The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  Still – be it said, latterly Rab turned outright mean and vindictive, a rotten way to behave to a friend of thirty years. But then such has been Robert’s mood since Killian supplanted him. Not that Steven couldn’t give out too. Once he got stuck into the ‘shallowness’ of Robert’s vocation, anyone overhearing might have decided that it’s cosmetic surgery and not religion that is the opium of the people. In the teeth of any such lecture (a ‘culture of narcissism’ and whatnot) Robert would merely shake his head in feigned wonderment. ‘Don’t we all like to make a good appearance …?’ was his standard laconic comeback.

  That last spat of theirs, though – perhaps most bitter because least important, or so it then seemed. Steven had merely been describing the treatment of certain anxieties in his patients through what he called ‘mindfulness training’, incorporating elements of Buddhist meditation. But this was the red rag for Robert, by now midway through the second bottle of our good Saint-Emilion, having drained the first one pretty well solo. The Scot in him surged up, the Selkirk tough, as he rocketed off into a tirade against the ‘utter fucking shite’ of karma, reincarnation and ‘a whole load of other equally cretinous beliefs held by certain rich Buddhist pals of my ex-wife’.

  Steven didn’t bother to defend methods he has clearly found useful. Instead he very coolly expressed surprise that Robert had now ‘married’ Malena some months after she left him. I must say that in the arctic moments that followed Rab looked very much ‘like he could kill a man’. I was startled myself. Yes, Steven can fight his own corner, but usually cedes the field when things turn nasty – decent, diffident, inclined to turn the other cheek, if only to harbour a grudge. That night, though, he got the hard blow in first. At any rate he had said what I knew he felt – that Malena’s leaving was Robert’s just desserts, that Robert had earned for himself the pain of being ‘traded in’ for a younger, more gifted lover – his own little karmic redress for a lifetime of treating women cursorily.

  Steven and Tessa were the last lingerers at table that night, and so I suggested to Steven that he could show Robert a mite more compassion. (With the redoubtable Professor Tessa at his side I was prevented from adding the obvious point that his own marriage is hardly a model of harmony.)

  ‘You know Rab loves you really,’ I ventured, ‘would do anything for you in a spot – has done, in the past.’

  ‘I’m doing my best for him,’ Steven shot back. ‘Who do you suppose is writing his Remeron prescriptions?’

  The very idea of Robert taking antidepressants was so outlandish that I was dumbstruck for some moments, a silence into which Steven gloomily injected. ‘He’s changed, Grey. Really, much for the worse.’

  ‘He’s not in a good way,’ I agreed. ‘Bloody Remeron could change him all over again, to be frank. So now’s the time he needs us. Steven, look at the faces we had round this table tonight. These are the friends we’ve made. I doubt we’ve got time to make many more …’ I’d intended to stir him to his senses, but I could see that instead I had burdened him further with my own private gloom. As if he hadn’t enough of his own to wade through.

  Stevie is a sound man, but one who squats on so much half-suppressed unhappiness. His position at Blakedene Hall pays well, for now, but I’m sure at heart he’s still haunted by having followed Robert out of the NHS and into pure-profit private practice. As Steven always tells it, he stepped out of the state system because the recurrent and systemic failures of care were just too depressing and distressing. I know he was greatly shaken by the pointless death of Tom Dole, a patient with whom he’d formed quite a bond. But some part of him must acknowledge: he had a mind to make more money – to impress Tessa, if nothing else. Whereas the Steven of old would sooner have slit his own throat than take that gig.

  I’m not even sure quite how well Blakedene’s doing these days. When Steven got the Director job the group’s business plan clearly envisaged a steady stream of self-paying patients – rich and/or famous drug addicts and their kids – and, for sure, they have a good few of those still, all stumping up their five or six grand a week. But for Blakedene – just as for any other private psychiatric facility, I suppose – the baseline must be met by short-term, high-margin state contracts for the mentally ill. That’s where the axe is falling, and so Steven, even in his private fiefdom, is subject to the state’s austerity measures. Thus he must sing for his supper, promote Blakedene as an upscale bolthole for posh drunks and waste-of-space cokeheads. There is a price levied on Steven’s soul for this. He’s not dealing with the conditions that concern him. He treats people for whom he has no respect, he is a dispenser of drugs rather than of counsel and care. He wanted to be a hands-on restorer of sound mental health. Instead he’s become the god Hypnos.

  On top of it all, late fatherhood has left him looking perpetually knackered. I do wonder, alas, if it’s really the twins keeping Steven and Tessa together. I know that six months back they had an unhappy, inconclusive talk about separation. When we were lads he always had such a gallant notion of the feminine, a romantic conception of marriage as the true union of Man & Woman. It sustained him through his thirties and the long relationship with Jessica, flaxen-haired poetess with a fanciful interest in psychotherapy that fooled Steven into thinking he’d found his female ideal. That was a messy ending, whereupon he married on the rebound – wound up hitched to a lassie made out of pins and needles, not a dreamy thought in her head. I daresay it’s from such hardy stuff that scholars of medieval history are made – Tessa’s doctoral thesis, if I remember right, was much concerned with methods of torture. Though I know Livy finds her perfectly companionable, admirably accomplished and all that.

  And to his credit, Steven always maintained he didn’t just want a wife who would cradle his tired head on her bosom – or so he said. He wanted an authentic partner, an equal, someone to challenge him. Well, ‘challenged’ he most certainly has been. Secretly he might feel he would have been happier with one from the delectable parade of Robert’s ex-girlfriends – those pliable, decorative dollies Rab used to squire around. Before Malena came along, then broke Rab’s heart. Before the Fall.

  6

  Dr Hartford’s Journal

  Inmates of Blakedene Hall

  August 27th

  Pitch-dark and silent outside my window. Since I can’t sleep I burn the lights in the office and write. Better than lying awake in bed, watching the ceiling turn to ominous shadowland. I suppose this insomnia means I’m not working hard enough. But I’m jaded, purposeless: the idea of pulling myself together, pitching into the patient load – two dozen inpatients, a handful in day care? – feels futile. A day like today, dominated by our most puzzling ‘inmate’, is as much as I can handle.

  I ought, then, to have more time for my alleged managerial duties. That this in-tray is also near-empty points to the covert diminishing of my authority round this place. Andrew Gillon, our new ‘finance director’, cuts an increasingly (self-) important figure. The odds of a sell-off/merger seem to shorten daily, in the event of which I fully suspect I’d turn up one morning to find someone else in my chair. This, the paranoia that keeps me key-pushing into the small hours.

  I could just switch on the voice-recognition software: mutter away to myself like Richard Nixon, let the room’s hidden mics be my witness. Could, in other words, be my own patient. But then should loyal Goran pass my door and overhear, he’d surely think me mental. And that’s not really the impression one wants to give, not in my line of work.

  Moments ago, in fact, Goran knocked lightly, his witching-hour patrol of grounds and corridors complete. Watchman, how goeth the night? He reports that all of Blakedene is sleeping save for me, and him. In his open, smiling face I read mild surprise, perhaps disapproval, at the fact that I was not myself back home and abed in the bosom of my family. Perhaps, too, he sniffed something in the air – the vaguest evanescence of Eloise Keaton’s perfume, Ghost or Poison or whatever. Goran knows me better, though – doesn’t he? – than to
suppose I arrange my end-of-day sessions so as to prey on my younger, blonder female patients.

  Still, the hour when I might have made the drive home before Tessa was out cold crept by once again. When I called to tell her she was curt, on Jacob’s behalf too. But it’s done, the Chesterfield is my mattress tonight. (The temptation to wander over to East Wing, take a room in my own asylum, must be resisted for obvious reasons.) It does feel like my true home, this office – its air of a professorial study, high-ceilinged, book-lined, oak-wainscoted. I feel stable and centred behind my long desk, a fit perch for a thoughtful man, a fine place to hide out from the hash he’s making of his actual life.

  This morning, at least, I woke in my own bed. There was a chill in the room, as has been for weeks. Murky light through the louvres, from the en suite the sound of water lapped onto skin. Then Jacob hurtled in, wearing his bunny pyjamas, windmilling his arms. Get up, Daddy, get up! Julian traipsed behind, rubbing red eyes. I gave Jules a hug. Jake evaded my embrace, hurtled out the door again. I found Tessa in the tub, her back to me, rinsing her hair. She didn’t turn, however long I stood gazing at the wet skin of her shoulders, the gleaming rope of her hair snaking down and round the notches of her spine. No words needed: in the silence between us there is absolute resonant telepathy.

  She’s displeased that I’m resuming care of Eloise: the minute I told her I felt her tension, the revived resentment of what she reckoned was my excess mental energy on this patient’s behalf last time. Frankly it just feels odd to me that Tessa should have so little sympathy for another woman who has been so ill-used, whose abuse as a child was of the sort routinely correlating with a lifetime of adult disorders.

  But no, Tessa feels free to lecture me about my business (‘You can’t help her, Steven, it’ll take real people in her real life to get her out of the hole …’ et cetera).

  ‘I’m well aware she can’t recover her childhood,’ I riposted. ‘But I do believe in adulthood you can be a sort of loving parent to yourself.’

  I haven’t even had one proper session with Eloise yet – have kept my distance, in a way, out of certain mixed emotions. But earlier today we spoke, and I saw her depression has returned with a vengeance, she complains both of insomnia and of nightmares, has evidently been unable to resolve her ruinous promiscuity, a regrettable outrider to the world of nightclubs and dance music that employs her intermittently (as ‘promoter’, DJ, hostess, I never quite understand, but none of it right for a young woman with a decent Oxford degree in French and Italian).

  This morning, then – after I’d shaved and brewed coffee and the boys came and went from the kitchen table, Tessa made her stomping descent, then roamed restlessly, complaining of the failed floodlights over the driveway. ‘It’s getting darker every night, Steven, something has to be done. You’re at Blakedene all hours, I come home to pitch black.’ Her main concern is some snapped catch on a kitchen window. I told her it seemed hardly a high-level risk.

  She: ‘Bad things happen, Steven. Look at your friend Forrest …’

  Well. I nearly wanted to ask how she’d succeeded where the police have so far failed in determining what’s happened to Robert. But of course Tessa never liked Robert, has only seemed faintly bemused by the current crisis.

  Then the phone rang. Tessa strode past me to the hallway. I watched as she lifted the receiver, a terse ‘Hello?’, then moved into the living room, closing the door over the cord. Truly I’ve become a pitiful invigilator of my wife’s daily doings, such as I see of them. But then, were she really cheating would she still find everything about me so irritating? Wouldn’t she be the soul of marital sweetness if only to throw me off the scent?

  It was then Julian trailed back into the kitchen, cheeks red and wet, and thrust out the palm of his hand to reveal weeping beads of scarlet. In an instant I knew. He’d watched me earlier from the bathroom door while I shaved. Alone, he must have been so curious as to pick up my razor, pluck out the blade from its bed … I shot out of my chair, swept him up, out into the hallway, hammered at the door. When at last it opened I caught the irritation on Tessa’s face, saw it turn to a gape at the state of her distressed child.

  ‘A&E,’ I bellowed. ‘Now.’

  Mercifully it just needed three small stitches – no tendons harmed, thank God. But this is what happens when two Married Professionals, occupied separately within the Family Firm, start to pass like ghost ships. Setting aside, for the moment, who bears the blame for that larger degeneration – who was responsible here for Julian’s mishap and distress? All I can say is that I acted first, and with sufficient conviction as to assume the moral high ground. That accomplishment was nearly worth the misery that settled on me once the two of them had hastened out the front door.

  Tessa, how were we reduced to this? Can we not talk about it? Can we not? There’s so much I would tell you, if you would only listen.

  * * *

  I’m well aware that, to hostile eyes, Eloise Keaton may seem the worst embodiment of Blakedene’s ethos of care: freeloading daughter of Britain’s ninety-second-richest man, consummate ‘poor little rich girl’, husky-voiced and jaded too soon. But I know just how unfortunate she’s been, however wealthy and titled her father – a grousing, mirthless sort of multi-millionaire, only amused (from what I’ve seen) when he has someone at a disadvantage. Her mother Jo was aloof, secretly alcoholic, wracked by her failure to bear Sir James the necessary son-and-heir – an ambition he realised finally with the second Mrs Keaton, Nicole, a catwalk model two months younger than Eloise.

  Yes, when Eloise first came to us six months ago her presenting problem was substance abuse. I weaned her off the cocaine and insane vodka consumption: a stock fortnight of detox, a standard month of person-centred therapy. She was a model patient, in a way: certainly she seemed like one who had sickened of self-poisoning. Still, she also gave off the aura of one who lived selfishly as a form of retribution – payback now because she’d deserved better then, back in the mists of a lost childhood. Only I didn’t yet know just how severe had been the loss.

  As we sat together and I tried to fathom her personal history (she irked and dispirited by turns) I couldn’t understand how a once-timid child who’d loved poetry, horses and the woodland near her home transformed into one who, aged 15, survived expulsion from her pricy boarding school by dint of daddy’s money, having been caught on the grounds after dark with Class-A drugs and two rough local boys. As much as she stonewalled me, at some point she accepted my concern as genuine, for one day I found a wrapped package in my pigeon-hole.

  It was a diary, such as a girl would keep – its pale violet covers water-marked and ink-blotted, a detail of embroidered flowers crushed lifeless. Flicking a few blue-biro pages I understood this was a bona fide adolescent journal, a secret recess, composed in minute scribble and intermittent schoolgirl French like code. I read it in one sitting, and so learned that at the age of 13 Eloise had been abused sexually. ‘Raped’ is the plain word.

  The offender was her father’s then business partner Marcus Flint. Their Cotswolds estates were cheek-by-jowl, and Flint kept a big, hardly used stables for his wife, much debilitated by depressions after the births of their sons. At said stables Eloise was deposited every weekend for equestrian lessons. She found Flint a thoughtful instructor, with a cajoling but kindly manner. He praised her in ways she never heard at school. In fact he was grooming her. It became his custom to take her for twilight walks in the woods, where he told her of a sadness inside him that caused him pain, was ‘exorcised’ only by having her near. He told her she was beautiful, and in those cold, dark, silent woods he persuaded her to cling to him for warmth, actually inveigling her into non-mutual masturbation. For a while, with snake-like wiles, he persuaded her these encounters were a precious secret, a covenant, since he so ‘loved’ being with her. That covenant broke the day he actually penetrated her, hissing in her ear that it would hurt less if she stopped fighting. Still he bullied and shamed her into silence
, warning her calmly of who would suffer most if she ‘told’. So she never did.

  It only ended one night at the family dinner table, when Sir James told Eloise her visits to the Flints would have to cease owing to the upcoming flotation of their company BlueWire. ‘Marcus will be too busy for you,’ her father said sternly. She never saw Flint again. Within months some financial irregularities on his part became known – some illicit/illegal use of stockholding – and he fled the UK hastily for boltholes beyond the law, first California, then Guatemala.

  Such was the tale of the violet diary; and weighing it in my hand, knowing she had placed it there, broke the ground of a great trust between us. All these years she had needed someone to read her, to relieve her of this grim, punishing secret. She chose me.

  Thereafter we worked on some techniques of cognitive processing, but I found her badly ‘stuck’ in several crucial respects. I’m all too familiar with how women can emerge from such traumas with a drastic sense of themselves as Bad, the psyche coping only by asserting that they are indeed, in some part, fundamentally brazen. Not only did Eloise consider her abuse defining of her, she was consumed by guilt over it. ‘I shouldn’t have been around’ was her sad refrain. ‘Shouldn’t have been in his way, moping about …’ I managed at least to make her feel her parents’ abdication of responsibility, their clear failure to watch over her. Her distress was slow-rising, like a storm drain in a torrent, but what finally came forth was nausea, disgust, rage both at Flint and her parents, but also, still, at her younger self. There was a catharsis in this venting, preferable at least to the cultivated insouciance and fecklessness that had ‘protected’ her to a limited extent since adolescence.