Casting Off (55 page)

‘Thank you. I’ll remember.’

Happiness makes people much nicer, she thought as she went down in the lift. I wonder what that makes me?

She decided to walk back to the hotel so that she wouldn’t have to talk to a cab driver. Angela’s suggestion that she should talk to Earl brought up painful thoughts. Earl was a psychiatrist, like Dr Schmidt had been, and remembering him still made her feel raw. He had seemed such an answer: an old man, with white hair and a moustache and dark brown penetrating eyes with dark marks under them. She had gone to his gloomy ground-floor flat where he practised. It was cold and the daylight that filtered through the dirty net curtains was like fog. But he had seemed so wise, and so kind, and he really listened to her – an experience she felt she had never had before in her life. She sat in a rather hard armchair, and he sat opposite her in its pair, with a small rickety round table between them. Dr Schmidt had come into her life not through Stella, although it had been she who had first suggested such a course, but through Polly and Clary, who had an Austrian friend who knew people like that. So she had asked them to ask ‘for a friend of mine’, and saw Clary shoot a quick look at her, although nothing had been said. But, quite soon after that, one of them had rung her with Dr Schmidt’s telephone number and address. She had told Michael that she was going to see him, and he had seemed quite pleased. ‘Good idea,’ he had said. ‘It might help to sort you out, darling.’

‘Supposing he wants to see you?’ she said.

‘Oh, I don’t think he’ll want to do that. I should think that very unlikely.’

Anyway, she rang up.

‘And how do you hear of me?’ she was asked.

She mentioned the Austrian friend.

‘Ah, so! A dear friend of mine.’ His foreign voice sounded warm. He made an appointment for her at once.

At first she had not known what to say, had sat twisting her fingers in her lap and looking over his shoulder. ‘You are nervous,’ he remarked. ‘It is natural. You do not know me.’

‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘You may begin anywhere. Tell me how you are feeling with your life.’

And after that, she found it quite easy to think of things to say. To begin with, she was very much afraid that he would think her so worthless and wicked that she would tell him something and then make some remark to pre-empt any adverse judgement. Things like ‘So, you see, I didn’t even want to have a baby although I knew that Michael might be killed.’ And about her affair with Rory: ‘So, you see, I was unfaithful to Michael about two years after we were married.’ She rushed headlong through her misdemeanours, attacking them not in chronological order but, rather, in order of their gravity. She watched him carefully for any reaction, but his expression of attentive interest did not change. She went twice a week for an hour, and after the first two or three sessions, she began to look forward to the time when he would pronounce upon her life and tell her what to do. But this continued not to happen: he occasionally asked a question, but that was all. This was beginning to irritate her, and when, some six weeks after she had started going to him, he asked – out of the blue, it had no reference to anything she had been saying – how she got on with her father, something snapped in her. ‘Why do you simply ask me questions? Why don’t you
tell
me what to do? I don’t care if you think I’ve behaved badly because I know that anyway, so why don’t you say what you think?’

He looked at her for a long time without speaking. Then he smiled. ‘I am not here to judge you,’ he said. ‘There seem to be enough judges in your life, beginning with yourself. I shall not join them.’

‘So what – what do you do?’

‘I am here to listen, so that you can unpack your mind and look at what you find there. If I were to say, “That is good, that is bad,” you might find it difficult to take everything out. I think you find it already hard.’

‘Do I?’ She was beginning to feel frightened.

‘I think you have not yet told me what has made you most unhappy – what has most disturbed you.’

‘No.’

‘Breathe,’ he said, ‘it is good to breathe.’

She let out her breath. ‘I haven’t told you, I haven’t told anyone. One person knows it
happened
but I didn’t tell her what it was like because I couldn’t bear to. It made me so very unhappy, sad, miserable for a long time and then, at the end of it, it felt as though a bit of me had died, as though I couldn’t feel any more about it, or much about anything else.’ She felt her throat closing and swallowed. ‘It was so awful! So horrible! And I loved him so much!’

‘It is natural to love one’s father.’

‘My father? I’m not talking about my
father
!
No
! I’m talking about someone called Hugo. I told you about Rory, which didn’t really matter, but I didn’t tell you about Hugo.’

She told him all of that. Every single thing she could think of: when she got to the last few minutes that she had spent with him, tears began streaming out of her eyes but she continued right through the sojourn in Holyhead, and Michael’s destroying Hugo’s letter, up to the luncheon party at Hatton, months later, when she had discovered Hugo’s death because casual mention was made of it at lunch. Then she broke down utterly – sobbed herself dry. Then he said she must go, but she could sit in the next room for a while to recover herself. ‘If you wish.’ She went and sat in an even darker room that had a divan in it and a wardrobe with a long mirror set in one of its doors, and an open, empty violin case lying on a table. But after a minute or two she didn’t want to stay there, and left. She felt light and parched and silent inside.

The next time she went, he asked her to tell him more about the Hugo affair as he called it. She didn’t want to – she felt she’d told him everything – but he said that this time he wanted to know how she felt about it at the different stages. There was an impasse. She sulked and he remained silent until the end of the session. The next time she asked him what more he could possibly want to know about all that, and he said, ‘The things I do not know.’

‘Or,’ he added, when she had not replied, ‘things that you have told me that I have not understood.’

So she went through it all again: this time, although she had tearful moments, she did not break down. When she got to the bit about Michael destroying Hugo’s only letter to her she did not feel so sad, much more furious with Michael. Afterwards she felt exhilarated and very grateful to Dr Schmidt, who seemed to her then to be the most wonderfully trustworthy, intelligent and wise person she had ever met in her life. It was extraordinary to have someone to whom one could say anything,
knowing
that one could entirely trust them. By now he knew all kinds of things about her that she had never dreamed of imparting to anyone. The fact that going to bed with Michael had never worked, for instance. ‘Or with Rory?’ he had asked. ‘Or with Rory,’ she had answered. ‘Most people aren’t like that, are they? Like me, I mean?’

‘When you say “most people”, you imply that you should be one of them. Why do you think like that?’

‘It would make one fit in more easily, I suppose.’

‘Ach, so. But sometimes we are not like most people. What then?’

‘
I
don’t know. I feel you keep asking me questions when you know the answers to them perfectly well. I can’t see the point of it.’

He sat quietly, looking at her. The skin under his black eyes was almost like purple grapeskin, she thought. ‘I do know why, of course. You want
me
to know the answers . . .’

One day she went, full of the news that she was going to New York – for some weeks, she thought, she didn’t know for how long. He said nothing to this: he seemed abstracted. At the end of the session, he asked her if she would mind changing the time at which she came. Could she come at five o’clock instead of three? It made no difference to her. She had become used to knowing when her session was up, because the doorbell would ring, and he would answer it and put the newcomer into his small back room until she had left. She never met another patient.

But the next time she went, she noticed that he was wearing a different suit and bow-tie and that the table, which was usually between them, had been moved and was now covered by a coloured embroidered cloth on which were a plate with two slices of cake and two wine glasses.

‘Are you going to have a party?’ she asked; she felt glad at these signs of his having some ordinary social life.

He smiled. ‘Oh, yes! Perhaps. We shall see.’

His assault, when it came, was utterly without warning of any kind. One minute he was opposite her, head slightly hunched between his shoulders, and the next he was on his knees, surprisingly powerful arms enclosing her, pushing her head – by the back of her neck – towards his face until his mouth met her cheek and moved sideways and downwards until he reached her mouth. The shock was so great that, for what seemed a long time, while these physical manoeuvres took place, she was paralysed, but as he fastened his mouth on hers she began to fight him, pushing weakly with her hands since he had pinioned her upper arms, clenching her teeth against his tongue, and finally dropping her head and butting his face with her forehead. He fell back at this and she freed her arms to push him suddenly and hard so that he fell sideways on to the floor. She got up from the chair to her feet just as he was beginning to sit up.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘You have not understood. I adore you—’

‘I hate
you
!’ she tried to say but, like a nightmare, no sound came out.

Without her coat or bag, she ran from his room down the passage to the front door, which she wrested open, down the steps into the street. She ran the whole length of the street and at the corner looked to see if he was following her, but he was not. She turned the corner and continued running, and when she reached the main road by the park, she realized that she had no money to get either the bus or a cab. It was late, and the park would be closing: she leaned against a pillar box trying to get her breath back and then renewed fears that he would pursue her took hold and she hailed the first empty cab that came. Someone would have the money for it at home, was her last coherent thought. When she reached home, she called Nannie, who produced the money for the fare, and, saying that Mummy looked really tired, offered her a nice cup of tea in the nursery. ‘Sebastian would love to have tea with his mummy.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t feel well. I may have caught something. I just want to go to bed.’ Michael was not back from the studio: she threw herself on the bed and lay there while it got dark.

She never saw him again. The next day, her coat and bag were returned to her by some young man of whom she knew nothing, but who announced himself as Hans Schmidt. ‘My father asked that I bring you these,’ he said. She took them without a word and shut the door on him.

When Michael enquired how she was getting on with Dr Schmidt, she said that she did not like him and had given up going, news that he received with a kind of weary indulgence: she was full of whims – she would never stick to anything.

Since then she had had a series of nightmares about him that always took the same form but with variations, so that there was always a shock attached to each dream. She would be going about her life and he would materialize from nowhere, and he was always coming towards her. Once it was on a moving staircase, when she was on the descending side and she saw him ascending – watching her with his dark intent eyes. When he reached a level with her he seemed to disappear, but then the man standing on the stair below her would turn round to face her – and it would be him. Another time she was running from him through a series of rooms with doors that led into one another, and when she reached the door that led out of the house, it would open and he would be standing there. The nightmares stopped exactly when she had tried to scream and discovered that she could make no sound. These dreams, although they slowly became less frequent, continued throughout that winter. Looking back on that time, she knew now that it had changed things. She remembered how that winter when she and Michael went to large dinner parties, she would look at the men alternated with women round a dinner table and wonder whether, when they were alone with a woman, they behaved in some way or another like Dr Schmidt. If this was so, she had to find some way of dealing with it. One way would be to look so awful and behave so unpleasantly that no man would want even to talk to her, but there was a serious flaw in this solution. She felt so worthless and guilty – about Sebastian and also about Michael – that the only times when she felt any better were when someone paid her any kind of admiring attention. She knew that people thought her beautiful, and although she did not agree with them (she would not have chosen her appearance which struck her as too bony and otherwise dull), she relied upon even small, casual remarks about it to give her fleeting moments of self-esteem. She had also a reputation for intelligence that privately she knew to be unfounded but, again, it helped that some people thought this and said so. So she could hardly afford to be entirely unapproachable. The situation remained miserably unresolved.

She had been lonely that winter: Stella, having landed a job with a London newspaper, was immediately sent abroad as a foreign correspondent, which meant that she came back to London rarely and only for fleeting visits.

She saw Polly a bit at the flat, but Clary was hardly ever there and when she was had turned into someone it was very difficult to talk to, although Polly was comfortingly the same. Sometimes, after she had spent an evening with her, she felt envious of Polly’s life: her own place, a job where she was taken seriously enough to earn money, and her being able to choose exactly how she spent her spare time. All the efforts Louise had made to get employment had come to little or, in most cases, nothing: an amateur reading of a Communist verse play in Ealing, a couple of small parts in radio plays, and three auditions for parts in the theatre none of which she got. There had been no film work and she had stopped trying to get any.