‘Don’t you think he might be a good person for Jane to talk to?’
Crispin thought for a moment, then smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Be nice to him, though. He’s an old friend.’ His Filofax was open on the table and he flicked through it and found the number.
‘Here,’ he gave me a slip of paper. ‘Should your mission fail, Jane, we will of course deny any knowledge of you.’
Six
The following morning I wrote a letter to Rebecca Prescott enclosing a cheque for the session and saying that I had decided not to proceed. Then, feeling foolish, I rang the number that Crispin had given me. The phone was answered and somebody said something unintelligible.
‘Hello, can I speak to Dr Alexander Dermot-Brown, please?’
More unintelligible speech.
‘Hello, is your mummy or your daddy there?’
This achieved something at any rate as the gibberish became the comprehensible ‘Dada, Dada’. The receiver was apparently snatched away from the first speaker who gave a high-pitched scream.
‘Be quiet, Jack. Hello, is there anybody there?’
‘Hello, I want to speak to Dr Alexander Dermot-Brown.’
‘That’s me.’
‘You’re a therapist.’
‘Yes, I know.’ There was a clatter in the background and Dermot-Brown shouted something. ‘I’m sorry, you’ve caught us in the middle of breakfast.’
‘Sorry, I’ll try to be brief. I was given your number by Crispin Pitt and Claire um…’
‘Claire Swenson, yes.’
‘Could I come and talk to you?’
‘All right.’ He paused. ‘What about twelve?’
‘You mean today?’
‘Yes. Somebody’s gone on holiday. If that’s not all right, it’ll have to be next week some time. Or the week after that.’
‘No, twelve will be fine.’
He gave me his address, in Camden Town, near the market. God, more disruption in the office. Not that it mattered all that much. ‘Work’ for me was the CFM office on the top floor of an old molasses warehouse overlooking the canal and the basin in Islington. The C – Lewis Carew – died of Aids in 1989. Now there was just me and the F, Duncan Fowler, and after the years of recession we were only just approaching a time where there was enough work for two of us. As long as I went to all the meetings concerning ‘my’ hostel and kept the paperwork up to date and popped into the office regularly then nothing much would go wrong.
I cycled over to the office anyway. I looked through the mail and chatted to our assistant, Gina (she’s our secretary, really, but we call her our assistant to compensate for paying her so badly). Duncan came in at eleven looking as relaxed as ever. Duncan is a portly fellow, quite short, with a nearly bald head fringed with reddish curly hair and an almost excessively expansive beard. I told him about some new complications with the hostel, he told me about a housing co-op job which would earn us even less money. Still, it was nothing much to worry about. I have no mortgage, and the children are away being paid for mainly by Claud. Duncan has no mortgage and is divorced with no children and no alimony. We own our leasehold. As Duncan put it in the dark days of the early nineties, before we could go bankrupt, we would first have to get some work.
I told Duncan I was going to see my second therapist in two days and he laughed and gave me a hug and then I got on my bike. I was predisposed to like Alexander Dermot-Brown because I was able to get almost all the way from my office to his house by cycling along the canal. I just had to cross Upper Street and then I could make my way through the wastes of gasometers and railway land past the post office depot and leave the towpath when I got to Camden Lock. Just a couple of hundred yards or so later I was chaining the bike to the railings.
Alexander Dermot-Brown was wearing trainers, jeans and a thin, worn sweater with holes in the elbows through which a checked shirt was visible. He had a craggy jaw, almost like Clark Kent in the old comic strip, and he had wavy brown hair flecked with the first hints of grey and very dark eyes.
‘Dr Dermot-Brown, I presume.’
He smiled and held his hand out. ‘Jane Martello?’
We shook hands and he gestured me in and downstairs into the kitchen in the basement.
‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘Lovely, but oughtn’t I to be going into a room and lying on a couch.’
‘Well, we can probably find a couch somewhere in the house if you’re desperate. I thought we should have a chat first and see what we think about things.’
With its ceramic floor and stained-wood panelling and cupboards, the kitchen would have seemed elegant if it had been empty. But there were toys on the floor, the walls were covered with posters, postcards and children’s drawings stuck haphazardly with pins and tape and Blu Tack. The walls were scarcely less crowded than the notice board, a largeish area of cork tiling above one of the work surfaces, on which takeaway menus for local restaurants, invitations, notices from schools, snapshots were attached in what looked like a whole series of layers. Dermot- Brown saw me staring around.
‘Sorry, I should have tidied up.’
‘That’s all right. But I thought analysts were meant to work in a neutral environment.’
‘This
He took coffee beans from the freezer and ground them, tipped them into a large cafetiere and poured in boiling water. He rummaged in a cupboard.
‘I ought to give you some biscuits but all I can find are these Jaffa cakes. If I allow one for each child, that leaves one over. Would you like it?’
‘That’s all right. I’ll just have coffee. Black, please.’
He poured coffee into two mugs and we sat down on opposite sides of the scrubbed-pine kitchen table. A smile was playing across his face as if the whole encounter seemed slightly comical to him, as if he was only pretending to be grown up.
‘Now, Jane – is it okay if I call you Jane? And you must call me Alex – why do you think that you need therapy?’
I took a sip of coffee and felt the usual overwhelming desire. ‘May I smoke?’
Alex smiled again. ‘Well, Jane, one idea I have about therapy is that it’s a sort of game and for it to work we both have to agree on some ground rules. One of them is that you don’t smoke. I have small children in the house. It also guarantees you at least one benefit from your sessions, even if you achieve nothing else. The other benefit of the rule is that it’s very easy for me to abide by because I don’t smoke. There is a good chance that I’ll be relaxed and in control while you’re neurotically suffering from nicotine deprivation, and that’s good as well, at least for me.’
‘All right, I’ll do without.’
‘Good, now tell me about yourself.’
I took a deep breath and sketched out my situation, there, over the coffee, which he topped up, in that kitchen, my elbows on the rather sticky table. I told him about my separation and the discovery of Natalie’s body. I talked a bit about the Martello family, this wonderful inclusive group that we were all meant to feel privileged to be connected to. I described my single life in London and its dissatisfactions, though I left out my sexual escapade. It took rather a long time and when I had finished Alex waited before responding. His first statement was an offer of more coffee. I felt a bit deflated.
