The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  16

  Dr Hartford’s Journal

  A tempest

  September 10th

  I know what I will do, what I have to do. Stupid of me to dream for one second that I had any choice.

  Lying to Grey might even be the worst of it, since I’ve no better friend on this earth. But then I’ve lied before in this matter, haven’t I? Isn’t my whole predicament just the latest in an iron succession of one lie by another? Grey can’t come and pull me out of the mire now – the damage was done a long time ago, in an hour of dire need, when I chose the wrong friend. Ever since, I’ve only been waiting for the karmic payload to drop. Yes, I was a coward for not telling Grey tonight, but I was a coward before, and even now I fear exposure – disgrace – as much as the next man. So my cowardice will persist.

  I read the look in Tessa’s eye instantly on my return last night: it had to be a security issue, but this time not the floodlight, nor the broken lock. As she told it, she hadn’t been long home, was changing bed-sheets upstairs when through the window she saw a gaunt figure hobble up the darkened driveway to our door – a long, lean individual clad from head to toe in shabby black. He disappeared under the porch and Tessa stood there, disconcerted, until she saw him hobble off again.

  ‘You’re sure you’ve not seen him around before?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have known, he was wearing a hood …’

  Downstairs she found he had shoved a small envelope through the letterbox, and I saw scrawled across it in a jagged hand as she passed it to me. The unease on her face convinced me, astutely, to shove it into my back pocket.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

  ‘I’ve other correspondence, Tessa. I doubt this one’s terribly urgent. But I’ll let you know …’

  And off I stomped up to the office, the bills and circulars brought by regular mail pressed piously to my chest. With the door shut behind me it was, of course, the grimy hand-delivery I tore open first, a letter composed over several note-cards, almost gentlemanly. Then, in an instant, came a crushing, vice-like sensation to my head on all sides.

  Dear Dr Steven:

  A friend of mine has bequeathed me a most disturbing story, as a result of which I know what you did – or shall we say failed to do? – in the sad case of Mr Tom Dole.

  Poor Tom. However could you have left him out in the cold and the dark, there to fall into a hole yet colder and darker? The coroner, I understand, adjudged it a cerebral haemorrhage. Would it not then distress his loved ones (also, your employer) to learn that the true cause of his death was You? That you let him die, and arranged for the disposal of his body – like so much garbage – just to save your skin?

  If I’m not to make this information more widely known, then it seems to me you must make reparation of sorts. For your convenience I will be the collector of dues.

  What you must do is place £10,000 in notes inside a plain carrier bag and get to Bishop’s Wood for 8pm tomorrow night. Enter the wood by the gate on Temple Fortune Hill. Walk 60–70 yards in, until the paths diverge. Take the left fork, until you see a red-painted bench under an oak. Take such time as you need to ensure that no one has sight of you, then walk into the woods directly beyond the oak for fifty or so paces: you will see a cherry tree into which a pentangle is cut. The tree-stump has a hollow near its foot. Place the carrier therein, leave it, exit the Wood directly, do not look back or return. I will be watching.

  Do all this exactly. Do not attempt to inform any other party of our arrangement. What I know in respect of yourself and Mr Dole has been written out, sealed and lodged with a notary, and will be made known in the event that anything should befall me. In which case, you know what will follow. But said document will be destroyed following your compliance with my instructions as above, whereupon, you have my word, you will not hear from me again …

  Didn’t I always know this would rise again, that the bones wouldn’t stay sunk? Five, six years vanish that way, cease to matter – my heart is back in my boots, just like the night Tom died on my kitchen floor where I’d left him. I lived a lie from that moment, went through the motions, commiserated with his family, loathsome to myself. In keeping my secret from Grey I clung to his approval of me and, I suppose, assured myself I would never tell another soul. And I never did. But my accomplice, my rescuer that night, the man who shook me hard, told me, ‘You weren’t the cause of this, Stevo, you can’t let it ruin you …’ No, my old friend Dr Forrest never took any vow of silence.

  Could anyone else but Robert know what he and I did? I can all too easily believe we were witnessed in some part of the act, I always feared as much. But that the witness should have kept quiet all this time? Or else – might Robert have kept some written account, now fallen into other hands? (The break-in at his apartment!)

  If this is Robert himself – then it’s insanity, because he’s running the risk of damning himself alongside me, if I chose to call his bluff, tough it out. Robert knows that the truth indicts him too: our ‘plan’ that night, it was his idea. I stumbled along with it, yes, but I didn’t conceive it. (This I tell myself, knowing full well the counter – that I was desperate, couldn’t face taking the honest course of responsibility for my actions, or inactions.) Could Robert be so desperate for money? Does he imagine he’s become invisible? Maybe he has, God knows.

  The letter is not in his handwriting, so he can only have an accomplice, an ‘emissary’, in this ‘Burnt Man’, le fantôme, who tried to hustle Grey for the coins in his pocket but wants ten grand out of me. How could Robert have made such a partner in crime? He writes just as fancily as Robert: possibly he was taking dictation. And yet the letter speaks of the ‘friend of mine’, who ‘bequeathed’ …

  No, out of all the mad scenarios only one seems to pass all tests of credence, if barely so: Robert must be in hock to somebody, heavily, some serious extortionist. Any one of his many debts or misadventures could have put him in the hole to someone so remorseless. I think Grey has it right – we are dealing with a kidnap, or a kind of forcible identity theft, or some sort of warped ransom situation. Someone’s got him, is holding him, bleeding him for cash. That’s why the raid on his place, that’s why this blackmail.

  A police matter, no question. Except that I’m no more ready to face them now than I was then. The truth will put me in a place where I can no longer face myself. If I came clean to Grey … he’d forgive me, I do believe that, but it wouldn’t hold him back from doing his blasted duty. The ‘Burnt Man’ is a suspect in this obscure ‘investigation’: I’d have to surrender his letter to forensics.

  All these thoughts ran round my head, the deceptively logical processes we use to persuade ourselves we are in control, and it’s all really okay, and the worst will never happen … But really I knew what I would do the moment the shock receded. The rest was only a making peace with that, a ritual burning of each pretend option. My reputation, my livelihood, the life I’ve made, all are at stake here. In going along with it – I’m not so stupid as to imagine that will be an end to it. But there’s no other hope.

  Thereafter my actions were fast and precise. I fed the notecards into the shredder. I logged on to our current account, booked a withdrawal from the branch on Haverstock Hill tomorrow. Then I came down and made dinner, whistling tunelessly as I sliced pearly scallops in two. Tessa wandered in, poured herself some wine.

  ‘So what did your little note say …?’

  ‘Just some poor itinerant sod, looking for work. “Odd jobs.” I don’t think he’s the handyman we’re looking for, do you?’

  I segued by telling her the tickets I’d ordered for Idomeneo at the ENO had arrived. She dipped a finger in my sauce vierge, tasted, made an approving face, even kissed the nape of my neck on her way out. Any other day I would have thought this progress. Tonight I flinched.

  September 11th

  It’s done, despatched. Nothing for it now but pray to God another call never comes. Even as I went through the prescribed motions
, my mind was wrenched two ways. I am bargaining with – taking the word of – an individual probably dangerous, possibly deranged. Grey’s tale of his clash with the Burnt Man on Parliament Hill was alive in my mind, had me feeling hollow-legged as I picked my way into Bishop’s Wood at dusk. Stepping between the sycamores and over the breaking twigs I kept fighting back the skin-crawling premonition I was about to catch sight of him suddenly, studying me through the trees, crouched as if to spring … His instructions, at least, were exact: all was as I found it, and I hastened back out of those mournful woods as fast as I could.

  My day at Blakedene, between the collection and drop-off of blood money, was one for which I doubted I’d be capable. I was so sure my fraudulence was rolling off me like a stink. And yet, I showed myself again that I can pack away anxiety as if in chambers round my person – just as I did in the days after Tom’s death. I can create a sort of doppelgänger, an efficient second self – breathe life into him, fill him with sufficient reality to carry out my chief functions. Still, as I moved from room to room there was a devil on my shoulder deriding me: Behold the good man, the kind clinician. Shall I tell you the terrible thing he did …?

  I sat in on all the morning groups, joined in Marcia Fallow’s team conference, found myself genuinely engaged and moved by the account of her good progress. I considered cancelling Eloise, fearing (absurdly) that with her perhaps I’d fail to hold it together. But then our previous session had been lost. More than that, it’s through her, above all – the thought of helping her – that I can see some route back to the mooring of my ‘good’ self.

  So see her I did, and something quite unexpected passed between us in the room – whereupon it became blindingly clear to me what I must do, for her sake.

  There was an odd moment, though, after I’d been told by Nurse Gardner that she was out on the veranda. I found her sleeping in the tall-backed wicker chair, a little slumped, head to one side and cradled in one hand. The air was warm, I could see perspiration on her brow, wondered if she was unwell, heat-struck. But as I stepped closer, I understood her condition was languid rather than awkward. She sighed and shifted, her breathing easy. There was a sweet breeze, a small holly-blue butterfly flitted by. Studying her face I was forced, reluctantly, to admire Robert’s skill, her skin having retained its honey tone and fine down without one blot of that taut, marbled collagen-iridescence you often see in the ‘worked-upon’. On the table before her were two elegant calla lilies, purple as our clematis in the gardens, their long stems wrapped in cellophane. Also an embroidery hoop and pincushion: a small needlepoint in progress, of an emerald snake coiled within larger spirals of hexagonal black and white. I thought it commendable work until I was uncomfortably reminded of that leering serpent tattoo Robert had etched onto himself while a student at the Bute.

  Then I had a sixth sense, turned to see David Tregaskis standing close to the wall a few yards behind me, only seeming to stare through me. He was breathing strangely, his eyes blank, flickering upward, his body in a curious trance-like posture. I shouted at him, grabbed his shoulders, and he came back to us. But I had to summon Brian from the orderly team to lead him back to West Wing. Was it genuinely ‘an episode’? Once he revived he was so much his familiar self I can’t be sure he wasn’t feigning it, to unsettle me, like so much of what he does.

  Yet, up in my office it was Eloise who truly knocked me for six by presenting me with those two lilies. ‘Les fleurs du mal …’, she murmured. A strange moment – I had to wonder quite what she was offering. In fact there was a sweet explanation: these were just two blooms out of a heaving bouquet delivered to her this morning, sent by Leon Worrell.

  ‘I do want to thank you, Steven,’ she said, eyeing the floor. ‘For being a friend. I’d buy you a drink if I could …’

  She half-smiled, yet the look in her eye was so earnest I felt something tighten in my chest. I almost didn’t want to sink us back into the routine of the therapy. Still, we sat and strapped in, ‘ran the numbers’ for her target traumas, and I could see she had been reflecting on things, however ruefully. I can’t pretend to see any uplift in her, any obvious indicator that her depression is ‘shifting’. But I sense that the disturbing force of the memory of her abuse has been dislodged, is fading. Her ‘disturbance-level’ she rated as one/zero. When I asked her why, though, her answer troubled me.

  ‘It was just a thing that happened to somebody …’

  ‘It happened to you, Eloise.’

  She only shrugged, scrutinised her fingers spread out on her knee. Yes, she accepts that what Flint did to her was ‘not her fault’. But what I must do now is turn her focus from past problems to future solutions, to end the self-sabotage, the death-drive, build instead on the things that make her feel capable. Here, though, she is so worryingly passive. ‘I can’t alter what happened, or what followed. I just feel … used up, Steven. Past my sell-by date. How can I change the given now? How can I redeem myself? I so want to, but it just seems … hopeless.’

  That earnest wish, though – to redeem herself! – God, but it resonated with me. Could we get to that place together, even if it need be by different doors? She has been brave enough to begin to face what’s oppressed her. In that, she has a lesson for me.

  The answer, I was sure, lay in those flowers from Leon. I gathered they’d been accompanied by a letter – ‘a lovely letter’, she said grudgingly, as if that only complicated matters. Her feelings for this man are nothing but complicated. They have circled each other, their relationship ‘off and on’, hostage to these alleged ‘barriers’ between them. The positives – their mutual physical attraction and basic compatibility – we have established. His worthiness as a suitor appears self-evident. Yet Eloise resists paying him the compliments she knows he merits. Still I believe that what glimmers through the murk of her insouciance is some trapped desire to come through for him, be the partner he wants her to be.

  I dragged her round to describing for me how their relations had proceeded, after his brother Lynval had effected the introduction:

  EK: I was promoting this club night, but I had twelve points on my licence and Leon offered to drive me around, deliver flyers and posters, carry gear. Then he sanded a floor in my place – that’s his business, he can do anything with wood. He was sweet, but, you know, the motive was clear. He got what he wanted.

  SH: After you slept together, did you begin a relationship proper? Dating?

  EK: No, I wasn’t doing that. We just took it as a one-night thing. Or two or three nights, probably, at the start … As it has continued.

  SH: But he stuck around. Even after it was clear you weren’t ‘an item’?

  EK: Yes. I … I got sick, it was a bacterial pneumonia and I was pole-axed for a few weeks. He came over, looked after me. Cooked me breadfruit casserole. His mama’s good buljol … What?

  SH: He cooks too? I’m waiting for the downside, Eloise.

  […]

  SH: I mean, he’s never stopped helping you, has he?

  EK: He was a friend and I needed that, I still do – that doesn’t mean it should be a relationship. He can turn, his temper, so quick. Don’t be fooled by the smile …

  SH: What makes him angry?

  EK: Ha. Once I asked him how he could have left the mother of his son, and he went ballistic, said ‘It’s right I break with a woman when there can’t be no peace.’ I thought that lacked commitment. Then again, I met her, she’s a piece of work …

  SH: But you’ve met other people in his life? You get on okay?

  EK: Oh yeah, that’s all cool. I mean, I remember a night in this club he likes, a girl he knows hissed at me as I went past, but that’s just— urgh, predictable … That same night, though, he told me off for ‘faking’, as he calls it, I’d gelled my fringe and he hated it. It’s important to him that ‘people be what they be’. Like he’s always himself …

  SH: How does Leon mix with your friends? You’ve introduced him?

  EK: He’s not �
� wildly comfortable. He tries but he knows he doesn’t slot into the rest of my life. My background. People with daddy’s money, degrees …

  SH: Does it matter you and he can’t talk about French poetry?

  EK: Oh but Leon speaks French. Oh yeah. His dad was a teacher. Leon rebelled, wanted a trade, to work with his hands. But his French is good … No, you know what I’m talking about, it’s what formal education means. Embodies.

  SH: And do you feel so comfortable – in the rest of your life, with your ‘background’? Is it something you’d be sorry to let loose of?

  […]

  EK: It’s just hard – relinquishing who you are. Whatever that is.

  SH: When Leon is angry with you, do you argue back?

  EK: Yes. I tell him not to be silly. To grow up. He hates that too …

  SH: I’m not surprised. No one cares to be condescended to. Do you not think you might be trying to make him surly? Just to confirm your thesis? Clearly he’s no monster.

  EK: Hmm. Maybe you and Leon should get together, Steven. Since you think he’s the man of my dreams … Don’t let me get in the way.

  SH: No, we know the man of your dreams. Who steals you away into slavery, submission. I don’t want us to deal in your dreams, Eloise, I want to know why you push away someone who’s trying to care for you.

  EK: Look, it’s not my dream to be— dragged off to hell. But I don’t want to be rowing all the time about bullshit either – details, inane things, who owns who, or owes what to whatever.

  SH: You mean growing up? I’m sorry Eloise, that’s what it is. What it means to have a partner in life.

  EK: Right. Barefoot and pregnant …

  SH: You’ve said that before. Has Leon done anything more than say he’d like children? And are you so opposed …? You know, I do think it was a good thing for us as a species that sexuality was split out of procreation. But you can’t make the two wholly incompatible. Does it scare you so much?