The House on the Cliff (5 page)

I turned the last fish over, opened the oven, and poked at the baked potatoes. When I looked up, I saw Bob at the sideboard, peering at his laptop screen.

“What are you doing?” I asked. The irritation in my tone was obvious.

“Just closing this down.”

“Well, can you go and get the girls, please?”

Bob went out into the hall and called up the stairs, while I laid the fish on the plates and brought them over to the table, along with the baked potatoes and some steamed greens. Then I got a big jug of water, filled each glass, and put it in the center of the table. Before I’d finished, the girls came cantering down the stairs and into the kitchen.

There was a short lull as I took off my apron and we sat down to eat, each of us finding what we needed to accompany our meal: butter, salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup. I felt a momentary, but nonetheless satisfying, sense of achievement as I watched my family prepare to eat the carefully planned, delicious, yet nutritious meal I’d made for them.

My satisfaction was short-lived, however. I’d noticed that Nella was looking unusually cheerful, her cheeks slightly flushed, and then she burst out with her news.

“I’ve been spotted by an A&R man,” she said. She savored the words, which were evidently new to her.

“What’s an A&R man?” Rose picked up the ketchup and put a huge dollop of it on the side of her plate. Then she began to spread it over her fish.

Nella ignored her.

“It’s a talent scout, Rose,” Bob said. “A person who looks out for good singers and musicians, to make a record.”

“He says I’ve got a fantastic voice,” Nella went on. “He wants to make a demo and send it to a TV producer in London.”

“That’s wonderful.” Bob grinned at her delightedly. “When did he hear you sing?”

He leaned over and cut off a piece of butter for his potato. A rather large piece, I thought. I wondered whether I should buy a low-fat spread instead.

“It was at the school concert.” Nella was all smiles.

“I was so sorry to miss that, sweetheart.”

Nella shrugged. “Mum was there, weren’t you?”

I nodded, slowly coming to the realization of what had happened at the concert after I’d left.

“Yes. You were great, Nella. Your singing was absolutely beautiful.” I hesitated for a moment. “What’s his name, this . . . this A&R man?”

“Emyr. Emyr Griffiths.”

My heart sank.

“He’s got his own recording studio, twenty-four tracks, and he’s going to put together some backing tracks, and we’re going to do my Billie Holiday song and maybe some others, and then . . .”

Nella chattered on excitedly, but I was only half listening. I’d been hoping this situation wouldn’t arise. I hadn’t given her Emyr’s card, as he’d asked me to, and there had been a reason for that.

You see, in his sessions with me, Emyr had explained why he’d lost his job as a teacher. One of his pupils, a teenage girl, had developed a crush on him, confessed her undying love, and burst into tears when he’d rejected her. He’d tried to console her, putting a solicitous arm round her shoulder as she wept, whereupon she’d promptly reported him to the head teacher. The head had been sympathetic, but because he’d actually touched the girl, she’d been forced to dismiss him. Emyr had never found work as a teacher again, and that was why he’d become depressed. The whole situation was very unfair, and I’d sympathized with him. He’d seemed a decent enough man, if a little naive. But all the same, I had to admit, when it came to my own daughter . . .

“We’re going to go up to London to meet this producer. He’s a manager as well . . .”

Nella was becoming more animated as she outlined Emyr’s plans for her rise to fame.

“I don’t know about that, Nella,” I cut in, before I could stop myself. “You’re far too young to be going up to London with a complete stranger. And anyway, you need to be concentrating on your schoolwork at the moment, with your exams coming up . . .”

Nella stopped talking. A sullen look came over her face, and she began to play with her food, pushing it around the plate with her fork.

Bob tried to make amends. “All Mum is saying, love, is that we need to take this step by step . . .”

Nella put down her fork and glared at me. “You just don’t want me to be happy, do you?” There were tears of anger in her eyes. “You’re so overprotective. None of my friends get this kind of shit from their parents . . .”

“She said shit,” Rose murmured, gazing down at her fish, now entirely coated in ketchup.

“Come on, Nella, don’t be so touchy. Nobody’s stopping you doing anything.” Bob’s tone was placatory. “We’re just trying to make sure . . .”

Nella got up from her chair, pushing it back so that it scraped loudly across the floor, and marched out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

There was a long silence.

“Shall I go after her?” Bob said.

“If you want to.” I put down my knife and fork, suddenly exhausted. It had been a long day. “I’d leave it a while, let her cool down.”

“Why did you jump down her throat like that? When she was so excited about it all?” Bob’s tone was perplexed, rather than accusing.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. It’s just that . . .” I paused. “It’s nothing to worry about, really. I’ll tell you later.”

Rose looked up from her fish, with interest.

“Nella’s probably got a point,” I went on. “I think maybe I am being a little overprotective.”

“Well, that’s natural enough.” Bob began to mash his butter into his potato. “You’re a mother. It’s your biological destiny.”

“What’s a biological destiny?” Rose piped up.

“It’s something you can’t avoid,” I replied. “Like being a woman. Or a man.”

Rose looked confused, but I was too distracted to explain further. Bob came to my rescue.

“It means, Rose, that if you’re a mother, you have an instinct to look after your children and protect them from danger. You can’t help it. Even when your children find you really annoying.”

“That’s right,” I said. Hearing him explain it, I felt less guilty that I’d been so insensitive, pouring cold water on Nella’s plans like that.

“We’ll just explain to Nella that she’s too young to go to London with this guy on her own,” he went on. “I’ll offer to drive them up in the car, hang around in the background, keep an eye. I’m sure she’ll be fine with that.”

I nodded, knowing that she wouldn’t.

We ate in silence for a while, or at least Bob and I did. Rose was busy helping herself to more ketchup, and I was doing my best to ignore the fact. For the time being, I’d had enough of dampening my children’s enthusiasms, be they for pop stardom or lashings of ketchup.

“That’s enough.” Bob leaned over the table and took the sauce bottle from her hands.

I smiled at him, grateful that he’d stepped in. Even when I’m angry with him, I can’t help acknowledging that he’s wonderful with the girls. He adores them, and they adore him, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that he’s away so much these days. So I wondered whether I should try harder to make amends, if only for their sakes.

Bob got up from the table. “I’ll go and talk to Nella. And by the time I get back, Rose, I want you to have eaten up all your fish. If you do, we’ll go on the Wii and do a bit of Dance Party.”

He struck a John Travolta pose and Rose laughed. I laughed, too, involuntarily. He noticed, caught my eye, and gave me a conspiratorial wink. As he did, a startlingly clear image came into my mind.

He was talking to a young woman. She was wearing a headset, speaking into it. She was blonde and slim, with perfectly made-up blue eyes and frosted pink lips, and she was smiling, showing her whitened teeth. She was wearing one of those tiny dresses young women favor these days, just a sliver of brightly colored fabric hanging off her tanned limbs, the asymmetric cut revealing, and then concealing, the shape of her body as she moved. Yet she looked genuinely innocent, as if it were completely natural for her to be showing off so much flesh while she worked. He was smiling back at her, talking, too, nodding encouragingly, keeping his eyes on her face. Then I saw him get up and walk over to her. He reached forward, took her hand, drew her toward him, and . . .

Just a local translator. No one of any significance.
Bob’s words echoed through my head, along with another few that I’d added.
False. Treacherous. Deceitful.

“If that’s all right with you, Jess.”

I realized Bob was talking to me, waiting for a reply.

“OK,” I said, looking away. “But don’t keep her up too late. It’s nearly her bedtime.”

4

I’ve got a set of rules for my job. Number one: never get too involved with your clients. Two: never arrange to see them outside the session. Three: never take calls from their family. Four: never visit them at home. Five: well, the list goes on. But I do make exceptions when I think a client is at risk. So when Arianrhod Morgan, Gwydion’s mother, phoned me to say that he was suffering from deep depression and she feared he was suicidal, I took her seriously. She was distraught, wanting to find out whether his behavior had given me cause for concern when I met him.

I told her that he hadn’t seemed unduly depressed when I’d seen him, and went on to ask her a few routine questions, such as whether he’d made any suicide attempts in the past, or had spoken of a specific plan, such as taking an overdose, to which she replied that he hadn’t. However, she said, he’d been lying in bed, refusing to leave his room, and apparently unable, or unwilling, to speak to anyone. He no longer got up in the morning, washed himself or got dressed. And in the last few days he’d virtually stopped eating. She’d sounded genuinely upset, and had begged me to come down and see him. I got the distinct impression that she was exaggerating about the suicidal tendencies but, just to double-check, I decided to make a visit. Normally I would have discussed the situation with my supervisor—all practicing therapists, however experienced, are supposed to have an hour or so of supervision every month—but she had recently taken a sabbatical and I hadn’t got round to finding a new one, so for the time being I was on my own.

It was a wet, blustery day as I swung the car onto the M4 and headed west, out of Cardiff toward Carmarthen, the roads enveloped in the kind of swirling mist that makes words like “Mabinogion” spring into your mind unbidden. As I passed the factories and wind-farms out on the hills I realized that, despite the sober purpose of my journey, I was glad to be getting out of the city for the day. It had something to do with the landscape, I reasoned. West Wales holds a kind of glamour for me: the brooding black mountains; the ruined castles; the huge beaches with their sweeping tides; the Celtic crosses looming out of drunken churchyards; the white stone cottages with their black slate roofs. . . . Let’s edit out the boarded-up shops, the smashed phone boxes, the toothless junkies, the pubescent parents, just for the moment. They’re not part of this particular story.

I passed the turning off to Porthcawl, the traffic thinned out, and a solo piano recital came on the radio. Chopin, I thought, by the sound of it. I wondered what the piece was. It could have been a prelude, a nocturne, or a scherzo for all I knew. Or even a polonaise, an ecossaise, a mazurka. I’d missed the announcement as I hadn’t been listening. But whatever it was, I found it immensely soothing. The lack of drums, or words, or mid-Atlantic nasal wails was especially appealing to me. I sighed, relaxed back into my seat, and hitched up my skirt. It was a dogtooth-check, kick-pleat number, a little tight at the hips, that I’d teamed with a cream silk blouse—no buttons—a cashmere sweater and lace-up brogues. I put my foot on the accelerator.

As I drove along the sea road I saw the satanic mills of Port Talbot, its tall chimneys coughing out a pall of yellow smog that hugged the coastline for miles, and the words “chimney-sweeping” came into my mind. That’s what Anna O., the first psychoanalytic patient, called her therapy with Dr. Breuer, Freud’s predecessor. (She also coined the term “talking cure.” In this game, it’s the patients who do all the work, including naming the treatment.) A thorough clean-out, I reflected, that’s all Gwydion needs. A chance to blow away the cobwebs, get his deep fears and anxieties off his chest. He’ll be able to talk to me. Hold my hand, in a purely metaphorical sense—though, as it happens, Dr. Breuer actually did hold Anna O.’s hand, listening to her for hours as she lay on her bed in the dark, telling him fairy stories. I wasn’t planning on doing that, of course. Modern professional ethics prevent that sort of thing and, besides, it didn’t end well between Breuer and Anna O., as is well documented. But all the same, I was certain I could help Gwydion. Come to him in his hour of darkness, his time of need. And even if I couldn’t, I was determined to try.

I got to the Morgan place in the early afternoon. It was a few miles away from a tiny fishing village, perched on a cliff top in solitary splendor, overlooking St. Bride’s Bay. Before announcing my arrival I stopped the car on the side of the road and peered at the house through the big iron gates. It was tremendously grand. A darned sight grander than I’d expected. One of those Jacobean piles with tall chimneys, pointy gables, and castellated whatnots all the way round the roof. It looked like something out of a fairy story. There were latticed windows everywhere, and barley-twist pillars around the porch, and carved stone garlands drooping down over the front door. But impressive as it all was, when you looked more closely, you could see that parts of it, especially on the wings, were crumbling away. The kind of house that, however much money you spent on it, would always be falling to pieces. Nevertheless, it was still beautiful. Unique. Rococo. Baroque even.

I hesitated for a moment. The house looked intimidating, as those marauding lords had intended it to do all those centuries ago. And there was an air of melancholy about it, too. I had a sudden urge to run away, but instead I forced myself to press the buzzer, speaking into the grille, giving my name, and resisting the temptation to say something silly like “Open, sesame.”