the moment you have people on your side who have protected you to a certain extent from the reality of life in a long-term ward. Sister has tried to help you in every way she could. But should you be sent to another ward or placed under a different psychiatrist, one of the old school, that protection would end. As a sectioned patient, you would be at risk of electric shock treatment and drugs like Paraldehyde. That’s the way patients are kept under control here. It’s still on your file that you attacked a patient without
provocation. Even if you never give them an excuse to administer electric shock or to be sedated, if you spend another few months here you will become completely institutionalized and incapable of returning to life on the outside.’

He smiled at her then and said what no one in the hospital had expressed before. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. You are just a normal person who has reacted to an abnormal situation. You’ve been put into hospital twice for depression, but you were simply very unhappy. You have been the victim of events you had no control over. You felt rejected – of course you did. You
were
rejected, by your family, by your school, your school friends, even the people who employed you. Your feelings are perfectly natural after what you’ve gone through. The anger that you felt was a sign that you were recovering. You should feel angry at the people who treated you like that. Your lack of self worth, caused by your childhood, is something that will improve. It already has. You should respect yourself for what you have achieved, for putting yourself through college, and paying your own fees for your secretarial course.

‘As for your paranoia,’ he continued, ‘that is not a term I would use about what has been wrong with you. You have told me that you feel suspicious of people; I think that is perfectly understandable. You felt people were talking about you and while that is a classic symptom of paranoia, in your case it was true. They were talking.’ He leaned forward and said earnestly, ‘You are not eighteen yet. You have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t waste it by staying here, Antoinette. One of the reasons you became ill is that you felt you had no control over your life. Well, you have now. You have to make your mind up to take charge of your future and I know you can do it.’

Then he informed Antoinette of her rights, which up until then she had not understood. ‘Don’t you know that you are still a voluntary patient? That means you have the right to sign yourself out. Your parents were informed of your transfer from the psychiatric unit to here but it’s only now that they have found the time to agree to come to the hospital to sign the consent forms. You are still free to leave. Tomorrow I will be the senior doctor on duty and that means that if you choose to sign yourself out, it is me that you will come to.’

Antoinette experienced a flood of different emotions as he spoke. There was shock at the fact that her parents had known about her transfer, followed by horror that they were prepared to sign forms to commit her. Then confusion and bewilderment at the decision she had to make.

‘I wish I didn’t have to hurry you into this, or to break the news to you in this manner,’ said the doctor. ‘But time is short. I want to convince you that your future lies outside these hospital walls. I want you to sit somewhere quiet and think about what I have told you. Your future is in your hands. Sister is going to make you some tea and sandwiches and put you in the visitors’ lounge. Take as long as you need and when you have thought it through, I hope you will tell her that you are exercising your rights to leave. If you do that tomorrow morning, she will bring you to me and the one other doctor who has to be present. You must inform us that you are exercising your right as a voluntary patient to sign yourself out.

‘Antoinette, I know that you will make the right decision. Once you leave here, never underestimate yourself again. You’ve survived your childhood, and you have survived being here. That alone is an experience that most people could never have handled.’

Giving her one more encouraging smile, he sent for the sister, who led Antoinette from his office into the visitors’ lounge, a room rarely used, with comfortable seating, where she would be undisturbed. The sister brought in tea and biscuits, smiled and then lightly squeezed Antoinette’s shoulder as she repeated the words of the doctor.

‘I know you will reach the right decision, dear, the one we all want for you.’ Then she left, giving Antoinette the time alone to digest the psychiatrist’s words.

She understood very clearly that what ever decision she came to over the next few hours would decide the course of her life.

A
ntoinette knew that loneliness and despair had brought her into the hospital twice. Over the time she had spent in both wards she had come to feel both protected and safe and as she did so the tangle in her head had become gradually unknotted.

She had not ventured outside the confines of the hospital, except for the fateful visit and the equally unpleasant follow-up visit to the dentist, for several months. She had received no visitors since her transfer and had lost touch with the few people she had tentative friendships with. Her mother had not been to visit her once.

It seemed that the more her world had shrunk to the walls of the hospital, the safer she felt. Here she had carved out some semblance of a life, one where she was never lonely. She had a routine, friendships with the nurses and constant company. For the first time since she was fourteen she felt accepted by people who knew her past, something that she doubted she would ever find in the outside world.

She thought of the conversation she had just had with the doctor. There was something niggling her at the back of her mind that she wanted to find and examine. She replayed his words in her memory and as their meaning sunk in, a
realization of what the doctor had been trying to tell her hit her like a thunder bolt.

He had said she was a voluntary patient.

A voluntary patient in a psychiatric ward would never have been transferred to the main hospital without the consent of her guardians. The doctor had made it clear that her parents had been notified of her move. They must have told the hospital that they were prepared to commit her then.

No sooner had she grasped that, then other questions crowded her mind, and the answers followed quickly.

Who opened all the post at her parents’ house? It was not her father, who was practically illiterate. No, her mother did.

And who answered all the telephone calls? Her mother. Her father disliked it with a passion and always ignored its intrusive ring.

So whom would the hospital have spoken to on the day the psychiatric ward had decided she was too ill to remain there? Her mother.

‘You must face it and face it now,’ she told herself sternly. ‘It was not only your father who wanted rid of you.’

This, Antoinette realized, was the truth and it was something she had run from all her life – that her mother’s love for her was worth nothing. It was eleven years since she had felt any affection towards her father, for she had long ago accepted that he was a man who was twisted and warped. With that acceptance she had ceased to question why or make any excuses for him. The months in the hospital had shown her that there were people without any rational explanation for their behaviour; it was just the way they were.

But she had hoped against hope that her mother loved her despite the way she had treated her, and she had wilfully
closed her eyes to the real state of affairs and the harsh reality of her mother’s actions. But she could do so no longer. Now she had to confront the weakness and shallowness of her mother’s love for her. And she had to know that it was this that had almost destroyed her for a second time.

In her early childhood it was her mother who had been the centre of Antoinette’s life. She was the person who picked her up when she fell and dried her eyes when she cried. At night it was her mother who bathed her, rinsed soapy water from her small face then carried her, wrapped in a fluffy towel, to the bedroom to be rubbed dry and sprinkled with talcum powder. Ruth had tucked her into bed and read her a story before dimming the light and kissing her goodnight. She could remember her mother sitting in a chair with a lamp on the small table beside her, its glow illuminating her lowered head as she patiently put the last touches to the latest dress she had made for her daughter.

Her mother’s familiar perfume of face powder mixed with the lingering scent of jasmine had comforted her, as did the warmth of her body when she was cuddled by her. It was her arms that had held the young Antoinette close, her heart that beat against her small daughter’s chest and her voice that told the little girl about fairies and magic when she read bedtime stories out loud. And it was Ruth’s hand that held her smaller one tightly when they crossed a road – ‘to keep you safe,’ she had said.

That was the mother she had always loved. That was the mother she had always refused to accept no longer existed. But the truth was that she had stopped being that mother when Antoinette was six.

It was then that coldness had replaced the warmth, the goodnight kisses stopped and protective arms had ceased to cuddle her. Ruth had stopped all that from the day that Antoinette had told her what her father did to her.

Before now, when the memory of that day threatened to penetrate her mind, she had pushed it aside. Now she wanted to examine it.

She summoned up the picture of her six-year-old self gathering up the courage to tell her mother that her father had touched and kissed her. Back then, the little girl had thought that by telling, it would be stopped. She remembered the expressions that had flitted across Ruth’s face that day: the love had vanished and it was replaced by anger and fear. But, Antoinette realized now, Ruth’s face had registered neither surprise nor shock.

‘I understand now,’ she murmured. ‘I’m beginning to see how it was.’

Now that her memories had forced themselves into her mind, she did not push them away. This time she knew that she had to deal with them because she had to examine her mother’s role in her life.

Who was her mother? She remembered the caring mother of her early childhood, the one she had adored. Then she recalled the cold, remote Ruth of the years of the abuse until the end of the court case. She had feared that mother. Then there was the laughing, chatting friend from the two years they spent together at the gate lodge. Finally there was the mother who had betrayed her trust, the one who had taken her husband back, thrown her daughter out and committed her to hospital.

A memory rose to the surface of her mind. When she had come to hospital months before in a state of such
depression and isolation she could not speak, she had experienced a brief spell of coherence. She had telephoned her mother, pleading with her to visit. Ruth had berated her daughter for her selfishness and down the line Antoinette had heard the refrain that had been repeated so often over the years. She was a constant source of worry, and that worry was enough to drive Ruth into the same place her daughter was.

‘It should be me in there instead of you,’ were her final words before the phone went dead.

‘What kind of mother says that? What mother doesn’t visit her daughter in hospital even once?’ Antoinette asked herself. And what kind of daughter continues to fool herself that her mother is hiding her love for her? Who carries on believing in a person who ceased to exist years before?

Antoinette had come to learn that memories are treacherous things and as she sat in the lounge, she faced another painful truth. Memories had invented a loving mother and a perfect love that had never existed, and Antoinette had never stopped believing those false memories. When it became too difficult to sustain the illusion any longer, Antoinette had blamed herself for what she had understood as a sudden withdrawal of maternal affection. She must be weak and bad and worthless. The key to the loss of her mother’s love must lie within herself.

She had so often opened the box stored inside her mind and taken out those memories of her mother protecting, cherishing and playing with her. The other times when Ruth had done none of those things Antoinette had completely obliterated from her mind. She realized now that her mother had always managed to turn things round and convince her that her, Ruth’s, version of reality was the true one. Ruth had turned innocence into guilt, and the victim into the wrongdoer
and she had forced Antoinette to accept that was how it was. She had made Antoinette her accomplice in rewriting the truth.

Sitting in the quiet visitors’ lounge, Antoinette tried to put everything she had learned about her mother over the years into some semblance of order. If she could understand why Ruth had become such a bitter discontented woman, maybe it would help her come to terms with her mother’s actions.

What lay behind the mask and lived in the mind of a woman with those different faces?

That was the question she wanted to answer before she spoke to either the sister or the psychiatrist and she knew that somewhere buried in her memories lay the clues that could lead her to an understanding.