She wore no rings. Her hands were surprisingly small and bony and the varnish on the nails was chipped, as if she was a grafter who didn’t give a toss about appearances, and he found this endearing. He didn’t like perfection. Too many of his patients were perfectionists. He liked to see a bit of slack in life.
‘Do you have time for a quick drink?’ he asked, surprising himself by how nonchalant he sounded.
Their eyes met and held. She had beautiful eyes, cobalt blue, bright, intensely alive. She smiled, glanced down at her watch, then looked away evasively. ‘Actually, thanks, but I – I have to get to a meeting at eight.’
‘Sure,’ Michael said, masking his disappointment with a cheery smile, and wondering what kind of a good-looking hunk this meeting was with.
He thought about her as he drove home, steering the Volvo in the slow crawl south over Putney Bridge and up the high street. He thought about her smile through the glass window of the control room. He thought about that look she had given him in the doorway as they were leaving. There had been some kind of attraction, definitely.
She had turned down his offer of a drink.
But hadn’t he detected some hint of reluctance in the way she’d turned it down?
There would be other chances. They’d be meeting again. Or . . . hell, he could call her tomorrow and try his luck. Why not?
Oh, yes, Dr Michael Tennent, and what exactly would she see in you? You’re a decade older than her. She’s a young, bright, hip girl with the world at her feet. You’re an old fart in a Volvo.
You’re not even any good at your job any more. The proof of that is in this morning’s paper. You’d better hope Amanda Capstick doesn’t get to see it.
But she liked me. She did. She really did. So she had a date, so what?
He would call her in the morning, he decided.
She could always say no.
wednesday, 9 july 1997
No one ever prepares us for death. It ought to be on the school curriculum. Instead, teachers make us learn that in a right-angled triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the two remaining sides. I’ve carried that nugget in my head for twenty-five years and never yet had any use for it. They make us learn how to ask the way to the town hall in French. I’ve got through thirty-seven years of my life without ever needing to do this
.
But they don’t ever teach you how you are going to feel when someone close to you dies. And that is going to happen to all of us. It has just happened to me, and I’m all alone here, having to work this out for myself
.
It seems there’s a whole sequence of emotions you go through. Shock. Denial. Anger. Guilt. Depression
.
I’ve been through shock, ticked that one off. I’ve been through refusal to accept. Ticked that box, too. Now I’m at the anger stage
.
I’m angry with a whole lot of people. But, most of all, I’m angry with you, Dr Michael Tennent
.
You killed my mother
.
‘Wednesday 9 July 1997. Report to Dr Gordon Sampson, Coroner, City of Westminster. From Dr Michael Tennent MD, MRC Psych.
Subject
: Gloria Daphne Ruth Lamark, deceased.
‘I had been seeing the deceased as a patient since March 1990. Prior to that she was a patient of my colleague, Dr Marcus Rennie, at the Sheen Park Hospital, intermittently from 1969 to his retirement in 1990. Her records show that she was under psychiatric care and on anti-depressant medications continually since 1959. (See attached schedule.)
‘My last interview with her, on Monday 7 July, was particularly unproductive. In recent months I had felt she was making some progress towards realisation of her difficulties, and towards acceptance that she was temperamentally unsuited to the disciplines required in the acting profession, and I was trying to encourage her to find other interests, particularly in the field of charity, where she could make a useful contribution to society and in so doing lead a more fulfilled existence.
‘In my opinion she was a deeply troubled woman, suffering from a personality disorder that prevented her from living an ordinary, socially interactive life, and led to her turning into a virtual recluse. This personality disorder was developmental from childhood or adolescence and the collapse of her promising career as a film actress during the mid 1960s was almost certainly a trigger for deterioration.’
In his den at home, Michael rewound the tape on his dictating machine, listened to the beginning of his report, then continued. ‘She had major roles, including some as
leading lady, in several films during the late 1950s and the early 1960s but these rapidly petered out while she was still only in her twenties. She blamed the collapse of her career on a combination of factors. The birth of her son, Thomas. The breakdown of her marriage. Underhand behaviour by some of her rivals, in particular the actress Cora Burstridge, whom she believed, obsessively, went out of her way to destroy her career for motives of jealousy and self-advancement.
‘In my opinion the root cause of the demise of the deceased’s career was her personality disorder. She was unable to accept or face any of the realities of life. She had a massive ego, which needed constant feeding, and would lapse into bouts of violent, uncontrollable rage when any aspects of her talents or abilities were questioned, frequently causing actual bodily harm to others.
‘She displayed manic depressive symptoms in characteristic mood swings, during which she would veer between a severely exaggerated opinion of her own talents, and extreme depression. To this end she maintained a large retinue of staff, whose principal role, in my judgement, was to pander to her ego and maintain her delusion that she was still a grand star (there are certain parallels that may be drawn here with the character in the film
Sunset Boulevard
).
‘On a number of occasions during consultations the deceased broached the subject of suicide, although my records show that she had not mentioned it for two years. It is recorded that she attempted to take her own life in 1967, and again in 1986, following the failure of a theatrical play in which she was attempting an acting comeback. Previous attempts are a known high-risk factor and I was aware of this throughout my dealings with her. However, from the relatively low dosages of pills taken on these previous occasions, the wording of the notes, and the general circumstances, it has been my opinion that these attempts were more a cry for help than serious intent to take her own life.
‘She was able to maintain her lavish lifestyle due to inheriting a substantial part of the estate of her estranged
husband, the German industrialist Dieter Buch, who died in a skiing accident before any divorce arrangements had been finalised.
‘Since the mid 1960s the deceased’s life had revolved totally around her son, Thomas, who has lived at home with her for most of his life, and upon whom she has been utterly – and abnormally – dependent, emotionally and socially.’
Michael stopped dictating. His report would almost certainly be read out in court at the inquest. He needed to consider her son’s feelings carefully. Gloria Lamark’s relationship with the son she rarely spoke about, and whom he had never met, had always bothered him, but he’d never succeeded in drawing out of her the full truth of it.
He gathered that the boy had been expelled from school for some reason she would not talk about, and had spent years of his childhood undergoing psychiatry. He had the feeling Gloria knew something was wrong with him, and had been shielding him, but whether it was for the boy’s sake, or to protect her own image, he had never been able to ascertain.
At fifty-nine she had still been a beautiful woman. After her husband had left her, she’d had a series of sexual relationships, but they had never lasted, and from the time her son had reached his early teens, she had stopped seeing other men.
He sensed that she was desperately protective of Thomas, and knew that for most of his childhood he had been educated at home. She had told Michael that Thomas had wanted to be a doctor but again, for some reason he could never elicit from her, the young man had dropped out of medical school and returned home. He appeared to have no friends.
Michael was pretty sure that this was due to the control she exerted over him. An overbearing possessiveness was not uncommon in mother-son relationships, although, he suspected, in Gloria Lamark’s case it might have gone further than that.
Gloria had always told him that Thomas was perfect in
every way. It was inevitable she should think that. It would have been inconceivable to her that she might have produced a son who was less than perfect. In his mind Michael had an image of a meek, inadequate, brow-beaten weakling.
He wondered how the poor man was coping now.
This place. The stairwell. The multi-storey car park. Grey precast concrete. Used syringes and torn burger wrappers. The smell of urine. Ceiling lamps squeezing out feeble haloes of light through filters of dead flies and dust.
Tina Mackay did not have a problem with this place in the mornings when there were always people around and daylight enough to read the graffiti, but at night, in dusk or darkness, it hot-wired her imagination, firing up all kinds of thoughts that she really did not want to be having.
The door slammed behind her, silencing the snarled traffic on High Holborn and replacing it with a hollow reverberating boom as if she was standing inside a vast drum. Then, shadows jumping around her, and newspaper headlines of dismembered torsos on her mind, she began to make her way up the five flights of steps. This was the one part of her journey home that she hated. But tonight she was distracted.
Tonight she had a date!
Her mind was on what she was going to wear, whether she should wash her hair (not enough time, so not an option). Shoes. Lipstick. Perfume.
Handbag?
Shit, I forgot to collect my shoes from the repairer!
Black suede. They would have gone perfectly with her outfit, and now she would have to do a fast rethink.
Damn. Damn. Damn
.
Someone had pulled the day away from beneath her like it was some big rug. Happened most days, time just ran out on her, work piles got bigger, lists grew longer, more and more phone calls did not get returned. But tonight she was
going to forget all that. Tonight she almost wasn’t afraid of the echoes of her footsteps that taunted her up the stairwell. Tonight she was thinking about Tony
(the Hon. Anthony!)
Rennison. Hunk, serious intellectual, shy, funny.
And he liked her.
And she liked him, big-time.
Suddenly Tina, who had always acted old for her years, was a kid again. Two weeks ago, before she’d met Tony, before he’d asked her out that first time, she had been thirty-two going on forty-two or maybe even fifty-two.
Short, with boyish brown hair, she had a pleasant face, plain but not unattractive, but in the way she dressed and carried herself, she exuded an aura of confidence. It made people instinctively trust her, had seen her rise to head girl at school and now editorial director of Pelham House, one of London’s most aggressive publishers, where she had transformed the fiction list and was in the process of turning round the once-ailing non-fiction.
But tonight she was a schoolgirl, with butterflies in her stomach that were fluttering harder with every step she took nearer her car, nearer home.
Nearer her date.
Her Golf GTI, exhaust broken, was in its bay in the far corner, rear end sticking out beneath the giant heating duct that in the darkness looked like some lurking prehensile beast. The Golf welcomed her arrival with a sharp beep, a wink of its lights and the sound of its locks thudding open. She was a little surprised when she opened her door and the interior light failed to come on.
Inside, she clunked her seat-belt buckle home. Then, as she put her key in the ignition, the passenger door opened and a massively tall figure slid into the seat beside her.
A male voice, laconic and confident, right next to her, inches from her face, said, ‘Remember me?’
She froze.
‘Thomas Lamark.’ He sounded as if he was rolling an ice-cube around in his mouth. ‘Remember me?’
Oh, Jesus, she thought, her brain cells colliding inside her head. The car reeked of cologne. Givenchy. It was the
same perfume her date wore. Was this him, playing some joke? Except the voice was different. This was a calm, deep, controlled voice. There was a cold beauty in it. Chilling. An almost poetic resonance. Her hand scrabbled for the door handle.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember you.’
‘You should remember my name.
Thomas Lamark
. You turned down my book.’
There were no people around up here. It was nearly eight o’clock. The attendant was in his booth, five storeys below.
‘Your book?’ She couldn’t see his face: she was talking to a silhouette, a tall, lean silhouette.
‘You turned it down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I – it – your name doesn’t ring a bell. Thomas Lamark?’
‘You wrote me a letter. I have it here.’
She heard a rustle of paper. Then she heard him say, ‘“Dear Mr Lamark, Thank you for sending your manuscript,
The Authorised Biography of Gloria Lamark
, to us. After careful reading, we regret we are unable to consider this for publication on our lists. We hope you will be successful with it elsewhere. Yours sincerely, Tina Mackay, Editorial Director.”’
There was a silence. Tina wondered what chance she had of opening the door and making a run for it.
‘This regret, Tina. Is this real? Do you really regret this?’ Then he added, ‘I need to know. It’s very important to me.’
There were other cars up here. Someone must appear soon, she thought, hoped. Just play for time. He was a crank, that was all, just a crank.
‘Would you like me to take another look at it?’ Her voice came out small and crushed.
‘It’s a bit late for that now, Tina.’
‘We use outside readers. I – we get so many manuscripts, it’s impossible to read every one myself. I get sent two hundred manuscripts some weeks.’