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  The twins began to complain, wrenching off their sun hats and squatting down on the path, the girl upset about an itch or pain she was unable to describe, clawing at the waistband of her tiny jeans. I stooped to look and smelled her warm, soft hair. There was a red welt on her skin where the jeans had chafed her.

  ‘You need to cut off the label,’ I said, showing Daniel. The child gripped my arm, pulling herself upright, and stood in front of me, glaring. Her cheeks were flushed and her lips looked dry and a bit sore. How would it be for her, with two dads? I’d wondered how it had shaped Joe Libard, growing up with two mothers, but I’d not asked Maya, and now I knew nothing.

  We wheeled into the café at Kenwood, where Daniel managed to borrow a paring knife from the kitchen and saw off the irritating label. After an interlude in the toilets with both children, he emerged with a plastic bag, which he chucked in the bin, and we paused for a coffee, having quelled them with boxes of fruit juice.

  He’d hoisted the girl onto his knee and was scooping her hair up into a topknot, which he secured clumsily with an elastic tie.

  Sudden memory: brushing Maya’s long, dark hair while she stood before me, a tiny, solemn, straight-backed figure in her satin pyjama pants and jacket. She was remarkable for her poise, even as a very small child. Aged three she would talk to me, describe her day. She had always talked to me.

  ‘Kids,’ Daniel said. ‘I can manage twenty-four hours without having a nervous breakdown. Just. Thank god for daycare. Are you all right?’

  I blinked, looked away. ‘Jet lag. I flew straight through. I’ve been awake for about forty hours.’

  ‘God. Why don’t we head out to the road and I’ll call you an Uber. Forget the Tube. Honestly, you look like a ghost.’

  He went on insisting, warmly. ‘Let me make it easier for you,’ he said; perhaps he’d noticed my eyes had filled, but was too tactful to say.

  As the Uber car was pulling up, we embraced, promising to get together when Maya was back in town.

  The kids sat in their stroller, kicking each other. I leaned down and said, ‘I’ve come from the other side of the world.’ They gazed at me, uncomprehending of course.

  I straightened up. ‘By the way, the secret weapon …’

  ‘Angela? I used to wonder, well, I don’t know. I wondered whether she brought people to Aiden so she could hear more.’

  ‘What kind of journalist is she?’

  ‘She used to write for newspapers, The Independent was one. She’s a security correspondent for TV at the moment. Angela Lang.’

  ‘Actually Daniel, I’d like to catch up with Sophie and give her my condolences.’

  ‘Oh, do you know her?’

  ‘Well, it’s been a really long time, but yes. I don’t suppose you’ve got a current number?’

  ‘I don’t have a cellphone number, don’t really know her, but she works in the City for an investment bank; Gillmans, I think. She might be at their country place. Aiden hated travel; he never went out of the UK. He bought a cottage in Cornwall so he could enjoy grim English summers.’

  ‘Does she use his surname?’

  ‘Sophie? No, she’s, um, still Greenaway, I think.’

  He said his goodbyes looking away, which I found disconcerting after the shared warmth between us. I tried to remember, but wasn’t sure. Did all English people do that?

  TEN

  On the way back to the flat in the Uber, I started to be aware of a sore throat, and by that evening I was in the grip of some kind of flu or vicious cold, a foreign bug caught in transit perhaps, or a resurgence of the illness I’d had before. I spent the best part of five days lying in bed in the Normanby, with scarcely enough energy to log on to my computer.

  The first day and night passed in a blur; late on the second day I dragged myself to Waitrose and Boots and bought a load of invalid’s supplies, painkillers, lozenges, and some food. It added to the strangeness of the jet lag, being laid low with flu in such hot weather. London was now officially in the midst of a heat wave, and the park was crowded with people lounging on brightly coloured deckchairs. The news carried warnings about ozone levels and heat exhaustion and even sunburn, which I ignored, since the beautiful, mild English sun can’t be taken seriously by anyone who’s experienced the carcinogenic glare of New Zealand’s summer light.

  I was lonely, disconnected, had moments of deep melancholy, yet woke each morning with the affirming sense that at least I was engaged in something, not only the miserable business of surviving the flu, but the search for what was really important. Not to be dramatic, but I felt it strongly in those dull days, as I crept from bed to bathroom, downed my pills, peered at my flushed face in the mirror, hacked my way through the short summer nights: I’d spent too much of my life living on the surface of things, avoiding people, not facing myself. I wanted things to change.

  Fever intensifies memories, sharpens the inner eye. There were random memories, half-dreaming impressions. I recalled Inez last Christmas at a lunch to which Natasha had invited a group of her friends, Inez dressed for the occasion in a hot pink shirt and new blue espadrilles that were fashionable that year.

  In the course of an exchange in the kitchen, just the two of us, I told her that I’d met Frank’s wife in the street and that she’d reported some new compulsive behaviour of his, and Inez rounded on me, hissing: how dare I suggest there was something wrong with Frank? A furious burst of sarcastic rhetoric, sotto voce: ‘Okay he’s a disaster, totally hopeless, sure, fine, have it your way, Frances.’

  I felt the blast of hostility, noted the way she turned away towards Natasha’s friends, how she went back to sitting near them and nodding and joining in; it struck me, pierced me with sympathy and love for her: the poignancy of her outfit, the careful new shirt, the coloured espadrilles; she was as vulnerable and small and full of rage as a child.

  Once I’d recovered enough to feel hungry, my mood changed and I felt depressed by too much time alone. I locked the flat and went down to the Dining Hall, which, according to the brochure in the apartment, promised ‘affordable and nourishing meals’ for guests.

  After inspecting moistly glistening salads and a pile of sausages that seemed obscenely too long, like coiled turds, I decided that despite my loneliness I couldn’t face a communal dinner with the students and academics, and walked slowly to Waitrose, where I bought punnets of deli food and a bottle of wine.

  The Normanby’s roof terrace was so private I was able to strip down to T-shirt and underwear, exposing my pale skin to the sun. I had my notebook on the table, along with an unwise glass of wine. My head still hummed with flu and jet lag and it was difficult to focus on the page, which blurred after just the first few sips.

  The wine burned on the way down and spread a hot glow through my chest; it was just a cheap bottle of something or other, but it was delicious.

  I had been adjusting to this painful fact: Maya and I had never discussed Aiden Wood. She must have stopped communicating around the time of his death, just before they’d all gone off for their summer break. If Daniel was right, she’d gone, initially at least, to Paris with Joe. I hadn’t known she was working for Aiden. If he was significant to her, if she’d worked as closely with him as Daniel had told me, then it was surprising that she’d never mentioned him to me, and shocking that she hadn’t told me about his suicide.

  That she hadn’t confided gave me an intense feeling of shame, which I’d hidden from Daniel.

  How had I failed her? Could it be that as well as ‘inventing’ Nick Oppenheimer, I’d invented my notion of myself? I’d thought I was a good parent, that we got on brilliantly, that our relationship, Maya’s and mine, was solid, successful, normal — admittedly it was a single triumph on my interpersonal record of fuck-ups, misunderstandings and solitude, but that was why I valued it so! I hadn’t consigned Maya to silence, as Inez Bravo Sinclair had done to me: this was the belief I’d held onto.

  As part of my year of trying to understand the family an
d myself, prompted by the silent treatment, I’d consulted a psychotherapist — rather a revelation as it turned out. It was my therapist, Dr Werner Bismarck, who told me about attachment theory: that one’s early relationship with primary caregivers dictates, broadly speaking, the formation of behaviour patterns across a person’s lifespan.

  According to nice, kindly Dr Bismarck, attachment patterns are formed when one is under four years old. It’s all about how well or badly you bond. If attachment is insecure, you may form a personality disorder, or some other issue. It rather took the wind out of Inez’s theory that Frank’s problems had been caused by his wife.

  I must admit I enjoyed Dr Bismarck’s company so much I kept going back for a whole year. I became attached to him. He listened. He didn’t tell me I was insane. Even more gratifyingly, he seemed to know things about Inez. ‘Of course she knows she’s giving you the silent treatment,’ he’d say airily. ‘She knows exactly what she’s doing.’ He would smile and rub his dry hands together as we both contemplated Inez and her mysteries, what an intelligent, complex woman she was.

  Does it take on the character of a folie à deux, this kind of relationship? Weekly closed-door meetings with a person whom you’re paying to view you with unconditional positive regard — it starts to seem like a secret society. I assume everything Dr Bismarck told me had its basis in solid medical training, but our meetings became so cosy and conspiratorial, it sometimes felt to me like we were in love. He didn’t exactly tell me that Mrs Bismarck didn’t understand him, but he did mention once (it burst out of him — I was deeply moved) that his wife could be ‘rather rigid in her thinking’.

  So anyway: attachment theory. Imagine my eyes sharpening. Ah-hah.

  I did nothing with the new knowledge Dr Bismarck had given me, other than feel armed against the Judge’s destabilising accusations of madness, and therefore better. I didn’t storm over to the parental home, barge in and shout, ‘I’m entitled to seek answers about myself.’

  What happened to me and to Frank that turned him into an intense, obsessive compulsive addict, and me into someone ‘too different’?

  Big question.

  During my sessions with Dr Bismarck I didn’t accuse the Judge of much except benign neglect. He was busy with the Bench and too preoccupied with his girlfriends to bother much with the family; to me he always seemed more macho flirt than security figure. I suppose it was a degree of narcissism that led him to write me those airbrushing emails, as well as blanket loyalty to Inez. Often, though, he’d matched Inez’s coldness with rationality and kindness, although only so long as I accepted it was my behaviour that was the problem.

  I never got to know my grandfather, Old Bravo; he passed, as American Inez was wont to say, before I could meet him. Who knows what he was like? According to Inez and also to Inez’s mother, Dee, Old Bravo was a tyrant.

  Dee had always been on the brink of leaving Old Bravo, so perhaps Inez suffered in her childhood, and perhaps Dee, who was at least eccentric, if not bonkers, didn’t do so well on the attachment front herself. I always saw Dee in my mind’s eye as a thin, pleading woman in a rocking chair in front of a shack with a shotgun across her knees …

  It’s a cycle, I know. Free will is largely an illusion. I’m not trying to apportion blame, is what I’m trying to say.

  But what I want, what I insist on, what I fucking demand, is the truth.

  My nice therapist did me another kindness, come to think of it: he told me to give myself credit for more than my relationship with Maya. He pointed out that Patrick and I had been an absolutely solid couple, and I should keep that in mind. It’s true. Patrick and I grew closer the longer we were together. I adored him …

  I found Dr Bismarck utterly fetching, but there was a turning point in my relationship with him. It wasn’t when I started having the odd surreal dream about him, or when I put wistful asides about his face and his wavy hair into my fiction. It was when I confessed to him that I didn’t remember writing my book. I had the stories mapped in my head, but the act of writing them was absolutely a blank.

  After I’d told him that, he seemed to pull up short, to stop being so cosily conspiratorial and to take our sessions more seriously. He began to use terms like ‘self-state’ and ‘ways of being you’, and after I’d done a bit of reading online I began to suspect that he thought I had some sort of dissociative disorder.

  I’d suddenly asked him one day, ‘Do you think I exist?’ I must admit the question surprised me. I’d told him I had at least two selves, an old one that had functioned poorly, was a failure and had been condemned by Inez (‘There is something bad in your self’), and a new one that had killed the old one and ruthlessly taken over, guiding me through my life: marriage to Patrick, journalism, working with the television team, and parenting Maya.

  The killing of the old self had taken place during a period of crisis when I, among other things (symbolically I suppose), picked up a mirror and hurled it against the wall. As far as I was concerned, after that self-destructive low, the old self was dead, and I didn’t need to hear from it again.

  My new self, who forged out into the world and met Patrick, was able to perform without too much pain or emotional need. It was single-minded, efficient, conscientious about working, and especially vigilant about parenting. I was determined to be a good mother, conscious of my duty at every moment, and I succeeded; Maya was happy, tranquil, clever, her kindergartens and schools praised her temperament. (I have to give a lot of credit to Patrick though, too; he was an excellent father.)

  The two selves, it was a state of affairs that had served me well, although I’d felt that the new self was a front that concealed the old bad one, and sometimes, when I was low, I suspected the old bad self was the real me.

  I wept when Dr Bismarck told me I wasn’t a fake. I was the new self. I was the real one. It was a revelation and I was moved. Dr Bismarck’s eyes glistened; he reached for a tissue, holding it between finger and thumb. He smiled modestly, acknowledging my gratitude. I suppose it was trance logic, but at that wonderful, warm moment I felt, for the first time in my life, validated. Affirmed.

  When Dr Bismarck started to talk about integration, and to look at me in a different, more serious way, I began to think we’d taken things a bit far. He decided I might have additional selves, an angry, punitive one, for example, that criticised me harshly and gave me imagined beatings when I lagged, and a different one again that collapsed and got distraught when it felt abandoned. Where he got the idea for these, I don’t know. Was it from me?

  He even, would you believe, ran away with the idea that my brother, Frank, might not really exist, and actually went so far as to check. This was after I told him I’d inserted my lovely brother into my short story collection as a kind of sentinel to keep an eye on the characters for me, since I didn’t actually remember writing them.

  Looking back at my early emails to Werner, as he asked me to call him, I wondered. Who made me tell him all that stuff about selves? Where did it come from? I did occasionally have a sense that I was a front man; that somewhere off stage there was a hidden narrator, some meta-cognitive entity, who was telling me what to say.

  Anyway. I started skipping sessions. I missed our relaxed old ways. Our relationship just wasn’t the same now that Werner had stopped kidding around and decided there was something about me he really should cure.

  I imagined he was making extensive notes, and was searching for signs of multiple personality. Eventually I grew tired of our fraught sessions and my yearning for friendship (which, disappointingly, he was too professional to encourage) and I quit. The idea he kept bandying around: integration. I really didn’t think we’d signed up for that.

  Heat, wine and jet lag: waves sending me drowsing off into confusion, my eyes on the hazy brown horizon, my ears full of the juddering rhythm of the giant building site down on Lamb’s Conduit Street. Make a plan. Go online and do the usual searches. Then, if no luck there, make contact with Aiden Wood
’s wife, Sophie.

  Still no sign of Maya or Joe as I shaded the screen, peering at Maya’s Facebook profile photo. What a beautiful smile she had, thanks to the billionaire orthodontist. Her teeth had been uneven, and Patrick and I had spent a fortune on two years of braces, then a retainer. She’d inherited her glamorous shape from Patrick’s side of the family: graceful figure, long legs.

  There were numerous Sophie Greenaway pages on Facebook. I had lied to Daniel: I didn’t know Sophie at all. Did I dare ring her? It would be impossibly awkward, a rude intrusion when she was grieving for her husband.

  But I’d been a widow myself; technically I still was one, although I didn’t see myself that way. I knew from bitter experience how people shy away from the bereaved. Neighbours and acquaintances will cross the street to avoid the difficult conversation, the effort required. It’s understandable, it’s just too hard.

  Perhaps Sophie would welcome the chance to talk about Aiden. Since he was dead I could (god forgive me) make up any explanation I liked, and could pretend a much closer connection than I had. Through Sophie, I might be able to find my way to the best friend, Angela Lang, who would possibly know more about Maya than she did.

  Angela Lang, online, had a sharp, narrow face, thin lips, pale pretty eyes. Her hair was fine, straight, sandy. There was a hungry look about her. She was in her early forties and had an impressive CV in print and TV news, had reported from around the world (Kabul, Damascus, Moscow, Grozny) and was currently security correspondent for a TV channel in London. She was educated at Cambridge, as Aiden Wood had been.

  I started to read a piece by Angela Lang about the leader of Chechnya, but my attention wandered.

  Those memories of my long-lost psychotherapist. I couldn’t picture Werner’s face, but it was no use searching Google images for him. He guarded his privacy carefully, given that part of his practice involved forensic work and he encountered dangerous types. So, in my mind he had no face.