Brodmaw Bay (25 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘No. There have been occasions when I have used it to kick-start my mind.’

‘You mean at the outset of a period of writing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see. Have the incidences of use in those circumstances recently increased?’

‘Yes, they have. I’ll be honest with you, Dr—’

‘Eleanor, please, Robert.’

‘I’ll be honest with you, Eleanor. I am terrified of the page remaining blank. Every day it seems more difficult to begin. I’m not sleeping. I’m exhausted most of the time. I don’t have the energy for exercise.’

‘This apparition, the little girl you see: she wakes you?’

‘She wakes me, yes.’

‘How does she accomplish that?’

‘She sings to me.’

Dr Deacon rose from her chair and walked behind it to her desk. Robert had brought with him some of the draft illustrations Lillian had done for the series of books about his telekinetic heroine from County Clare. They were spread out on the polished wood, curling slightly in the June sunshine slanting through the big Georgian window of her consulting room.

‘She looks like this?’

‘No. She looks nothing like that. That’s the confusing thing.’

Robert had not always pictured his heroine in the way that Lillian had. He had always imagined her waif-like; but Lillian had given her an almost elfin quality, as though the capacity for potent and practical magic lay behind the drab reality of a young life in servitude. It was there in the translucent skin and the halo of blonde curls and the green sparkle of her eyes. It was Lillian’s talent of course to communicate such things visually; the mischief concealed by the apparently mundane, each child studying the images would assume a secret only they had spotted.

‘If she does not look like this, what does she look like?’

‘Like a ghost.’

‘You need to be more specific.’

‘Why? Why do I need to be more specific about a hallucination triggered by cocaine psychosis? I need some help in getting off the coke, Eleanor. I need to believe I can carry on working without the inspiration provided by a line snorted before I even sit down to begin. It’s as much a part of my morning ritual now as brushing my teeth and brewing my coffee and I haven’t the strength or the courage or the self-belief to stop.’

Dr Deacon looked up from the pictures on her desk and walked back to her chair. She sat down and crossed her long legs and pulled the hem of her skirt to the knee. ‘Describe the little girl who wakes you with her singing,’ she said.

Robert did not really want to think about the little girl. One had to face one’s demons – it was the reason why he was in that august and imposing wood-panelled consulting room – but it was an unnerving ordeal to have to do so. It should not have been, really, in such eminent company and in the sober light of day. But somehow the sober light of day and the therapist’s cold professionalism made his night visitor even scarier to recall.

‘I called her a ghost. By that I mean that she is quite real and not at all human.’

‘Like a memory, you mean?’

‘No. I don’t mean that at all. There is nothing vague or diaphanous about her. She is not your stereotypical ghost. She is not vague and insubstantial. She is solid and detailed and occupies three-dimensional space. She is dead, though. She is emphatically dead.’

‘And yet she speaks, which corpses do not, in my experience.’

Robert smiled. ‘You can be as sarcastic as you like, Eleanor. I do not have that luxury. Seeing a child, one who died a long time ago, at the foot of your bed, having her communicate with you, is not an experience that provokes much mirth in me.’

‘Your Irish accent is much stronger when you are upset. That’s quite interesting. Is your apparition Irish?’

‘No, she is not. She speaks the English of a native. She is refined in her speech. There might be a hint of the West Country about it, but only a hint. She does not use contractions. She is from another time. She sounds Edwardian. She is attired in a school uniform. It is purple and grey, this livery. Close to, it is as threadbare as she is. She is not imagined. She is resurrected. She has not been dragged reluctantly back.’

‘What precisely does that last sentence mean?’

‘It means I think that she enjoys teasing me. Precisely, there is a sense in which she cavorts.’

‘I see.’

‘What do you think?’

Dr Deacon pondered for a long time before replying. Then she said, ‘There are two possibilities. You are right that cocaine psychosis is the most obvious cause and, trust me, we can deal with that. It’s a much more common problem than you might suppose and there are tried and tested therapies with which I have enjoyed encouraging success. Only a tiny percentage of my own patients relapse and that is because they are deliberately self-destructive, which, with your strong streak of narcissism, you are not.’

‘What’s the second possible cause?’

‘You have recently suffered the trauma of sudden and unexpected separation from someone to whom you have developed a strong emotional attachment. You need to resolve that situation yourself.’ She glanced behind her to where the illustrations were laid out on the desk. ‘She is a very talented woman.’

‘She is also quite captivating.’

‘My advice would be to take her at her word and accept that the affair is over. That said, you are not paying me to function as an agony aunt.’

‘No. You are much too expensive.’

‘And I’m far better qualified, Robert.’

‘Who do you think she is, the little girl?’

‘You want me to establish the identity of your ghost? That is quite straightforward. I think she is simply a character from a story you have not yet written.’ Dr Deacon glanced at her watch. Their session had concluded on the stroke of the hour. She was very professional. ‘What does she say to you, by the way? What does she talk about?’

Robert laughed. The consultation had left him feeling unexpectedly much better. It would have been cheap, he thought, at twice what he was being charged. Eleanor’s expertise would wean him off his destructive narcotic habit. He would woo and win Lillian with the stout heart and unwavering will a woman so lovely deserved.

‘What does she talk about? She tells me rather gleefully that I am going to die.’

‘We all owe God a death,’ Dr Deacon said.

‘So you believe in God?’

‘It’s a quote, Robert. It’s from Shakespeare.’

Robert grinned. ‘I knew that,’ he said. He really did feel much better than he had an hour earlier on walking into the room. Dr Deacon gathered the Lillian Greer illustrations up and put them back in the folder he had brought along and he put it into his bag.

He was her last appointment of the day. As he wrote his cheque or more likely paid with his debit card at the reception area two floors below, Dr Deacon considered the treatment Robert O’Brien would require from her to restore his mental equilibrium by conquering his cocaine addiction. She sat at her desk and wrote some notes on a pad. The first word she wrote was
confidentiality
.

A coke habit was not that serious a slur on the reputation of a writer of adult fiction. In some of the more hard-boiled genres, it was probably viewed as a necessary qualification, she thought, a badge of credibility. But in a writer of fiction for children it would spell disaster, should it ever become public knowledge. Children’s writers were not so much expected to live blameless lives as lives that in personal terms were invisible.

If the press found out about his habit, the consequences would be dire. Libraries would stop stocking and lending his books. School libraries would come under pressure from governors and local authorities and perhaps even parents to ban them. Bookshops would be reluctant to stock them for fear of public indignation. A man who derived a living from children’s pocket money could not squander that money on narcotics without encouraging widespread disapproval.

He was a role model, whether he liked it or not. And she suspected that he did like it. He revelled in his status. He was narcissistic and was proud of the position his success had earned him in the world. He liked the attention, the wide-eyed adulation he got from young readers like her daughter. That was why he did the school visits.

The first time she had treated him, in the aftermath of his mother’s death, she had thought him a very attractive man. He was physically beautiful, talented and so sensitive his sensitivity was almost as tender as an unhealed wound. She had identified two characteristics in him back then that she would have termed flaws. One, of course, was the narcissism. The other was stubbornness. He could be almost childishly petulant and this immaturity, allied to a strong will, caused him to be stubborn.

On this second consultation, she had not found him attractive. She had actually found him repellent. The flaws were more apparent and accompanied by rather too much self-pity. She did not think the stubbornness would hamper the cocaine habit treatment. He would not cling to that. She thought, however, that it would likely pose a problem for Lillian Greer. She was fairly sure that he would ignore her advice concerning the affair. It was obviously a lost cause. Or rather, it was obviously so to anyone but him.

Dr Deacon thought the flaws in O’Brien’s character very probably the consequence of a spoiled upbringing. She suspected that his Spanish mother had indulged him totally. He had been an only child. Prematurely born, he had almost died in the incubator on the maternity ward before his mother had got the opportunity to hold her son in her arms. Analysing the reasons for his personality weaknesses was child’s play. Treating them was impossible because he refused to recognise their existence.

She went over to her window, long experience having taught her to time the moment to perfection. And she saw him exit her premises and take the crash helmet from the case bolted to the back of the Harley Davidson motorcycle gleaming in the sunshine at the side of the kerb.

He zipped himself into his leather jacket. He pulled on his helmet. And across the road, against the railings of the far pavement, movement caught her eye as just for a moment she thought she saw a small, slight figure in purple and grey, the face pale and serious under a straw hat, gazing up at her.

Robert O’Brien kick-started his bike into an abrupt blat of loud engine noise. At her window, Dr Deacon blinked and recoiled. Straddling the machine, her patient opened the throttle and roared away. And when she looked again at the far pavement, it was entirely empty of life.

Richard Penmarrick showed them around Topper’s Reach. Lillian thought the inside of the house every bit as impressive as the exterior had earlier suggested it would be. It was light and spacious and stood in the sort of isolation that gave its occupants privacy. The views out over the bay were breathtaking in their scope and scale. It was a potential home for them more ideal than any they had coveted together poring over the pages of
Coast
magazine in the evening back in their Bermondsey sitting room. The contrast with their terraced townhouse, with its views of harried pedestrians and gridlocked rat-run traffic, could not have been more acute or pleasing.

The early history of the house was poignant, even tragic. Adam Gleason had been killed by a German sniper bullet at the front in
1916
. His wife and daughter had not long survived him.

‘How did they die?’ Lillian asked Richard.

‘They perished within hours of each other, victims of the Spanish flu epidemic of
1919
,’ he told her. ‘Sarah had not recovered at all from Adam’s death and was not physically or emotionally strong. Little Madeleine was only eight years old. Not that strength or maturity provided any meaningful protection against the epidemic. It was incredibly virulent.’

‘I’m surprised it reached this far,’ James said. ‘The bay is pretty remote now. It must have been even more remote in those days.’

Lillian looked at her husband. She could still feel the faint throb inside her of their earlier lovemaking. It had been as passionate and raw as when they had met. He was the reason they were here, in this beautiful place. His vision and resolve had delivered them there. His forgiveness had overcome the infidelity she had allowed to jeopardise her family’s future. She looked at him in the vibrant light reflected upward through the windows from the sea and knew without doubt that she loved him.