Today is a special day as Simone and I are preparing to walk down the lane, not back to the village but away where it will be quiet. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring but I am pleased with my progress. It’s enough that I am here and that I trust Dr Gilbert. Anyone would trust a man like him, wouldn’t they? And, after many sessions, during which we have been peeling back the years, I have started to knit my life back together. I do some work in my garden now. Only a bit of weeding and pruning but it makes me so happy I could weep for joy.
I cannot leave the doors unlocked, not yet, for fear that what is outside will worm its way inside and I will lose my sanctuary. Dr Gilbert would prefer me to work in the back garden while leaving the back door open, so I can observe if anything were to happen. But I worry something will sneak in, then fill up every nook and cranny of my home and I will not be strong enough to prevent it. I tell him it is my nightmare to be left alone and unprotected from all that is out there with no safe haven.
Nevertheless, I am improving. As well as encouraging me to take small steps beyond the house, he is also reducing the amount of medication I take, and I do believe there is a real chance I may one day be well again. We talk about everything, the doctor and I, including my shame over Douglas’s unfaithfulness in Burma. Up until now I’ve only dared share this with Simone, always told myself not to think about it. But how can you not think about something when it’s always there? For several of our meetings Dr Gilbert encouraged me to talk about what it had felt like. I knew, of course – the hurt, the fury, the impotence. At first, I was unwilling to say so, it seemed a weakness to confess, but when I finally did, I cried and cried. And when it was all over, and I dried my eyes, the shame had lifted as if by magic and I realized the true weight of the burden I’d been carrying.
As if a light had come on in my mind, I also came to see the shame should have sat fairly on Douglas’s shoulders and not on mine. But when we lived in Burma, if a husband strayed it was seen as the wife’s fault for not keeping her husband happy, and if he strayed while she was pregnant, well … men would be men. No wife ever spoke of feeling hurt or betrayed.
What interests me most about this process is the way the doctor asks me how I felt about something. Nobody has ever asked me how I’ve felt before, not even when I was a child or later when my mother died of the terrible influenza. Although I think my parents loved me in their way, as an only child I spent most of the time with my nanny. It was never my mother who comforted me when I fell and grazed my knee, or when I was sick and confined to bed. I only ever saw her for special outings, or when I was freshly bathed at the end of the day and dressed in my starched white nightdress and Nanny would bring me down to the drawing room to say goodnight.
Dr Gilbert even asked me what I would have said to my parents if I could have. I remained silent, but I knew. Love me, I would have said. Love me. But I didn’t want to say, didn’t want to make a fool of myself by weeping again. He asked how I had felt about the lack of love and I was shocked at how little I could really remember. I told him I had been loved. Nanny had loved me. The doctor suggested I visit my father as soon as I feel up to it and I might. Maybe there is a way to repair the sadness of the past. I should make the effort. It has been too long, though he writes a few times a year and I have invited him to stay at my cottage.
Ever since then I have been remembering more and more. And now, of course, I feel a devastating guilt in the pit of my stomach that my daughter, Annabelle, has experienced the same lack of love at my hands. I think of her jade-green eyes and coppery hair and realize I am missing her so much. He says we will talk of Annabelle soon and, although I’ve come to see how these sad and shameful things are better out in the open, I’m fearful too. The doctor tells me that when we do not face our inner darkness it has the power to make us very sick indeed.
So, because of all this, hard though the unravelling has sometimes been, my life has begun to feel real again. I have started to become real again and my heart swells with courage.
And now I must get ready for our walk. Simone has described it all. First, we shall walk uphill a little and then we will turn right and go down past the church and churchyard, through the remains of Minster Hall, and from there to the riverbank. She says it is a short distance and we shall be alone in the beautiful, comforting peace of nature. The doctor says nature heals, and I believe him.