‘No, no, thank you, really. I’ve just had lunch with Helene. In fact I’m just delivering these.’ She thrust out the bag with the plants in it.
‘Oh, for me? Oh, how wonderful!’ Jim drew the pots from the bag as if they were porcelain, and placed them on the table. There were tears in his eyes. ‘A rose. A white miniature rose. And winter pansies.’ His chin had started to wobble. ‘I’m sorry, I think I’m a little overcome.’ He pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket, sat down and began to weep quietly.
Sara could not leave him like this. ‘Oh, Jim, I’m so sorry. The whole thing’s just so awful. So sad,’ she said, sitting down in the other chair.
‘Oh, no, you don’t understand. It’s relief. I’m so relieved. And touched. I never thought she would, you see, and now these.’ He gestured to the plants on the table. ‘Of all the ones she could have given. Don’t you see? White rose for “my love is unsullied” and pansies for “my thoughts are with you”. The language of flowers. It’s a message. She is thinking of me, with love unimpaired by recent events. I can go to tonight’s rehearsal with an easy heart.’
His joy was appalling to watch, because it was misplaced, but Sara could not rob him of it.
‘She just needed time, you see? I knew it. Perhaps she’s beginning to see at last that she and I need each other.’ Jim looked at her suddenly and clammed up, almost as if she had been eavesdropping and he had only just seen her. ‘I’ve been so rude. I haven’t even asked how
you
are. A death affects us all, doesn’t it? How are you managing?’
‘I’m all right, I suppose,’ Sara said, unwilling to think about, let alone reveal anything to Jim about her many miseries. ‘I just keep thinking there’s something wrong . . . I mean, I know that theoretically Adele could have done something like this at any time. It was always a possibility, but still, I can’t explain why, I’m finding it difficult to accept. It doesn’t seem real.’
Jim shook his head. ‘It’s all too real to me. I try not to think about it, or about the court case. My lawyer says it might even be dropped and meantime I must think positive. I’ve got the place sorted out again, at least. I should try and get on with some work, but I haven’t found the heart.’
Sara hesitated. ‘Will you show me? The workshop? I mean, I’m not even sure why I want to see it. But perhaps it’ll seem more understandable if I do.’
If Jim was appalled at her curiosity he did not say so. ‘Well, yes, of course you may. Yes, I’ll show you round. No one’s seen it, actually, since the workmen finished, so perhaps it’ll help me too. Look forward and all that. It’s this way.’
He led the way back out of the kitchen door and unlocked the smaller door next to it. A narrow passage ran straight down to another door at the end, which he also unlocked. ‘This was a basement bedsit when I bought the place,’ he said, stepping in and holding open the door. ‘Separate entrance and so on, quite self-contained. I’ve got my kitchen, as you saw, and upstairs a decent-sized sitting room-cum-bedroom and a little bathroom. Quite adequate for just me. This house is typical Circus, all regular on the outside and mucked about on the inside.’
Sara was staring round the room. It was high and very light for a basement, and rectangular. The only inappropriate reminder of its bedsit use was a thin corner partition with a cheap door, presumably with the loo and shower behind it. It was unremarkably functional, with its worktops, table and shelving, but it was cold and smelled damply new. The door had not been opened for days. No work in progress, let alone work completed or work to get started on, was anywhere in evidence. The one large window of opaque glass at the back was barred.
‘I had plans to knock through from my kitchen when I moved in,’ Jim said, ‘but I changed my mind. That window’s barred, and outside the garden’s surrounded by eight-foot brick walls. And there are two doors into here, so it made it nice and secure for a workshop full of antiques.’ His voiced tailed off almost to a whisper. ‘Fine and secure, yes. That’s what it was. Very private.’ He closed his eyes against the mental picture of Adele with her skirt up, impassive on the couch, and swallowed. Nobody would ever know, now. So why could he not stop thinking about it?
He waved an arm towards the gap in a line of floor cupboards, bridged by a new piece of worktop. ‘Adele never showed the slightest interest in the cooker. I only kept it there for heating glue and whatnot, for the ceramics work. And before she came I was so busy I usually worked over lunchtime and warmed something up. She only ever used the electric kettle. She only used warm soapy water for the chandeliers. I never dreamed it was unsafe for her here, I would never . . . I never thought . . .’ He was fishing for his handkerchief again.
‘Oh, Jim, nobody did. Nobody saw what might happen. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I would have been here, you see, normally. Adele always locked up both doors and went home at four. I’d get back later and just check the outer door was locked; it always was. And next day I’d see her first thing, get her started and then go down to the shop. Only this time I didn’t. I left straight from the shop the night before and stayed at a pub in Odstock—it’s got rooms—because the sale in Salisbury started at nine and I wanted to view at eight. I gave up most of those terribly early starts when I turned sixty. So I’d left two days’ work out for her. I’d done it once or twice before.’
‘Jim, the cooker. It was just an ordinary gas cooker, wasn’t it, with dials for the burners? How many? Where were they arranged?’
‘Well, yes, quite ordinary. Not terribly modern. There would have been . . . oh, six dials. Four for the top, one for the grill and another for the oven.’
‘All in a row, along the front?’
‘Good God, what’s it matter where they were?’
He sounded irritated, like someone who has craved company but found it, when it came, disappointing. Sara thought that perhaps what Jim needed was not her troublesome and irrelevant questioning, but absolution which was not hers to give.
‘Jim, you’ve done wonders here,’ she said, turning towards the door. ‘I’m sure you’ll get things going again, once you’re over the shock. Nobody thinks you were to blame.’
‘Thank you, you’re most kind,’ Jim said stiffly. He was not of a generation that could weep openly and not afterwards be a little pompous. ‘You are most kind. And now I mustn’t keep you.’
Jim led the way out of the workshop, said goodbye in the area and returned through the other door back into his kitchen. At the top of the steps Sara turned to see if he might be at the window to wave her off. But he was standing at the sink and watering the compost round his new plants from a milk bottle, smiling.
CHAPTER
26
S
O,
P
HIL, HOW
’
S
this fortnight been?’
Penny Meakins spoke with a smile in her voice, looked up to establish appropriate (neither tentative nor intimidating) eye contact, leaned back slightly to signal non-threatening but receptive body language and allowed the trained silence to prevail, during which she felt her jaw swell and sink as if someone were trying to shove a length of drainpipe down her throat. Her eyes were watering, but she would
not
yawn, although the effort of not doing so was making her swallow like a cat being made to take a worming tablet.
‘Aw, it’s been okay, really. Not feeling too bad last week.’
You could never tell, with this one, whether or not he meant it. Three interminable bloody terms coming every other Wednesday and he still behaved as if he thought it was rude to talk about himself. Self-effacement to this degree was an affectation that she did not have time for. She smiled with irritation.
‘Tell me a bit about your work. How’s that going?’
‘Aw, it’s been okay. I’m going to all my lectures. Mr Frewer gave me an extension, so now that also okay.’
‘Okay. That’s for his essay, is it? So you gave him the note I gave you, and he understood all the factors relating to the stress you were experiencing.’
‘That’s right. He said I could have a chat any time with him about it, no problem.’
‘And have you?’
‘Naw. He never in his room.’
‘How about the’—Penny Meakins glanced at her notes—‘the, er, resit you only just scraped through. That result was making you very depressed in early September. We’re nearly at the end of October now. Have you made any progress there?’
Phil appeared to have forgotten about what had been depressing him in September, the memory no doubt crowded out by the pressing demands of things depressing him in October. ‘Er, well, that all okay now,’ he said vaguely. ‘I can done some more revision, my lecturer say. He say not to worry.’
How boring. Eleven years ago when she’d started here as a student counsellor it had been practically impossible to get any leeway out of the teaching staff. She had run workshops, introducing concepts such as stress loading, whole student wellbeing and unacceptable performance pressure to sceptical academics who had retaliated with expressions like cotton wool, old-fashioned hard work and thin end of the wedge. She’d fought some battles in the early days (in non-confrontational modes, of course) against that sort of prejudice. But now the academics were floppier than she had ever been. It was the lecturers who most often these days referred students to her, and they who were endlessly understanding of writing blocks, late assignments, and essay after essay being simply no bloody good. And that was just the ones who weren’t clients themselves. She, on the other hand, had probably been in it too long; she felt all counselled out. A career move was in order, into running assault courses for middle managers or something. She could just picture herself shrieking at humiliated executives to grab on the ropes, the ones that would swing them straight into pits of shit-coloured mud. It was time for her to do some work on her own aggression, she realised, noticing that once again she was itching to tell Phil to go and get laid, or get some work done. She took a few deep breaths.
‘And how about the social life? Last time we explored your attitude via-à-vis some of the, er . . . social drugs.’ She scanned her notes. ‘You said you had been an occasional user, when you were out in a group. Are you still using recreational drugs from time to time?’
Phil shrugged. ‘Haven’t been out.’
‘Right. Well, as you know, Phil, drugs are not really my area. Here’s the Drugs Helpline number, if you need further counselling or advice. If there’s nothing in general terms you want to raise with me.’ She pushed the printed card across the table. ‘Now,’ she said brightly, ‘what else? Still enjoying the, er . . . group?’
She could not remember the details of what Phil’s group got up to. Two terms ago she’d sat and listened as Phil explained that campus life was not working out very well. He mixed, slightly, with the students on his course, but he was too worried about keeping up with the work to spend long socialising. He found his hall of residence depressing, and seldom went out. He didn’t care for pubs and hadn’t much money anyway. Well, she had suggested, could he not join something? What were his interests?
Mistake. It turned out that Phil’s interests were opera and architecture. Really, he had wanted to study music or become an architect, but he did not have the talent for the first and his family did not have the means to support him through six years of the second. They were doing as much as they could to send him to Britain for a three-year engineering course. There was no university club or society catering for his other interests, Phil said. Penny had reflected that he was certainly right about that: real ale, paragliding, rugby, Nintendo maybe. So she had suggested he ask at the library and see if there was a club in the town he could join. Perhaps it would be good for him to get away from the campus environment and meet a wider group of people.
‘Group’s fine,’ Phil answered wistfully. Penny was appalled to see that tears had appeared in his eyes. She waited, giving the appropriate, non-judgmental space for him to cry. But must he do that here? She had another client in ten minutes.
‘Group is fine,’ Phil was repeating, with difficulty. ‘But there was a girl. She gone. I . . . loss her. I lost my girl.’
A few minutes passed as he whimpered and struggled to control himself. When he eventually emerged from behind a torn paper tissue, his face reminded her of a set of wooden Chinese dolls she had once had as a child, that fitted one inside the other. As they got smaller and smaller the painted flat faces looked crosser and crosser, until the baby’s was screwed tight in infantile anguish. She said, ‘It’s very painful, isn’t it? When a relationship ends. We feel pain. And we feel anger, too. Sometimes we turn that pain and anger upon ourselves, when in fact they are quite natural reactions to what’s happened. That leads to confusion. And guilt. We blame
ourselves,
don’t we? I expect that’s how you’re feeling now?’
Phil shook his head and sniffed. ‘Naw. Dunno. I lost my girl.’
‘We mustn’t deny that guilt and anger, must we? Isn’t that how you are feeling now, if you’re honest?’
‘Well, kind of.’
‘You see, Phil, if you remember the anger work we did. You remember that we have to
own
our anger. And sometimes that means first of all we have to acknowledge it. Own up to what we’re feeling. Sometimes we have to express it.’ Christ, don’t we just, Penny thought, her fists tingling. ‘So you mustn’t blame yourself. Of course you’re feeling pain, if you’ve split up with someone. The pain and anger you are feeling are part of a process. A healing process. We tend to think we shouldn’t be feeling these things. But we should. It’s human, and natural. Will you think about that, Phil? Own your anger. Anger is natural. Anger is
good
.’
Phil nodded uncertainly.
‘Anything else, Phil? All right now? Is there any more you’d like to talk about, or shall we meet again in a fortnight?’ she asked, raising her voice against the scrape of her chair. She stood up to push Phil’s notes back into her folder.
Phil had stuffed his tissue in his pocket and was reaching for his bag. Really, she should try to wind things up with this one by the end of term. It was doing him no good to spend all this time worrying about himself, and her no good either. A minute later she was grateful that Phil left the room too quickly for her to succumb to the temptation to call after him jokingly to get his finger out. That would not have been appropriate counsellor language, and she was a professional.