(1998) Denial (6 page)

You have to
.

They made him feel better.
Cause and effect
. That was the way the world worked. Tina Mackay had bitten him and now she wouldn’t bite him again.

No need for guilt.

Her rejection of the manuscript had caused her to be here in the first place. This was all entirely her fault.

The human will to live is a strange thing, he thought. People will do anything to stay alive, say
anything
. Even when, like Tina Mackay, all you are staying alive for is more pain and the hope of death.

His conscience clear now, he leaned across to his Bang and Olufsen stack and pressed
PLAY
. Immediately the psychiatrist’s voice filled the room. Thomas knew by heart every one of the words on the tape.

He rewound it, sat back, and listened again, for the hundredth, or maybe the thousandth, or maybe the millionth time to Dr Michael Tennent’s anxious voice.

‘This is Dr Tennent speaking. Gloria, would you please give me a call as soon as you get this message? I’m rather afraid I upset you this morning. It might be helpful if we had a quick chat on the phone.’

He pressed
STOP
, looked back at the screen, and tried to continue writing up his diary. But the words were just a blur as now, alone in his den, he wept for all that he had lost.

His session with Herman Dortmund had left Michael Tennent’s mind in an even more turbulent state than when he had arrived that morning. He hadn’t been able to concentrate at all on his next patient, a forty-two-year-old woman suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, who’d had cosmetic plastic surgery on her face and body eleven times in the past five years. And the tragedy was that she’d been a beautiful woman to start with and was incapable of believing it. Unlike Gloria Lamark, who had been incapable of believing she might ever lose her looks.

His head ached like hell. In spite of the cool beige linen suit he was wearing, he felt clammy. He ought to go home, gulp down a couple of paracetamol, sit in a darkened room. But he had a full list today, and a few were totally dependent on him. The newspaper obituary on his desk was proof of that.

An overdose of drugs
.

He knew exactly why she had done it, that was the worst part. She had done it because –

His phone buzzed. His secretary, Thelma, announced the arrival of his eleven o’clock appointment. Michael asked her to have the patient wait a few moments.

‘Yes, Dr Tennent,’ she said, then added nervously, ‘I listened to the programme last night. I thought it went very well. If you don’t mind me saying, you sounded much more confident than usual.’

Michael had inherited Thelma from his predecessor, and reckoned she had a bullying husband and almost certainly a bullying father. A small, trim, grey-haired woman, nervy, servile and anxious to please, she looked older than she
was. He guessed she had probably learned to get through life by avoiding confrontation. She just steered a course through the rocks and stuck rigidly to it. Few highs but few lows. Existence at its baldest. That was all far too many people had to hope for.

She rarely expressed opinions to him, which made her remark now all the more surprising.

‘Really?’ he probed. ‘I didn’t think I’d done a very good job last night.’

She hesitated. ‘It seemed as if you were speaking much more from the heart than usual. I – I don’t mean that you aren’t usually good, but there was definitely something different.’

Amanda
? he wondered. He said, ‘Thanks. I’m not at all sure I’m going to continue doing it, though.’

‘You
should
, Dr Tennent,’ she said emphatically. ‘I think you help people.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ He paused. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, I have to make a call.’

He replaced the receiver and stared at the framed photograph of Katy, a head and shoulders shot. Their last holiday together. They were on a boat going down the Nile, and she was leaning against a deck rail, grinning, looking at him with those trusting blue eyes. The wind had twisted her blonde hair around her neck, and strands of it lay across her pink cashmere jumper. She had a healthy tan and those three colours, the brown skin, the blonde hair, the pink jumper against the clear rich blue of the Nile sky seemed perfection. Exquisite.

So why had he done what he had?

Why?

She
was
beautiful. An English rose. A princess. His brain was a kaleidoscope of memories. She could eat anything and she never put on weight. She loved food. Grilled Dover soles a yard long. Hunks of rare steak smothered in onions. Great big sticky doughnuts filled with custard cream. He remembered on their honeymoon when she’d rammed a massive doughnut into his mouth, then licked the sugar off
his lips, all the time laughing and scolding him as if he were a child.

Dead.

Trapped beside him in the wreckage of the car, broken and bleeding and inanimate. The airbag lying limp like some grotesque parody of a spent condom. The bloodied face of the dead man in the van that they had hit head on, staring accusingly out through the crazed glass of the windscreen, while the firemen sawed their way in and the crowd stood around gawping.

yourfault . . . yourfault . . . yourfault

Memories he did not want to have, but which he needed to confront.

Every day, every night, his mind returned to that accident. A safe door had locked shut in his brain. Inside it were a few seconds of his life, twenty, maybe thirty, in which his whole world had changed. He could not get to them, could not find the key, or the combination, that would unlock that door.

Once, when things had been good, they used to have those intense conversations lovers have over a bottle of wine or curled up in bed, and often they’d talk about death and how they’d cope if one of them lost the other. Katy always said it would make her sad to think that if she died he might never be happy again, and she’d made him promise faithfully that he would move on, find someone else, start a new life.

Now that generosity of spirit was twisting him up inside as he looked at Amanda Capstick’s business card lying on his desk: 20-20 Vision Productions Ltd. Amanda Capstick. Producer.

Then he looked again at the
Times
obituary. Gloria Lamark.

An overdose of drugs
. . .

He almost knew it by heart now.

Gloria Lamark, movie actress, died from an overdose of drugs in London on 9 July, aged 69. She was born in Nottingham on 8 August, 1928.

A leading actress in the 1950s, hailed by critics as Britain’s Brigitte Bardot, although in many respects a far more accomplished actress, her numerous roles included
The Arbuthnot File
, directed by Orson Welles,
Race of The Devils
, directed by Basil Reardon,
Storm Warning
, directed by Carol Reed, and her most successful film,
Wings of the Wild
opposite Ben Gazzara. Her first stage appearance was aged three at the Nottingham Playhouse in
Mother Goose
. Her husband, German industrialist Dieter Buch, died in 1967. She is survived by her son, Thomas.

Then, as if it would ease his guilt not to have the paper in front of him, he slipped it into a drawer. This was behaviour wholly contrary to the advice he gave his patients. Confront your problems, your inadequacies, your fears, your demons, your monsters.
Don’t file them away in a drawer
.

An overdose of drugs
.

It happened to every psychiatrist, although that knowledge did not make it any easier. And he’d never particularly liked the woman, but that made no difference to his distress. His job was to help people, not to sit in judgement of them. And he had failed.

And the worst of it was that he knew exactly why he had failed. He’d taken a gamble he should never have taken. Gloria Lamark had not been up to it.

He removed his glasses and buried his head in his hands.
Oh, God, how the hell could I have been so stupid
?

His phone rasped. He picked it up and heard Thelma’s voice.

‘Shall I send Mrs Kazan in now?’

‘A couple more minutes,’ he said.

He looked again at Amanda Capstick’s card, and thought of her smiling at him through the glass control-room window. The warmth she had radiated.

Keeping his eyes well clear of Katy’s photograph, he dialled the number. A telephonist put him on hold, then Amanda was on the line. She sounded pleased to hear him. ‘You were great,’ she said. ‘Last night, on the programme. I was
so impressed!
’

‘Oh – uh – right – thanks!’

‘No, really, you were
so
good! We’re going to include a segment for sure.’

‘I’m delighted,’ he said. ‘Uh – look – um – listen,’ he was feeling swelteringly hot suddenly, ‘I – I was given two tickets for the Globe Theatre, next Thursday evening. To see
Measure for Measure
. I – I just wondered if you’d been there? Whether it would interest you?’

She hadn’t been there, she told him. And yes, it would interest her hugely. She sounded genuinely delighted to have been asked. And she’d seen a televised version, she said, but she’d never seen the play performed live.

Michael replaced the receiver, elated. He’d done it. They had a date!

Seven whole days away, but that didn’t matter. For the first time in three years he had something to look forward to.

Thelma buzzed him again, the phone rasping away urgently.

But now not even Thelma mattered.

‘Tina, look, I want to show you! You’re in the
Evening Standard!
’

Thomas Lamark leaned over the operating table and held the front page in front of Tina Mackay’s closed eyes.

Her face was pale. Dark rings around her eyes. Blood dribbled from her mouth. She didn’t look good.

She hadn’t made the front-page splash, Ulster was the lead story, but the only photograph was Tina Mackay’s face.

EDITOR – KIDNAP FEARS GROW
.

‘I’m the only person in the world who knows where you are, Tina. How do you feel about that?’

There was no reply.

He checked her blood pressure: it was very low. Her pulse was racing: 120. There was still only a small amount of urine in the catheter bag. He hadn’t given her fluids or food since she had been here.

How did I forget to do that
?

This worried him. He’d always had bad memory lapses but now they were getting worse. He looked down at her with remorse, trying to remember how long she had been here. Almost a week. ‘You poor thing, you must be thirsty, hungry, I didn’t mean to make your life hell. I wanted to hurt you, to punish you, I wanted you to understand pain, Tina, because you gave my mother so much pain. I wanted to educate you, but I didn’t mean to be cruel by depriving you of food and water. Do you understand that?’

He searched for a flicker of response in her face, but saw none.

Raising his voice, he said, ‘I’m saying sorry, Tina. I’m
apologising, I really do want to apologise. Can you forgive me?’

No response.

He put down the
Evening Standard
on the metal table where he laid his instruments, then opened the
Daily Mail
, and held that up above her face. ‘You’re in the
Mail
too. Page five. It’s a nice-sized piece, a good photograph.’ He looked at it. Her brown hair was cut short, the way it was now; she was neatly dressed, smiling pleasantly, she looked a responsible person, in a school prefect way. She could never, ever, have been beautiful in the way that his mother had been, and this made him sorry for her.

Trying to cheer her up, he said, ‘They say nice things about you, Tina. That you rose from being a secretary to a senior fiction editor, and now you’re in charge of the entire non-fiction list.’

He put down the
Mail
, opened the
Mirror
and held that up for her to see. ‘Tina, take a look at this. Here’s a photograph of your boyfriend. The Honourable Anthony Rennison. He’s saying he can’t understand what has happened to you, he’s at his wit’s end.’

Thomas studied the man’s face more closely, then looked down at Tina. Here were two people and they had a relationship. How had they met each other? How had they become boyfriend and girlfriend?

‘Tell me, Tina, why do you like this man? He’s really not very good-looking – he’s a chinless wonder. Why would someone want to go out with a man like this, but not with me?’

Still no response.

He turned away and put down the newspaper.

What have I done to this woman
?

A tear rolled down his cheek.

What have I done
?

Have to snap out of this
.

‘Tina, you kept on saying to me how sorry you were about not publishing my mother’s book. You have to understand that I’m sorry too. I’m sorry my mother had to go to her grave without her biography being published.’

Then he turned away and paced up and down the concrete chamber, churning a question over and over in his mind.
Do I keep her or let her go
?

Finally he pulled his coin out of his pocket, tossed it in the air and palmed it.

Tails.

‘Tina, I’m letting you go.’

tuesday, 15 july 1997. 4 a.m
.

The caterers are coming to day, to get everything organised for tomorrow, and I need to keep my mind clear. Lots to think about
.

I go to see Tina and find she’s already gone. No pulse at all. It only took a small dose of curare, which paralysed her lungs. The end would have been quick for her, in her state
.

On the whole I think she made some good progress here, she got well beyond the apex of the learning curve I set for her. I told her what Socrates said, that the greatest pain is that which is self-inflicted, and she was intelligent enough to understand this. I’m glad for her that she did
.

I feel that with the benefit of what she’s learned, next time she wouldn’t make the same mistake. But that’s for the Higher Authority to decide
.