Your Roots Are Showing (20 page)

“How old are your children?”

“Three.”

“And you rock Alex to sleep?”

Lizzie paused a moment. “Actually, not anymore,” she said slowly. “Not since I moved out.”

Ivana noted something down. “Ah,” she said.

“And then I’d go and have a shower. Before bed.”

“I see. A quick shower to get ready for the night of love.”

Lizzie cringed. People were obviously a lot more forward about this sort of thing in Croatia, or wherever Ivana hailed from. “Yes. Except maybe not such a very
quick
shower. I love showering, you see. Well,
used
to love it. The only bit of peace and quiet I’d get in the whole day. So I didn’t take quick showers, exactly. Actually, they could be rather long.”

“Ah.”

“So my husband would sometimes be asleep when I’d go to bed.”

“Sometimes?”

“Well, often, then.” Lizzie could see what the woman was driving at. Okay, so maybe there hadn’t been sex three times a week, or even twice a week. But it had still been pretty frequent. At
least
three or four times a month. And she’d always made him think she was enjoying herself.

She was still no closer to understanding how a single rogue e-mail message could have ended her marriage.

Ivana looked at her watch. “Time is over,” she said. “You need another appointment. Talk to Katriona at the front desk.”

But later that day, as she and Tessa did some stretching exercises before their run, Lizzie told Tessa categorically: “I’m not going back. The woman is useless. She sits looking through her diary while you talk.”

“Bloody cheek!” said Tessa. “I wonder why my friend Petronella thought she was good.”

“Dunno. Maybe she’s more interested in whatever brand of loony your friend is. I’m certainly no expert in psychotherapy, but I expected some sort of —
input
from her. She didn’t give me any advice at all! I’m worse off than I was before I went.”

“Worse off? How come?”

Lizzie shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just dwelling on things again. Thinking too much. Probably breaking down even
more
often than before. D’you know what? I think I’ll go and give the old bat a piece of my mind.”

She was back in the beanbag a week later. “Ivana,” she said, clearing her throat. “Ivana. I have something to say to you.”

“Yes?”

“I’m not coming back after today.”

“Ah.”

“I only came back at all because I thought someone should mention to you . . . the thing is, you might want to do some extra courses in psychotherapy. I’ve done a bit of Internet research, and I believe things may have changed since you got your degree. I think today’s mentally disturbed client wants a little more, what do you call it, intervention? A little more to-and-fro, at any rate. A bit more bang for their buck.”

“Ah,” said Ivana. “Now, where were we.” She looked at her notes, not at all perturbed, while Lizzie churned with the double stress of having spoken her mind and not seeming to have offended the injured party.

“Yes, frequency of relations,” Ivana said calmly. She closed her notebook, tipped her spectacles up off her nose, and looked straight at Lizzie, who was startled to see that her eyes were periwinkle blue.

“I want to tell you a story,” the therapist announced. “A young couple is getting married. She is in the beautiful white gown, he is handsome in his tuxedo. When she arrives at the church, he is there outside. So she whispers to the bridesmaid: ‘Tell the organist to keep on playing.’ Then she pulls him into the little cloakroom. The organist keeps playing for maybe six minutes, then the husband comes out fiddling with his fly, and he is smiling from the cheek to cheek. He walks up to the front of the church and goes in the pew next to the best man. ‘Where were you?’ the best man asks. ‘I thought maybe you bolted.’ ‘I was in the cloakroom with the bride,’ says the bridegroom and he is grinning. ‘I’ve just had the
best
. . .’ ”

“Okay, I think I’ve heard this story,” Lizzie interrupted. “And the bride comes out smiling too because she’s never going to have to give him another one of those again.”

Ivana looked at Lizzie with tranquil interest. “So you have heard that joke before?” she asked.

The woman was a nutter. She should be in therapy herself. “Yes, I’ve heard it, and maybe two or three more in the same vein.”

Ivana leaned back and folded her hands across her stomach. “Why do people tell jokes like that, I wonder?”

Lizzie shrugged. “I don’t know. To make people laugh, I suppose.”

“But why is such a joke funny?” the woman demanded.

Lizzie was at a loss. Was she supposed to explain the mechanics of punch lines now? Was this some sort of test of mental fitness? If she couldn’t explain how jokes worked, did that confirm she was losing her mind?

Just then, the door cracked open and the receptionist poked her head into the room. She was pale and fair, dressed, oddly enough, in jeans and scuffed cowboy boots.

“You buzzed?” she asked.

“Ah, yes, Katriona. I have just told Lizzie here joke number forty-two.”

Lizzie curled her toes inward, but Katriona nodded her head in a businesslike way. Did she really have a mental catalog of at least forty-two jokes?

“Can you explain why that joke is funny?”

Katriona smiled pleasantly. “Well, it’s not that funny when
you
tell it, Ivana. You don’t have the timing quite right. But basically, it’s funny because it illustrates a stereotype that we all have about marriage and sex.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that women use sex to catch a man, then lose interest in it once they’re married.”

Ivana nodded her head sagely, like a professor of literature when a student has explicated something tricky in one of the classics. “People pooh-pooh the stereotypes,” she pronounced. “They think they are like, what is it? — the cliché. You know, not the valid observation.”

“But they’re usually based on a partial truth,” Katriona recited back.

“Lizzie here believes she has the very unique problem with her husband,” Ivana told Katriona. For God’s sake, weren’t there rules about patient confidentiality? “Katriona, tell her of the other night, when you went out for dinner with the ladies of your baby’s playgroup. You phoned to your husband before you left the restaurant, yes? Will you tell Lizzie why?”

Katriona grinned. “I rang him to warn him that I had a really, really bad headache. You see, he thinks that if I only get a bit of booze in me, I’ll be up for anything. I didn’t want him lying in wait with the massage oils and scented candles.”

“Thank you, Katriona.”

The receptionist gave Lizzie a bright smile and withdrew from the room.

“So,” said Ivana. “This unique problem is not so unique, we see. Katriona has a baby. Katriona’s body says no more babies now. It is very simple. Let us move on to other areas. You said last time you had a ‘lovely marriage.’ What does this mean?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? We were compatible. We loved each other.”

“Did you ever have the fights?”

Lizzie thought. “Not really, I mean, we’d squabble a bit sometimes — but no big fireworks.”

“If there was the one thing you could have changed about this marriage, what would it be?”

“I wouldn’t live in Mill House,” Lizzie said quickly.

“Mill House?”

“His house. It’s on his parents’ estate. It’s beautiful, really, but not my sort of thing. Too many antiques. And his mother was always breathing down my neck, looking after the garden, making sure I didn’t break things. I never felt it was truly my own.”

“Ah,” said Ivana with a sigh. “Tell me of the mother.”

“She doesn’t like me.” Lizzie had a sudden quick vision of Lady Evelyn’s thin, supercilious face, and the way her nostrils had pinched in when she’d first laid eyes on Lizzie. Of course, Lizzie must have made a very poor first impression with her motley crew of inappropriately dressed friends, turning up almost uninvited on the manor doorstep, but still. The woman could at least have cracked a smile for the sake of politeness. “She thinks I’m a bit common and sort of — vulgar.”

“Vulgar?” The way Ivana pronounced the word, Lizzie wasn’t sure she knew what it meant.

“Yes, you know — in bad taste. I mean, she thinks I can’t garden. She thinks I’m not the gardening
sort
. Plus I always seem to be in the wrong clothes, and she makes me feel too, you know, busty.”

“Busty?”

Lizzie gesticulated at her chest. “You see, it really doesn’t matter what I wear. As soon as I put anything on, unless it’s up to my chin, it looks a bit — indecent. I mean, you should have seen her face at the last Christmas party up at the manor. I was wearing this lovely green velvet dress. Thought I’d better make a bit of an effort, you see — I’d been slouching around in sweatshirts for ages. So anyway, I’d put on a bit of weight, and maybe I didn’t quite realize when I tried the dress on, but it was more or less skin tight, and, well, probably a bit much. The thing was, nothing else I tried on was any good either, so I really didn’t have much choice. I had to wear it or go in a sack. Of course, I never meant to go swimming in it.”

“Swimming?”

Lizzie nodded. She could hardly bear to think of the Christmas party now. It had started out well enough, with James wiggling his eyebrows appreciatively at her dress and pretending to whistle. “Do you really think I should wear it?” she’d asked nervously. “It’s a bit — low, isn’t it?”

“Lizzie, you look gorgeous,” he’d replied. “I haven’t seen you look this good in ages.”

Bit of a double edge to that compliment, but she hadn’t blamed him. After all, when she’d looked at herself in the mirror of the change room in Stratford, she’d been a bit taken aback herself to see how unkempt and just plain
wide
she appeared in her leggings and woolly sweater.

Most of the dresses she’d tried on for the Christmas party had been absolutely nightmarish, of course, making her look like a ship in full sail, or a haggis squeezed into a sausage skin. But the green dress was cut just right. In it, she’d felt rather sophisticated and statuesque.

James’s father had liked the dress too. He’d lifted his monocle to get a better look, then done a sort of bow and kissed her hand in a rather theatrical way. But Lady Evelyn had sucked in her cheeks and averted her gaze from Lizzie’s cleavage.

Later, surrounded by a good helping of the men at the party, Lizzie had felt invigorated and invincible. Her father-in-law’s famous punch probably had something to do with her euphoria. She’d glanced at James every now and then to see if he was taking note of her triumph. It wasn’t often that she could rouse herself, these days, to be the life and soul of the party, and she wanted him to notice that she was a big hit. But he never seemed to be looking at her; he always seemed to be bending forward to hear something some willowy brunette in pearl-colored satin was whispering to him.

Lizzie had given up feeling jealous about the way women reacted to James. She knew perfectly well that he didn’t encourage them. Still, it had looked just a little bit like encouragement, the way he’d touched the willowy woman’s shoulder and then let his hand graze her side.

“Show us a bit of the synchronized swimming, then,” one of the chaps in Lizzie’s group of admirers suddenly suggested. For some reason, she’d been regaling them with a story from the glory years of her synchronized swimming career at school.

“What —
now
?”

“Why not?” somebody else cried, a raffishly handsome character with blonde hair and bloodshot eyes whose name, for the life of her, she couldn’t remember. “I mean, we’re in a room with a pool.”

“Come on, Lizzie! Show us some of your moves!”

Lizzie had no idea what was in that punch, but it was obviously lethal. The next thing she knew, she found herself toeing off her shoes and doing a swan dive into the water. In her green velvet dress.

As she surfaced, she realized that the entire party had gathered at the pool’s edge. People were clapping and egging her on.

Feeling strangely detached from the situation, she’d floated about in a back layout for a while staring up at the cherubs. “Come on, show us a trick or two,” somebody called hoarsely. Lizzie remembered glancing at the spectators and catching sight of James in his dinner jacket with the willowy woman still by his side, laughing now and clinging to his elbow for support. In one swift movement, Lizzie pointed a ballet leg at the ceiling and then disappeared underwater in a back somersault followed by a continuous descending spin or two. People were still clapping and cheering, but when Lizzie glanced over at James, he was watching with a stony face.

When she swam up to the steps, her dress suddenly heavy and cold on her skin, it was the blonde chap with the bloodshot eyes who pulled her out of the water and gave her a bear hug. James merely gave her a towel.

“You’ll have to borrow something of Mum’s,” he’d said in a flat, even voice. “Though I’m not sure anything will fit.”

They’d left the party shortly afterwards, Lizzie with her hair still wet, bundled up in a monogrammed terry cloth dressing gown and one of Roger’s overcoats, her green dress in a Waitrose shopping bag. Evelyn had produced the clothes with a look on her face that suggested she would probably toss the dressing gown into the fire with a pair of tongs when it was returned to her.

The walk from the manor to Mill House had never seemed longer. Lizzie kept glancing at James, trying to think of something to say to break the strained silence, but he never looked back at her, not once. By the time they got home, her teeth were chattering and her lips were blue. She took a long, hot shower to drive the chill out of her body, and when she came out, James was sound asleep — or at least pretending to be so.

Lizzie glanced at Ivana but couldn’t read the expression behind her flashing spectacles. “I — I put on a bit of a synchronized swimming show at the party,” she confessed.

“Ah?” said Ivana.

“Yes, you see, everyone was egging me on and I’d had a tiny bit too much to drink. And you know what — I don’t believe James liked it very much.” Lizzie closed her eyes. She could see James’s face, definitely annoyed and possibly embarrassed, as he draped the towel over her shoulders.