“I can’t tell you the difference it’s made to me knowing that I didn’t kill Stephen. A huge, threatening weight’s been lifted off my shoulders.”
Tess sat in the session in her usual chair, facing Evelyn. She’d spent the last two days digesting the new information that Evelyn had disclosed to her and felt, in turn, liberated and exhausted. After, she’d retired to the potting shed, excusing herself to Ted who had been expecting her to work in the garden for the rest of the day. She sat on the old gardener’s bench facing the sun as it moved low in the winter sky, watching the birds searching for food. She’d always meant to put up a bird feeder to help them out in the winter months but had never got round to it. She remembered making a cursory mental note but was unmotivated, preoccupied by the recent tumultuous turn of events. The uncomfortable mixture of relief and guilt that she’d identified persistently nagged at her mind. The conflict had gradually calmed itself with the passing hours, but sitting that late morning in the potting shed the conflict was in full cry.
Nothing could have prepared her for this bolt from the blue. For the best part of a year she had been trying to come to terms with what she believed she’d done and reviling herself for it. She watched Ted hoeing the vegetable beds, then amble over to the array of compost heaps, remove the old carpet covers and examine closely what lay beneath them. He seemed unusually relaxed. Perhaps he was simply enjoying the easy-going pace of winter when what needs to be done in the garden is unhurried. She was fortunate that Ted seemed to know when she needed her space in the shed, that he was sensitive to her and accepting of her moods. He stood and pressed his hands into the small of his backwardly arching back, turned and looked towards her. He waved when he saw her watching and resumed his work.
She looked up, still thinking about the garden and then remembering where she was and how she wanted to use the session. Evelyn smiled at her.
“Now I’m free of Stephen I want to talk about Rachel. It’s hard to know how to start. I’ll just jump in and see where it goes. I came back from West Wales after what I thought was killing Stephen. I was in a strange state of mind, guilt and relief, replaying what had happened, wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t hit him. I was getting nowhere, going round in circles. I can remember going out into the garden and spending maybe two, three hours there, getting cold but enjoying the fresh air. It made me forget, just for a minute or two at a time.
I started thinking about Rachel, something I usually tried not to do. I let her lie. It was weirdly comforting knowing she was there. But I began to think about her and what she’d meant to me for those brief days and weeks when she was alive. I loved her, yes, like I’d never loved anyone before. But it was more than that. When she was alive I found her fragility and vulnerability almost unbearable. It would be so easy to do her damage from which she’d never recover. And she’d be helpless and powerless to stop it happening. I found that the most painful thing to live with, every time I looked at her.”
She stopped, distressed.
Evelyn watched her and her descent into the past. After several minutes she said:
“I think that your feelings about Rachel are important. It seems to me as if you were projecting something of yourself onto her, your own fragility and vulnerability, your own fears about being damaged, your inability to recover from what happened to you in the past. You were helpless and powerless in relation to your mother and Stephen. And that was what changed in West Wales. You stopped being helpless and powerless. I can understand why you could face Rachel again and bear her fragility and vulnerability. You were strong enough. You were able to go down to the cellar and dig her out of her grave.”
Tess looked up. After many minutes she said: “Yes” and then asked, mostly to herself:
“But why did I bury her? When she died, why did I bury her?” She was struggling.
“You said before that you found it weirdly comforting knowing that she was buried in the cellar. Perhaps you couldn’t bear to let her go. But perhaps more likely you weren’t ready to let her go because there was something more that she meant to you that you didn’t understand at the time.”
“I can see now that she was sort of part of me, fragile and vulnerable. Were bad things done to me at the age Rachel was when she died? Perhaps that was what was so unbearable. I wasn’t ready to look at that in myself. Now I’ve begun to and the shock of what happened with Stephen made that possible. In more ways than one. But most of all, Rachel made it possible when she died and set this whole process in motion. And then meeting you here and doing this work. How amazing it is to look at all of this in this way.”
She looked up again and smiled at Evelyn. There was a look of intense relief on her face. Evelyn said:
“I agree with you, that sometimes things work themselves out in the most unexpected way. We don’t always know how or why, we just follow our instincts. Burying Rachel in the cellar was true and prescient of you for all the reasons we’ve talked about. Somewhere you knew what you were doing.”
There was little more to be said.