Page 6 of Pictures of Him

Sam and Greg are talking about me again, standing here, right in front of my chair, as if both of them have begun to believe that those who do not speak also cannot hear.

‘We can pinpoint the exact moment of dissociation,’ Greg says. ‘The question is, how much does she remember about what happened?’

Sam says, ‘You honestly think she doesn’t know?’

I don’t like the way his voice sounds; these words of his slither around the base of my stomach, they stick like an airlock in my throat.

‘Until she speaks to us or finds some other way to communicate, it’s impossible for us to be sure of what she does and doesn’t remember. This is all conjecture at the moment, but in cases such as these – and they are rare – the patient often wipes out the exact moment of trauma because they are unable to process it.’

‘It’s been almost three months, Greg.’

Sam’s voice is earnest, angsty, I can hear his frustration with the doctor. Why can’t you sort it out? That’s what he’s thinking. Why don’t you know exactly what’s wrong with her? Why can’t you fix it?

‘You’ve made your diagnosis, you’ve told us she has dissociative disorder. Why aren’t we seeing any improvement? Why doesn’t she want to get better? It’s as if she doesn’t care.’

‘Have you heard of la belle indifference? Freud again, he coined the term. He used it to describe people who apparently didn’t seem to care about their symptoms. But really this indifference is just another tool to avoid an unbearable feeling or memory. Catherine’s shutdown, if you like, is simply her means of forgetting what happened at Shute Park. And making sure it stays forgotten.’

‘So what now, Greg? What now?’

Sam’s voice is calm but his quiet anger is spray-painted on my brain.

‘Is she going to get better? Are you going to cure her?’

‘I know it’s frustrating, but right now we just don’t know what the outcome will be. The most important thing is that you don’t give up hope, Sam. And you have to give her more time. That’s the only thing you can do.’

After Greg leaves, I hear Sam sitting down in the chair next to mine and I know without looking that he is crying. He doesn’t bother to talk to me at first, none of his usual stream-of-consciousness chat, relentless and forced, an enormous effort for a man who was famed for his brevity. I almost forget that he’s there, it’s such a long time before he starts speaking again.

When I tune back in, I understand that he’s talking about a day at the beach last summer. Lulworth Cove, he says. The one with the cliff, the one with the famous door. Durdle Door. Jurassic arch. Geological wonder. There’s something in his voice as he says this and it takesme a while to work out what it is. Do I remember what happened that day, he’s asking, the last time we went there? He doesn’t mean the obligatory climb to get the best view of that ancient rocky door hooping up from the water, a Caribbean turquoise when viewed from the top. He doesn’t mean the little wooden dinghy we ended up buying, a small, shabby boat that captured all our hearts. He wants to know if I remember what came afterwards, and I do. The day when everything changed, the precise moment, as it turned out, when I was able to start working my way back to you.

Four months before: Catherine

Lulworth Cove, a day of endings and beginnings, though I don’t know that yet as we arrive at the famous shell-shaped beach, with its clear, brochure-blue water arcing into shore. Sam strides ahead, picking his way over buckets and pale English limbs, loaded up with backpack, hamper, rug and towels. We trail behind him, Joe with his earbuds in, not yet thirteen but already in every way a teenager; Daisy carrying books and buckets and the grubby, bobbly Eeyore that at nine she is really too old for. The minute we’re settled on a rug, on the furthest, loneliest corner of the beach, the kids race at full pelt into the water, diving beneath its surface and sending white jets of spray up into the air.

‘Go on,’ I say to Sam, who is sitting anxiously beside me, watching me rub suncream into my face, ‘go and swim.’

He hates sunbathing, sitting still a slow torture to him. What he likes is to swim out as far as he can, pushing himself harder and harder with his laboured crawl until he feels the blood pumping in his lungs. He likes to swim to the diving platform with Joe and dive over and over again into the cold, murky depths of the Channel. Or climb overthe rocks until he finds the perfect rock pool with Daisy, where they will lie on their stomachs waiting for crabs.

My eyes are shut, and I am drifting in and out of memories, good ones, perfect ones, when an ice-cold hand lands without warning on my stomach. I let out a tortured, horror-movie scream. It’s Sam, laughing as he squats down next to me and shakes drops of seawater from his thick black hair. Sometimes I think we’re more like siblings than anything else, just an older extension of Joe and Daisy. We are and we aren’t, I decide, as Sam slides briefly on top of me, trapping me beneath his cold, hard body, slipping one hand dangerously between my thighs.

‘Family beach,’ I say, pushing him off. ‘Daisy heading our way.’

We lunch in the sun on cheese rolls and crisps and little bottles of Orangina, and afterwards Sam forces us on a walk, right to the top of the cliff, where we’ll have a perfect view of Durdle Door. It’s an easy climb, ledges worn into a staircase over the years, and at the top a covering of grass that has been scorched of its greenness by our long summer of sun. We sit by a cluster of stones looking out at the sea and Sam takes two beer bottles from his pockets, a surprise, chipping off their tops cowboy-style against the rocks.

The beer is cold and I’m about to take a sip when he says, ‘Wait. A toast first. To your mum.’ He raises his bottle skywards, waiting for me to do the same.

‘To Mum,’ I say, checking myself for the ache that is always there.

It is fourteen years since she died, or fourteen years since she lived, whichever way you look at it a great biggap of missing and mourning, an absence, a silence that is louder in my head than anything else. I worry that my children are growing up without knowing anything about the grandmother they never met. They do not know, because I cannot bring myself to tell them, that her favourite flowers were peonies and when they were in season she gifted them to herself every week. Peonies and Rodin and Eau de Rochas perfume. Mozart and spaghetti vongole and tailored white shirts from Paul Smith (we found fourteen almost identical ones in her wardrobe after she died). Easy to list her loves, impossible to recount the loss, the moments I had with her, thousands and thousands of them stacked up and compressed into a flat little pillow of sadness.

My children, used to this sort of thing, to their father’s impromptu parental toasts, say nothing; they just stare out at the whirls of bright foam breaking at the shoreline.

Afterwards we go to look at the boat, an old-fashioned beauty painted white on the outside and sky blue within. She’s calledPandora, which wins Daisy’s heart immediately.

‘Best thing is to find a mooring at a lake near you,’ says the old boy who is selling her. ‘That way you’ll use her all the time.’

Pandorais more than we can afford, but Sam barters good-naturedly and the old man knocks off fifty pounds, and on the journey home, just over an hour in summer-holiday traffic, we talk of nothing else. Eventually Daisy falls asleep and Joe sticks his headphones on and Sam flicks through the radio channels, stopping when he finds a programme about beekeeping. He cocks his head to oneside, the way he does when he’s concentrating, and when I start to speak, he shushes me.

‘My God, you’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?’ I say, and he laughs and grabs my hand and doesn’t let go for the rest of the journey; even when he changes gear he takes me with him, up, across and down. So I stare out of the window at the colours and curves of the Dorset landscape, still new enough to hold my interest, shrugging myself into our regular country life, and I think that it’s really not so bad after all.

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