All in the Mind (33 page)

‘Are you in the same game as Martin?’

‘No. I trained as a medic, but just did the house and the kids really.’

‘Same as Sandie, till the kids left.’

‘Maybe I should do something now they’re all grown up. Not sure what though.’

They found themselves flitting in and out between small talk about their families and big talk about his situation. Sometimes, her questions linked the two.

‘How long have you been married?’

‘Over thirty years.’

‘She won’t want it to end just like that.’

‘Hope so. Hope she’s avoiding the papers too.’

‘Your family is more important than your work. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I do now, yes. Now I don’t have one.’

She asked if he minded her putting on the radio so she could hear the weather forecast. Then came the headlines. The lead story was the Prime Minister saying the government would quickly recover from the ‘temporary setback’ of Mr Hall’s sacking. He said it was more a personal tragedy for the former minister than a lasting problem for the government. Daniel Melchett was visiting a hospital to spell out his commitment to the NHS, and pollsters said the immediate response from the public seemed to be that they thought the Prime Minister had handled it decisively. ‘Meanwhile, mystery surrounds the whereabouts of the disgraced former minister himself, who has not been seen since leaving his department last night. We now go to our reporter Suzanne Crowther outside Mr Hall’s home.’

They both laughed, then she switched off the radio.

‘Thank you for putting me up. I am grateful to you and your husband. He’s a very good man. You’re a very lucky woman.’

Mrs Sturrock looked down, and stirred the tea in the pot.

34

‘Hafsatu is here,’ said Phyllis, putting her head round the door.

Sturrock stared hard at his desk. Perhaps he should simply cancel, say he was ill. But Hafsatu would have travelled all the way from Chigwell to get here, probably an hour’s journey. And she would have taken the time off work, unpaid time that she could ill afford. And did he really imagine that he could let her come so close, and then let her go again?

He went to the door to call her in. As always, her beauty shocked him. Every week, he hoped that as he summoned her to his consulting room, he would view her as any other patient. Every week, she seemed lovelier. She rose from her chair, and as she walked towards him, he hoped neither she nor Phyllis noticed how closely he was watching her. She was wearing her hair in braids. It made her face look even more slender, her cheekbones even higher and stronger. Her eyes seemed darker, more seductive. As she walked by him and into his room, he closed his eyes, and told himself to push such thoughts aside.

But when she sat down, he knew he couldn’t do it. So often during their sessions he had lost his train of thought gazing at her strong muscular body. She always dressed smartly. Today she was wearing a white jacket, black blouse and tight white skirt. She loved clothes. He’d built on this in their sessions together, suggesting that, every time she felt a traumatic event from her past surfacing in her mind, she think of a design for an outfit, imagine a fabric she’d like to make a dress out of, try to see how colours might work together. He had no idea if it helped her or not.

‘How are you today, Hafsatu?’ he said, as he settled into his leather armchair.

‘I’m good, Professor Sturrock, good,’ she said. She grinned. She had quite the whitest teeth he had ever seen. There was a slight chip on one of her lower teeth, but it did nothing to diminish her smile. The overall effect of her today was overwhelming. Black skin, white suit, white teeth, black blouse.

I must find a way to tell her that I think she should transfer to another psychiatrist, he thought. But he couldn’t see how to do it, so stalled for time, desperately trying to recall what homework he’d set her at their last session. Goals for the future, that was it.

‘So how did you get on with your three goals?’

The fact that he had set her this exercise was symptomatic of the way in which he was failing her. It was too early in her treatment to ask her to set future goals. They hadn’t done enough work on her past. But he shied away from hearing about it. He was fine talking about her childhood in Sierra Leone and how all the suffering and conflict around her had affected her. But when she talked about being forced to work as a prostitute, about how she felt when made to have sex with strange men so that her controllers could make themselves rich, he felt he was probing himself more than her, and he didn’t like what he saw there. He felt hypocritical whenever he sat nodding in sympathy at the life she was forced to lead, knowing as he did that he regularly used prostitutes. It was not as though he did not suffer enough guilt already. What he did offended his upbringing, his religious education, his marriage vows, his self-image, and what he felt he really believed. And yet he continued to do it, and that simple fact was inescapable when he was sitting down listening to a woman who, in different circumstances, at a different time, would have been allowing him to indulge his desire for a quick sexual hit. The guilt was worsened by his inability to master thoughts about her as a prostitute, and him as a client. With every such thought that came into his mind, and every struggle to banish it, he felt a little more tired.

She had written down her three goals on a little card.
1. Build a life in Britain. 2. Own my own business. 3. Raise a family of my own
.

‘How hopeful are you of achieving all this?’ he asked.

‘Quite hopeful.’

‘What business would you like?’

‘I don’t know yet. Perhaps fashion.’

‘Yes, you like clothes.’

Was he treating her, or chatting her up? He felt at a loss as to what to say next. He was dancing around big issues, and wasting her time and his. It was the kind of conversation she might have with a stranger she met on a train, not a conversation between a consultant psychiatrist and a deeply damaged patient.

Fortunately, she broke the silence by taking the lead.

‘May I ask
you
something, Professor?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You ask me how hopeful I am about meeting my goals. How hopeful do you think I should be? What can hold me back?’

What could hold her back? So many things, himself included. He wanted to tell her this, to reveal to her the extent of his duplicity and hypocrisy. He wanted to apologise and tell her that his colleague Judith Carrington would be able to do so much more for her.

‘I see nothing to hold you back, Hafsatu. Re your first goal, you have proper status. Re the second, you are intelligent and determined. Re the third, why not? You should be confident. You have your life before you.’

He felt sick. It was a cop-out, and he knew it. She wanted his proper analysis of where she was psychologically, whether he felt she was through the worst, whether a wretched past was sufficiently well addressed to let her imagine the future she had scribbled on her card, and he gave her this empty, platitudinous, over-optimistic answer. That was because he wasn’t really thinking about her. He was thinking about himself, his tiredness and his wretched desires.

He wondered whether she ever sensed that he was not really going to the heart of her issues. He was able to talk to her about the rapes in the boat that brought her to Britain, because that was before she was made to work as a prostitute. And yet it was the prostitution that had left the greatest physical and psychological scars, the fears and
anxieties
, the lack of self-esteem, the difficulties she had in trusting or believing other people.

He dreaded to think about how many prostitutes he’d had sex with. Jack must have been about seven when one night on his way home from work, he decided to call in at a brothel he had driven by hundreds of times. It was seedy from the outside and even seedier inside but once he’d made that first visit, a second followed, a third … Then he found other, less seedy places. He discovered that his local paper could provide him with addresses he could visit, where there was no receptionist or risk of running into other clients, just a nice flat or a nice house with a nice enough prostitute living inside. And before long he had a network of women he could call on, and the rate at which he did so remained fairly steady. Some months just once or twice, some months several times a week. For a moment he thought of Emily and her physical deformity. She was lucky. Her disfigurement was inflicted on her from outside, and in time she would come to terms with it; whereas his deformity was inside, self-inflicted and impossible to live with.

In an effort to stop his eye from falling on the place where Hafsatu’s short skirt was riding up her thigh, he tried to focus on her hands, but watching her long fingers move was just as challenging. As she stroked one hand with the other, and he imagined those hands on him, he felt deprived that he had never met her when she was a prostitute. He imagined what it would be like to make love to her, and also what it would be like to have sex with her, and he could feel the beginnings of an erection stirring. He stood up abruptly and walked to the other side of the room. What should he ask her next? About what she saw as the difference between having sex and making love? Given the difficulty she had forming relationships, and given her goal of raising a family, that would have been a perfectly legitimate line of psychological enquiry for him. But he felt inhibited from pursuing it. So he danced around, and she danced back, and he got to the end of the session, not just tired but drowning in shame. He had to get someone else to see her. But how would he explain it without admitting that the reason was that he
did
want
to see her? Too much. It was all too much. He was too tired to think.

‘See you next week, Professor,’ she said as she left, and he wanted to pull her back and say, ‘No, Hafsatu, you mustn’t see me. You must see Judith and I’m going to set it up right now.’ But he didn’t. He just watched her go and then sank back into his chair.

Phyllis came into the room.

‘You remember I’m leaving early today, Professor Sturrock? Can I get you anything before I go?’

He looked at his secretary, and felt a sudden fury at her unending efficiency, her refusal ever to display any kind of emotion, beyond annoyance at a missed appointment.

‘Phyllis, can I ask you something personal?’ he asked.

Before she had the chance to reply, he went on. ‘Do you ever actually
feel
anything?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean, Professor,’ she replied, looking guarded.

‘You know,
feel
sad, happy, angry, sorry …’

‘Are you all right, Professor? You seem a little under par today, if you don’t mind my saying so. Is there anything I can help with?’

He could read the concern on her face, and he felt angry with himself for having challenged her like that. He felt angry with her too though. Theirs was the workplace equivalent of the relationship with Stella at home – stuck, unsatisfying, unchanging, going nowhere. Both women have spent so many hours in so many years with me, he thought, but neither really knows anything about me.

‘It’s OK, Phyllis,’ he sighed. ‘You can go home. I’ll see you Wednesday.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, adding as she reached the door, ‘I hope the funeral is not too painful for everyone.’

Alone in his room, he logged on to his computer for the first time that day and was immediately confronted by an inbox of unopened emails. Most were from patients. Guilt threatened to overwhelm him. All these people he had failed. What had been happening in their lives? Things that he could have sorted out if he hadn’t been so caught
up
in his own petty and despicable problems. And now it was too late. He might as well just turn the computer off. There was nothing he could do.

He was just about to shut down, when he noticed an email from David Temple at the bottom of his inbox. He couldn’t ignore something from David. He clicked on it and saw the attachment: ‘Humility’.

As he read it, he had in his mind an image of David sitting in the cemetery, writing slowly, stopping to think about every word.

I am as important as you are … You are as important as I am. We are all important to ourselves and to the people who matter to us, and the people we matter to. There are not many people I matter to, but I matter to them a lot. I matter to my people as much as all the people who matter to a king or a queen matter. The king and the queen probably don’t know it though. Because they’re not truly humble.

Kings
could
be humble, you know. Humility is not about military rank or where you are on a social ladder. Humility is knowing we are all as important as each other. And even the ones we think are really important, the ones we see on the TV or put on the pedestals, in the grand sweep of history, and amid the great forces of nature, they are grains of sand.

Everyone wants to control the world around them as best they can. Of course they do. Even the freest spirits in the world have to have a bit of order, don’t want to be surrounded by chaos, want to make the things happen that they think will make them happy. So we try to keep that control around us. We might have some success. But there are forces bigger than all of us, and they are the things that should make us humble. History. Time. Nature.

There are some people who can shape history. Most of us can’t. Nobody can stop time. Nobody can control nature. We can mow the lawn and prune the flowers, but it is other forces that make them grow.

We can only leave a small stamp on the world. Even the
kings
and the queens, when they go, the world stops and talks about them for a while. Some cry. Some mourn. Many remain unaware. Many who are aware are unmoved and uninterested. The world carries on turning.

There are points in our life when we feel we matter more than others. When we feel stronger than others, when we feel we own our own universe. But at any point in our life, had I died, had you died, the world would have gone on. There is no place on earth that cannot be filled by others tomorrow.