Weird Sister (15 page)

‘We know that,’ I said, ‘we know the dates.’

‘I would say,’ said the man from the National Trust, ‘I would say it is almost too late.’ He continued his progress around the house, reacting with alarm when I took him upstairs to view the renovations. ‘You’ve got to be careful,’ he said, ‘with a house this old. You’ve got to treat it with care, like you would a very old lady.’

‘It’s only a house,’ said Agnes reasonably, ‘people have to live here.’

‘Only a house,’ said the man over his spectacles. ‘American, did you say?’ Then he left without telling us when he’d be in touch again.

I’d had a few complaints from the workmen about other matters. I knew that both Agnes and Graeme had taken to popping upstairs to see how things were going; the men were more than happy to entertain Agnes from time to time but I hadn’t realized that Graeme had taken it upon himself to become unofficial overseer. He’d been a policeman, you’d think he’d have known how to get on with the lads. But no, not Graeme. The foreman was polite, perhaps deferring to Graeme’s disability, but I could tell he’d have liked to have taken away Graeme’s cane and given him a good whack over the head with it.

‘I’ll have a word with him,’ I promised.

‘What the fuck?’ Graeme was, predictably, outraged.

‘Just let them get on with the work.’

‘The lazy bastards, with their tea-breaks and their fag-breaks and their –’

‘They’re doing good work.’

‘How do you know that? You don’t know the first thing about building work.’

‘They’re getting on with it.’

Graeme glared at me. I turned away. He’d leave them alone now, I could tell. He’d have to find someone else to plague.

Elizabeth

Later, when things began to go wrong, people used to ask me what Agnes was really like. It was as though she was in our midst but none of us could really see her. Or what we saw differed so dramatically from one person to the next that you wouldn’t think we were describing one person, but many.

This is what I saw: Agnes Samuel, anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-five, although she could have been one of those impossible forty-year-olds who are lithe and strong and glossy. I think she was probably thirty. I never asked her how old she was, it wasn’t the kind of thing one asked of Agnes. When I asked Robert – later, much later – he didn’t know either. That surprised him. That made him sad.

She was about 5′10″, tall, but not too tall, the perfect height for Robert who is 6′2″. Robert and Graeme are the same height, they were always the tall boys in the village. Jenny was tall as well, maybe even a little taller than Agnes, and I think at first it was very good for Jenny to have another woman her size around, an example, a role model. Karen was little, 5′3″, and I’m not much bigger. I used to buy Jenny clothes for her birthday, Christmas, but I could never get it quite right. Once Agnes arrived the way Jenny looked and dressed improved dramatically.

Agnes had shiny dark hair that fell to her shoulders with a wave that she straightened or exaggerated, depending on the look she was after. She always had a look. She didn’t wear a lot of make-up but what she did wear was perfect and expensive; maybe a fine face powder or cream, a little eye shadow, mascara and beautifully outlined and coloured-in lips. She must have had a very steady hand, I could never get make-up on that straight. She smelled faintly of perfume, nothing heavy, flowers and apples perhaps. She had that kind of undeniable femininity that few women achieve, bogged down as we are by other things.

Her clothes were just right. Elegant, close-fitting, showing off the slim long lines of her body. She wore a lot of black, metropolitan black, much more than any of the other women in the village, even Marlene who was probably her closest rival in the glamour stakes. Not that Marlene has any sense of competition in that sense. Agnes was partial to velvet and fine wool. She wore designer shoes, usually with high spiky heels, and everything in her wardrobe was well taken care of, dry-cleaned and carefully pressed. She looked easeful, as though she dressed this way without a great deal of effort. Expensive, but not ostentatious. I noticed that when she played with the boys she wore her hair pinned up, tendrils escaping; she would get down on the floor with them and play hard and when she had finished her face would have a lovely healthy glow and she’d brush the dust off her hands and knees casually, as if it didn’t worry her. Her voice was low and sometimes a little throaty, if it was late at night or early in the morning. Her laugh was low too, immediate and thrilling. Conspiratorial.

When Robert looked at Agnes Samuel I don’t know what he saw. Love, I guess, love itself, his own love reflected back at him. More than enough to keep him going. More than enough at the time.

Toward the end of November I went round for a meal. I was determined to continue to be casual and friendly, how I felt at home late at night was nobody’s business but mine. Robert invited me, so I went. As I was getting ready to leave, Agnes gave me a bright smile.

‘Have you got your Christmas shopping done yet?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t even thought about it.’

‘Let’s go together – how about Saturday?’

‘I . . .’

‘Cambridge. I think we should go to Cambridge. I hear the stores are good there.’ She seemed determined that we should go shopping, as if she believed that’s what women do best together.

The thing about Agnes was that you always found yourself agreeing with her, no matter how you actually felt. Cambridge is not my town of choice when it comes to shopping. It is a long drive across country to get there, the traffic is terrible in the town centre and there is nowhere to park. But I made the mistaken assumption that Agnes, as a tourist in this country, wanted to look around the colleges as well as shop, so I agreed.

I picked her up first thing in the morning. Even then, so soon after the wedding, I couldn’t stop myself liking her, enjoying being with her. Liking her confused me, I felt I was being disloyal to Robert, disloyal to myself somehow. She was an extravagant and decisive shopper and that appealed to me. And as I’ve said before she was very good at getting people to talk about themselves. She worked her magic on me despite my resistance. As we wove in and out of the shops she asked me a series of questions and I found myself telling her my life story. I left out the bits that included Robert, like the time we went to Greece together when we were twenty. Robert could tell her what he wanted about me, about us.

She appeared to find my life fascinating and, of course, that is very seductive. We went to a pub at lunchtime. Before I knew what was happening I was telling her everything.

‘I had finished my psychology degree and was taking some training and working as a counsellor. I hadn’t embarked on my psychoanalytic training yet – that came later. Therapists – at least the kind of therapist I was – do endless training. I was in therapy myself, of course; I’d been in therapy since my first year in university.’

‘Why?’ asked Agnes.

‘Why? Well, didn’t you find leaving home and going off to university a little traumatic?’

‘I didn’t go to university.’

I suddenly felt embarassed, as though I’d been bragging about my own erudition.

‘Tell me what happened,’ Agnes said.

‘Like I said, I was doing some work as a counsellor. I had a few clients – students, for the most part, at the university – and my work with them was supervised; I didn’t have someone sitting in on the sessions but I would report in detail on each client to my supervisor. Have you ever been in therapy?’

Agnes raised one eyebrow and shook her head. There are some people who would never go in for therapy. Agnes was one of them.

‘One of my clients was a young woman, a university student – Elaine Warner.’

I swallowed hard. I’d told Agnes the client’s name. I had never breached confidentiality before, not once. And yet I’d done it now, without thinking. Yet another indication of how disconnected I’d become from my profession, my previous life.

‘She was nineteen. Elaine was not eating, not going to lectures, not really doing anything much. Classic symptoms,’ I paused.

‘Of what?’

‘Depression. I found her fascinating. She was like something out of a textbook. Some days she would come to me too depressed to speak, but still, she came, twice a week. That gave me faith, I suppose, that she could get it together to come and see me. I felt it was a very positive sign and I told her so.’

Agnes leaned back in her chair and took a sip of her drink. She nodded encouragingly.

‘One day she didn’t turn up. She hadn’t rung to say she wouldn’t be coming – for all Elaine’s troubles she was a responsible and thoughtful young woman – and so I started to worry. But I was busy myself, trying to find my way, and I didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t show up for our second session that week either. That galvanized me into action, finally, and I tried to ring her.’ I paused again. Agnes had on her listening face – that’s the only way to describe how she looked. It was perfect. I kept talking. ‘But I was too late.’ Too late, I thought, always too late. ‘She had hanged herself that morning. Her flatmate came home after a lecture to pick up some books. She found her.’

‘Oh, how sad,’ said Agnes, heartfelt. ‘It’s so sad when young people die.’

‘I should have known she was at risk, I should have recognized the signs. I should have done something immediately, at the beginning of the week.’

‘You were inexperienced.’

‘That’s right. I was inexperienced and I was a little too interested in the way that she fit the symptoms for clinical depression so nicely. I should have taken much more action – any action. I should have done something for her.’

‘But you didn’t. She was beyond you. You couldn’t save her. You didn’t.’

‘I didn’t. And she died. And I got over it. My supervisor was very sympathetic – something similar had happened to her when she was my age. She told me that sometimes when people decide to die there is nothing we can do to stop them. We’re therapists, not policemen, not social workers, not paramedics. We can call on the services of those professionals, but we aren’t in the business of rescuing people, not literally. I listened carefully to what my supervisor had to say, I talked to my own therapist, and I put what had happened to me, to Elaine Warner, I mean, behind me.’

‘Did it make you a better therapist?’

‘Yes, I think it did. A little hyper-sensitive to the risks of suicide, for the first few years at any rate. I worked primarily with students and I was forever informing the university when I thought they were at risk.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Maybe. None of them killed themselves. My clients survived their therapy.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. And the years went by, and I became more confident, and I went to work for a clinic and embarked on psychoanalytic training. And began to take on private clients. I converted the extra room in my flat into a therapy room . . .’

‘What was it like?’ Agnes interrupted.

‘There was a big couch for clients to sit – or lie – on and a desk against the opposite wall; I had a swivel chair so I could turn to look at clients and take notes at the same time.’ I could picture it clearly. I loved that room. Lots of books, a thick carpet, and a big window, free of curtains, with a view of an oak tree and the sky, and I made sure I always had fresh flowers in the vase. ‘I had a cleaner –’ I laughed, ‘– those were the days – and one of her duties was to dust the houseplants in my office. It was a nice room. People were comfortable in it.’

‘Sounds lovely.’

‘When I lived in London I came to believe in things in a way I no longer do – can no longer afford to. Material things.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought it was important to possess well designed good-looking things. A kettle wasn’t simply a thing to boil water in, it had to look smart, it had to come from the right place.’

‘Fashion,’ said Agnes.

‘Of a sort. I was never any good at clothes. Am still no good at clothes,’ I felt myself blushing.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No?’ I wondered why Agnes would say this when it was clearly important to her.

‘Of course not. That’s not what counts.’

‘Maybe –’

‘What happened?’

‘My parents died and I inherited their cottage –’

‘No,’ Agnes said, abruptly. ‘In London. To your job. To your life.’

This rattled me. I was the one who thought my life was over. Other people were meant to disagree.

‘Why aren’t you a therapist any longer?’ she persisted.

‘Why did you leave the US?’

Agnes folded her arms and pursed her lips, mock-annoyed. ‘We’re not talking about me. I’m boring. We’re talking about you, Elizabeth.’

‘Well,’ I said, suddenly resigned to telling Agnes the whole of my story, ‘then my therapist left me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘My therapist, whom I’d been seeing for years – she left the profession.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know why.’

‘Did that matter?’

A non-therapy person like Agnes would never understand the significance of this. Losing Christine was like losing my mother. Except worse somehow, in some ways. It was like losing my voice. But I wasn’t about to try to explain that to Agnes.

‘Yes. It mattered.’ I paused. ‘And then it happened again.’

‘What?’

‘I lost a client. “Lost” – listen to me. Another suicide. Another client killed herself.’ I spoke calmly, quietly, in fact the words came easily. Too easily. As if they had lost their power, their true meaning. Telling these stories made me feel dead inside. Was I dead before Robert got married? Or had I been dead for a long time?

‘Was the client another woman?’

‘Most of my clients were women. Another young woman; she was twenty-three. Gillian Collins. I’d been seeing her for more than a year. Again, she was seriously depressed, but I didn’t think she needed to be hospitalized. She wasn’t on any medication, I didn’t think she needed it. She seemed, I don’t know, she seemed okay to me. Making progress. But when I looked back at my notes, well, it was quite stark really. Her deterioration. The signs were there. I didn’t see them. Or couldn’t see them. Couldn’t be bothered to see them –’