Sister

8

Thursday

I am walking across St. James’s Park toward the CPS offices. The sky is blue again today, Pantone PMS 635 to be precise, a hopeful sky. This morning Mr. Wright is going to ask me about the next installment in your story, which is my meeting with your psychiatrist. But still half asleep, my mind lacks the necessary clarity so I will run through it out here first, a mental dress rehearsal before I tell Mr. Wright.

Dr. Nichols’s NHS waiting list was four months, so I paid to see him. His private patients’ waiting room looked more upmarket hairdressing salon than anything remotely medical: vases of lilies, glossy magazines, a mineral water dispenser. The young receptionist had the same de rigueur disdainful look, lording her keeper-of-the-gate power over the clients waiting. As I waited, I flicked through a magazine in a futile bid to look occupied. It had the next month’s date on the cover and I remembered you laughing at time-traveling fashion mags, saying the date on the cover should alert people to their absurdity inside. Nervous mental chatter because there was so much riding on this meeting. It was because of Dr. Nichols that the police were convinced you had postpartum psychosis, because of him that they were sure you committed suicide. It was because of Dr. Nichols that no one was looking for your murderer.

The receptionist glanced at me. “What time did you say your appointment was?”

“Two-thirty.”

“You were fortunate Dr. Nichols made a space to see you.”

“I’m sure I’ll be charged accordingly.”

I was limbering up for a little more confrontation. She sounded irritated. “Have you completed the form?”

I gave her back the form, which was blank apart from my credit card details. She took it from me, voice snide, eyes scornful. “You haven’t filled in any of your medical history.”

I thought of people coming here who were depressed, or anxious, or losing their grip on reality and falling into the void of madness; fragile, vulnerable people who were owed at least a little civility by the first person they would have to talk to.

“I’m not here for a medical consultation.”

She didn’t want to show me she was interested. Or maybe she thought I was just another barmy patient, not worth the bother.

“I’m here because my sister was murdered and Dr. Nichols was her psychiatrist.”

For a moment I had her attention. She took in my greasy hair (hair washing is one of the first corner cuttings of grief), my lack of makeup and the bags under my eyes. She saw the markers of grief but interpreted them as signs of madness. I wondered if, in a larger way, this was what happened to you: your signals of fear being interpreted as insanity. She took the form from me without another word.

As I waited, I remembered our e-mails when I told you once that I was thinking of seeing a therapist.

The receptionist looked up at me from her desk. “Dr. Nichols can see you now.”

As I walked to his room, I remembered our phone call that evening (my time; two in the morning your time). I still didn’t tell you why I wanted to see a psychiatrist, but you explained why you didn’t think it was useful.

“Our mind is who we are; it’s where we feel and think and believe. It’s where we have love and hate and faith and passion.”

I was getting a little embarrassed by your earnestness, but you continued, “How can someone hope to treat another person’s mind unless they are also a theologian and a philosopher and a poet?”

I opened the door to Dr. Nichols’s consulting room and went in.

When you saw Dr. Nichols in his NHS clinic, he would have worn a white coat, but in his private consulting room he was in faded corduroys and an old lambswool sweater, looking scruffy against the regency striped wallpaper. I put him in his late thirties; do you think that’s about right?

He got up from his chair and I thought I saw compassion in his rumpled face.

“Miss Hemming? I am so very sorry about your sister.”

I heard the sound of thumping from beneath his desk and saw an ancient Labrador dozily chasing rabbits in her sleep, tail wagging onto the floor. I realized that his office smelled slightly of dog, which I liked more than the lilies of the waiting room. I imagined the receptionist dashing in between patients with air freshener.

He gestured to a chair near his own. “Please take a seat.”

As I sat down, I saw a photo of a little girl in a wheelchair prominently displayed and I liked Dr. Nichols for being unconditionally proud.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“Did Tess tell you who was frightening her?”

Clearly taken aback by my question, he shook his head.

“But she did tell you that she was getting threatening phone calls?” I asked.

“Distressing phone calls, yes.”

“Did she tell you who made them? Or what the person said to her?”

“No. She was reluctant to tell me about them and I didn’t think it helpful to pursue it. At the time, I assumed they were most likely a cold caller or someone phoning a wrong number, and it was because of her depressed state of mind that she felt victimized by them.”

“Did you tell Tess that?”

“I suggested to her that might be the case, yes.”

“And she cried?”

He looked surprised that I knew. But I’ve known you all your life. At four years old you could have grazes on your knees and a bloody nose, but you never cried—unless someone didn’t believe you when you were telling the truth and then your streaming tears would express your outraged indignation.

“You said that at the time you assumed them to be a cold caller or wrong number?” I asked.

“Yes. Later I realized that Tess wasn’t depressed, as I’d first thought, but was suffering from puerperal psychosis, more commonly called postpartum psychosis.”

I nodded. I’d done my homework. I knew that puerperal psychosis simply means it occurs during the six weeks after the birth.

“Anyhow,” continued Dr. Nichols, “once I realized that she was suffering from puerperal psychosis, I realized that the phone calls were, most likely, auditory hallucinations. In lay terms, ‘hearing voices,’ or in Tess’s case, the sound of the phone too.”

“You changed your diagnosis after she was found dead, didn’t you?” I asked and saw a flash of emotion over his crumpled face, momentarily hardening it. There was a moment before he spoke.

“Yes. I think it might be helpful if I tell you a little more about puerperal psychosis. The symptoms can include paranoia, delusions and hallucinations. And the consequences, tragically, are a highly increased risk of suicide.”

From my own research, I already knew that.

“I’d like to get this clear,” I said. “It was after she died that you changed your diagnosis from depression to psychosis. And it was only then that the phone calls became ‘auditory hallucinations’?”

“Yes, because auditory hallucinations are a symptom of psychosis.”

“She didn’t have psychosis. Puerperal or postpartum, or any other kind.” He ineffectually tried to interrupt me but I continued, “How many times did you meet my sister?”

“Psychiatry isn’t about intimate knowledge of a specific person, which you get in close friendships or with family members, nor in acute cases is it anything like the long-term relationship a psychiatrist has with a patient as a therapist. When a patient has mental illness the psychiatrist is trained to recognize certain symptoms the patient demonstrates.”

For some reason, I imagined him practicing all this in the mirror beforehand. I repeated my question, “How many times?”

He glanced away from me. “Just once. She was automatically referred to me because of her baby’s death, but she discharged herself from the hospital almost immediately after the birth, so I couldn’t visit her on the ward. She was given an emergency outpatient appointment two days later.”

“Was she a National Health Service patient?”

“Yes.”

“On the NHS, your waiting list is four months. That’s why I am paying to see you.”

“Tess was an emergency. All potential puerperal depression and psychosis cases are dealt with immediately.”

“Dealt with?”

“I’m sorry. What I meant was in terms of jumping any waiting list.”

“How long is an NHS appointment?”

“I’d rather have more time with each patient but—”

“With a waiting list of four months, you must be under a great deal of pressure to get through them.”

“I spend as much time as I possibly can with each patient.”

“But it’s not enough, is it?”

He paused a moment. “No. It’s not.”

“Puerperal psychosis is an acute psychiatric emergency, isn’t it?”

I thought I saw him flinch because I knew this, but I’d done my research beforehand.

“Yes, it is,” he replied.

“Requiring hospitalization?”

His body language was rigidly controlled, arms held determinedly at his sides, his corduroyed legs a little splayed, but I knew that he wanted to cross his arms over his chest and put one leg over the other to give physical expression to his mental defensiveness.

“Many psychiatrists would have interpreted Tess’s symptoms as I did, as indicators of depression rather than psychosis.” He absentmindedly reached down to stroke his dog’s silky ears as if he needed comfort, and continued, “Diagnosis in psychiatry is far harder than in other branches of medicine. There aren’t any X-rays or blood tests to help us. And I didn’t have access to her notes, so I didn’t know whether there was a history of mental illness.”

“There isn’t any history. When was her appointment with you?”

“The twenty-third of January. At nine a.m.”

He hadn’t consulted his diary or looked at his computer.

He had come prepared for this meeting, of course he had. He’d probably been on the phone all morning with his medical defense union. I saw in his face a beat of some genuine emotion. I wondered if it was fearfulness for himself, or genuine upset about you.

“So you saw her the day she died?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And you thought the morning she died that she was suffering from depression not psychosis?”

He could no longer hide his defensiveness, crossing one leg over the other, huddling into himself. “At the time, I didn’t see any indicators of psychosis. And she didn’t show any signs that she was considering hurting herself. There was nothing to suggest that she was going to take her life.”

I wanted to scream at him that of course there were no signs, because you didn’t take your life; you had it violently cut from you. I heard my voice sounding distantly quiet against the shouting in my head. “So it was her death that rewrote your diagnosis?”

He didn’t reply. I no longer found his rumpled face and corduroys endearingly scruffy, but hopelessly negligent.

“Your mistake wasn’t that you diagnosed her with depression when she was actually psychotic.” He tried to interrupt me but I continued, “Your mistake is that you didn’t once think that she might be telling the truth.” Again he tried to interrupt me. Did he interrupt you too as you tried to tell him what was happening to you? I thought psychiatrists were meant to listen. I suppose in an emergency NHS appointment, probably shoehorned into a full clinic, there’s not much time for listening.

“Did you even consider that the phone calls threatening her were real, just as the man who followed her to the park that day and murdered her was real?” I asked.

“Tess wasn’t murdered.”

I thought it strange he was so adamant. After all, murder would have let him off the misdiagnosis hook. He paused, then forced the words out as if they physically pained him.

“Tess was having auditory hallucinations, which I’ve told you about, and we can disagree about the interpretation if you wish. But she was also having visual hallucinations. At the time, I interpreted them as vivid nightmares, not uncommon for a patient who’s depressed and bereaved,” continued Dr. Nichols. “But I’ve reread her notes and it’s clear they were hallucinations, which I missed.” The beat of upset in his face I’d seen earlier seemed to spread across his features. “Visual hallucinations are a clear signifier of acute psychosis.”

“What were the ‘hallucinations’?”

“I have to respect patient confidentiality.”

I thought it strange that he suddenly thought of doctor/patient confidentiality when it hadn’t hindered him up until now. I wondered whether there was a reason for it, or whether it was just another incidence of his incompetence.

“I asked her to paint what she saw,” he continued, and his face looked kind. “I thought it would be helpful to her. Maybe you could find a painting?”

The secretary came in. Time was up, but I didn’t leave.

“You must go to the police and tell them you have doubts she had puerperal psychosis.”

“But I don’t have any doubts. The signs were there, as I said, but I missed them.”

“You’re not the reason she died, but you could be why her murderer gets away with it. Because of your diagnosis, no one is even looking for him.”

“Beatrice…”

It was the first time he’d used my Christian name. The bell had been rung; it was after school, so now he could be intimate. I didn’t stand up, but he did.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you anymore. I can’t change my professional judgment because you want me to, because it fits with a construct that you have put onto her death. I made a mistake, a terrible misjudgment. And I have to face up to that.”

His guilt was seeping out around the edges of his words, a trickle to start with before becoming the mainstream subject. He looked as if it was a relief to finally give way to it.

“The harsh facts are that a young woman with puerperal psychosis went undiagnosed and I must take my share of blame for her death.”

I thought it ironic that decency can be harder to argue with than its self-serving reprehensible opposite. The moral high ground is just too certain, however uncomfortable.

Outside the open office window it’s raining, spring rain, collecting the scent of grass and trees before falling onto the concrete pavements below. I feel the slight drop in temperature and smell it before I see it. I have almost finished telling Mr. Wright about my meeting with Dr. Nichols.

“I thought he believed he’d made a terrible mistake and was genuinely appalled with himself.”

“Did you ask him to go to the police?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes, but he maintained he was certain she had puerperal psychosis.”

“Even though it reflected badly on him professionally?”

“Yes. I found it surprising too. But I put his motive down to misplaced moral courage—agreeing with me that Tess didn’t have psychosis but was murdered would be a cowardly option. By the end of our meeting I thought he was a hopeless psychiatrist but a decent man.”

We break for lunch. Mr. Wright has a lunch meeting scheduled and I leave on my own. Outside it is still raining.

I never did answer your e-mail and tell you the real reason I saw a therapist. Because I did go in the end. It was six weeks after Todd and I had become engaged. I’d thought getting married would stop my feeling so insecure. But an engagement ring around my finger wasn’t the new hold on life I’d thought it would be. I saw Dr. Wong, a highly intelligent and empathetic woman who helped me understand that with Dad’s leaving and Leo’s dying within the space of a few months, it was hardly surprising that I felt abandoned and, consequently, insecure. You were right about those two wounds. But it was being sent to boarding school, the same year, that felt like the final abandonment.

During my therapy sessions, I realized that Mum wasn’t rejecting me but was trying to protect me. You were so much younger and she could shield you from her grief, but it would have been far harder to hide it from me. Ironically, she sent me to boarding school because she thought it would be emotionally more secure.

So with Dr. Wong’s help, I came to understand not only myself better but also Mum, and quick facile blame transmuted into harder-won understanding.

The problem was, knowing the reason I was insecure didn’t help me to undo the damage that had been done. Something in me had been broken, and I now knew it was well intentioned—a duster knocking the ornament onto the tiled floor rather than its being smashed deliberately—but broken just the same.

So you’ll understand, I think, why I don’t share your skepticism about psychiatrists. Although I do agree that they need an artistic sensibility as well as scientific knowledge (Dr. Wong majored in comparative literature before going into medicine), and that a good psychiatrist is the modern version of a renaissance man. As I tell you that, I wonder if my respect and gratitude toward my own psychiatrist colored my opinion of Dr. Nichols—if that’s the real reason I felt that he was fundamentally decent.

I get back to the CPS offices earlier than Mr. Wright, who hurries in five minutes later, looking hassled. Maybe the lunch meeting hasn’t gone well. I presume it’s about you. Your case is huge—headline news, MPs calling for a public inquiry. It must be a big responsibility for Mr. Wright but not only is he adept at hiding the strain he must be under, he doesn’t load any pressure onto me, which I appreciate. He turns on the tape recorder and we continue.

“How soon after your meeting with Dr. Nichols did you find the paintings?”

He doesn’t need to specify—we both know which paintings he means.

“As soon as I got back to the flat I looked for them in her bedroom. She’d moved all her furniture out apart from her bed. Even the wardrobe was in the sitting room, where it looked ridiculous.”

I’m not sure why I told him that. Maybe because if you have to be a victim, I want him to know that you’re a victim with quirks, some of which used to irritate your older sister.

“There must have been forty to fifty canvases propped up around the walls,” I continue. “Most of them were oils, some on thick board, a few collages. They were all large, a minimum of a foot across. It took me a while to look through them. I didn’t want to damage any of them.”

Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that, or was I just too concerned that you weren’t going to earn a living? I know the answer. I was anxious that no one would buy enormous canvases with colors that wouldn’t go with their room decor, wasn’t I? I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone’s carpet, rather than realizing that you’d made color itself tactile.

“It took me about half an hour to find the ones Dr. Nichols had told me about.”

Mr. Wright has seen only the four “hallucination” pictures, not the ones you did before. But I think it was the contrast that shocked me the most.

“Her other pictures were all so…” What the hell, I might as well go for it. “Joyous. Beautiful. Explosions on canvas of life and light and color.”

But you painted these four paintings in the palette of the nihilists, Pantone numbers 4625 to 4715, the blacks and browns spectrum, and in their subject matter you forced the viewer to recoil. I don’t need to explain this to Mr. Wright; he has photos of them in the file and I can just glimpse them. Made smaller, and even upside down, they still disturb me and I look hurriedly away.

“They were at the back of a big stack. Paint from the front of one had smeared the back of the next. I thought that she must have hidden them quickly, before they’d had time to dry properly.”

Did you have to hide the woman’s face, her gash of a mouth as she screamed, so that you could sleep? Or was it the masked man, dark with menace in the shadows, who disturbed you as violently as he did me?

“Todd thought they were proof that she had psychosis.”

“Todd?”

“My fiancé at the time.”

We are interrupted by Mrs. Crush Secretary, who gives Mr. Wright a sandwich; clearly his lunchtime meeting didn’t include any lunch and she has thought about this, looked after him. She barely glances at me as she gives me mineral water. He smiles at her, his open, winning smile. “Thanks, Stephanie.” His smile is going out of focus. The office is dimming. I can hear his concerned voice.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

But the office is in darkness. I can hear but not see. It happened at lunch with Mum yesterday and I blamed the wine, but today there’s no scapegoat. I know that I must keep calm so the darkness will clear. And I continue, forcing myself to remember back—and in the darkness your dull-toned paintings are vivid.

I was crying when Todd came in, my tears falling onto the paintings and becoming drops of inky black and mud brown sliding down the canvas. Todd put his arm around me. “It wasn’t Tess who did these, darling.” For a moment I was hopeful; someone put them here, someone other than you had felt like this. “She wasn’t herself,” continued Todd. “She wasn’t the sister you knew. Madness does that. It takes away someone’s identity.” I was angry that he thought he knew about mental illness, that a few sessions with a therapist when he was thirteen, after his parents’ divorce, made him some sort of expert.

I turned back to the paintings. Why had you painted them, Tess? As a message? And why had you hidden them? Todd didn’t realize my silence had been filled with urgent mental chatter.

“Someone has to tell it as it is, darling.”

He’d got so redneck all of a sudden, as if being resolutely wrong was being masculine, as if he could turn the aftermath of your death into an Iron John weekend. This time he sensed my anger. “I’m sorry, ‘mad’ is maybe too blunt to describe it.”

At the time, I silently and furiously disagreed with him. Psychotic sounded far worse to me than mad. I thought that you can’t be psychotic as a hatter or a march hare. No playful light-hearted storybook images for psychotic. Nor was King Lear psychotic when he discovered great truths in the midst of his ravings. I thought that we could relate to madness as emotion experienced at an intense and troubling level, even respect it for its honorable literary pedigree, but psychosis is way out there, to be feared and shunned.

But now I fear madness rather than look at its literary pedigree. And I realize my earlier viewpoint was that of onlooker rather than sufferer. “Not mad sweet heaven”—because loss of sanity, of self, generates despairing terror whatever label you want to use for it.

I came up with some excuse to leave the flat, and Todd looked disappointed. He must have thought the paintings would put an end to my “refusal to face the truth.” I’d heard that phrase in his quiet concerned chats on the phone to mutual friends in New York, when he thought I couldn’t hear, even to my boss. From his perspective, your paintings would force me to confront reality. It was there in front of me, four times, a screaming woman and a monster man. Psychotic, frightening, hellish pictures. What more did I need? Surely, I would now accept the fact that you committed suicide and move on. We could put things behind us. Get on with our lives. The hackneyed life-coach phrases could become reality.

Outside it was dark, the air raw with cold. Early February is not a good time to be constantly stropping off. Again, I felt in my coat pocket for the nonexistent glove. If I’d been a lab rat I’d have been a pretty poor specimen at learning patterns and punishment. I wondered if slipping on the steps would be worse than gripping a snow-covered iron railing with a naked hand. I decided to grip, wincing as I held the biting cold metal.

I knew I really had no right to be angry with Todd, because if it were the other way around, I’d want him to return to being the person I thought I knew too—someone sensible and levelheaded who respected authority and didn’t cause unnecessary embarrassment. But I think you’re pleased that I argued with policemen and accosted grown men on their doorsteps and in their flats and took no notice of authority and that it’s all down to you.

As I walked alone through the streets, slippery with frozen slush, I realized that Todd didn’t really know me at all. Nor me him. Ours was a relationship of small talk. We’d never stayed awake long into the night hoping to find in that nocturnal physical conversation a connection of minds. We hadn’t stared into each other’s eyes, because if eyes are the window to the soul, it would be a little rude and embarrassing to look in. We’d created a beltway relationship, circumventing raw emotions and complex feelings, so that our central selves were strangers.

Too cold to walk any farther, I returned to the flat. As I reached the top of the steps, I collided with someone in the dark and was jolted with fear before realizing it was Amias. I think he was equally startled to see me.

“Amias?”

“I’m so sorry. Did I give you a fright? Here…” He held a flashlight for me to see my footing. I saw that he was carrying a bag of earth.

“Thanks.”

It suddenly struck me that I was living in his flat. “I should pay you something while we stay here.”

“Absolutely not. Anyway, Tess had already paid next month’s rent.”

He must have guessed I didn’t believe him. “I asked her to pay me with her paintings,” he continued. “Like Picasso with his restaurant bills. And she’d painted ones for February and March in advance.”

I used to think you spent time with him because he was another of your waifs and strays, but he’s got a rare kind of charm, hasn’t he? Something masculine and upper class, without being sexist or snobbish, making me think in black and white of steam trains and trilbies and women in floral frocks.

“I’m afraid it’s not the most salubrious of dwellings,” he continued. “I did offer to modernize it, but Tess said it had character.”

I felt ashamed of myself for being irritated by the lack of mod cons in the kitchen, the state of the bathroom, the draughty windows.

My eyes were further accustomed to the darkness and I could see that he had been planting up your pots outside your door, his bare hands stained with earth.

“She used to come and see me every Thursday,” continued Amias. “Sometimes just for a drink, sometimes for supper. She must have had so many other things she’d rather be doing.”

“She liked you.”

I’d realized that was true. You’ve always had friends, proper friends, in different generations. I’d imagined you’d do it in reverse as you got older. One day you’d be an octogenarian chatting to people decades your junior. Amias was totally at ease with my silence and with consideration seemed to sense when my train of thought had finished before speaking.

“The police didn’t take a great deal of notice of me when I reported her missing. Until I told them about the nuisance phone calls. They made a big song and dance about that.”

He turned his face back to his planting and I tried to have the courtesy for him too to finish his train of thought in peace before I butted in.

“Did Tess tell you anything about the phone calls?”

“She just said she’d been getting vicious calls. She only told me because she said she’d unplugged her phone and was worried I might need to phone her. She used to have a mobile, but I think she lost it.”

“‘Vicious’?” That was the word she used?”

“Yes. At least I think so. The ghastly thing about old age is you can’t rely on yourself to be accurate anymore. She cried though. She tried not to, but she did.” He broke off, for just a moment, struggling to keep his composure. “I told her she ought to go to the police.”

“Tess’s psychiatrist told the police the phone calls were in her head.”

“Did he tell Tess that too?”

“Yes.”

“Poor Tessie.” I hadn’t heard anyone call you that since Dad left. “Awful not to be believed.”

“Yes.”

He turned to me. “I heard the phone ring. I told the police but I couldn’t swear that it was one of the nuisance calls. But it was immediately afterward that Tess asked me to look after the key. It was just two days before she died.”

I could see the anguish in his face, illuminated by the orange glow of the street light.

“I should have insisted she went to the police.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Thank you, you’re very kind. Like your sister.”

I wondered whether to tell the police about the key, but it would make no difference. It was just another instance of your supposed paranoia.

“A psychiatrist thinks that she was mad. Do you think that she was, after the baby, I mean?” I asked.

“No. She was very upset, and very frightened, I think. But she wasn’t mad.”

“The police think she was mad too.”

“And did anyone in the police ever meet her?”

He carried on planting bulbs, and his old hands, the skin paper-thin and misshapen by arthritis, must have been aching in the cold. I thought that this must be the way he was coping with grief: planting dead-looking bulbs that would miraculously flower in springtime. I remembered how after Leo died, you and Mum seemed to spend so much time gardening. I’d only now seen the connection.

“These are King Alfreds,” said Amias. “Her favorite variety of daffodils because they’re such a strong yellow. You’re meant to plant them in autumn but they come up in about six weeks, so they should have time to flower this spring.” But even I knew that you shouldn’t plant things in frozen earth. For some reason, thinking that Amias’s bulbs would never flower made me furious.

Just in case you’re wondering, yes, I even suspected Amias at the start of all this. I suspected everyone. But as he planted bulbs for you, any residual suspicion withered into absurdity. I’m sorry it was ever there.

He smiled at me. “She told me that scientists have put a daffodil gene into a rice plant and made rice with vitamin A. Imagine that.”

You’d told me that too.

“The vitamin A in daffodils is what makes them yellow. Isn’t that amazing, Bee?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

I was trying to concentrate on my design team’s roughs for a new corporate logo for an oil distribution company, noting with annoyance that they’d used PMS 683, which was already used in a competitor’s logo. You didn’t know there was any other chatter in my head.

“Thousands of children used to go blind because of a lack of vitamin A in their diet. But now with the new rice they’re going to be fine.”

For a moment I stopped thinking about the logo.

“Children are going to see because of the yellow in a daffodil.”

I think it was the fact that a color could save sight that you found so miraculously appropriate. I smiled back at Amias and I think in that moment we both remembered you in exactly the same way: your enthusiasm for life, for its myriad possibilities, for its daily miracles.

My vision is returning to normal again, the darkness transmuting into light. I am glad for the faulty electric light that can’t be turned off and the spring sunshine pouring in through the overly large window. I see Mr. Wright looking at me with concern.

“You’re very pale.”

“I’m fine, really.”

“We’re going to have to stop there. I have a meeting to get to.”

Maybe he does, but it’s more likely he’s being considerate.

Mr. Wright knows that I am ill, and I think it must be on his orders that his secretary makes sure I always have mineral water, and why he is drawing our session to an early close today. He is sensitive enough to understand that I don’t want to talk about my physical problems, not yet, not till I have to.

You’d already picked up that I’m unwell, hadn’t you? And you wondered why I didn’t tell you more. You must have thought it ludicrous yesterday when I said a glass of wine at lunchtime could make me black out. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just didn’t want to admit, to myself, my body’s frailties. Because I need to be strong to get through this statement. And I must get through it.

You want to know what’s made me ill, I know, and I will tell you when we get to that point in the story, the point when your story becomes mine too. Until then I will try not to think about the cause, because my thoughts, cowards that they are, turn tail and flee from it.

Music blaring interrupts our one-way conversation. I am near our flat and through the uncurtained window I see Kasia dancing to her Golden Hits of the 70s CD. She spots me and appears moments later at the front door. She takes hold of my arm and doesn’t even let me take my coat off before trying to make me dance too. She always does this, actually, “Dancing very good for body.” But today, incapable of dancing, I make up an excuse, then sit on the sofa and watch. As she dances, face beaming and sweating, laughing that the baby loves it, she seems so blithely unaware of the problems that she will face being an unemployed, Polish, single mother.

Upstairs, Amias is banging his foot on our ceiling in time to the music. The first time he did it I thought he was asking us to keep the noise down. But he enjoys it. He says it was so quiet before Kasia came to stay. I finally persuade a breathless Kasia to stop dancing and eat something with me.

While Kasia watches TV, I give Pudding a bowl of cat food, then take a watering can into your back garden, leaving the door slightly ajar so I can see. It’s starting to get dark and cold, the spring sunshine not strong enough to heat the air for long into evening. Over the fence, I see that next door your neighbors use the same outside area to house three trash cans. As I water the dead plants and bare earth, I wonder as usual why I’m doing this. Your trash-can neighbors must think I’m absurd. I think I’m absurd. Suddenly, like a magician’s sleight of hand, I see tiny green shoots in the dead twigs. I feel a surge of excitement and astonishment. I open the kitchen door wide, lighting the tiny garden. All the plants that were dead have the same tiny, bright-green shoots growing out of them. Farther away, in the gray soil, is a cluster of dark-red leaves, a peony that will flower in all its exuberant beauty again this summer.

I finally understand yours and Mum’s passion for gardening. It is seasonally miraculous. All that health and growth and new life and renewal. No wonder politicians and religions hijack green shoots and imagery of spring for themselves. This evening I, too, exploit the image for my own ends and allow myself to hope that death may not be final after all, that somewhere, as in Leo’s beloved Narnia books, there is a heaven where the white witch is dead and the statues have life breathed back into them. Tonight it doesn’t seem quite so inconceivable.