Part Fifty-One
When the next Tuesday came round, and John arrived at his fourth therapy session with Helen, he was forced to admit that he was now almost becoming used to the feeling of being examined so closely. Helen wouldn't let him get away with anything, which he supposed was the point of the exercise. She was almost ruthless in her verbal scrutiny of him, forcing and cajoling him into answering her questions and forming new ones of his own. Had she been like this with Ross, he wondered to himself? Had she pinned him with that firm, unwavering gaze of hers, making him unable to avoid her for the merest second.
"Well, you had an interesting night last week, didn't you," Helen said, after closing the door of the consulting room behind them. "That's one way of putting it," John told her ruefully as he sat down in his usual chair, and thinking that Shell Dockley's visit must have done the rounds of the Larkhall women long before now. "So, how would you describe it then?" Helen asked, sitting down opposite him. "Erm," He tried to think of precisely the right word, "Enlightening," He replied eventually. "Why enlightening?" Helen asked, a little bemused by his choice of phrase. "I've observed Karen in action on a number of occasions," He explained to her. "But never has it been quite so important to my continued existence. She quite literally had my life in her hands, not something I think I've ever really experienced before." "Which I should imagine goes against every instinct you have to be in control," Helen said thoughtfully. "Yes," John agreed with her heavily. "There was absolutely nothing I could do to improve the situation. In fact at one point, I almost made it worse." "Don't tell me," Helen said with a rueful smile. "You told Shell you were a high court Judge, didn't you." "I seemed to think it would frighten her into giving up," John said self-deprecatingly. "But all it achieved was to make her tell me what a judge had once said to her. It wasn't the brightest thing I've ever done by any means." "Did you think that by doing that, you would be able to regain the reins so to speak?" "Possibly," John admitted. "It sounds stupid, but I don't think I entirely trusted Karen to be able to deal with the situation satisfactorily, even though I know she's been doing it for years." "Where Shell Dockley was concerned, Karen always was the best at handling her. I don't know why, but Karen always managed to get through to her where the rest of us only served to alienate her even more." "Karen talked to her just as she might to anyone else, as though she could completely forget everything Shell had previously done. I've always believed that criminals are human beings just like the rest of us, but to see Karen talk to an extremely dangerous woman like that was quite, odd, perhaps even a little unnerving." "Why?" Helen asked, truly mystified by this. "I suppose it was because even though Karen's space had been thoroughly invaded, even though Shell had broken into her home and was figuratively if not actually holding the pair of us hostage, Karen simply accepted it as almost normal. She made her a cup of tea, and they sat there smoking, just like two people who had a lot of catching up to do, which I suppose in a way they did. I felt pretty surplus to requirements." "Believe me, Judge," Helen told him ruefully," you ought to be very glad that Shell didn't take more notice of you than she did. Men in particular can wind her up very quickly." "Oh, I know," John replied, trying to make her see that he thoroughly understood her. "I just wish I'd been able to do something, to make that decision easier on Karen. Did she tell you what Shell wanted from her?" "Yes, she did," Helen said regretfully. "And I don't think anything could have made that easier for Karen to deal with, because in the end, the decision to help or not to help Dockley had to be Karen's and no one else's."
Then, after a moment's thought, Helen said, "Tell me, when you informed Shell that you're a judge, was that something you thought about doing, or was it a spur of the moment piece of recklessness?" "Probably the latter," John admitted fairly. "Though I'm not sure that I'd agree with your assessment that it was reckless." "Judge, no one, without a little due care and consideration, tells a con of any kind that they are in a position of high authority, especially someone like a high court judge. Let's face it, all prisoners are far too aware that it was one of your brethren who sent them down in the first place." "Point taken," John conceded ruefully, unwilling to admit that this hadn't really crossed his mind with Shell. "So, would it be fair to suggest, that behaving a little recklessly with women, in whatever situation, is something you do as a rule?" "Certainly not," John replied fervently. "You're protesting a bit too much there, Judge," Helen told him with a smile. "All right, I do occasionally behave recklessly where women are concerned, but no, I definitely wouldn't say I do it all the time." "Just as a little exercise," Helen encouraged him. "Try and think of the time you behaved most recklessly with a woman."
John had to think about this for a while, because he was forced to admit that he couldn't quite decide between a few likely candidates. There was obviously Karen, and Angela, the woman who had given them all Chlamydia, and Yvonne, and Carol, that waitress friend of Charlie's. It did offend him slightly that the list went on so long, with more names and faces than he really cared to remember. Then he hit on her, the one woman who had almost managed to cause him no end of trouble, purely and simply because he'd refused to see beyond her body and her silky, treacherous voice. "Francesca Rochester," He said into the expectant silence. "She played the oboe in the performance of 'The Creation' that we did back in June. She's Sir Ian Rochester's wife. I first became involved with her, not long after I rose to the heights of the high court. I loathed her husband on sight, and part of me probably thought it would be amusing to seduce her right under his nose, which I am a little ashamed to say it was. I was in the middle of two pretty nasty rape trials at the time, so chasing her proved to be a very welcome distraction. I took her out for dinner, and I found her interesting to talk to as well as stunningly attractive. We went back to my chambers, because there was something in one of my books there that she wanted to look up, though I can't for the life of me remember what it was now." He stopped, clearly a little embarrassed by what was to come next. "I can't possibly say that I made love to her, because that's blatantly not what it was." "You had sex with her. Will that do?" "Yes, I suppose so," He agreed reluctantly, though not thinking this entirely adequate to describe the furious and frantic way he had swept all objects from his desk with one hand, and pushed up her skirt and removed her knickers with the other as he'd leant over her. There had been nothing sensual in that coupling, just a hard, fast, animalistic meeting of bodies in a fraught attempt to achieve instant gratification. "Having sex with Francesca Rochester in my chambers, was definitely not the most sensible thing I've ever done," He admitted sheepishly, and I thought the art room was bad, Helen inwardly smiled. "I discovered just how reckless that had been," John continued, "When the next day it was revealed that we had been caught on camera." Putting a hand quickly to her mouth, Helen tried to stifle a smirk. "It's all right," John told her with a smile. "You can laugh, I find it quite funny myself sometimes. I had to persuade my clerk to get rid of the tape. You could say that put paid to any possibility of an actual relationship with Francesca, which was probably no bad thing. But a year or so later, I met up with her again, and this time she managed to hook me under her spell. She was running a soft porn empire with her cousin, whom she was also sleeping with, both of which I obviously knew nothing about. Jo could see that she wasn't all she pretended to be, but I refused to even consider it. When I found out what she was up to, I also discovered that she had set up an off shore account in my name, presumably filling it with the proceeds from a number of lap dancing clubs and other such enterprises."
When he had come to the end of his story, Helen sat and regarded him thoughtfully. "After that little fiasco, did you ever think differently about the women you became involved with? I mean, did it make you more cautious, more wary of who you slept with?" "For a little while perhaps, but not to any great extent." "Why?" Helen asked in astonishment. "Because I would have thought that protecting your reputation would have been uppermost in your mind after something like that." "I don't see my private and public lives as being even remotely connected," John told her simply. "When I'm a judge, I stick to the rules, most of the time, and only break them when I consider that keeping to them doesn't allow justice to follow its natural course. What I do outside of court, has absolutely no bearing on what I do in court." "Let's try and put this another way," Helen said speculatively. "When you're sitting on that throne, doing your best to achieve justice for every ordinary average citizen who comes into your domain, you are inhabiting the highest level of moral integrity possible in this life. You are upholding what is right, as opposed to what is wrong, something that most people would be immensely proud to be able to do. Therefore, when it comes to what you do when you're not in that coveted position of power, all those restraints, all those instincts that keep you within that moral high ground, are somewhat relaxed, enabling you to perhaps behave more recklessly and more unwisely as a result." John was extremely quiet at this pronouncement, because he didn't want to tell her that she was right. Her description of what he tried to do every day of his working life had made him briefly uplifted, something he'd never previously felt during one of these sessions. But her assertion that he allowed his moral restraints to disappear as soon as he left the courtroom, that made him feel more than a little uneasy. "That worries you, doesn't it," She said, breaking in on his thoughts. "Because you don't want to admit that you might just be capable of behaving in a manner that might not always be desirable to those around you." "I need to think about that," John told her, needing to buy himself a little time. Glancing at her watch, Helen replied with, "Well, you can have a fortnight to think about it, because we're out of time." "Good," John said with an obvious sigh of relief. "Though I can't come to see you a fortnight today, because it's my birthday, and no way am I going through any form of mental torture on my birthday." Helen smiled. "All right then, but in that case it'll have to be just before Christmas, because I can't fit you in before then. This time of year gets very stressful for some, so I'm in great demand. Do think about what I've said in the meantime though, because I would like you to have a response to it the next time I see you."