Part One Hundred And Sixty Five
It was the evening of Wednesday the Third of May, with the sun beaming down on the city of London, accompanied by a soft, gentle breeze. But as John crossed the car park and entered the doors of the clinic where he went to see Helen, he could feel that his entire soul was weighing him down, crushing any contentment he might have felt, and making him wonder just why his psyche persisted in doing this to him. He had felt like this all day, intermittently craving his meeting with Helen as it might provide him with something of an outlet, and alternatively dreading it for precisely the same reason. Why did he keep coming here, he continuously asked himself? But the answer seemed forever to be allusive, hiding from him, until perhaps Helen would drag it to the fore, to be examined and questioned under the spotlight.
"You look a bit preoccupied today, Judge," Helen said when he'd sat down in his usual chair opposite to her. John's reaction was immediate. "Why do you always have to see straight through any facade I might attempt to cultivate?" "Because it's my job to do that," Helen replied calmly, seeing that she'd definitely struck a chord with her skill of observation. "Part of what I need to do with anyone I see in a professional context," She continued. "Is to try to get to the truth behind what a patient may be feeling." John remained quiet, clearly trying to subdue his swiftly rising anger towards her, if not towards the entire world. "Why're you so angry?" She asked quietly. "I'm sorry," He replied. "It's just been one of those days." "Did you have a bad time in court?" Helen asked, wanting to get to the bottom of his unusual display of fury. "No, not especially," He said, wishing that he had the power to lie a little more convincingly, which might have helped him to avoid telling her the truth. "So, what's made you so furious with the rest of humanity? Or am I just a privileged exception?" "Something I've discovered over the months I've been coming to see you," he began carefully, not as yet attempting to answer her question. "Is that part of me has come to dread these sessions, because revealing my innermost thoughts to anyone, no matter someone who has been trained to analyse every word, is something that I would usually avoid at all costs. Yet I am forced to remind myself that it was my choice to come here in the first place, which was possibly one of the most stupid decisions I have ever made. But sometimes, this room feels like a haven, somewhere I don't have to be afraid of expressing what I feel." "And which is it today?" Helen asked, never having heard such an articulate description of a session with herself. "I'm not sure," He was forced to admit. "Because I am itching to do something really stupid, something so reckless that it might just get me impeached, and yet I am also terrified of being here, because if you persist in your ambition to completely obliterate any emotional armour I might possess, today you may just achieve your goal." Helen stared at him for a moment. The realisation had hit her right between the eyes, that if he thought she had him worked out, he had certainly done a number on her psyche and above all her intentions towards him as a patient.
"Okay," She said after a moment's thought. "Let's take this one at a time. Tell me what is so terrifying to you, if you take your assessment of my overall ambition for you to be correct." When he didn't answer, she said, "Just what are you scared of?" "I think," He replied with a heavy sigh. "That I am afraid of admitting to possessing feelings that I know I shouldn't have." "And why has this all come to a head today?" "Today is the forty-sixth anniversary of my mother's death." Suddenly, everything became clear to Helen. Well, he might just be right, she thought to herself, today might just be the day she would manage to penetrate his emotional armour. "You know, Judge," She said, looking him straight in the eye. "I might understand what you're currently feeling better than you think I do." Regarding her thoughtfully, John understood what she was telling him. "I didn't know," he said quietly. "How old were you?" "Not much older than you were," She told him regretfully. "When my mum died, all the love in that house seemed to disappear overnight." "Do you still see your father?" "Not often. He thinks I'm doing a pretty pointless job for even more pointless people, and he certainly doesn't approve of Nikki. But we're supposed to be talking about you, not me. I sometimes get the impression that your unresolved feelings about your mother's death, are what govern the way you deal with feelings of any kind. Am I right?" "Probably," He replied with a slight smile. "Any feelings I had at the time had to be forcefully buried. Feelings weren't really permitted in that house after she died, because it was easier for my father to cut them out of our lives than to deal with them." "This will undoubtedly be very difficult for you," Helen suggested carefully. "But I would like you to try and tell me what you did feel when you found out how she'd died." Before he embarked on what felt like his final journey on Earth, John took a moment to examine the truth about what he had felt, and to some extent still felt, attempting as he did so to put them into a clinically straightforward context, and to surround the emotions associated with his feelings with the strongest most formidable barrier he could swiftly construct.
"When my sister and I returned from school, my father was sitting in the lounge waiting for us. I think I knew that something bad had happened, because the house somehow felt very different, as though a presence was missing. When he tried to explain to us that mum had died, I didn't believe him, or didn't want to believe him. I asked him how, and he couldn't at first answer me, but even at the age of ten I was somewhat persistent. I wouldn't leave the question alone because I had to know. When he said that she'd killed herself, my sister cried, but I was just stunned. I don't think I quite understood why someone would seriously consider doing that. I kept trying to work it out, asking myself questions again and again, but finding that I was totally unable to come up with the answers. We all knew that she'd been depressed for some time, but I think I still naively thought that if she loved us, she wouldn't do anything that would take her away from us." "Were you angry with her for leaving you?" Helen asked softly, seeing that her attempt to break away his barriers was gradually beginning to work. "It wasn't her fault," John insisted, his expression showing the pain that he still obviously felt. "When people are depressed, for whatever reason, they make decisions that are as clear as day to them, but which don't make the slightest bit of sense to the rest of us." "That's not what I asked," Helen persisted quietly. "I asked how you felt about what your mother did, not what you think you should have felt. Nothing you might have felt towards your mother after something like that could possibly be in any way wrong, because you, your sister and your father, had just received the biggest shock that any relative can receive. She wasn't there to tell you why, or to reassure you that it wasn't because of anything that either of you had done. If you were angry with her for leaving you, she wouldn't have held it against you, nobody would." John's whole body stiffened, his hands gripping the arms of the chair, because he could feel the tide of emotions rising up in him, trying their damnedest to get out after all this time of being concealed and subdued. He forcefully bit down on his lip to stop himself from saying any more, from actually putting voice to the corrosive torture that had lived inside him for the past forty-six years.
"You need to let it out, John," Helen cajoled him quietly. "If you want to be able to find any reprieve from the torment you're going through right now, you need to put in to words, all the thoughts that are currently whizzing round behind your eyes. I can see some of them from here, but you need to tell me what they are.
"I can't," John replied eventually, the tightness in his throat almost cutting off his speech.
"Why?" Helen asked, seeing the battle going on inside him.
"Because what I did feel, what I still do feel is wrong," John told her, feeling his resistance against her probing beginning to slip, beginning to tear any hint of emotional restraint away from him.
"If I loved her as much as I think I did," He tried to explain, though every instinct was telling him to get up and run as fast as possible away from here, away from this woman who was trying to break him into a dozen pieces. "I would be able to accept that she wasn't in her right mind when she made that decision, and I would be able to reassure myself that if she hadn't been as depressed as she was, she would never have been able to leave her husband and children in the way that she did."
"The process of grieving and the feelings associated with it are never rational, you know," Helen tried to reassure him, though she could see that it was a pretty futile attempt. When the words finally burst out of him, they were no surprise to Helen, though she could see why he had tried to bury them all these years.
"I couldn't forgive her for doing what she did," He said, his voice not remotely steady. "Before I grew up enough to understand what the word depression actually meant, I was furious with her for leaving us, for making that final decision to leave our family incomplete. Part of me couldn't bear being in that house a moment longer than necessary, and part of me didn't ever want to leave it, for fear that I might forget all the things that had made her my mother. I couldn't take my eyes off the empty chair at the table, or the empty armchair in the lounge, or the empty hook in the hall where she used to hang her coat. I sometimes raged at her because I thought that the way my father cut himself off from us was all her fault."
"How did this manifest itself?" Helen asked, almost not wanting to break in on his undoing, because she didn't want to distract him from journeying the rockiest road he had ever travelled.
"Fights at school usually," He admitted without any hesitation. "It was far too easy to retaliate when those at Eaton chose to mock my working class accent. I think I wanted her to explain to me why killing herself had been the right thing to do, which she obviously couldn't."
"And why was that so wrong?"
"Because she didn't deserve my anger," John insisted, the tears now running unchecked down his face. "Whilst she was alive, she was the most loving mother any child could have wanted. Her family was her entire life, nothing mattered to her as much as we did. But ever since her death, I haven't been able to get passed the fact that she actually chose to die."
"And how do you think this might have affected your relationships with women for the whole of your adult life?"
"I think that I tend to leave women before they leave me," He replied, digging for a handkerchief to wipe his face. "Because I couldn't bear being left in the same way again. I've almost forbidden myself to get to the stage where I might fall in love with so many women, as a way of protecting myself from being hurt quite so thoroughly again, though both Jo and George seemed to have successfully bypassed that rule. On the few occasions that George has been in danger of killing herself, it has terrified me beyond measure. I don't want to contemplate what it would do to me if Jo ever followed that instinct." At the voicing of this utterly terrible thought, John's eyes clouded over, the fear of this one-day happening penetrating his every pore. Helen observed the shock as this fear took hold, the prospect that his beautiful, loving Jo might one day leave him causing his entire brain to seize up under the onslaught.
Helen watched him for a while, seeing the torment battling for supremacy behind his eyes. Eventually, she decided that something had to be done, if she was going to ensure that he was taken care of once he left her consulting room. "John," she said, breaking in on his contemplation of what would be the greatest horror of his life, but he didn't respond. Getting up from her chair, she sat down in one next to him, and gently rested a hand on his shoulder, waiting until his eyes came to rest on her. "John, I need to tell someone that you're here, because I would be failing in my duty if I allowed you to go home to an empty flat, feeling the way you do." "Is that absolutely necessary?" He asked, his voice feeling overused and far too brittle for his liking. "Yes," Helen told him simply. "Who would you prefer it to be?" After a moment's thought, he said, "George." "Okay," Helen said, getting to her feet. "I won't be long." As she went into the outer office, where the receptionist had quite clearly gone home for the day, she sat down behind the desk and picked up the phone, having retrieved her address book before she left.
When George answered the ringing of her mobile, Helen briefly wondered precisely how she would explain the situation. "George, it's Helen," She said, trying not to sound quite as bleak as she felt. "Helen," George said in surprise. "What can I do for you?" "Where are you?" Helen asked, trying to buy herself a modicum of time. "Sat in a traffic jam on my way home," George told her. "And getting a distinct feeling of deja vu. You sound just like you did when you phoned Karen to tell her about Ross." "I'm sorry," Helen said with feeling. "I don't mean to, but I need you to come to the clinic in Paddington where I work." "Why?" George asked, her fear inexorably rising, as she turned off and started making her way towards Paddington. "Were you aware," Helen asked her slowly. "That John had been coming to see me as a psychology patient for the last few months?" "No, I wasn't," Replied George in gob smacked incredulity. "First of all, don't worry, he is physically absolutely fine. However, he had quite a difficult session this afternoon, and I don't want him going home alone." "All right," George said after trying to take all this in. "Tell me where you are and I'll be there as soon as possible."
After giving George directions, Helen made John a cup of tea and went back to the consulting room. He was sitting precisely where she'd left him, just staring into space. Putting the tea down on the coffee table in front of him, she said, "I've phoned George and she's on her way." "Thank you," He said, briefly looking up at her but not really taking in what she'd said. When George arrived sometime later, a buzzer on the wall behind her desk let Helen know that someone had entered through the main doors of the clinic. Going out of the room and down the corridor, Helen found George waiting for her in reception. "Hi," She said quietly, going up to her. "I'm still trying to take this in," George told her in greeting. "And I could do with a few answers." "That's no surprise," Helen said, leading the way to a row of seats where the patients usually waited. "Just how long has he been coming to see you?" "Since the middle of October," Helen informed her. Then, seeing the look of shock on George's face, she asked, "Why, is that date in any way significant?" "Oh, god," George said in realisation. "It's significant all right. But if he hasn't told you why, then it certainly isn't my place to do so. So, what brought on today's 'difficult Session'?" She asked, using Helen's own words. "I finally persuaded him to talk about his mum," Helen explained. "Then I'm hardly surprised that he's in a state of shock," George said disgustedly. "Helen, precisely why do you think it has taken me years to persuade him to talk about that particular subject?" She demanded, feeling her anger rising at this woman who had mentally beaten away all of John's emotional armour. "George, he had to do it," Helen insisted vehemently. "Eventually, he had to talk about her." "Well, I hope he agrees with you," George replied a little caustically. "Tell me, was Nikki aware that you were seeing John as a patient?" "No," Helen replied instantly, though she could feel her expression betraying her. Examining her closely, George's anger rose even further. "Might I suggest that you learn to lie a little better if you really want to conceal the truth, because you currently wouldn't fool a ten-year-old, never mind someone who has been ferreting out the truth for the whole of her working life. Do you have any idea just how professional it is for someone in your position to see a friend as a patient? It's almost as unprofessional as having an affair with an inmate in your charge, but let's not forget that you've done that too, haven't you." "What do you want me to say?" Helen asked her bitterly, because she couldn't help admitting to herself that every word George had so far uttered was one hundred percent correct. "Nothing," George replied angrily. "You've so far said and done quite enough for the time being."
When Helen led the way into the consulting room, George took in John's anguished face, his eyes red from crying, something that shocked her to her core. John never cried, at least not in front of anyone if he could possibly help it. As she walked over to him, his eyes rose to meet hers. All the life in them appeared to be gone, temporarily replaced with the pain that he'd obviously been discussing. When she stood before him, he found his voice, though it didn't bear any ounce of the confidence of his usual tone. "What are you doing here?" He asked, though he had been vaguely aware of Helen saying that she'd phoned George. "I've come to take you home," George told him simply, and when he stood up, she tucked his arm through hers. "Is that all right?" He nodded, not feeling the need for words with one of the women who understood him better than he understood himself. When they reached the car park, George unlocked her car and John got into the passenger seat. Retrieving a delighted Mimi from the back of John's car, George drove them silently home, taking little glances at John every now and then, just to make sure he was really all right.
When they reached her house, both John and Mimi followed her inside and Mimi watched expectantly as George opened a tin of dog food for her. Going into the lounge, George found John slumped at one end of the sofa, staring into space as though his very existence hardly mattered. "Would you like a drink?" She asked, thinking that his thoughts were far away from where he actually was. "I wouldn't mind a large Scotch," he said, briefly looking up at her. After pouring them both a drink, and opening the French windows so that Mimi could wander in and out at her leisure, George put on some soft music, eventually sitting down next to John and putting her arms round him because she could see that this was what he needed. As he felt her familiar embrace, a slight smile of recognition crossed his face. His right arm went around her, and he rested his face in her hair, taking in the much-loved aroma of perfume and cigarette smoke that seemed to permeate her entire being. They sat there for a considerably long time, neither of them speaking because words were not necessary for the moment. George didn't feel the need to ask questions of him, because she knew that if he wanted to tell her anything about what he'd been doing over the last few months, he would, and that was good enough for her. She was immensely proud of him for starting therapy again, and even more so for his having stuck to it. She knew that she certainly wouldn't have had the courage to do anything of the kind. Her gentle embrace seemed to gradually soothe his shattered nerves, and to return to him some of the contentment he usually felt when he was so close to either her or Jo. She had asked him at one point if he was hungry, but he had answered in the negative. Not feeling the need for food herself, she hadn't moved.
When they had remained in this position for some three hours or so, he asked, "Will you play for me?" "Of course," She said, disentangling herself from him and moving over to the piano, switching the stereo off on the way. She began playing some Chopin, thinking this music the most likely to penetrate his wounded soul, its soft, gentle sadness always having soothed her own fractured psyche in the past. They were called Nocturnes, she supposed, because their persistent caress was the essence of dreams, because it's purity and temptation towards that half life that dreams usually engendered could call any soul back from the depths of despair. John lay along the length of the sofa, allowing her beautiful playing of Chopin's creations to wash over him, gradually smoothing away some of the roughened edges of his thoughts, each note appearing to contain all the love she had for him.
When she had played for him for almost an hour, she stopped, thinking that he had perhaps fallen asleep. But as she quietly lowered the lid of the piano, he spoke. "Do you know the lines of the thirty-second psalm?" "Not for purposes of immediate recall, no," She replied, a little surprised by his question but willing to see where he was going with this. "Thou art my hiding place," he began quietly. "Thou preserve me from trouble, thou dost encompass me with deliverance." George sat stunned in the resulting silence, his words having moved her beyond belief. "That's what you've been for me tonight," He clarified for her. "Something I badly needed." Moving over to the sofa, she perched on its edge, gazing down at him as he lay there looking up at her. Gently stroking his cheek, she said, her voice slightly hoarse, "And do you have any idea just how often you've been precisely that for me? You have kept me going, and tried your damnedest to keep me sane when I've been almost fully submerged in a pool of guilt and regret and all the other feelings that have pulled me far too close to the edge over the years. If I can possibly do the same for you after all this time, then I would gladly do it as often as you might require it." He could hear the total sincerity in every word she uttered, and he couldn't help but wonder what he'd done to deserve it.