It was the first time he’d used my Christian name. The bell had been rung; it was after school, so now he could be intimate. I didn’t stand up, but he did.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you anymore. I can’t change my professional judgment because you want me to, because it fits with a construct that you have put onto her death. I made a mistake, a terrible misjudgment. And I have to face up to that.”
His guilt was seeping out around the edges of his words, a trickle to start with before becoming the mainstream subject. He looked as if it was a relief to finally give way to it.
“The harsh facts are that a young woman with puerperal psychosis went undiagnosed and I must take my share of blame for her death.”
I thought it ironic that decency can be harder to argue with than its self-serving reprehensible opposite. The moral high ground is just too certain, however uncomfortable.
“I thought he believed he’d made a terrible mistake and was genuinely appalled with himself.”
“Did you ask him to go to the police?” asks Mr. Wright.
“Yes, but he maintained he was certain she had puerperal psychosis.”
“Even though it reflected badly on him professionally?”
“Yes. I found it surprising too. But I put his motive down to misplaced moral courage—agreeing with me that Tess didn’t have psychosis but was murdered would be a cowardly option. By the end of our meeting I thought he was a hopeless psychiatrist but a decent man.”
We break for lunch. Mr. Wright has a lunch meeting scheduled and I leave on my own. Outside it is still raining.
I never did answer your e-mail and tell you the real reason I saw a therapist. Because I did go in the end. It was six weeks after Todd and I had become engaged. I’d thought getting married would stop my feeling so insecure. But an engagement ring around my finger wasn’t the new hold on life I’d thought it would be. I saw Dr. Wong, a highly intelligent and empathetic woman who helped me understand that with Dad’s leaving and Leo’s dying within the space of a few months, it was hardly surprising that I felt abandoned and, consequently, insecure. You were right about those two wounds. But it was being sent to boarding school, the same year, that felt like the final abandonment.
During my therapy sessions, I realized that Mum wasn’t rejecting me but was trying to protect me. You were so much younger and she could shield you from her grief, but it would have been far harder to hide it from me. Ironically, she sent me to boarding school because she thought it would be emotionally more secure.
So with Dr. Wong’s help, I came to understand not only myself better but also Mum, and quick facile blame transmuted into harder-won understanding.
The problem was, knowing the reason I was insecure didn’t help me to undo the damage that had been done. Something in me had been broken, and I now knew it was well intentioned—a duster knocking the ornament onto the tiled floor rather than its being smashed deliberately—but broken just the same.
So you’ll understand, I think, why I don’t share your skepticism about psychiatrists. Although I do agree that they need an artistic sensibility as well as scientific knowledge (Dr. Wong majored in comparative literature before going into medicine), and that a good psychiatrist is the modern version of a renaissance man. As I tell you that, I wonder if my respect and gratitude toward my own psychiatrist colored my opinion of Dr. Nichols—if that’s the real reason I felt that he was fundamentally decent.
I get back to the CPS offices earlier than Mr. Wright, who hurries in five minutes later, looking hassled. Maybe the lunch meeting hasn’t gone well. I presume it’s about you. Your case is huge—headline news, MPs calling for a public inquiry. It must be a big responsibility for Mr. Wright but not only is he adept at hiding the strain he must be under, he doesn’t load any pressure onto me, which I appreciate. He turns on the tape recorder and we continue.
“How soon after your meeting with Dr. Nichols did you find the paintings?”
He doesn’t need to specify—we both know which paintings he means.
“As soon as I got back to the flat I looked for them in her bedroom. She’d moved all her furniture out apart from her bed. Even the wardrobe was in the sitting room, where it looked ridiculous.”
I’m not sure why I told him that. Maybe because if you have to be a victim, I want him to know that you’re a victim with quirks, some of which used to irritate your older sister.
“There must have been forty to fifty canvases propped up around the walls,” I continue. “Most of them were oils, some on thick board, a few collages. They were all large, a minimum of a foot across. It took me a while to look through them. I didn’t want to damage any of them.”
Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that, or was I just too concerned that you weren’t going to earn a living? I know the answer. I was anxious that no one would buy enormous canvases with colors that wouldn’t go with their room decor, wasn’t I? I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone’s carpet, rather than realizing that you’d made color itself tactile.
“It took me about half an hour to find the ones Dr. Nichols had told me about.”
Mr. Wright has seen only the four “hallucination” pictures, not the ones you did before. But I think it was the contrast that shocked me the most.
“Her other pictures were all so …” What the hell, I might as well go for it. “Joyous. Beautiful. Explosions on canvas of life and light and color.”
But you painted these four paintings in the palette of the nihilists, Pantone numbers 4625 to 4715, the blacks and browns spectrum, and in their subject matter you forced the viewer to recoil. I don’t need to explain this to Mr. Wright; he has photos of them in the file and I can just glimpse them. Made smaller, and even upside down, they still disturb me and I look hurriedly away.
