‘I’m sorry I’m late.’
Caspar slid into the seat opposite me; he didn’t touch me.
‘I’ve only just arrived myself.’
We were both being warily polite. I held out the wine list, and he took it carefully, so our fingers didn’t touch.
‘I’ve ordered a pinot noir,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Shall we get something to drink as well?’ He looked up and caught my eye. ‘Haven’t you missed my irresistible humour?’
I shook my head disapprovingly. ‘Is that an example of it?’
‘Well, I haven’t been using it much.’
The wine arrived and we sipped it gravely. I lit a cigarette and found that my hands were gently trembling. Caspar’s expression darkened slightly.
‘Would you rather that I asked you resentfully why you suddenly dropped me without any explanation and then suddenly rang up again?’
‘You can ask. I don’t want you to be resentful.’
‘How are you, Jane?’
I had forgotten, in the weeks in which I had kept away from Caspar, the quality of his attention. When he looked at me, I felt as if he were really looking; his gaze was a kind of scrutiny. When he asked me how I was, I knew the question wasn’t rhetorical, he really wanted to know. I took a deep breath.
‘Not at my best, I guess. You know…’
He nodded. ‘Has the press attention died down?’
‘Yes, a bit. But the trial’s still to come, so it’ll get worse again, I suppose.’
‘And will you have to give evidence?’
‘Probably not. Unless Alan suddenly changes his mind again and pleads not guilty. Then it all hangs on me.’
‘Will you tell me about it?’ His question was phrased just right. If he’d said ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I’d have felt he was offering to help me and probably would have closed down on him. As it was, I found that I did, very much, want to explain what I had gone through. After all, I hadn’t quite explained it to myself, yet. I needed this conversation.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t call,’ I said impulsively.
Caspar smiled. ‘I’m glad that you’re sorry, but it’s all right,’ he replied. He studied the menu. ‘Let’s have some dips and some olives. I’ve hardly eaten anything since breakfast.’
I told Caspar everything. I described my childhood, our friendship with the Martellos (I skated over Theo) and the disappearance of Natalie. I told him how I’d married Claud young, and how my long marriage had over the years invisibly eroded, like a sandcastle flattening back into the rippled surface of a beach. I told him how I had finally left Claud, and then I described finding Natalie’s body. Caspar was a good listener. When I paused to light a cigarette, he ordered another bottle of wine.
I said I had realised that I was profoundly unhappy, and that after a few false starts (I offered up my first aborted attempt at analysis but didn’t mention the one-night stand with William), I had started therapy with Alex Dermot-Brown.
‘What did you want from therapy?’ Caspar enquired.
‘Some kind of control over my life, I guess. I felt I was in a mess and didn’t really know how to get out of it. Later, it became more of a search for the truth about my past.’
‘That’s a big thing to search for,’ said Caspar mildly.
I tried to tell him about the therapy, but that was more difficult; the illuminations I’d received on the couch slipped away from me, like beads of mercury under the press of a finger.
‘He helped me find a narrative to my life,’ I said ineptly, echoing what Alex had once said to me.
‘I’ve always thought,’ responded Caspar, ‘that the great appeal of psychoanalysis is that it enables us to tell the story of our own life.’
I couldn’t tell whether he was criticising or complimenting me – probably neither.
‘It’s hard to talk about it now; it’s weirdly hard to remember it as a chronology,’ I admitted. ‘It’s more like a kind of space, where I explored myself. I don’t know if I’ll continue with it, though – I don’t know what it would be for. Also’ – the wine bar was filling up now; I had to raise my voice against the hum and chink of a day ending – ‘also, it’s quite scary. I mean, I never really thought before how much pain people can carry around with them and still cope. And I’m still not sure whether dredging up memories and re-opening wounds is always right. Sometimes, horror should be left buried.’ I shuddered. ‘Not in my case, of course. But I think some things don’t need to be explained. And sometimes damage should be left in sealed containers, like nuclear waste. That’s heresy to therapists, of course. Except sceptical ones like Alex.’
‘I’m glad you’re sceptical too,’ said Caspar. ‘And I’m glad that you haven’t used the word empower.’
I laughed. Then I told him about the group I’d been to, and he didn’t say anything at all.
‘There, that takes us up to now. And now you know about a hundred times more about my life than I know about yours.’ I felt suddenly and dazedly self-conscious, as if the lights had gone on in the cinema.
‘My time will come,’ he said, and beckoned the waiter. ‘Can I have the bill, please?’ He pulled on his gloves. ‘I’ve got to get home to Fanny now,’ he said. ‘She talks about you, by the way.’
We left together. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied, for I thought I probably would be.
‘And will you call me?’
‘Yes, I will. This time I really will.’
‘Goodbye, then.’
‘Goodbye, Caspar. Thank you.’
For a moment I thought he would touch me, but he didn’t and I was glad.
Thirty-Four
One evening, Claud dropped off my box from the Stead on the way home from work. He hovered a bit on the doorstep. He didn’t ask, but I could tell that he wanted to be invited in for a drink or dinner or to live with me again. I held firm on every count. This wasn’t an evening for dealing with things like that. I wanted to go through this box on my own. Claud talked about what things were like up at the Stead now that Jonah was getting rid of everything and preparing for the house to be sold. I listened but didn’t ask questions and scarcely responded. After a few minutes the conversation slowed and I was still standing resolutely in the quarter-opened door. He looked crestfallen and said he supposed he had better be going and I said thanks for bringing the box round and he looked even more crestfallen and mumbled something. I didn’t ask what it was he had said and he looked downright self-pitying and walked off.
The brothers had lived at the Stead, of course, but Paul and I used to go there only at intervals, so we had our boxes. Martha and Alan had given them to us when we were small. They were packing cases with lids and they were for the possessions we had at the Stead, the things we put away at the end of the summer when we returned to the world and the boxes were stowed away in the loft. The first thing we would do when we came back from the world at the end of the following July, would be to run up and retrieve our boxes and extract the things that had got smaller because we had got bigger.
The sight of the box was incongruous, almost indecent. It belonged in the Stead, in my past, and now it had been dumped on my doorstep by my ex-husband. When I tried to pick it up, I almost regretted not asking Claud in. My arms are too short to go around a packing case, so I had to drag it down the hall, making a sound like a fingernail on a window-pane and leaving a dusty white line that I suspected was now a permanent feature. I got it as far as the kitchen and parked it by the table.