‘Probably not.’
‘No.’ He suddenly looked at her very intently. ‘Mrs Seddon, why did you really come to see me?’
Oh dear. She hadn’t planned for this. Was he really about to call her out as a fraud, whose not-very-painful knee was being used simply to further a criminal investigation? Carole floundered.
But, before she could give herself away, Dr Rawley revealed that his thoughts weren’t going in the direction she’d feared. ‘It’s a common syndrome that we doctors recognize well.’
‘Oh?’
‘A patient makes an appointment to consult about some minor condition … like, say, your knee … and then shows no interest in the treatments we recommend for it. And the reason for that is that … it wasn’t really the knee they had come about.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Frequently, there’s another, much deeper, anxiety that brings them to the surgery. Some life-threatening illness that they believe they may have contracted. Something so terrible to their mind that they daren’t talk to their closest family or friends about it. They make an appointment with a doctor either to get the all-clear or to have their worst imaginings confirmed.’
‘What, you’re saying they imagine they’re ill. You mean they’re hypochondriacs?’
‘Not necessarily. There might be a genuine cause for concern. And their worry about the secrecy of their condition might well lead them to make an appointment with a doctor who is not the one they see regularly … just as you have done.’
‘Well, I—’
He overrode her. ‘Quite often, it’s cancer they’re really worried about. I just wondered whether that might be the case with you, Mrs Seddon …?’
‘Certainly not!’ said Carole.
The bill she paid to the receptionist was, to Carole’s mind, pretty steep. She was glad she wasn’t about to book further appointments. But she thought she might possibly have got value for money in terms of information gained.
SIXTEEN
Jude was always surprised what a relief it was to be out of Fethering. The needs of her clients, the concerns of the village, trapped her in an opaque bubble, out of which she could not see the wider world. But being away from the place was like breathing newly minted air. Her life until she settled on the South Coast had been fairly nomadic. Fethering was the place she’d stayed longest. And when she wasn’t there, she wondered whether it had been for too long.
The ‘Healing Is in the Head’ conference in Leeds was fun, and it was a pleasure to be amongst people to whom she did not have to explain what she did. Also, amongst people who did not raise their eyebrows and draw in their breath after she’d said what she did. It was an opportunity for Jude to mix with old friends and be introduced to new people. The programme of talks, panels and seminars had been well thought through, and she was stimulated by the influx of new ideas, which often encouraged her that she was doing something right, but sometimes made her healthily question the way she did things. Such events had often stimulated her to experiment in different areas of healing.
Above all, the conference was an opportunity to spend time with Karen and Chrissie.
The beginnings of Jude’s relationship with Karen had been as healer and client. Karen Thomlinson had had everything that in Fethering counted as success – an accountant husband wealthy enough for her not to go out to work, three healthy children at private boarding school and a house on the Shorelands Estate. The only detail that apparently distinguished her from other well-heeled Fethering housewives was that she believed in the powers of healing. Karen Thomlinson had it all.
Yet, when she’d first arrived at Woodside Cottage, she had been so crippled by back pain that Jude had had to help her from the BMW into the house.
Though she would never use words like ‘psychosomatic’ in conversation with a client, experience had taught Jude that the origin of back pain was frequently in the mind rather than the body. Inner tensions expressed themselves externally. Her healing could ease the physical pain, but nothing approaching a cure could be achieved until the underlying causes had been addressed.
It had taken a long time with Karen, but gradually over the sessions the source of her disquiet emerged. It was her sexuality. As a teenager, she had felt drawn to her own gender but, coming from a very traditional middle-class West Sussex family, she had not allowed herself to give such feelings any expression. They were schoolgirl crushes, just a phase she was going through. Marriage and the demands of children had kept the feelings at bay, but with the departure of the youngest for boarding school, she had been forced to face the reality of her situation. And the conflict between the way she was expected to behave and her real instincts was what had crippled her.
Having identified the problem, it certainly wasn’t part of Jude’s remit to make recommendations as to what her client should do next. The last thing she wanted to do was to have any part in a marriage break-up. But Karen, having had her own suspicions of what was causing her debility confirmed, felt strong enough to stop having her sessions with Jude and to sort out her own future.
At that stage, there was no female lover in her life, not even any woman who she wished was her lover. But when she finally confronted her husband with the truth, she found there had been a lover in his life. He’d been having an affair with his receptionist at the office for some years.
This made their separation and subsequent divorce easier. And their children welcomed the move. They had been getting increasingly stressed by their parents bickering at each other. Their father married his receptionist and imported her into the family home. With her divorce settlement, Karen bought a smaller house in Fethering, and the children cheerfully divided their holiday time between the two parents.
Karen, away from the stifling conformity of the Shorelands Estate, blossomed. With guidance from Jude, she developed her instinct for healing. It was at a healing conference in Bristol that she met Chrissie, a forty-year-old reiki practitioner from Yorkshire, and from that moment the two were inseparable. In her early fifties, for the first time, Karen knew what it was to love someone.
For a while it was a long-distance romance. They met a lot during term-times, but Karen wanted to be in Fethering for the children during their holidays. Then, when the youngest was settled at university, she and Chrissie pooled their resources to buy a cottage in Ilkley, where, with their different but complementary skills, they ran a thriving alternative health clinic. Soon after Karen moved up north, they got married. All of Karen’s children, with their various appendages, were present at the ceremony, and it had been one of the most joyous occasions Jude had ever attended.
She was happy for them. She knew how difficult it was for anyone to find the one person they wanted to share their life with. Given that difficulty, the gender of that person was a detail.
Jude relished Karen and Chrissie’s company. They were serious about their work, but not about anything else. Often very funny together, both aware of life’s idiocies. And, in common with most gay couples she knew, nothing in their behaviour would have indicated their sexual orientation. If the subject came up, they would talk about it, but they never forced it on people.
The venue for the healing conference was not very grand. Leeds boasted many high-spec conference facilities, but the organizers were working on a limited budget, so the programme of events took place in a converted school. It was somehow in keeping with the alternative ambience of a healing event.