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 is a neutral environment compared with my office.’
He took coffee beans from the freezer and ground them, tipped them into a large cafetiére 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.
‘No, thanks. If I have too much it makes me all trembly.’
He ran his finger round the rim of his coffee mug in a slightly fidgety way. ‘Jane, you haven’t answered my question.’
‘Yes, I have. I said I didn’t want any more.’
Alex laughed. ‘No, I mean, why do you feel you need therapy?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me. Look, you’re having to deal with life on your own after – what is it? – twenty-one years of marriage. Have you ever lived on your own?’
I shook my head.
‘Welcome to the world of being single,’ Alex said in an ironic tone. ‘You know, I sometimes have a fantasy of what it would be like if I wasn’t married and didn’t have any children. I could suddenly decide in the evening to go out and see a movie or have a drink in a bar. Perhaps, occasionally, I meet a woman at a party and I think, if I were single, I could have an affair with her and it would be so exciting. But if I suddenly found myself single, it wouldn’t be like that at all. Maybe I’d have an initial bit of euphoria. I might even have one or two sexual experiences. But I doubt whether it would be as much fun as I had anticipated. And then all the things I was used to, the reassurance of seeing people I know when I go home, all that would be gone. It would be hard.’
‘I thought I was supposed to do all the talking.’
Alex laughed again. ‘Who says? You’ve probably been reading too much Freud. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to a man who psychoanalysed both himself and his own daughter if I were you. Anyway, not only do you have all that to deal with but you have a perfectly clear family tragedy as well. You have a perfect right to be unhappy for a while. Do you want me to wave a wand and take it away from you?’
‘That sounds tempting.’
‘Let me give you a very glib diagnosis, Jane, and it’s on the house. I think you’re a strong woman and you don’t like to feel you can’t cope, you don’t want people to feel sorry for you. That’s the problem. My comment is : life is painful. Allow yourself to give way to that. You could talk to me, of course, but you could also spend your money in other ways. You could have a weekly massage, have some nice meals in restaurants, go on holiday somewhere hot.’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘Now that really is tempting.’
We were both smiling and there was a rather embarrassing pause. It was the sort of pause that in other circumstances I might have thought of dispelling by kissing Alex.
‘Alex, I hate saying “but seriously?”… But seriously, I had this talk last night with my brother, who, incidentally, has got this deranged idea of making a film about the family, so you’ll soon probably be able to learn all about my problems by watching BBC2, and Paul – that’s my brother’s name – was talking about our golden childhood. I’ve always had this image of our golden childhood as well but as he was talking in this nostalgic way there was something inside me that was saying no, no, no. Over the last few days I’ve been preoccupied with an image. It must be all to do with Natalie being found. But I’ve been thinking about my golden, golden childhood and a black hole in the middle of it, and I can’t get a grip on it and I don’t know what it is. Somehow it’s there, always on the edge of vision but when I turn to look at it directly it’s gone, gone to the edge again. I’m sorry, I’m probably not making sense. It hardly makes sense even to me. If you can imagine it, I’m listening to myself talking as a way of trying to understand. Perhaps what I’m asking is for you to trust me when I feel that there is something worth looking for behind all this.’