The Memory Game (8 page)

'Be quiet, Jack. Hello, is there anybody there?'

'Hello, I want to speak to Dr Alexander Dermot-Brown.'

'That's me.'

'You're a therapist.'

'Yes, I know.' There was a clatter in the background and Dermot-Brown shouted something. 'I'm sorry, you've caught us in the middle of breakfast.'

'Sorry, I'll try to be brief. I was given your number by Crispin Pitt and Claire um...'

'Claire Swenson, yes.'

'Could I come and talk to you?'

'All right.' He paused. 'What about twelve?'

'You mean today?'

'Yes. Somebody's gone on holiday. If that's not all right, it'll have to be next week some time. Or the week after that.'

'No, twelve will be fine.'

He gave me his address, in Camden Town, near the market. God, more disruption in the office. Not that it mattered all that much. 'Work' for me was the CFM office on the top floor of an old molasses warehouse overlooking the canal and the basin in Islington. The C - Lewis Carew - died of Aids in 1989. Now there was just me and the F, Duncan Fowler, and after the years of recession we were only just approaching a time where there was enough work for two of us. As long as I went to all the meetings concerning 'my' hostel and kept the paperwork up to date and popped into the office regularly then nothing much would go wrong.

I cycled over to the office anyway. I looked through the mail and chatted to our assistant, Gina (she's our secretary, really, but we call her our assistant to compensate for paying her so badly). Duncan came in at eleven looking as relaxed as ever. Duncan is a portly fellow, quite short, with a nearly bald head fringed with reddish curly hair and an almost excessively expansive beard. I told him about some new complications with the hostel, he told me about a housing co-op job which would earn us even less money. Still, it was nothing much to worry about. I have no mortgage, and the children are away being paid for mainly by Claud. Duncan has no mortgage and is divorced with no children and no alimony. We own our leasehold. As Duncan put it in the dark days of the early nineties, before we could go bankrupt, we would first have to get some work.

I told Duncan I was going to see my second therapist in two days and he laughed and gave me a hug and then I got on my bike. I was predisposed to like Alexander Dermot-Brown because I was able to get almost all the way from my office to his house by cycling along the canal. I just had to cross Upper Street and then I could make my way through the wastes of gasometers and railway land past the post office depot and leave the towpath when I got to Camden Lock. Just a couple of hundred yards or so later I was chaining the bike to the railings.

Alexander Dermot-Brown was wearing trainers, jeans and a thin, worn sweater with holes in the elbows through which a checked shirt was visible. He had a craggy jaw, almost like Clark Kent in the old comic strip, and he had wavy brown hair flecked with the first hints of grey and very dark eyes.

'Dr Dermot-Brown, I presume.'

He smiled and held his hand out. 'Jane Martello?'

We shook hands and he gestured me in and downstairs into the kitchen in the basement.

'Would you like some coffee?'

'Lovely, but oughtn't I to be going into a room and lying on a couch.'

'Well, we can probably find a couch somewhere in the house if you're desperate. I thought we should have a chat first and see what we think about things.'

With its ceramic floor and stained-wood panelling and cupboards, the kitchen would have seemed elegant if it had been empty. But there were toys on the floor, the walls were covered with posters, postcards and children's drawings stuck haphazardly with pins and tape and Blu Tack. The walls were scarcely less crowded than the notice board, a largeish area of cork tiling above one of the work surfaces, on which takeaway menus for local restaurants, invitations, notices from schools, snapshots were attached in what looked like a whole series of layers. Dermot-Brown saw me staring around.

'Sorry, I should have tidied up.'

'That's all right. But I thought analysts were meant to work in a neutral environment.'

'This
is
a neutral environment compared with my office.'

He took coffee beans from the freezer and ground them, tipped them into a large cafetiere and poured in boiling water. He rummaged in a cupboard.

'I ought to give you some biscuits but all I can find are these Jaffa cakes. If I allow one for each child, that leaves one over. Would you like it?'

'That's all right. I'll just have coffee. Black, please.'

He poured coffee into two mugs and we sat down on opposite sides of the scrubbed-pine kitchen table. A smile was playing across his face as if the whole encounter seemed slightly comical to him, as if he was only pretending to be grown up.

'Now, Jane - is it okay if I call you Jane? And you must call me Alex - why do you think that you need therapy?'

I took a sip of coffee and felt the usual overwhelming desire. 'May I smoke?'

Alex smiled again. 'Well, Jane, one idea I have about therapy is that it's a sort of game and for it to work we both have to agree on some ground rules. One of them is that you don't smoke. I have small children in the house. It also guarantees you at least one benefit from your sessions, even if you achieve nothing else. The other benefit of the rule is that it's very easy for me to abide by because I don't smoke. There is a good chance that I'll be relaxed and in control while you're neurotically suffering from nicotine deprivation, and that's good as well, at least for me.'

'All right, I'll do without.'

'Good, now tell me about yourself.'

I took a deep breath and sketched out my situation, there, over the coffee, which he topped up, in that kitchen, my elbows on the rather sticky table. I told him about my separation and the discovery of Natalie's body. I talked a bit about the Martello family, this wonderful inclusive group that we were all meant to feel privileged to be connected to. I described my single life in London and its dissatisfactions, though I left out my sexual escapade. It took rather a long time and when I had finished Alex waited before responding. His first statement was an offer of more coffee. I felt a bit deflated.

'No, thanks. If I have too much it makes me all trembly.'

He ran his finger round the rim of his coffee mug in a slightly fidgety way. 'Jane, you haven't answered my question.'

'Yes, I have. I said I didn't want any more.'

Alex laughed. 'No, I mean, why do you feel you need therapy?'

'Isn't it obvious?'

'Not to me. Look, you're having to deal with life on your own after - what is it? - twenty-one years of marriage. Have you ever lived on your own?'

I shook my head.

'Welcome to the world of being single,' Alex said in an ironic tone. 'You know, I sometimes have a fantasy of what it would be like if I wasn't married and didn't have any children. I could suddenly decide in the evening to go out and see a movie or have a drink in a bar. Perhaps, occasionally, I meet a woman at a party and I think, if I were single, I could have an affair with her and it would be so exciting. But if I suddenly found myself single, it wouldn't be like that at all. Maybe I'd have an initial bit of euphoria. I might even have one or two sexual experiences. But I doubt whether it would be as much fun as I had anticipated. And then all the things I was used to, the reassurance of seeing people I know when I go home, all that would be gone. It would be hard.'

'I thought
I
was supposed to do all the talking.'

Alex laughed again. 'Who says? You've probably been reading too much Freud. I wouldn't pay too much attention to a man who psychoanalysed both himself and his own daughter if I were you. Anyway, not only do you have all that to deal with but you have a perfectly clear family tragedy as well. You have a perfect right to be unhappy for a while. Do you want me to wave a wand and take it away from you?'

'That sounds tempting.'

'Let me give you a very glib diagnosis, Jane, and it's on the house. I think you're a strong woman and you don't like to feel you can't cope, you don't want people to feel sorry for you. That's the problem. My comment is : life is painful. Allow yourself to give way to that. You could talk to me, of course, but you could also spend your money in other ways. You could have a weekly massage, have some nice meals in restaurants, go on holiday somewhere hot.'

It was my turn to laugh. 'Now that really
is
tempting.'

We were both smiling and there was a rather embarrassing pause. It was the sort of pause that in other circumstances I might have thought of dispelling by kissing Alex.

'Alex, I hate saying "but seriously?"... But seriously, I had this talk last night with my brother, who, incidentally, has got this deranged idea of making a film about the family, so you'll soon probably be able to learn all about my problems by watching BBC
₂
, and Paul - that's my brother's name - was talking about our golden childhood. I've always had this image of our golden childhood as well but as he was talking in this nostalgic way there was something inside me that was saying no, no, no. Over the last few days I've been preoccupied with an image. It must be all to do with Natalie being found. But I've been thinking about my golden, golden childhood and a black hole in the middle of it, and I can't get a grip on it and I don't know what it is. Somehow it's there, always on the edge of vision but when I turn to look at it directly it's gone, gone to the edge again. I'm sorry, I'm probably not making sense. It hardly makes sense even to me. If you can imagine it, I'm listening to myself talking as a way of trying to understand. Perhaps what I'm asking is for you to trust me when I feel that there is something worth looking for behind all this.'

As I made this long, incoherent speech, I looked down at the table and when I finished looked up, almost scared of catching Alex's eyes. He was frowning, with a look of alert concentration that I hadn't seen before.

'You may be right,' he said, almost muttering it.

He took my mug and his and put them in the sink. Instead of returning to his chair he began to pace up and down. I didn't know whether I should say anything but decided not. Finally, he sat down again.

'You've probably got false ideas about the process of therapy. You may have seen films in which someone's psychological problem is dramatically solved. You may have friends who are addicted to analysis and they talk to you about the wonderful insight it's given them into their problems and how much happier it's made them. It may have done, but if you've spent three hours a week for five years and twenty grand, then you've got a vested interest in its success.'

'Well, why...?'

Alex held up his hand to silence me. 'You do interest me, Jane. I think we could do something. However, I think we've both got to be clear about a few things first. This process isn't going to be like going to the doctor with an infection or a broken leg. You might ask me if I'm going to make you better and we might then have a boring philosophical discussion about whether I am going to do anything for you at all and what we mean by making you better.'

'I'm not looking for some easy answer.'

'I don't think you are. So let me be as clear as I possibly can about what may or may not happen. Let me give you a couple of warnings. You may feel, like many people do, that there could be nothing more pleasant than spending two or three hours a week having a good natter about your problems, getting them all off your chest. In my own experience this is hardly ever true. The process may be unpleasant in itself. How can I describe it?' Alex looked around the kitchen and grinned. 'The mess in this kitchen probably appals you. It certainly depresses me and infuriates my wife. So why don't we just clear it up? Well, although it looks dreadful we're actually used to it and we can find most things we need quite quickly. If I started to clear up, it would involve making everything even more chaotic for a while as I would have to empty all the cupboards as well. There would be a time when everything was worse, with the added fear that we might lose our nerve and leave it in that disastrous state. It would keep on seeming worse until just before the clean-up was completed. Even then, it wouldn't feel quite as comfortable as it did before. And although theoretically the new arrangement might be more functional, because it has been rationally arranged, in practice we would probably be unable to find things more often because we would still be used to the old irrationality. So, you see, I'm an advertisement for leaving well alone.

'You may not even achieve anything. I make no claim at all that after, I don't know, six months or a year, you will be happier or better able to deal with the practical problems in your life. You'll still be living in a world where people die and have irreconcilable conflicts. But I can guarantee at least something. Your life at the moment may seem like a collection of rough notes and impressions. Perhaps I can enable you to turn them into a narrative that will make sense to you. 'That may help you to take responsibility for your life, even, perhaps, to gain an increased control over it.

'That's something at any rate, and it's the least we can hope for. There are other possibilities as well. Let me give you one speculative example. I'm intrigued by the way you talk about your sister-in-law having been buried there, at the heart of the landscape of your childhood. That's a telling image. Some of us may have bodies in our minds, hidden, waiting to be discovered.'

'What do you mean?'

'Don't worry about it, it's just a thought, an image.'

'What about the practicalities? What do we actually do?'

'Good. Now it gets straightforward. I want to see you twice a week for an hour which actually lasts fifty minutes. My fee is thirty-eight pounds a session, payable in advance at the beginning of each week. As I have said, it would be entirely understandable for you not to go into therapy at all. I can assure you almost a hundred per cent that without any therapy or treatment at all, you will be feeling substantially better in a year or so. The pain of your sister-in-law's reappearance will have receded and you will be used to your new life. If you do decide to go ahead, and I hope you do, then you have to make a commitment. By that I mean that the sessions are sacred, not to be missed because of work, illness, sexual opportunity, disenchantment, tiredness or anything. If you break your leg, come here on your way to A and E. Naturally, you are perfectly free to stop the therapy at any time, but I think you ought to make a private commitment to stick it out for something like four or five months at the very least. And also a mental promise that you'll give it a chance. I mean emotionally and intellectually. I know you're smart and that you've probably read Freud more recently than I have. If you come in here and start wanting to discuss transference, which I don't believe in anyway, then we'll both be wasting our time and you'll be wasting your money. There. Have I said everything?'