There was a prince, playing in a clearing. I imagined him wearing one of those Tyrolean hats we see in fairy tales, a feather sticking out from the brim, in a pair of high, thigh-length boots as he strode through the undergrowth, sawing his bow. The large mossy trees echoed with the music, intermingling with the sound of the morning bird chorus. Tiny hamlets scattered around and one child is woken first by the unearthly melody. She walks out and follows and is lost for ever.
I was daydreaming. I was taken out of it by one word.
Haunted.
Haunted. The Viennese repeated it, sceptically twisting the end of his moustache.
We deal in objective realities here, he said.
You do?
I was surprised, to say the least. Buried memories, suppressed desire, hidden motivations, marital secrets. There was nothing objective about any of them.
Perhaps, he said tentatively, the stresses of your situation has led to a parallel fantasy in your daughter.
And how do you explain – her sudden virtuosity?
You said she had heard the tune, he told Sarah. You had been playing the Bach collection by—
Casals, she said wearily, Pablo Casals, as if he should have already known.
I’ve handed in my notice, she continued. I can’t take this any longer.
This – disturbance —
The whole thing. Jenny. The demonstrations, the riots, the sense of something just about to burst. The heat. And there’s something my husband is not telling me.
I’m sure there is. That is the purpose of these sessions.
Maybe he can tell you. Can you tell him, Jonathan? Whatever is the hidden key, the secret, the unmentionable thing? Because we’re leaving without you if you don’t.
He waited, expectantly, but without any hope of illumination. As if he was too used to these scenarios to be really surprised.
She died, I said.
We already know that, Sarah almost spat. You left her the note and the next thing they pulled her from the river.
No, I said. She died before that.
Oh God, Sarah moaned, please take me out of here.
She died the night I met her, I said bluntly, coldly, as if none of it mattered any more.
Help me, doctor, Sarah said, this is the father of my child talking. This was a rational man, a functioning partner, a good parent.
I met a girl on the bridge. I pulled her from the water. I took her back to her apartment, on the other side of the river. When I traced a missing girl to the morgue in the twelfth district, it was her. And the records show that she died that night.
Isn’t there a word for that, doctor? Insanity? Or perhaps necrophilia? He gets emotionally entangled with someone who’s dead? At least his wife chose the living.
Please, Sarah—
There is no ‘please’ about it. I’m taking Jenny back to London. And I would like you to come, if you can rid yourself of this . . . thing – this obsession – this mad fucking—
And she stood.
I’m sorry, doctor. I have to go now.
After she’d left, we sat in silence for a while. I heard a street musician outside, playing through the opened window. I thought of the prince again, and his melody weaving through the mossy trees, like blowing hair.
You find it hard, the therapist said, and I understand, we all do. Something happened that you can’t explain; it’s like life, we can’t explain the bulk of it, and though it’s my job to pretend to, I know at heart I am – what is that word? – a charlatan.
That word again. I would have stopped him there, but he had some burning need to continue.
Take things at their face value, as they happen to you; you are presented with a puzzle and if there is a solution, find it. Does it matter if the elements of the puzzle are rational or irrational, happened to the individual or didn’t happen? The result is the same. The problem is the same. The trauma is the same. Who am I to say that the source of any upset is imaginary? I can see the result, the pathology in front of me. Whatever caused that gave rise to a physical outcome. So if imaginary causes lead to actual outcomes, can the cause be justifiably termed unreal, imaginary? No. It has its own reality. Its own rules. And if those rules can be found, be identified, be traced, then maybe a solution is possible.
He looked at me, his grey eyes burdened with some kind of inner exhaustion.
And I, like your wife, am tired of all of this. You are a detective – no? – of kinds. Your job is solutions. Not mine. My job is consolation. Of whatever kind I can offer.