The Memory Game

Five

She was younger than I expected. And she was a she. And it must have shown on my face.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was probably expecting an old man with a white beard and a Viennese accent.’

‘Do you mean a Jew?’

‘No, I don’t mean that.’

‘Do you feel uncomfortable with a woman?’

‘Well, I haven’t even had a chance to sit down yet, Dr Prescott.’

Dr Prescott was at least six feet tall which lent force to what was already a most striking appearance. She was pale, almost transparent-skinned, with a long, thin artistic nose. Her wavy brown hair was deftly arranged so that only a few strands fluttered around her neck, giving her the appearance of a Bronte sister. A robustly healthy Bronte sister. A robustly healthy Bronte sister who power-dressed. I was stopping in on my way from Waitrose to the proposed hostel site and I felt faintly shamed by her crisp business suit. And then rather ashamed of being shamed. Did I expect female therapists to wear cheesecloth and light joss sticks?

‘Should I fill out a form or something?’

‘Jane – is it all right if I call you Jane ?’ Dr Prescott shook my hand but then maintained her grip as if she were weighing it. ‘Does it feel important to you to make this a formal occasion?’

‘Is this part of the therapy?’

‘How do you mean?’

I paused for a long time and breathed with slow deliberation. I was still standing up. My new analyst was still gripping my hand.

‘I’m very sorry, Dr Prescott,’ I said with elaborate calmness. ‘I’m living rather a chaotic life at the moment. And a friend of mine, who is a doctor, and whom I trust more than anybody else in the world, has told me that she thinks I’m at a moment of crisis. And I’m having a rather chaotic day as well. I was at Waitrose when it opened and then I dashed home and unloaded everything, although, now I think of it, I haven’t put the ice-cream in the freezer, and then I dashed over here. When I’m finished here I have to drive to the site of a building I’ve designed. I’m going to meet an assistant planning officer, and she is going to tell me that changes have to be made to my plan using money that doesn’t have any prospect of being forthcoming and that’s only the beginning of a project that is close to my heart and that’s going to make me very miserable.

‘Now I’m here in your office and I had some hopes that it would be something of a refuge from what I think of as my troubles. I suppose I thought we could begin by discussing what a course of therapy might be able to achieve for me. We could discuss ground rules, establish what sort of things we are going to talk about, that sort of thing. But just at this very moment I want to sit down and get going in some sort of sensible way.’

‘Then sit down, Jane.’

Dr Prescott gestured towards the battered couch over which an eastern-looking rug was draped. I quickly looked around the room. It was obvious that every detail had been planned. There was an armchair at the head of the couch. There was a Mark Rothko poster on the wall that would be invisible to the recumbent patient. On the window ledge behind the armchair there was a small abstract sculpture with a hole in it, carved in, I think, soapstone. The walls and the ceiling were painted a supposedly neutral white. There was nothing else.

‘Should I sit or lie down?’

‘Whichever you feel like.’

‘It’s a couch.’

‘Whichever you feel like.’

I huffed and lay down on the couch and stared at the wood-chip paper, a product of a shoddy eighties’ conversion. God knows what was under it. If she bought after ’87, Dr Prescott was stuck with negative equity. She sat down behind my left shoulder.

‘Can’t we have a straightforward transaction about anything at all?’

‘Why do you choose the term “transaction”?’

‘No, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to talk about why I chose the term “transaction”. Dr Prescott, I feel that we’ve got off to the wrong sort of start. At this rate we’re going to spend an hour without having reached “Good Morning”.’

‘What do you want to do?’

I felt a prickling in the corner of my eyes as if I was going to cry. ‘I would like to smoke a cigarette. Is that all right?’

‘I’m afraid it isn’t.’

‘Why are you afraid?’

‘It’s just an expression.’

I forced my neck rather painfully around so that I was able to meet Dr Prescott’s eyes. ‘Just an expression?’

She was unamused. ‘Jane, what do you want?’

‘I suppose I was expecting that you would ask what my problem was and I’d talk about what was on my mind, the pressures that I’ve been under, and we’d take things from there.’

‘So talk.’

‘Dr Prescott, can I ask you something?’

‘You can say – or ask – anything you like.’

‘Are you experienced at this? I’m in a ragged, vulnerable state. Perhaps we should talk about how I can feel confident about entrusting myself to you.’

‘Why do you need to feel confident?’

‘If I was dropping my car in to a garage to be repaired I would want to know that the mechanics were competent. I’d find out if the garage was any good. Before I give myself up to this therapeutic process I need to have some sense of what it’s going to do for me.’

‘Jane, this is the therapeutic process. In this room there is nothing outside the process. The way to feel confident about it is to trust it, give yourself up to it.’

They were all laughing around the table. It had seemed like a nightmare at the time but, as I described it, later that evening, it somehow mixed with the wine and the creme brulee and now the cheese, and it became a comic turn.

‘I was feeling that I couldn’t cope,’ I continued, ‘I was desperate for some sort of reassurance and I stumbled into this remedial class for deconstructionists. There was no way I was going to pin her down. Every time I asked a question she would be like Macavity the cat. She wouldn’t be there. She’d have dodged to the side and she’d be saying that the real thing we ought to discuss is why I felt the need to ask that question. I would have needed a .45 Magnum to get her to tell me the time.’

This was the sort of therapy I needed. I was at Paul’s and Erica’s opulent house across in Westbourne Grove, the exotic bit of London I never felt really at home in. Around the table for dinner was Crispin, who was one of Paul’s directors on his game show, Surplus Value, and his girlfriend, Claire. There was Gus, the obligatory eligible single man in whose direction I was being pushed. He was all right but I was much more attracted to the two other men, two Australian builders called Philip and Colin, either of whom would have been far better choices for my crying-for-help one-night stand than whateverhisname was, but unfortunately they were not only both gay, but living together. I wasn’t particularly drawn to their technical expertise but they had benefited in other ways from their time in the sun moving heavy objects around.

‘So you never managed to get through to her?’ Paul asked.

‘Yes, I did. In the end there was only one thing I could do : I stood up and said, “I’m going, and I mean that in the sense of walking out of the room and never coming back into it again.” To which she replied, she really did, “What is it that you’re trying to resist?” I suddenly saw myself trapped in this conversation for the rest of my life like someone being pulled into a whirlpool. So I’m sorry to say I finally told her to fuck off and stormed, it’s the only word for it, I stormed out of the room.’ I took a sip of wine and the most beautiful drag on a cigarette. ‘And the next thing I knew, I found myself here telling you this story.’