‘She’s gone, hasn’t she, Jennifer? Definitely gone?’ He’d asked the same question a lot, since helping her from the chapel, a reassurance they all needed.
Jennifer nodded. At first she’d spoken, agreeing, but now she just moved her head, as if to repeat herself would risk bringing Jane cackling back.
‘It was God,’ insisted Dawson, another repetition. ‘God’s work. God’s mercy.’
‘She disappeared before,’ reminded Hall, cautiously. He wanted it to be true as much as any of them – was as anxious as any of them for it to be true – but couldn’t accept it this soon, this easily.
The priest made an angry gesture of denial,’It’s over now. All over.’
Hall found the possibility of that the most difficult of all to believe. It was too quick, too sudden. But how else could it have been? Exorcise meant to cut out, to remove evil. Which was what the priest was insisting had happened. There was no process, apart from the service. No prolonged treatment and after that a period of recuperation. Or wouldn’t there be? Not the recuperation after an illness, although what Jennifer had suffered was as bad as the worst imaginable illness. An adjustment then. A time – who knew how much time? – to become normal, ordinary. Would it be possible for Jennifer ever again to become normal and ordinary? For the rest of them, perhaps. For Dawson it was a religious miracle that proved the power of God and would sustain him for the rest of his life. For Charles Cox and Julian Mason it was the most incredible clinical experience of their lives: Mason would become world famous from his thesis. And Hall supposed he would in time accommodate the curiosity and notoriety.
But how could life ever again become normal and ordinary for a woman who’d been possessed – physically occupied even – by the spirit of someone else and been used as a vehicle for murder? Perhaps this was where the prolonged treatment began, the counselling and the guidance.
Not over at all, in fact, for Julian Mason and Jennifer. But over for him, if Jane had definitely gone. At once came the objective balance. Over for him even if Jane hadn’t gone. There was nothing more he could do. There were still some things to tidy up, perhaps: two or three weeks’ work, maybe a month. And after that… After that, what?
His difficulty, he at last realized, wasn’t that it was all over. It was at the thought that after that time, after a month at most, he wouldn’t be seeing Jennifer again. Have any reason to see Jennifer again. Too soon to think like that. Despite the conviction of the priest and of Jennifer, none of them yet knew – were convinced, beyond doubt – that Jane had gone. And there was still a lot to do, if she had. He’d let things take their own course, at their own pace. There wasn’t any hurry. He smiled across at Jennifer at the thought and she smiled hesitantly back.
‘It’s so wonderful,’ she said, faint-voiced. ‘I’m so…’ She shook her head, unable to finish, too tired for the words to form.
‘We all want it to have happened,’ warned the psychiatrist, joining Hall’s caution. ‘But we don’t know for sure, not yet.’
‘What do we have to do now?’ frowned Cox.
‘What we’d already decided,’ said Mason. ‘We go on waiting.’
Chapter Thirty-five
Which they did. Nervously. With Jennifer in those early days the most nervous of all, the convinced priest the least. Jennifer very much needed his conviction to sustain her own hope, after the immediate elation of the exorcism. But as those days passed it became easier for her, the confidence growing imperceptible layer by imperceptible layer.
She kept her vow and maintained her religious instruction under Dawson, eager to pray – although unsure to whom – for the freedom to be permanent. She continued her treatment under Julian Mason, too, surer that she’d come through the horrific mental ordeal with her sanity intact but realistically accepting she needed that agreed and confirmed by a trained psychiatrist – a mind doctor – just as much as she needed to be guaranteed physically to have recovered by Charles Cox. Least perceptible of all was the gradual preparation each provided, unconsciously at first and each in their own specialized way, to equip Jennifer for her return to the closest she’d ever come to life among ordinary people who would never consider her anything but abnormal, apparently free of Jane or not.
Mason identified Jennifer’s unprompted acceptance that she needed him as one of the most important indicators of her mental health. ‘She has come through it,’ he told Jeremy Hall. ‘She could still be damaged, wrecked even, if Jane comes back: that’s the key, which it’s always been. But basically she’s as solid as a rock. What we’re seeing – what I’m seeing – is the determination always to win, to be the best, that we’d heard about but never properly been able to see, until now.’
‘Isn’t that a pretty quick prognosis?’ queried Hall.
‘What are you talking about?’ demanded the psychiatrist. ‘I’ve been with her, night and day, for weeks, remember! She’s been my only patient. And she never had a mental problem: she had Jane, inside her head, trying to give her one. And it didn’t work.’
‘What about thinking of killing herself?’
‘Thinking of doing it is very different from actually doing it. Wouldn’t you have considered suicide, if you’d been the victim?’
Wanting to make his practical contribution to Jennifer’s rehabilitation – secretly disconcerted that he wasn’t doing as much as the other three men – Hall said, ‘There’s been quite a few things left in limbo. Is it too soon to involve her in making decisions?’
‘It can’t be soon enough. One thing that’s got to be restored is her total confidence, the arrogance if you like, that she had before. People become confident making decisions for themselves.’
‘It’s about confidence that I’m concerned. I need to go back to London: get a lot of things on course. We talked about it last night, out walking. She asked me not to go. Got upset at the thought.’
Mason nodded, ‘That dependency is something we’ve got to deal with.’
‘So do I just go?’ It was a clinical question, his only concern to do nothing to cause Jennifer any setback. He still couldn’t imagine everything coming to an end: that there was a finite point and that it was fast approaching.
‘No,’ decided Mason. ‘She’s making giant strides but at her speed, not ours. She’s still in a cocoon here. She’s got to be eased off her dependency upon you and me and upon Mr Dawson. Not have anything snatched away.’
‘What needs to be settled is still largely about her. How about bringing people here? Involving her that way?’
‘Good,’ nodded Mason. ‘A very good idea.’
Jennifer thought it was, too. Guided by the psychiatrist Hall gave her two days’ warning and hopefully briefed everyone else just as thoroughly against anything she wasn’t prepared for. Bert Feltham was to be the only stranger and Jennifer said she was quite happy with his inclusion, too.
‘My first single-minded contact with someone from the outside world!’ she said. Mason was as pleased with the joke against herself, as he was with everything else Jennifer was doing and saying. But not as pleased as Jennifer. She felt alive, vibrant, a sensation she could scarcely remember. It was going to be all right. Everything. All right best of all – most of all – with her and Emily. Jennifer abruptly stopped the reflection, refusing it.
The chamber’s chief clerk, unaccustomably subdued in dark grey, arrived with Humphrey Perry. Well briefed – perhaps too well briefed was Hall’s initial thought – by the solicitor, Feltham tried overly hard to behave as if there had been nothing whatsoever unusual about Jennifer. But couldn’t quite carry it off at the moment of introduction, offering and then withdrawing his hand.
Jennifer laughed openly at the man and said, ‘I don’t bite any more: and I no longer have an alter ego that does it, either.’
Geoffrey Johnson got to the clinic fifteen minutes later, burdened by briefcases and files. Inevitably the plump family lawyer was smoking one of his carved-bowled pipes. He paused by the Bentley to knock out the dottle before coming into the clinic.