Chance had allowed Helen a little time for her thoughts to free float by themselves, before preparing to see her first patient. Naturally, her thought took her to Nikki and she imagined how she might be getting on. That little bit of role-play had recalled her long ago past, when she had been wing governor at Larkhall. She could feel Nikki's feelings as hers, with the sympathetic anxiety of someone who knew what her soul mate was going to go through, partly because of her own previous experience. For one second, she inhabited the skin of her former identity and all those dormant instincts rose to the surface.
"…….but you aren't wing governor any more…" she mouthed to herself in reply. "Nikki is. Let it pass on to her who must shoulder the burden on her own at the end of the day….."
Instinct pulled her back from her worries, as confidence rose up inside her that Nikki would definitely hack it, one way or another. She told herself that she had to detach herself and come back to the here and now of being a psychologist. Her present preoccupations came back to her into sharp focus. As she sat in her chair, she pulled into her mind everything that she needed to engage with John's high intelligence and supple mind. She acknowledged that this forced her to exert her wits to the maximum. Her starting point was comparatively easy, as she had heard that George had breast cancer. What wasn't going to be easy was how to edge the conversation to that point.
She ran a sharp glance over him as he quietly made his way towards her. He certainly looked as if he had been in the wars. He looked distinctly careworn, without that spring in his step that she had noticed on other occasions.
"Well, judge, it's not been so long since we last met." Helen greeted him with a broad smile. John's smile was wan and subdued in response.
"It seems like longer." He frankly confessed. Such a lot of water had gone under the bridge since he had set foot in this room.
"We talked last time about your feelings of guilt and how you had difficulty in handling them."
She noted that John did not respond immediately with his usual prompt precision of manner. There was a disquieting vagueness in his blue eyes, as he paused to search his memory.
"Do you mean actual guilt or feelings of guilt?" He answered in an unsteady voice, as the functioning fragment of John's reasoning ability came to his rescue. Helen's instinct told her to temporarily back away from that one.
"You felt that there was something that George was hiding from you." Helen
pursued in gentle, even tones.
"Well, I found out about that one all right."
It jarred Helen's instincts to hear the mirthless laugh that was not a laugh being expelled from John's mouth, and to see the smile that was really a grimace. She allowed a pause before edging her agenda onwards.
"Can you explain, John"
"George has been diagnosed as suffering from breast cancer since last Christmas and never told a soul about it, not me, not Jo, not anyone until Karen found out about it. She left it too late for the hospital to do anything but operate on her. In the immortal words, she is now 'as well as could be expected"
Helen could feel the waves of hurt and pain radiate off John, which the cold, clinical tones with which John delivered his lines failed to belie or cover up. Her hesitation attracted a sharp penetrating look from John right into her eyes and a flat statement, not a question.
"You knew about it from what you told me about the 'old girl's network.'"
Helen coloured a little. He sensed his suspicion as to how many others had known of this shattering event before he had.
"I'm going to go 'off topic' for a bit and tell you, John, that I had not the slightest suspicion of this until Friday March 3rd 2006 when Karen arranged what I thought was an 'old girls reunion' at the pub across the way from the Old Bailey and told me, Nikki, Yvonne, Cassie and Roisin what had happened. What I want to ask you what's been happening in your life since then"
To Helen's relief, John relaxed a little in his chair as he accepted her sincerity and her spring heeled gambit.
"Well," he said in contemplative tones with a faraway look in his eyes. "I've been doing more caring for other people than I ever knew that I could do"
"In your personal life as opposed to being on your judge's throne." Put in Helen.
"Just so." John responding, with an appreciative nod. That insight had literally not occurred to him till now.
"I had to be strong for George and deal with her feelings... I had to get Charlie to deal with the fact that even if she had been distanced from George all her life, life is limited…I had if anything a worse job in telling Joe Channing. At one point, I could swear that he was going to die of a heart attack. The only way I could get through to him was by convincing him that George's sheer bloody obstinacy of will would see her through…. you can see how it felt a long time since I'd last seen you."
Helen could hear in every syllable every tone of justifiable pride in himself as John told his story and rounded it off with that lapse into introspection as he brought himself up to the present.
"Have you ever done this sort of thing before?" asked Helen. "If you haven't, then you have done marvelously well for a beginner"
John visibly swelled up inside to hear that high compliment paid to him. After all, in this field, he acknowledged that he was the rank inexperienced amateur, while Helen was the accomplished professional.
"But what you haven't told me is how you felt about it, first of all about George's illness"
John smiled wryly to himself that he might have expected her gambit. He had begun to relax and, in a flash of irritation, his emotions rushed to the fore.
"Why do you build me up only to knock me down?" the words jumped out of his mouth.
"You misunderstand me, judge. You've just told me that you have done a brilliant job of telling your daughter and father in law the terrible news of George's illness and doing your best to get them to deal with it. I have every reason to believe that you are telling the absolute truth"
"So what are you getting at"
"Simply that you have never allowed yourself to reflect about how you feel about it"
"There wasn't time." John rapped out.
"At the time, maybe but there is time afterwards. You have to make time for yourself even in your busy life."
John paused as Helen had deftly preempted the argument that he was going to lob back at her.
"'Who cares for the carers?' is a phrase that comes constantly to my mind. My experience is that this is a constant thread that runs through patients of mine that I have seen in the past. Believe me, you are not alone in your predicament even if you think you might be"
"Why should I think that way"
"Because it is highly probable that none of your circle of acquaintances in the legal profession have had the remotest experience of being a carer, or am I wrong"
John ran his mind's eye over Monty, Brian Cantwell, Neumann Mason-Alan and the rest of the massed ranks of the legal profession and not one of them fitted the bill until Jo came into his vision. No, they were all very comfortably placed with domestic circumstances, which ran like well-oiled machines. He had been long conscious that both his turbulent love life, and his politically combative nature set him out as the odd man out. It dawned upon him that he was set apart from his brethren more than he had realized.
"So how did you manage in all these years when you were separated from George and bringing up Charlie on your own"
"That was comparatively easy. I have always had a rapport with Charlie. Looking after her came easy to me"
"What did that mean to you, judge? Just taking her for Sunday morning treats and an open wallet." Helen teased.
"There's more to it than that. You almost have to go through a second childhood yourself and take yourself down to her level, even to the execrable child's TV programmes she used to watch." Came John's leisurely reply in obvious fond nostalgic tones to Helen's fascination. "You have to entertain and guide a child with not too much of the traditional heavy father routine. You have to invent your own rules"
"So what about when you were at work and Charlie was on holiday"
"Charlie was away at boarding school for large periods of time and when she was home, I looked after her. I had childcare arrangements so that Charlie was looked after when I was at work. It also enabled me to go out and I was free to live my life. It all comes down to being organized"
Helen didn't pursue the last point with John. It was patently clear to her that he had neatly explained how he had managed to be a serial philanderer and how he came to juggle both his personal and professional responsibilities.
"So when you had to deal with Charlie's and Joe's feelings, it was the first time you had to deal with the situation on your own and one that didn't come naturally to you"
"You could put it that way."
"Let's come back to the main reason we are here to talk. How did you feel when you found out about George's illness after you had slept with Connie?"
Helen's softly spoken words came like a bolt out of the blue. John's expression of fear and self loathing was etched into the expression on his face and
"I ..I.I can't talk about it"
"You have to, John." Helen's forceful determined tones insisted. "When we talked last time, it was established that you were carrying around a real burden of guilt about your marriage to George. It's hardly likely to have lessened with your discovery of George's illness"
"Do you consider I'm guilty?" flashed John, suddenly flailing out at random.
"That's not for me to say," she shot back, unconsciously echoing Coope's favourite words of understated criticism, much to John's discomfiture. "I need you to talk about how you feel. We've already heard about what you did"
"I can swear by everything that I hold dear that I never had the slightest suspicion of George's illness when I behaved so recklessly, so foolishly with Connie Beauchamp." John's broken tones were phrased so slowly, so deliberately, with such stressed emphases that this was a million miles away from the smooth talking debonair John in other surroundings.
"But that's not what your feelings are telling you"
Instantly, John rose to his feet, turned away promptly and paced round the room, not once but twice, with short jerky footsteps, not his normal relaxed stride somewhere out in the country.
"But how do I deal with these feelings?" he burst out at last from behind Helen's back.
"What are your feelings?" came the relentless answer.
"I feel that I've been guilty of the worst form of betrayal and that I must be the most loathsome creature on this planet and I don't know what I can do about it." Muttered John, driven out from all his defences.
"So why are two very caring, very strong minded women who have seen you at your best and your worst staying with you, John"
"I don't know. Why, indeed?" John said in the most desolate of tones that made Helen's blood turn cold.
Half an hour later, Helen started to type up the notes from her previous therapy session in a leisurely fashion. This was her way of clearing her mind before her next patient. For once in her life, the intensity of John's feelings made that very hard to accomplish. It took an effort of will to distill the exchanges of words down into concrete form and make a few notes as to where to proceed next. It was one thing for John's tenacious defences to be laid bare, but it was quite another matter for John to achieve reintegration. The room was very still as Helen tapped away on her keyboard.
"So how did my role-play work yesterday?" Helen enquired over her shoulder at Nikki as she attended to the steaks under the grille. It was Monday night.
"I kind of used it, but in places I ended up doing my own thing in the end"
"I might have known it." Grinned Helen. She glanced at Nikki who looked as weary as Helen felt.
John was worn out at the end of the day. He made his way straight home to his enormous bed and crashed out early. He lay in bed listening to the quietest, most soothing music that he found and in a bleary haze, clicked off the music and shut out the light. It was later on, that some childhood freak of memory saw him as the driver of a steam train. He remembered how intense some of his boyhood friends were about keeping details of famous trains. He remembered that he was not that inclined but being on a real live train was different. He was childishly pleased to be able to pull the chord, and make that unmistakeable low pitched but raucous throaty whistle. The train pulled away from the station in a cloud of steam, which only partially obscured the bright sun shining down on them. Even though he realised that he was the mature, supposedly adult John, it made no difference. He could indulge that childlike side of him in perfect safety. They were off and away, and were travelling away to some great adventure. John was not sure what it would be but just knew how good it would feel.
It was only as time went on that he noticed that the train had picked up speed. He hadn't thought that steam trains sped along as fast as it was. It was all appearances and perspective, he supposed, and so he was not too perturbed. He looked at the firebox and there was a steady red-hot glow from the flames from the coal that propelled the train along. Everything was in hand, or so he thought until he gradually noticed that dark lowering clouds started to invade and eat up the blue hemisphere far above his head. Everything was changing and was not going according to schedule.
John started to get worried when the view outside turned to blackness, illuminated only by the fiery flames behind him. The train slowly gathered momentum until it was a metallic force of nature, thundering along the rails. He suddenly became aware that he was the only man that was in control of the train, if control it was. His feelings pitched up the scale of intensity, when he felt as if the train had a life all its own. As he looked around, he realised to his utter horror that the train was driving him, not the other way round. What had happened to the bright morning that promised so much for him? It was as surely turning to the ashes that the firebox so greedily consumed and left behind.
As he looked round desperately, he saw the distant lights of friendly homesteads before they were rapidly left behind. They were hopelessly lost to him, a sign of safety that was as lost to him as he felt, lost and alone. All was impenetrably dark except the lurid red flames that were stoking the speed of the train to the point of insanity.
When else had he felt so out of control, he shouted wordlessly to the fates around him? It was that night he's slept with Karen at that ill-starred conference. 'Slept with'- what a horribly hideous irony those words conjured up to his precise moment, even at a moment of psychic crisis as this? .