All in the Mind (10 page)

She said nothing. She looked at the floor, her right hand clenching her left arm so tightly he could see the nails digging in. He wanted to wait until she said something but the silence was too strong.

‘Do you think you could do that? Find forgiveness?’

She showed no reaction, apart from lifting her eyes towards him. He sensed she was computing what he had said, trying to decide whether to be angry and upset, or intrigued.

‘It doesn’t mean you accept what they did was right, or justified. It doesn’t mean you forgive the act. It just means you forgive the people.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Why should you, do you mean?’

She nodded.

‘Because only if you forgive them will you set yourself free from
them
. I think. I could be wrong, but I think it’s possible. You will never forget, but you can forgive, and then you may be free.’

She was saying little, but at least she wasn’t rejecting him out of hand. She was a bright woman, and he sensed she was really thinking now about what he had said. He was content to wait. They endured a longer silence without too much tension. It was Arta who broke it.

‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Can’t, or won’t?’

‘If I saw them here now, I would wish them dead. They have destroyed my life, and they have destroyed my family’s life. Even if I could forgive them for what they’ve done to
my
life – which I can’t – I couldn’t forgive them for what this has done to my family.’

‘But they’re not in your life now. You are the one who controls your life. Your family are still with you, and they love you, even more than before. The men are gone. The family are with you.’

He paused.

‘I would like you to think over the next few days about whether it might be possible, not now maybe, but sometime, that you can forgive them. Your anger is totally understandable. But anger can either motivate, or it can entrap, and at the moment, you are trapped by it. Forgiveness might let you escape the trap.’

She shook her head.

‘You don’t know what it is like,’ she said. ‘How many times I try to tell you what happened. I tell you how I felt, how I feel now, how I feel when he comes at me night after night, always different ways, different places, and I wake up scared of the dark. I am scared of the light, scared of my own husband lying next to me, I spend all day tired and scared and thinking I am letting my family down and sometimes I wish he had taken that knife and cut my throat so I didn’t have to feel like this one day longer, and still you don’t know what it’s like.’

‘I accept that. I don’t know what it’s like. But it happened, and now we have to try to rebuild. Forgiveness may be the first very difficult step you have to make.’

It was when she stood up that he realised his gamble had failed disastrously.

‘You said, “Can’t, or won’t?” Like that was a choice I had. I have no choice. I can’t. I can’t forgive them, and if you really think your place is to ask me to forgive them, you have more concern for them than you do for me.’

Her words really hurt him. He felt like he was being punched in the stomach. As when Emily left his consulting room earlier, he felt a sense of failure, this time far more profound. Three patients in one morning, and none had left any happier. Arta walked out in such a state of anger and shock that she didn’t even say goodbye.

Phyllis came in, troubled that another one-hour consultation had ended early.

‘Fuck it,’ he said, banging his fist on his desk. ‘Fuck it.’ It was the first time he had ever sworn in front of Phyllis. ‘I should have waited another week, maybe two,’ he said. ‘I should have given her more to read. I should have spoken to some of the Kosovo people. She needed more time. I went at it too quickly. I totally screwed it up.’

‘Am I getting her in next week?’ Phyllis asked matter-of-factly, and he looked at her, failing to hide his irritation that she seemed more concerned about her appointments system than the success or failure of the consultation.

‘You can try,’ he said. ‘I doubt she’ll be coming.’

‘OK,’ said Phyllis. ‘By the way, Hafsatu Sesay called.’

‘Oh.’ He looked at her more intently now.

‘She said she’s very sorry but she has a meeting with her police handler which can’t be moved and she can’t make it this afternoon. I’ve fitted her in on Monday.’

‘OK,’ he said, feeling a mix of disappointment and relief.

‘Do you want to see Ralph Hall instead? He called again to see if you’ve got a gap.’

‘Good idea, yes. Can you fix that?’

‘I will. Oh, and Mrs Sturrock called. Said it was quite urgent.’

Sturrock went over to the window and stared out. He wondered where Hafsatu was amid the mass of humankind that filled London’s streets. He wondered whether her police handler was a man or a woman. He hoped it was a woman. He wondered if she was in danger,
if
the sex-trafficking gang she gave evidence against had tracked her down, and she was being moved again, perhaps this time further out of London. That might be the best thing all round, if she was given a new life and a new identity somewhere else. He would miss her. But it would definitely be for the best. And if she stayed in London, he knew he couldn’t go on treating her. It wasn’t fair to either of them. She inspired in him feelings he felt he couldn’t control, a desire so strong he felt his stomach turning to mush, and his mind dissolving, so he was deprived of the ability to think straight. It meant he was not giving her the treatment she needed and was entitled to. He made a mental note to write to Judith Carrington later, and ask if she would take on Hafsatu as a patient. He would tell her Hafsatu had had so many bad experiences with men that he felt she would better respond to a woman. But could he really give her up? He knew that what she stirred in him was wrong, but it was real, and he wasn’t sure he could let go of it, lose the chance to see her and fantasise about her and let those fantasies fill some of the gaps in his life.

The building site below was teeming with people and trucks and lorries. He could not believe how quickly the previous buildings had gone, and the foundations for the new ones had been laid. He wondered how many of the people he could see were less happy than he was. He looked down to the pavement cafe on the far side of the road. Three workers from the building site were sitting outside on white plastic chairs, still in hard hats, drinking tea. They were laughing, one of them almost uncontrollably. A nice-looking waitress came out with a trayful of food and within seconds was joining in whatever joke it was that Sturrock couldn’t hear. One hundred per cent of the people down there are happier than I am, he said to himself. He looked over to the big office blocks now dominating the skyline down towards the river. Inside those buildings, he thought, the figure might be lower than 100 per cent. But not by much.

He walked over to his desk, sat down and called home. Stella wondered if he could pop into Waterstone’s. There was a book Jack had mentioned he was interested in getting, she said, a collection of
aerial
pictures of the great European cities. It might make a nice birthday present.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I can do that. I’ve got one more patient before lunch. I’ll go out then. Or I could do it this afternoon. I have a patient to see in Westminster.’

He rang off, and as he did so, he realised neither of them, in the two conversations they’d had on the phone that morning, had mentioned Aunt Jessica. He made a mental note to call Simon to check on the arrangements for the funeral. As he reflected on the effort it would take him to research, write and deliver the eulogy, he sat back, let his head fall over the top of his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling.

8

It was when Matthew caught sight of an elderly woman in a wheelchair being lifted from the back of an ambulance that the full horror of his predicament hit home. This was a hospital, full of sick people being cared for by doctors and nurses; and to the medics and the management, he was one more sick person, even though he did not consider himself to be ill at all.

As he and Celia walked into the teeming foyer, he could tell that, like him, she was hoping they would be able to find directions to the psychiatry department without actually having to ask for them. Until now she had been brimming with confidence. But since they’d arrived, in a real hospital with real sick people and real doctors, he sensed Celia had started to feel a little of what he had been feeling. It was all so dreadfully embarrassing. Fortunately, at the information desk was a board with a map of the building and an index below it, so they could work out where to go without having to utter the word ‘psychiatry’ to anyone.

He felt very self-conscious pressing the button for the sixth floor in the lift and hoped that the young man in a white coat might think he was going for renal surgery rather than psychiatric care, since the two departments shared the same floor. He accepted it was odd that he would rather have it thought he was about to lose a kidney than admit to requiring treatment for sex addiction, but he had always believed psychiatry was a branch of medicine dedicated to helping life’s losers, not good decent people like himself. It was never pleasant when your long-held, comfortable assertions and prejudices were challenged by experiences as bad as this. He tried to recall the last time he felt quite so humiliated. He had been caned twice at school and it was probably the second caning that took him closest to the awful sick feeling he was trying to conceal
as
the lift doors opened on to the sixth floor and a blue arrow pointed them left to the Le Gassick wing, and ‘psychological medicine’. It was a good job he had never told Celia about the reason for the caning. Had he done so, she would certainly have been using it in recent days to bolster her current theory about his sex addiction. His ‘crime’ had been to make a highly aggressive pass at a fifteen-year-old girl from a visiting school. A few fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds from St Hilda’s School for Girls had been brought in to help his boys-only school put on a performance of
Henry the Fifth
. Matthew had a fairly small part as Lord Scroop, one of the conspirators against the king. During a longish period when he was not required onstage he misread signals from the girl playing Queen Isabel. He forced himself upon the girl in full view of his drama teacher, Mr Burrows, creating a disturbance which could be heard by the audience in the main hall, just as Henry was about to deliver the battlecry. The girl made a complaint, refused to take any further part in the performance, and the combination of his amorous advance and the fact that Queen Isabel, who was important in the final act, had to be played by Mr Burrows as the play reached its climax, left the headmaster convinced he had to punish Matthew in the conventional manner.

The caning was humiliating at the time, but signing in for a session with a top psychiatrist for a discussion about sex addiction, with his wife present, was even worse, though at least there were few people around to notice him and he was pleased that the receptionist did not look at him in anything other than a perfectly friendly and entirely normal way. She was getting on a bit and so was presumably used to dealing with all manner of deviants and inadequates. He couldn’t help noting, however, that, on a single-page printout marked ‘Schedule, Friday’, she had scribbled, alongside his name, the letters SA, which he assumed to refer to his alleged ailment. A lifetime’s commitment to his personal and professional development, now reduced to two letters. S for sex, A for addict. A fresh wave of nausea surged through him, though his attention was then diverted to what he could only describe as a kerkuffle as a door opened loudly and an Eastern European-looking woman in a flowery dress stormed out, slamming the door behind her, then rushed past them and ran down the stairs.
He
saw Professor Sturrock’s nameplate on the door she had just slammed, and wondered what on earth he was letting himself in for.

‘Take a seat,’ said the receptionist. ‘I’ll tell Professor Sturrock you’ve arrived.’

The short wait was excruciating. But then the psychiatrist appeared at his door, apparently unruffled by the storming out of his patient, though he seemed surprised that his new patient’s wife had accompanied him. It required him to make a slight rearrangement to the chairs in his consulting room.

‘Welcome,’ he said, once Matthew and Celia had sat down. He was a little older than Matthew had been expecting him to be, a bit shorter too. He was wearing a short-sleeved light blue shirt and a grey tie. He didn’t have spectacles. Matthew had imagined he would have glasses. He had a long thin face and deep lines running down from the side of his nose. When his face was in repose, the lines gave him a slight resemblance to a walrus, Matthew thought.

‘I wasn’t expecting both of you,’ said Professor Sturrock, ‘but I’m sure it’s very good that you have come together.’

‘We see this very much as Matthew’s problem, but one which we can face together,’ said Celia.

‘Excellent,’ said Professor Sturrock. ‘Of course, it may be that at some point I will need to talk to your husband on his own, but let’s see how we go.’

He turned to Matthew and smiled.

‘Mr Noble, I wonder if it might be best if you say in your own words why you’re here.’

Matthew nodded, paused, sighed very loudly, looked at Celia, sighed again, shook his head a little, looked up at the ceiling, licked his lips, looked at Celia again, then at Professor Sturrock, then at Celia again, who whispered the single word ‘sex’.

‘Sex, I suppose,’ said Matthew. ‘I have a very happy marriage in many ways, far better than many of my friends and colleagues, I think, but I’ve had a couple of relationships with other women which have made me, made Celia and me, I guess, think that perhaps I have a problem in that area.’

‘The problem being?’ asked Professor Sturrock.

‘Sex addiction,’ said Celia.

‘I see.’

‘Well, Celia has been doing a lot of research into this and thinks perhaps that I’m possibly a sex addict.’ Even as the SA words left his mouth, he was struck by what a waste of everyone’s time this was. He was a busy lawyer with a lot of work to do. Here in front of him was a busy psychiatrist with a busy department to run, in a large city full of people with serious mental illnesses, and instead of the poor man’s time going on helping the real unfortunates of the world, he was having to listen to a heap of nonsense about Matthew’s sex addiction.