The Seduction Page 13

  Beth gazed at an enhanced version of the woman from the consulting room. She looked striking in a way Beth had never previously perceived her to be, yet her appearance was disquieting, not altogether appealing. Her eyes now seemed, if such a thing were possible, over-large, her features exaggerated, the heels changing her proportions.

  Tamara smiled at Beth, scanning her face, and the disconcerting aspect of this new version of her resolved itself in that moment into what could only be viewed as beauty. The transition took Beth aback.

  ‘I thought you were here …’ Beth said blankly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tamara, and despite the unnerving gloss of her appearance, that smile alone wrapped Beth in softness, as of old. ‘I had to take a phone call.’

  Who? Beth wanted to say.

  The man at the next table nodded at Tamara – now Tamara, quite different from Dr Bywater – and she smiled, whereupon he addressed her with flurries of outdated gallantry while the woman opposite him remained immobile.

  ‘I need a drink. Do you?’ said Tamara finally in an aside. ‘Save me from him,’ she muttered.

  She turned her neck and smiled straight at Beth. ‘We can talk …’ she said. ‘Unbelievable.’

  There was a slight pause. ‘You look – different,’ said Beth awkwardly to fill it.

  ‘This is me.’ Tamara looked to one side, then she gazed at Beth in a stream of focus. ‘You think I’m a besuited social worker in my real life?’ she said with a run of laughter through her 1940s delivery. She reached out, but instead of touching Beth’s hand, she took some edamame, the impenetrable doctor eating like a human.

  ‘My friends sometimes laugh to see me in my nun’s weeds,’ said Tamara. ‘I suppose – yes – you’ve only seen me in disguise so far … I forget that.’ She smiled again. She tapped the table with her fingers in sequence, the nails sufficiently exquisite to be the sole source of beauty. ‘How –’ she hesitated ‘– strange that is when I’ve met you in my mind so many many times outside the office.’

  Oh God, Beth stopped herself saying.

  ‘I think I’m still hiding from you a little bit,’ said Tamara, and there was a nervous play of her hands. ‘I’m not allowed to do this. Do you understand?’ She swallowed. ‘I don’t think you could.’ The light caught the hollows below her eyes, beneath the concealer, powder she had never worn at St Peter’s. She twisted, running the tips of her own fingers through her others in turn. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I nearly called and cancelled this – this and any other contact. I had fears. I didn’t sleep well. I’m doing something very wrong. But I’m not. I know you enough to know that seeing you will do you no harm. But – I could actually be struck off for this.’

  Beth’s mouth opened slowly. ‘We will, though?’

  Tamara paused. ‘Of course. How could I not? I gave you the choice.’

  ‘Yes.’ Beth smiled. The flowers on Tamara’s dress were flattened into grey-reds under the lights between fretwork. ‘I’m no longer your patient,’ she said. She cleared her throat. Without thinking, she laid her hand on Tamara’s. The hand stayed still. Beth removed hers.

  ‘That professional rule book wasn’t made with any real human emotion in mind,’ said Tamara.

  Her face was half-shadowed, its highlights exaggerated like a screen print. Beth wanted to capture her in paint or as a few saturated seconds of film noir. She was also Dr Bywater. A queasy excitement lay in the disparity between the images.

  ‘It’s not relevant. There’s a time issue with ex-patients. But – I had to dare myself to come here. If we don’t take risks, challenge ourselves, especially at this stage of life …’

  ‘You think? Yes. Well.’ Beth cringed at herself. ‘Tell me things,’ she said rapidly.

  ‘What kind of things, Elizabeth Penn? Sitting right opposite me!’

  She picked up Beth’s hand and kissed it. A lipstick mark remained.

  Beth laughed.

  The waiter appeared, hovered and left them again.

  ‘If we’re seen here,’ Beth said, ‘you can claim I’m a craven patient who’s stalked you at dinner.’

  Tamara laughed. ‘I’m happy to be stalked by you. How are you?’

  ‘I’ve been—’ she said, and suddenly they were recalling moments from the past months, of awareness or curiosity, replayed and reinterpreted, discussed with leaps of recognition, and nothing, thought Beth, could ever be so satisfying, or so illuminating, as they interrupted. Do you remember when …? What did you think when …? What did you mean that time …? Do you know how much I dared myself to say …? They forgot to order, the waiter appearing, disappearing, reappearing.

  ‘So now I can ask you,’ said Beth self-consciously, ‘everything. About you, I mean.’

  ‘I can’t think what you’d want to know. It’s you who has the much more interesting life.’

  ‘That is rubbish,’ said Beth. She watched Tamara’s mouth as it formed those Pinewood enunciations. She was not real: a celluloid creature momentarily materialised. ‘So you have children, right?’

  ‘Yes. Girls.’

  ‘Oh. Lovely,’ said Beth. ‘What age?’

  ‘Oh. Miriam. She’s seventeen. His – he married quite early. She’s my beloved. And the younger one’s eleven. Francesca. So –’ she smiled, as though to herself ‘– I have a little more time now. Not much, but a bit.’

  ‘Good,’ said Beth. ‘Eleven is sweet. Before it all changes.’

  ‘You and I both gave birth to one girl. And we each have an older stepchild. But I could never tell you such things. It was so frustrating.’

  ‘So …’ said Beth, leaning on her elbows. ‘Where – where do you come from? Who’s your family?’

  ‘I don’t see them very often.’ Tamara gave a small smile. ‘You see, all families are complicated. I think working out my own past was what drove me to psychology in the first place. Making some sense of a dysfunctional background.’

  ‘Where did you grow up?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Norfolk.’

  ‘Oh.’ Beth paused. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that. I tried to ask you.’

  ‘And I could say nothing.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Leaking rented section of a huge house. The parkland was all soggy. No money. School fees unpaid. Mud, salt marshes, asthma, sisters, etc. That’s about it.’

  ‘That’s so not what I imagined either.’

  ‘I know. I look too un-English. My – Angus – husband – always says I could come from anywhere but the Norfolk marshes. Actually, my mother was Ukrainian-East Anglian. Trouble.’

  ‘What else?’

  Tamara shrugged. ‘God. I don’t know. This kind of rackety grandeur, all unpaid. Lecherous odd-job men. Nannies left because of lack of food. Private schools while we went hungry.’

  ‘I could tell you were a bit of posh,’ said Beth eventually.

  ‘They couldn’t pay for their lifestyle. My mother was virtually brought up as a hooker, it seemed to me later. East Anglian-Ukrainian bred to catch minor aristocracy like my father.’

  Beth gave a slight laugh. ‘Your husband?’ she said, and paused. ‘I – what does he do?’

  He’s an architect. She heard the answer before it was said.

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Tamara.

  Beth laughed again. ‘Nothing much of what?’

  ‘He’s a financial adviser, he has a few clients, but he’s very involved with the girls’ upbringing.’

  ‘Right,’ said Beth.

  ‘It’s hard to know how to say this,’ said Tamara. ‘But he – Angus – is not like you or your friends. Not of your world, with all its creativity. That intrigued me, from the beginning … You’re talented. That’s precious, you know.’

  Tamara’s eyes slid away, then landed back on Beth and bathed her, and she could do anything while basking in the persona manufactured for her, in which her good qualities were magnified and her flaws ignored or unseen.

  ‘Your life to me – and I know,�
� she said gently, ‘that you’ve suffered much grief – but your life really does interest me. If the therapist can project on to the patient as well, perhaps I have, but anyway, I picture it all. Your friends, your house. Camden. Those openings. I picture Fern.’

  ‘Fern!’ said Beth, jolting. ‘I must check on her.’ She reached for her phone.

  ‘You’re the creator,’ said Tamara, as though she hadn’t heard. ‘I’m just a collector, an enthusiast. In another life … But I always wanted to help people too, or work them out. So as it is, I only decorate my house and myself.’

  ‘You must come round to mine some time.’

  ‘But …’ The flash of anxiety passed over Tamara’s face, adding vulnerability. ‘I can’t ever meet your husband, be public …’ She tailed off. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure I even want to meet him.’

  ‘Oh you should.’

  ‘I saw you two in the Standard. I got very jealous. But you must get on with your evening!’ she said suddenly. ‘You don’t want to sit here listening to all this.’

  ‘But—’ Beth’s throat tightened into a cough that took several attempts to eliminate, worsening as she tried to ignore it. ‘This is my evening.’

  Tamara smiled to one side and her neighbour was all attention once more. Beth made a few comments that failed to elicit interest. There were silences.

  ‘Let’s order,’ said Beth stiffly.

  ‘Isn’t Sol wondering where you are?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I’ll go and phone him,’ said Beth in a cold tone. She could find nothing to say. It had all changed. The real Beth Penn was a tedious disappointment. The humiliation made her clench her muscles. She rose and walked outside, where Christmas lights were painting the street and taxis came and went. She phoned Fern instead, who was happy and occupied and wanted to end the call.

  She returned to the restaurant. Tamara was ignoring her neighbour’s body language, his girlfriend stiff-backed, and she appeared smaller than usual, shrouded in her own thoughts. Beth wanted to reach out and touch her.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tamara.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, you can touch me.’

  Beth started. ‘Oh, God, I—am I—?’

  ‘I can read you. I think I always could,’ she said, and with the effects of a little wine, with great effort, Beth made herself dare to lean across and hold Tamara’s shoulders, her arms, and Tamara bowed her head, then tilted her face up to Beth so she was all eyes, black-framed, neon-blued, and they gazed at each other without embarrassment. Beth had never in her life looked at a woman this way. There was something else faintly discordant, off-kilter, that Beth could detect beneath the confidence. She couldn’t identify what she meant.

  The couple at the adjacent table started to leave, and an object appeared between them. Tamara picked it up.

  ‘His card,’ she said, pulling a face.

  ‘Bloody cheek!’

  ‘I have dozens of these,’ she said, bending it idly between her fingers till it jumped on to a napkin. ‘I put them all in a jug.’

  ‘What for?’

  She shrugged. ‘They might be useful one day. Probably not.’

  ‘You know, I have to leave,’ said Beth, glancing at the bill and paying.

  ‘I know you do,’ said Tamara. She gave Beth a wry smile, and Beth felt the warmth of her breath on her. ‘We will meet. Somehow. We have all of each other to discover.’

  ‘Me to discover you,’ said Beth.

  Beth kissed Tamara goodbye, and she was passive and held out her other cheek, barely tilted, for a second kiss, and Beth took in the little chemical motes around her and a charge shot through her that she didn’t expect, like static. That cat smile of old curved Tamara’s mouth. ‘You must behave,’ she said quietly. ‘Be good. A good little wife …’

  Beth laughed. ‘Don’t say that.’

  A group of pre-Christmas revellers poured from a taxi on to the pavement outside the restaurant and, without hesitation, Beth stuck her head through the cab window and secured it for Tamara, then stepped back as Tamara got in and drove off, not turning to look at her once more, and Beth stood there and gazed while people milled round her, and she watched the space on the road where the taxi had been.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘You don’t need to stay in with me any more in the evenings,’ said Fern three days later. Her mouth was a tight pout, baby giraffe legs in tracksuit bottoms. She had largely stayed in her room while Sol was away.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Then you don’t need to put me to bed.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Beth. She made herself turn around. Her voice seemed too loud. Ducks suddenly chattered. A lorry roared somewhere further off.

  She turned back. Fern seemed to be eyeing her thoughtfully.

  ‘I only really come up and kiss you goodnight now,’ said Beth, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, then hummed, unnecessarily moving some papers.

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘You’d rather I didn’t.’ She focused on the table. There was camera equipment Sol had left behind, Fern’s Kindle by the perpetual pile of paperwork at the end, Fern’s felt tips.

  The tense shoulder blades turned, emanating something close to disgust.

  Fern shrugged, nodded.

  Beth’s neck tightened. ‘OK.’

  Fern blushed a little. ‘Then you can be dreaming with your pencil held in the air while you’re doing Mice,’ she said. ‘Or on your phone. Don’t worry, you can.’

  ‘Oh, Fern. Don’t be ridiculous.’

  Fern watched her, as though through a coating of ice.

  That body had been wrapped in Beth’s arms, head rubbing, finding patterns in the luminous stars on her ceiling, Fern begging for more time, kisses sipped, scalp warm, cheeks almost downy: the earth-shaking pouring of maternal love. At the same time, in truth, Beth’s neck aching, fighting through the tiredness of the day, dinner calling, wine if they let themselves, adult chat with Sol, but always the wonder of the human beside her whose voice tone, skin smell, was boundlessly pleasing.

  ‘OK,’ said Beth with apparent calm, her heart racing, ‘I’ll say goodnight down here. Of course.’

  ***

  ‘Are you all right?’ was the first thing Beth had said when her estranged mother had appeared in Hackney over a decade before. ‘Why are you in London?’

  Lizzie stood there on Beck Road by the buggy, as poised as an ageing ballerina. She hesitated, then nodded. ‘Can I see?’ she said, and didn’t wait for permission, but dance-plunged as she always had to the buggy head and bent over to look at the two-month-old Fern.

  Beth gripped the handles.

  ‘Oh, Bethy,’ Lizzie said, on a draining out-breath. ‘So beautiful.’

  Beth stood there. Certainty was quite gone. Seconds were shunting past.

  ‘A boy or a girl?’

  Beth paused. ‘A girl,’ she said stiffly. Lizzie’s looks were softening into old age; she seemed to be alone. No wedding ring. There had always been a man attached to her.

  ‘Beautiful. A beautiful baby, Bethy,’ said Lizzie, peering into the pram, and Beth stared at her mother’s head with the defenceless spray of a crown, and fury started to rise: a storm of uncryable tears.

  ‘I’d love—’ said Lizzie, reaching out to Fern’s cheek, a witch’s finger on the peach skin. ‘Please can I see her?’

  ‘Well, no—’ Beth began. She pulled the buggy towards her. ‘Sorry,’ she said. Lizzie stared at her, all eyes of need, assessing and age-clouded.

  Everything in Beth wanted to cry, throw her arms round this mother and protect her, this spiky vulnerable woman, the burden of responsibility on her own shoulders – only hers; her brother and father absent – and she would bow down to the ground to her, minister to her for life, have her back.

  And yet lying below her was an innocent with that witch’s finger on her. Beth jerked away the buggy.

  ‘You couldn’t even be bothered to turn up,’ she managed to say.

&n
bsp; Beth walked off, trembling more violently than she ever had in her life, and after a few steps in silence, she turned, because what if she had killed her mother? It was the expression of Lizzie’s which always returned later when she hated herself: a mouth round in a face that was a deflated balloon, pouched with grief. Her mother had now been abandoned. The shaking brought a rush of saliva to Beth’s mouth, and she walked faster.

  ‘No. No,’ Beth had begged Sol later when he had written to Lizzie care of her half-brother. ‘Not like that.’

  ‘Ungrateful,’ Lizzie had called to Beth’s retreating back.

  ***

  The following week, Fern shrugged her way out of a jumper covering a skimpy top, and put on her favourite hoodie that, touchingly, bore the simple legend London. Beth caught sight of her waist, her belly button thinning as she stretched upwards, and the slightness and thinner face filled her with a leap of protectiveness.

  Fern seemed to stare back at her, then a small smile twisted her mouth.

  ‘You really don’t need to stay in for me any more. Remember.’

  ‘What kind of bonkersness is this?’ said Beth.

  ‘Go out again tonight.’

  ‘I don’t want to!’

  ‘You can,’ said Fern. ‘I have a rehearsal. I’ll go to Maia’s first.’

  ‘For what?’ said Beth. ‘Can we talk about—’

  Her phone started to ring in her bag.

  ‘My play. Remember. I’m Dulcie.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Beth, scrabbling for the phone.

  ‘Beth,’ said Tamara Bywater.

  ‘Hi! Just one minute …’ She held the phone to her palm. ‘Let me just talk to you in a minute?’ she said to Fern.

  Fern turned her back. ‘I don’t think you care about anyone,’ she seemed to say.

  Beth was slack-jawed. ‘Did you just say that? Fern, I love you and care about you more than the world.’

  Fern gave a scornful laugh. ‘Legitimately, bullshit,’ she said.

  ‘Good God,’ said Beth to Tamara. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Not really. Some teenage nonsense?’ said Tamara, the low-level voice from the consulting room on her mobile. ‘You have to ignore a lot of these dramas going on in their own heads at this stage. Because you become the scapegoat. Beth. I needed to hear you.’