the coffee she had spent half an hour on Hammersmith Bridge, gazing down at the brown water at some people learning to scull, miserably trying to bring herself to face the doctor. After that, the consulting room, with its cut flowers and tranquil light, seemed such a zone of peace, and Helen Alpert so welcoming, that she didn’t know where to begin. For years, she explained, she had lived in a kind of suspended animation. That seemed to be over now. During the last few months, life had been waking her out of a sleep she didn’t want to relinquish, forcing her to take part again.
‘That’s what I haven’t liked about it.’
‘No one likes that,’ the doctor agreed.
‘No. But they want it anyway.’
‘Anna, I’m interested in the way you put it, life “forcing” you to take part again. What sort of thing do you mean?’
‘For example, Marnie’s not well.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I found that I welcomed it. I know that sounds odd.’ Having admitted Marnie to the negotiation, Anna became unsure how much space to allow her. ‘Anyway, it’s time someone looked after her for a change.’
‘You feel she’s been the parent for too long?’
‘And something else has happened,’ Anna said, ‘which I’d rather not talk about.’
The doctor smiled. ‘Your business is your business.’
Given their circumstances, Anna considered this the cheapest of jibes. ‘Actually I just want to live my life,’ she heard herself say, with somewhat more emphasis than she had intended.
‘Everyone wants that. What exactly is wrong with Marnie?’
‘She’s having tests.’
There followed a silence, during which Dr Alpert played with one of her gel pens and made it clear that she was expecting more. Anna considered describing the visit to St Narcissus — the women shackled to their symptoms by the system and to their lives by mobile phone; the fatuous receptionist; the cancer-shaped stain on the ceiling — but preferring to avoid the interpretive bout that would inevitably follow, in which she would feel compelled to take part out of simple courtesy, said instead, ‘I never wanted to examine my life, I just wanted to be inside it.’ This had the nature of a bid or gambit, she realised. ‘Not,’ she qualified, before Helen Alpert could take it up, ‘that I never had a point of view on myself. Of course I did. Look,’ she said. ‘The fact is, Helen — you’ll understand me, I know you will — I’ve met someone. A man.’ She laughed. ‘Well, more of a boy, really. Is that awful? Michael is dead, but I feel alive again, and that’s what I want to be. Alive.’
This much denial filled the doctor’s heart with rueful admiration. ‘I’m delighted,’ she said, though it must have been clear that she was not. She wondered why she bothered. She reached across the desk and put her hands over Anna’s. ‘Tell me what you dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you why you mustn’t stop coming here. Not yet.’
‘Do you know, I didn’t dream at all last night,’ Anna said. ‘Isn’t that odd?’
Half an hour later Helen Alpert accompanied her client to the door, where, both eager to admit how they would miss one another, they said goodbye. While Anna walked swiftly up Chiswick Mall towards Hammersmith without looking back, Helen crossed the road and leaned on the river wall. It was a sunny morning, but the air had an edge: September, accepting that the game was up. The Thames ran low, with a sullenness that suggested the tide was on the turn. Two or three mallards, who had looked as if they were going to make a morning of it, honking and squabbling in the mud, suddenly took off and swept west, gaining height until they vanished behind the trees on the far bank.
Back inside, she put the Waterman file away; then changed her mind and, leafing through it angrily, began to make a fresh set of notes. The client, her personality frozen in adolescence, had disguised herself as an adult for the duration of her marriage to Tim Waterman. To what end? She had effectively erased the abjection of her life with her first husband, yet remained bound to it, and through it to the unthought known. Why allow the disguise to fall away now? As to the significance of the repeating dream: other dreams seemed as diagnostically valuable, and moreover came with all the necessary tools for their own decoding. The central problem, of course, was Michael Kearney. Helen Alpert couldn’t imagine being unable to forget a man whilst at the same time being unable to remember him. Anna’s self-deception seemed to have spread itself, deft and obdurate, into the real world: the very sparseness of Kearney’s biography — mathematician, suicide, patch of fog in every life he touched — gave him an unfocused quality.
Today, however, the doctor found herself more interested in Brian Tate, who — casting himself as the assistant, the unassuming experimentalist, workhorse to his friend’s conceptual genius — had committed career suicide so as not be left out of the grand finale of Kearney’s psychodrama. The great difference between the two men was this: Dr Alpert knew enough about Tate’s subsequent life to find him. She even had an address, somewhere deep in gentle Walthamstow, cocoon of the North London academic mafia. The file remained on her desk all morning. She took it with her to her favourite restaurant, Le Vacherin at Acton Green, where she read it again while lunch ran through its rewarding, quietly inevitable cycle — duck egg cocotte to assiette of hare to prune and Armagnac tart — and the tables emptied around her. ‘Do you know,’ she told her waitress, looking up in surprise to find it was already two in the afternoon, ‘I think I’d like the bill.’
She was soon on the way to Walthamstow. If he could be found, Brian Tate might perhaps be persuaded to speak — about Kearney, about the events of that time, about the original Anna. It would be unethical to contact him, certainly. She would have to admit, too, that she was uncovering some unsuspected feature of her own personality. Until now she’d made sure to buffer her life from the client’s, proud of the fact that in the face of failure she had always been able to find closure without entanglement.
By three in the afternoon, thick moist air had piled itself into Carshalton High Street, the sharpness of the morning having long given way to a sourceless, muggy heat. Anna Waterman wandered fretfully up and down, trying to put off the inevitable encounter.
She leafed through the second hand books in the Oxfam shop; stood for a moment next to the artificial cascade in Grove Park, where the falling water evaporated with a smell like stale bird feathers. Eventually, on the pretext of getting lunch, she went into a pub near the ponds and ordered a pint of beer. The taste of it caused her to remember the boy on top of her, so hard and nervous, his eyes inturned. Her afternoon with him came back less like a memory of events than a single seamless rush of sensation — a shiver everyone knows but no one knows the name of — and she had to walk up and down looking at the posters on the wall by the bar to give herself something to do. Club Chat Noir. The Aviator Club. A traction engine rally in October; in December, the Chinese Circus. After that, she gave up on herself and sat in a corner and let the afternoon fade into evening. People wandered in and out, saying things like, ‘I can’t cope, I was expected not to live.’ She caught the word ‘patterning’ or perhaps ‘patenting’; then, decisively, ‘contracts’; or perhaps it was ‘contacts’. On the TV above the bar, a European football game began. Pulling Anna’s third pint of Young’s, the barman looked up emptily and then away.
Fake beams, artex ceilings and floral carpet each have a profound — if under-investigated — anxiolytic effect of their own: by seven o’ clock, she had managed to forget the discomfort of her encounter with Dr Alpert and gather enough of herself together to face 121, The Oaks.
As she left the pub, the evening rush was under way. ‘He can’t have steak,’ someone called out, ‘it’ll give him piles!’
Laughter.
Away from the centre the streets were wrapped in foreign-seeming air — air that warmed and yellowed the night without transforming it. You expected to hear cicadas, catch sight of your own shadow on a curved stucco wall behind which growths of palm or jacaranda further enclosed a shuttered domain. But all you found was the usual holly tree and dirty pebbledash, and in the mossy driveway an unreliable British sports car from the 1970s or a short-wheelbase Land Rover bought for a gap-year tour: some late-adolescent project abandoned under its green tarpaulin fifteen years before, as the globalised economies, running out of new services to sell one another, preoccupied themselves with their own decline.
Holding up the pocket drive like a permit, Anna made her way round to the rear of the house. She found the main window dimly lit, as if by a source somewhere else in the house. When she pressed her face against the glass, everything was exactly as she had seen it last: rippled green lino; a roll of carpet propped up in the corner opposite the door; and on the table the little pressed-tin Mexican box containing a downscaled human skull nestled in scarlet lace. An old sofa, loose-covered in what might have been chintz, now faced the table. On it sat two women, short,
