All in the Mind (9 page)

In the weeks that followed, he felt he was truly in love for the first time in his life. He awoke each morning, happy to be alive. They spoke in any spare moment. They met as often as their schedules would reasonably allow. He shocked himself with the risks they took. He would collect her from her office, knowing he might be seen by her colleagues. They ate out together, went to cinemas and theatres together, even spent weekends away together in country hotels on the pretext that he was speaking at legal conferences.

As what he believed to be his love for Angela grew stronger, he began to think about leaving Celia. He worked out how and where he was going to tell her – in the car, as they arrived home on one of those rare nights when he collected her from Durrants after work. He would just tell her straight out: he had met someone else, this time it did mean something, and he was really sorry, but he was going to move in with Angela, they hoped to marry, and therefore he would be looking for a divorce. Then one afternoon, as he and Angela lay in bed post-sex, he told her what he was thinking about. She was appalled. Of course she loved him, she said. She was having the time of her life. He was great fun to be with, and a terrific guide professionally. Of course
she
wanted to carry on, but she was almost twenty years younger than he was. She never for one moment imagined they would spend their lives together.

From that moment, the affair began to die. He felt hurt by her reaction. ‘Us? Married?’ She had almost laughed and for the first time, he saw a harshness in the smile. For months, she had made him feel so young and alive but her inability even to imagine that they might have a future together made him suddenly feel old. Silly. Old. Man.

Perhaps, somewhere in his subconscious, he wanted Celia to discover that a young and beautiful woman had fallen for him, albeit not sufficiently to wreck their marriage. In any case, this time it was a silly lie that led to his being found out.

He and Angela had gone to a nice hotel in Ireland for a weekend. He had told Celia he was going to play golf with friends in Scotland. A golfing weekend in Ireland was just as plausible as a golfing weekend in Scotland. So why did he say Scotland when his credit-card bills would show Ireland? Why did he take his passport to ‘Scotland’ when normally he used his driving licence as ID for internal UK flights? Why did he take the little stash of euros she kept in the top drawer of the bedside table? And why didn’t he take his golf clubs?

Unfortunately, Celia had seen the offending American Express bill:
12 February, Aer Lingus, 230 euros. 16 February, Galway Bay Hotel, 348 euros
. She had checked out the website of the Galway Bay Hotel: it didn’t even have a golf course.

To make matters worse, she decided to use his clerk, Julian, to shame him. Angela had sent him a text just as he arrived home from work one evening. ‘
How about coming round to see me now?
’ He couldn’t resist. He’d told Celia the text was from Julian, asking where he was, reminding him he was supposed to be at a late-night meeting about a case next week. He went into a great fandango about how stupid he had been, went to get his coat and briefcase, and convinced himself he had been utterly convincing.

‘What time do you think you’ll be back?’ she’d asked.

‘God knows, love. Don’t wait up. Complicated case. Five defendants all with their own briefs, turning against each other.’

When he got home at eleven, Celia had met him in the hallway. She gave him a little kiss, which surprised him, and asked if he wanted a drink. ‘I’d love a tea,’ he said. ‘Awful meeting. Cut-throat defence looming.’

‘Who was there?’ Celia had asked as she led the way towards the kitchen. The ‘J’ of the word Julian was beginning to form halfway between his teeth and the roof of his mouth as he walked into the room. The ‘u’ was forming at the front of his mouth, just behind the top lip, as he caught sight of his clerk sitting at the table, his hands curled around a large whisky tumbler filled with sparkling water. It was too late to get the word back into his mouth. By the time the third syllable arrived on his tongue, all strength and confidence in the voice had gone. He felt momentarily faint. He kept looking at Julian so as to avoid looking at Celia. Julian appeared confused, and a little scared. He didn’t know what was going on, having been called out of the blue by Celia and asked to come and see Matthew for an urgent meeting, but he didn’t like it.

‘I think you have been a pawn in a little private difficulty between a man and a wife, Julian,’ Matthew said. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been drawn into this. It’s my fault. You should go home now, and I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention what happened to anyone.’ Julian left.

To Matthew’s surprise, Celia continued to make him tea. She stood watching the kettle boil, and said nothing. She didn’t look at him. She was waiting for a confession, and he knew he had to provide one.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said. She said nothing, just stared at the kettle, and waited to see whether he could bear the silence. He couldn’t.

‘Sorry for lying,’ he went on. ‘But I thought the truth would be worse.’ He longed for her to say ‘tell me the truth then’, or even ‘go on’, anything that would spark a dialogue. But she was still staring at the kettle and he knew he was on his own.

‘She’s called Angela,’ he said, and she nodded to the kettle, as though the name of someone she had never met, nor ever would want to, somehow helped it all to make some kind of sense. ‘She’s thirty,’ he said.

‘Young enough to be your daughter,’ she said, quietly, as she dropped a tea bag into a cup.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Pathetic really.’

‘Is it about sex?’ she asked. ‘Is that what this is all about?’

‘Probably,’ he said. In truth, he didn’t know whether it really was all about sex, but he felt it was what Celia wanted to hear, and it was at least believable, allowed itself to be rationalised as true.

‘Do you love her?’

‘I thought I did, for a while. But no, not really, not the way I love you.’ Again, he didn’t know for sure whether any or all parts of that statement were true, and it was quite a while since he had told Celia he loved her, but it felt about right. He felt he was getting the tone of these exchanges right, much better than when he was confronted about Maddie.

‘So it’s all about sex really, isn’t it?’ she said. It appeared to be her big point.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Is it really that bad? Between us, I mean?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ It was his turn to be silent.

Now, as the taxi drove through an amber light at Marble Arch, accidentally cutting up a bus and getting a blast of its horn, Matthew felt increasingly sick. Celia was holding his hand, and smiling. He looked into her eyes, and smiled back, hoping she couldn’t tell just how much he was hating every single second of this.

7

As Arta settled down in the brown leather armchair opposite Professor Sturrock, she pulled out the notes she had scribbled about her dreams.

‘I’m sorry I not email,’ she said, handing them over. ‘Lirim is very busy in his work and I have little time.’

Sturrock was taken aback to see the homework. Because nothing had been emailed, somehow he hadn’t expected it, and he had spent the few minutes before he called in Arta reflecting on whether to go for a high-risk strategy that might begin the process of breaking her free from the imprisonment of her rapist. Now that she had given him her dreams, he would have to read through them, which would take a few minutes, and then ask her about them, which would take a few minutes more, and possibly lead to further avenues of discussion. The dreams exercise was part of a cognitive-behavioural therapy he had worked on in an earlier research programme on dreams and post-traumatic stress, which had formed the basis for one of his books. The idea was to help train the mind to know when it was dreaming and, when recurring bad dreams cropped up, to develop the ability to force events to go in the direction the dreamer wanted them to. It was called lucid dreaming treatment, but, so far, Arta had not responded well.

The upside of her handing over her dreams register was that a short discussion would give him more time to work out whether she was in the right frame of mind for the high-risk strategy. If she was closed up and unyielding, he would continue to probe gently the nature of her dreams about the man who had, to use her own words from their first meeting, ‘destroyed’ her life. If, on the other hand,
she
appeared to be open to a different form of dialogue, he was going to try his new approach. He would rely on instinct.

He quickly noted that the rapist appeared to have been less violent in the past week than he had in previous weeks. He noted too that, although her attacker continued to wear his balaclava, when he raped her on Tuesday night, he wasn’t holding his knife. It also struck him that she had once again, with regard to Sunday night’s rape, equated what happened to her with death.

In their discussion, he focused more on the first observation, the fact that the rapist seemed to be raping less and simply observing and abusing verbally. He asked if she thought this was significant, and whether in the dreams it made her feel any differently.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe a little, I don’t know.’

He felt himself being pushed towards his high-risk strategy.

The danger was that she would feel he was minimising her suffering, and it might lead to something of a rupture in the relationship he had slowly developed with her. She had definitely become more open, willing to accept that only she could really change the way she looked at the world. But he knew from some of his research on asylum seekers and their efforts to integrate that there were cross-cultural clashes that he needed to be more sensitive to. It was particularly hard for her, a Balkan Muslim, to talk to him, a Western man, about some of the issues they discussed.

He always tried hard to imagine how his patients felt. Often, it was easy. With David Temple, for example, and his unknowing ability to capture feelings in a way that sometimes captured Sturrock’s own moods better than he could. But with Arta, it was more of a challenge. It was clear that before the rape, she was someone who, despite, or perhaps because of, the suffering she endured as she fled Kosovo, was warm, optimistic, generous and very happy with what life gave her. He would certainly assume that her general disposition was sunnier than his. The rape, though, had left her with overwhelming feelings of hurt and fear. The fact that it had taken place in the country to which she fled, rather than the one she was fleeing, where so many women had been raped, added to her bewilderment.

There was a feminist view in psychiatry, not widely held but occasionally put to him by his young colleague Judith Carrington, that only a woman psychiatrist could properly treat women patients. Sturrock rejected that entirely. He felt he was just as capable of treating women as men, and giving equal quality care to both. If a patient were to say to him, ‘You’ve no idea what it is like to be a woman,’ he would argue back that he could understand what it was the woman was feeling, and why. There were sufficient solid principles in his approach to psychiatry to make him feel confident in making that case. But when someone said, as Arta had the last time they met, ‘You have no idea what it is like to be raped,’ he had to accept that was true.

He had tried, many times, to imagine. What would it be like, for example, to be sodomised by another man against his will? When he tried to picture this, he always saw himself fighting off his attacker. When he made himself imagine that he failed and was instead being held down by others, it was still difficult to summon up the feelings of pain, hurt and humiliation that a woman must feel. In his imagination, though he knew a man could be raped face to face if held down, he was always raped from behind, his face against the ground; whereas a woman would more likely be forced to feel a man’s breath over her face, forced to see his eyes, forced to feel his penis in a part of her body she had only ever shared with a husband or boyfriend. It was the invasion of body space that seemed the greatest difference. A heterosexual man was likely to be raped in a part of his body he shared with nobody. And so Sturrock believed – though never having counselled a victim of male rape he had no idea if this was true or not – that male rape was less likely to destroy the victim’s long-term interest in a sex life with a female partner. Arta’s problem, as well as the dreams, was that she now couldn’t face sex with her husband. Though Lirim was clearly trying hard to be loving and understanding about what had happened to her, there was no doubt it was leading to tension in the marriage. Sturrock knew too, from previous patients, that rape of a woman could change her partner’s
self-image
which in turn could badly affect not just his sex drive, but his self-esteem.

Arta was looking at him, waiting for him to say something. He was trying to gauge how much she meant it when she said she had been feeling ‘just a little’ different in her dreams. He desperately wanted to see her make progress. He was going to try to speed things along.

He sat up straight, and sighed deeply, trying to indicate that this was an important moment for them. Arta picked up on the signal, and shifted a little in her chair, then she too sat up, put her left arm on the arm of the chair, and put her right hand on top of her arm.

‘I’m going to ask you to try to do something very difficult, Arta. Do you think you could do that, something difficult?’

‘I have done difficult things before. It depends what it is.’

‘That’s very true. You have done difficult things before. Brave things. Things that when you set out to do them, you weren’t sure you would be able to see them through.’

She nodded. The warmth in her eye had faded a little, though he might have been reading too much into that, and anyway he was now set on his course. He was letting his instinct drive him forward.

‘The difficult thing is this. I want you to try to forgive the man who raped you, and the man who frightened Besa.’