But today I was feeling stubborn. ‘You haven’t even read him,’ I pointed out. ‘You can’t dismiss something you’ve never tried.’
‘Of course you can!’ Dr Barbara countered. ‘Astrology, chakras, numerology. I know enough to know these subjects have no basis in reality, just as I know that Freud has no relevance in this room.’
‘I think you’re missing the point,’ I said. ‘I don’t care if Freud is correct. He’s interesting and he writes well. That’s good enough for me. I’d rather read well-written bunkum than poorly written fact. Wouldn’t you?’
Dr Barbara was still wearing the same narrow smile. ‘Okay. Let me ask you a question. What do you think your dream means?’
‘It’s obvious,’ I replied. ‘It’s painfully obvious. I’m worried that sooner or later I’ll have to grow up and get a serious, secure job that I despise – like my sister. I mean things haven’t been so bad recently, but most of the time I’m just treading water. Without Beck’s salary, we’d have no security at all, and I hate feeling . . . dependent. But, then, I think I’d feel like a fraud if I did something I hated, just for the money. I’m not even sure there’s any regular job I’d be competent in. That’s why I don’t have any clothes on beneath my sister’s trouser suit.’
Dr Barbara waited patiently until I’d finished, then nodded again. ‘Okay. And if you know all this anyway, then what’s the point of analyzing the dream?’
‘Yes, fair enough. There is no point. It’s just a more interesting way of looking at the same problems.’
‘It’s a more opaque way of looking at the same problems. If you’re feeling anxious, we should talk about that. But there’s no need to muddy the waters by bringing in dreams and so forth. Why circle the issues when you can confront them head-on?’
I didn’t know if this was an open question or something more pointed, with implications. Probably both. Whatever the case, Dr Barbara was right. There was no reason to complicate matters by introducing Freud into the picture.
My second therapist had been a card-carrying Freudian (literally; his card read: Dr Bryce: Freudian Analyst). I found him advertised at the back of the London Review of Books, and he had been an unmitigated disaster. He was patronizing and arrogant, and far less intelligent than he assumed he was. He reminded me of a medical student I went out with in the first year of university, a pompous idiot who read only the Lancet and genuinely believed that George Eliot was a man. That relationship had lasted three weeks; I walked out on my psychoanalyst after less than an hour.
The therapist before that, my first therapist, had not fared much better. She was an NHS counsellor, a woman in her early forties who worked three days a week in the local surgery. Her office was an awful pastel blue, and littered with the drawings her children had presented to her at the various stages of their artistic incompetence. For five weeks, I found her to be merely ineffectual. Then, on the sixth week, she started expounding with increasing insistence on the value of medication ‘as well’. Not necessarily lithium, given how it had made me feel the first time round – fat, flat and stupid – but perhaps one of the newer line in mood stabilizers, which might present fewer side effects. At this point, I realized that she was in league with my GP and left.
Compared with these earlier experiences, Dr Barbara was a godsend. She was neither patronizing nor wishy-washy, and she had no hidden agendas. She might have agreed with my ineffectual counsellor when it came to medication; a mood stabilizer, she once said, probably would be of some benefit to me in the sense that it would do precisely what it was meant to do: it would stabilize my mood. But that was not the point. If I found the cure worse than the disease, she respected my right to refuse it. One day, the balance might change, but that was something I would have to evaluate.
Dr Barbara was a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued woman a couple of years younger than my mother. She had steel-grey hair and a tastefully bookish office in South Kensington. There were no children’s pictures papering her wall; Dr Barbara had known from the age of fifteen that she didn’t want to have children, and this, too, was something I respected. Her desk was a rich mahogany, and upon it sat a dragon tree and a Newton’s cradle – its playfulness counterbalanced by the framed Ph.D. certificate affixed to the wall behind it. It was rare, however, to find Dr Barbara sitting at her desk. She preferred to conduct her sessions in the two leather armchairs, which faced each other against the backdrop of one of the several oak bookcases.
All in all, there was a pleasant weightiness to the furnishings in Dr Barbara’s office. I liked being there. There was something comforting about the routine of it alclass="underline" the armchairs, the unrushed journey through affluent central London, the black coffee from the Caffè Nero across the road. After seven months of fortnightly appointments, even the fact that I had to rely on my father to foot the bill had stopped rankling. Because, really, this was money he owed me. It didn’t feel like the guilt money he had tried to throw at me in the past; this felt more like compensation I’d been awarded by a benign, sagacious judge in a small claims court. I felt I deserved it, and I knew that Freud would have agreed.
‘I read your article,’ Dr Barbara told me. ‘The interview.’ Only the interview had been printed at this point. Simon was due the following Sunday.
‘What did you think?’ I asked.
‘It was very compelling. And well written, of course. But you don’t need me to tell you that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You found a body?’
‘Yes. My neighbour’s.’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
I didn’t take long to think about this. ‘Actually, Barbara, I’d rather not. I’d rather you read about it next Sunday. Is that okay?’
‘Yes. It’s your choice, of course. But . . .’ Dr Barbara laced her fingers and probed the top-left corner of her mouth with her tongue, the way she always did when taking some care over her next sentence. ‘But I’d like you to tell me a couple of things, concerning both articles.’
‘Fire away.’
Dr Barbara sipped her coffee. ‘I’d like to know why you’d rather I read about what happened, instead of just talking. It seems a convoluted way of doing things.’
This first question was easy to answer. ‘It’s not about being convoluted,’ I said. ‘It’s about being clear. What I’ve written expresses exactly what I wanted to say. It’s as perfect as I could get it. Anything I told you now wouldn’t be as accurate. It wouldn’t be as truthful.’
‘Okay. I think I can accept that argument. But it also leads on to my second point. I’m all for honesty – it’s indispensable within these four walls – but you’ve chosen a very public forum to talk about some rather private issues.’
‘My father?’
‘Your father, your thoughts, your feelings. Is this the best outlet?’
‘My father doesn’t read what I write. And as for my thoughts and feelings, well, I didn’t really plan to write about myself. It just turned out that way. With the interview, it was pretty much thrust upon me.’
‘You have a choice about what you put into the public domain.’
‘Yes, granted. But I suppose it felt like quite a liberating thing to do. It felt nice to tell the truth, and not have to dilute it. If I’d tried to write up the interview in any other way, it would have had no basis in reality. I don’t see the point in writing something dishonest.’
‘There’s a difference between being honest and writing without self-censorship. Everyone self-censors, all the time.’
I shrugged. ‘As I said, it felt liberating not to. Besides, I don’t think Miranda Frost self-censors, or not very much. So the format of the interview made a certain amount of sense.’