Chapter 4
Dr. Sorel's Chair
Dr. Miriam Sorel kept two chairs in her consulting room. In thirty years of practice she had never let anyone tell her which one was hers.
They stood on either side of a low table in the bay window of a Georgian house on Pellam Street, a quarter of a mile up from the Infirmary. They were two identical armchairs in worn green corduroy, angled toward each other so that neither person faced the other directly and both could look out at the street. She said it made things easier to say. Nobody likes being stared at while they're being truthful, she had told him at the first appointment, in January. We do it better side by side, like people on a train.
He had chosen the chair nearer the door. She said nothing. He chose it again the next week, and the week after, and by the third time he understood that his choice was being noted.
It was five o'clock on Friday and the rain had come back. It ran down the long window in thin braided strands, and the street beyond was a smear of wet slate and brake lights. A gas fire hissed. On the table stood a box of tissues, a carafe of water, and a small brass bell that she had never rung and that he had decided was a joke.
"You've been quiet," said Dr. Sorel.
"I'm always quiet."
"No. You're always careful. It's different." She was fifty-eight, with a short silver bob, a long, humorous face and glasses on a chain. She spoke in a low, even, slightly dry voice, like a good radio announcer reading the shipping forecast. She never took notes in front of him. She wrote afterward, he supposed, in a locked room, in small neat handwriting. "Today you're being quiet. You've sat on the edge of the chair."
"I'm going away tomorrow."
"I know. You told me last week. You said you hadn't decided."
"Helen decided."
"Did she?" Her pen wasn't in her hand, but the question had the shape of one. "And what was it like, to have it decided for you?"
He looked at the rain. It was a good question, and he hated it. "Restful," he said at last. "It was restful. Isn't that terrible?"
"I don't think it's terrible. I think it's informative."
"Of what?"
"That you're tired of deciding things." She let it sit. "Callum. How have you been sleeping?"
"Three hours. Four, last night."
"That's better."
"It's a start."
"And the other thing?"
He didn't answer at once. The gas fire popped. Without meaning to, he turned his right ear toward her, the good one, and was aware of her noticing.
"The key," said Dr. Sorel gently.
It was the first thing he had told her, and he hadn't meant to.
In the second session, in January, with the rain doing exactly what it was doing now, he had found himself describing the sound of the lock. A small, particular sound: the click and turn of the Chubb lock on the third-floor landing, followed by the soft thump of a bag being put down. He had been sitting on the sofa with the television off. And he heard it. He heard it so clearly that he stood up and walked to the door before he understood what he was doing.
It was about six, he said. It's the time she came in.
And what did you find?
Nothing. The landing. The light on its timer.
What did you feel?
That I'd made a fool of someone.
He thought she would be alarmed. She wasn't. She listened to the whole account, the key, the faint presence at the edge of the kitchen, the smell of the soap she used on the pillow once, a week in December, with the same patient attention she gave to everything. At the end she said, This is very common.
Is it?
It's the most common thing in the world. I'd be more worried if it didn't happen. She adjusted her glasses. The mind doesn't know she's gone, Callum. It only knows she's in a different room. Part of you is still waiting for her in the old places. It keeps the schedule. At six, the key. At seven, the kettle. It isn't madness. It's loyalty.
To his surprise he found he was crying. She pushed the tissues an inch toward him with one finger and looked out of the window.
"No key this week," he said now.
"Good."
"Not since Tuesday."
"And Tuesday?"
"Just the once. I was washing up. I thought I heard her in the hall." He rubbed his thumb across his knuckle. "It was the pipes."
"It's usually the pipes."
"Dr. Sorel."
"Miriam."
"Dr. Sorel." It was a small private ritual, his refusal to use her name. "Can I ask you something and have you not write it down?"
"I never write anything down in front of you."
"You think it afterward."
"That," she said, with the ghost of a smile, "is allowed."
He looked at his hands. In the green chair, in the gas-warm room, with the rain sliding down the glass, he felt the question rise in him, the one he hadn't asked in January or February or March. He put it as plainly as he could. "If I saw her. Not here. Not in the flat. Somewhere I wasn't expecting. A stranger. If I saw someone who looked like her, and for a moment it felt completely certain. What would that mean?"
She was quiet.
"It would mean," she said slowly, "that you're a grieving man in a city full of faces."
"That's not an answer."
"It's a partial one. Here's the rest." She turned her chair a few degrees toward him, which she didn't usually do. "The brain is a pattern machine. It's extremely good at faces, better than almost anything else it does. It has a special place for them. When it has lost one, it does what any frightened thing does. It reaches too far. It offers you the nearest likeness and it offers it with all the old feeling attached, so that for an instant you aren't seeing a stranger. You're recognizing her." She spread her hands. "Psychologists have a long name for it. Bereaved people call it a Tuesday."
"So it happens."
"It happens to a great many people. Usually in the first year. Usually at a distance, at a bus stop, across a street. The person turns, the likeness melts away, and there's a brief awful lurch." She looked at him with her level, kind, unsurprised eyes. "I want you to understand that this isn't a sign of illness. It's the shape of loving someone. But I'd also like you to be careful."
"Careful how?"
"By not accepting every offer." She said it gently. "The mind will give you faces. It will give you the sound of a key and a figure in a doorway. It means it kindly. But you don't have to follow it. When it happens, you stop where you are, you breathe, and you say to yourself, this is my grief, and it's trying to help. And you don't cross the street."
"And if I do?"
"Then you do," said Dr. Sorel. "And you tell me about it afterward. I'm not a policewoman."
He almost laughed. "You know about my mother."
It wasn't a question and she didn't treat it as one. His GP had sent the referral in January with a short, tactful, tired letter. Attached to it, because the practice was old and thorough and kept its paper, was a single photocopied page from a hospital file twenty-four years old. He had never read it. He remembered the substance clearly. His mother had died in March, when he was nineteen, of something quick in the lungs, in the winter of his first year at art school. And for the best part of two weeks afterward he saw her at bus stops.
Not a likeness. Her. Her gray coat, her green headscarf, the way she stood on one foot. He crossed three roads against the lights. He followed a stranger for a mile in the rain and put a hand on her arm. She turned, and she was someone else, a frightened woman with a toddler. He stood in the street with his hand out and understood, for the first time, with his whole body, that he was ill.
They kept him nine days. It passed. It passed completely, and he finished his degree and grew up and met a woman who laughed in threes, and in twenty-four years he never told anyone.
"I read the page," said Dr. Sorel. "It was a short one. A reactive episode, passed by itself, no relapse. I'd say it tells us you're someone whose mind is capable of this particular kindness. And that it was handled well before." She paused. "It doesn't tell me you're in danger."
"But you'd keep it in mind."
"I keep everything in mind. It's my trade." She smiled. "Will you tell me one more thing? Because I think it's the thing you came to say."
He turned his head and looked at her.
"The night," she said. "You've told me about the quarrel. You've told me about the telephone call from the sergeant. But you've told me nothing about the hours in between. Not once, in four months. Where were you between half past six and ten past two?"
The rain ran down the window.
"At home," said Callum.
It came out smoothly. It came out the way it had come out for the sergeant, in November, on the plastic chair, and on a dozen other occasions: quickly, flatly, in a voice of complete certainty. It was the one sentence he had never had to practice. It was simply there, whole, like a stone in a pocket.
"At home," she repeated.
"I had a drink. I went to bed."
"Mm."
"I don't remember much." The words came slowly. "It's a blur. I was drunk. I'm not proud of it."
"I'm not asking for pride." She didn't move. She watched him with that steady, mild attention he had come to dread, and which he suspected, with the part of him that read surfaces, was the only truly careful thing in the room. "But I think the blur matters to you. I think you've been standing at the edge of it for six months."
"It's nothing."
"Is it?"
"It's a gap. Everyone has gaps."
"Of course they do." She turned her chair back to its old angle, as if letting him go. "Then we'll leave it. Go to Carrow. Give your speech. Eat your fish." The gas fire hissed. "And if you see something that looks like a ghost, Callum, remember what we said. This is my grief. It's trying to help. You don't cross the street."
"And if I do?"
"Then ring me," said Dr. Sorel, "from wherever you are."
He stood outside for a while on the wet steps with his collar up, watching the traffic on Pellam Street.
It was nearly six. The buses had their lights on. People went by in the rain with their faces tipped down: a woman with a pram, two students sharing an umbrella, a man in a postal uniform eating something out of a bag. He watched them go. He did what he had done at every bus stop in Halvern since November. He looked at each woman's face as it came toward him out of the weather, quickly, and then looked away, the way you touch a burn.
None of them was her.
Of course not, he thought. She's dead. I identified the ring.
He said it to himself aloud, once, under his breath, in the rain. Then he went down the steps and across the road and didn't look back at the window. Behind the glass, in the green chair, a woman with a silver bob sat quite still with her glasses in her hand, writing something down.