At 10.50am on Thursday morning Evelyn was seated in the therapy room on the first floor of Wellbridge House awaiting the arrival of Tess Dawson. It was only her fourth session but already, Evelyn thought, so much had happened. She was beginning to think that Tess’s reluctance or difficulty in speaking had originally been the result of trauma.
Evelyn had also recently considered the possibility that Tess’s silence was now in her own interest, that it may even have become a deliberate strategy. Her preferred theory was that Tess was breaking her silence because she had found a place safe enough to do exactly that. Perhaps of more importance, she had found someone with whom she could talk who would listen and once she had begun her work with Evelyn, she had realised very quickly that therapy offered her an opportunity to begin to remedy what had gone badly wrong in her life. She had begun to see their work together as a way of moving on, even offering the possibility of a future that was radically different from the past. Tess could pursue her therapy as a way of achieving what she needed.
There was a knock at the door. Evelyn stood and turned in the small room and opened the door to Tess. She looked tired this morning, standing in the doorway, as if she had not slept properly.
“Come in,” said Evelyn. “Please come straight in in future. No need to knock or wait. I’ll be here.”
Tess stepped inside the room and took her seat opposite Evelyn’s. Between them was four feet of floor, which was made from old dark brown wooden boards covered in the centre of the room where they sat by a grey and blue well-made, patterned rug. It looked new, as some of the furnishings at Wellbridge House were, unlike the chairs they sat in which were worn at the arms and sagged at the seat. They were comfortable enough, with their high backs, for the fifty minutes they were sat in, but after a day of sessions, which could be as many as six, Evelyn often felt pulled out of shape, as if her back were wrongly located on her hips. She made a mental note to persuade Peter Archer to provide some new, body-friendly therapy chairs.
Tess sat without moving, looking down at the carpet in her now habitual starting position, as if she found eye contact too intimate. She needed a helping hand to begin, Evelyn thought.
“This is your space, Tess, to use as you want.” She paused. “You look a little tired this morning,” she said kindly.
Tess sat impassively. She raised her eyes slowly, taking in a bookcase that stood on the floor, half-hidden behind Evelyn Doyle’s chair. She could see the spines of old paperbacks with their titles cracked and obscured by the bent-back spines handled by careless readers. She would grow familiar with this room. It was painted cream, not the neutral grey of other rooms here, she thought, and the window had cheerful yellow curtains with a muted pattern that she couldn’t make out. By each chair there was a small table, each with a lamp on it. The lamps were switched on because the day was dull and grey and these lights cast a pleasant muffled glow on the room and its occupants.
At last she looked at Evelyn. “I do feel tired today. I didn’t sleep well again. I think it was after the meeting with the police.” She paused and rubbed her frowning forehead with her left hand. “I want to talk about the meeting.”
Evelyn Doyle shifted in her chair and rested her left elbow on the arm. She rested her chin on the knuckles of her hand.
“It was so difficult. I wanted to talk but I knew it would just be about Stephen and how he died and what was I doing there. Was I close to him and how often did I see him? But there’s no point in talking about that. Not for me.”
“I can tell that you feel strongly about the experience you had with Inspector McKenzie,” Evelyn said.
“Yes. I do. You see…I hadn’t seen Stephen for so many years, since I’d lived at home with him and my mother. In those years so much happened. I have to go through the whole story in my head to try and get things straight. I need to get them out of my system.” She paused. “Being sent here means that you’re here to listen and I can do that. That’s true isn’t it?”
She looked directly at Evelyn, as if for confirmation that what she had pinned her hopes on was in fact real.
“Yes, that’s why I’m here. Tell me the whole story and then we can try and make sense of things.”
“I hoped you’d understand. I thought you would.” She paused for several minutes. Then: “I don’t know where to begin.”
Tess paused again. Evelyn felt that she was half-waiting for a question or a comment, some cue from her that would give Tess a clue about how to find her next step. Evelyn said nothing and waited. Minutes passed.
“I think I should begin at the beginning. Since I’ve been at the unit, I’ve thought such a lot about the past.” She paused, deep in thought. “I haven’t done that deliberately. Things have just come into my head as if I’ve turned a TV on and I’m watching a programme about me. I should begin in the past, as far back as I can go. I think that’ll help.” She paused again and continued:
“I was just thinking about what they used to do to me and how that made me who I was. I always felt like a victim to them, like they could do whatever they wanted to me and there was nothing I could do.”
As she spoke tears welled up in her eyes. After a moment’s hesitation they slid down her face and turned to moist patches on either side of her chin. She raised her hand and with the back of it wiped the moisture from her skin, still looking down to the floor and the patterned rug under her now sightless gaze.
“You’re remembering something painful,” Evelyn encouraged, risking the possibility that she had got the tears wrong.
“Yes,” came Tess’s reply. “I am. They tormented me, you know. They made me suffer. I know I didn’t deserve it, but they did it. Over and over again, every day of my life.”
Evelyn could see the distress on Tess’s face. It could be that tormenting Tess was a bonding, joint venture in Stephen and Irene’s attempt to find one another in a human relationship. These attempts were doomed to fail and every time they failed, Evelyn had no doubt that Stephen would try again and again to attract his mother’s attention and affection by tormenting his sister who was powerless to fight back. Evelyn believed that Irene Dawson was incapable of connecting to another person, even her own children. It was Tess who provided the convenient means for these repeated moments of attempted connection that they both yearned for. She was always there, the unwilling victim. Evelyn was beginning to believe that it must have driven Stephen to the very edge of despair to strive for love and warmth and for there to be none, just the promise of it, the hope that one day his mother would turn and hold him in a selfless embrace and make him feel warm and safe.
And what of Tess? What had this done to her? Tess must have lived in the hope that one day things would be different. She must have lived in the hope that her father would rescue her, although he never did. And when he finally left, all hope was lost. William Dawson, it seemed to Evelyn, was a shadow, a vague presence in the family, an ineffectual bystander on the periphery. Evelyn resumed her focus on Tess who was still looking at the rug, mulling over the meaning of her recent memories and wondering what to say next. Evelyn said:
“I think that the things you remember of what happened between you and your brother and mother are traumatic. Because of the constant process of traumatisation that you lived through, you automatically regard other people with mistrust whilst being highly dependent on them and vulnerable to them.”
Tess thought about this carefully. Everything Evelyn said had to be weighed up and evaluated. Tess thought about mistrust and whether she did, in fact, mistrust people. She thought first that she did the opposite, that she was always ready to trust and believe in other people, that she was naive, even gullible. But perhaps that was more in the hope that people would be trustworthy, that if she acted as if she trusted them, like a child, then they would be trustworthy and treat her well. When she looked back over her life she knew that this was not true, that people took advantage of this naivety and treated her badly, and used her. She was their victim because she wanted to believe so much that they would eventually treat her with respect and care. She felt that she had rarely been respected. Then she thought of Mr Muddiford. He had respected her and she could still remember how that had felt and how she had felt about herself. She thought of her mother and brother and what they had done to her and she remembered how that had felt and how it had made her feel about herself. Tess said:
“I think I trust people too easily when they aren’t trustworthy. I think I’m a bit naive and too open to other people. That would make me very vulnerable to them, I think. I always want them to be trustworthy but most times they aren’t. I never seem to learn. I always seem to be looking for someone to be nice and good to me and I always seem to get the opposite. I’m like a child who keeps on being badly treated and comes back for more. I seem to have this pathetic hope that it will change as if by magic.”
“I think that your insight about your childlike need to trust others is a good one. It leaves you unprotected and unrealistic about life in the adult world, prone to being hurt.”
Tess thought again about what Evelyn had said. Was it right or was it wrong? She waited. Yes, it was quite accurate. She could now see clearly that she was unrealistic about life in the adult world, as Evelyn had put it. Her hope that things would be alright as if by magic was sad and had left her exposed again and again to unwanted experiences that had harmed her. Her trip to Wales to see Stephen had been like that, a naive and foolish errand to do what her mother wanted her to do. It had nearly been the end of her. Trying to please her mother had brought her to the brink. The realisation of that was, in its own way, a trauma. She felt punch drunk for a moment and looked away from the session at the curtains, a small muted splash of colour in the cream room with the lamps on to lighten the dull and darkening day. It was raining now and there was a strange kernel of comfort in that fact that brought her back to herself. Unexpectedly, Evelyn broke into her thoughts and said:
“You seem upset by something.”
She thought with relief that in this room there were things that she couldn’t hide. She replied:
“Yes, I am.” She paused for some minutes. “I was thinking of trauma and vulnerability.”
After more minutes of silence, Evelyn Doyle indicated that the session was over and that they would meet again on Tuesday. Tess stood up, nodded at her and left the room.
Before she made her notes Evelyn considered the change in Tess’s mood after her intervention about childlike trust. Something had come into Tess’s mind, she thought, that she had found difficult and upsetting. It seemed to be concerned with trauma. It struck her that there had been a trauma that she was living with the effects of now and that trauma was almost certainly more recent than when she was a child. Perhaps this trauma went some way to explaining Tess’s silence for so many months. She knew she and everyone else wanted an explanation. She reminded herself that she was not a detective but even so, she had always liked the idea of being a detective and solving a puzzle. At the moment it somehow seemed easier and more exciting than sitting with a patient’s emotions and resistance, the things that they said and the things that they didn’t say. She crossed to the desk, file in hand, and began to write her detailed recollection of the session. This familiar and habitual task suddenly seemed like an unbearable chore. She thought of her coffee break and persevered.