Finally, I stand in front of my near empty wardrobe and survey the result of all this effort. A pale pink Oxford shirt swings from the rail, a single black skirt, a navy fitted pinafore dress. On the floor in front of me, there’s a small pile of just about wearable underwear.
This is it. This is now the basis of my new wardrobe, my new identity and my new life.
I take a Post-it from the desk in the corner, write on it in bright red marker, and stick it on the corner of the wardrobe mirror.
‘Never be seduced by anything that isn’t first rate,’ it reminds me.
No, never again.
I’m on the train headed for Brondesbury Park to see my therapist. It’s my husband’s idea; he thinks there’s something wrong with me.
After we were married, I began to have recurring nightmares. I’d wake up screaming, convinced there was a man at the foot of the bed. The room would be exactly the way it was in waking life and then all of a sudden, he’d be there, leaning over me. I’d chase him away but he’d return every night without fail. After a while, my husband learnt to sleep through these nightly terrors, but when I started to cry during the day and couldn’t stop, he put his foot down. He explained to me that I had too many feelings and I’d better do something about it.
When I get to my therapist’s house, I ring the bell and am admitted into a waiting room, which is really part of a hallway with a chair and a coffee table. There are three magazines and have been ever since I started therapy two years ago: one House and Garden from spring 1997, and two copies of National Geographic. I can recite the contents of all of them. However, I pick up the copy of House and Garden and look again at the cottage transformed into a treasure trove of Swedish antiques using nothing but Ikea furniture and a few paint effects. I’m falling asleep when the door finally opens, and Mrs P asks me to step inside.
I take off my coat and sit on the edge of the daybed that is her version of a couch. The room is muted, sterile. Even the landscapes on the walls have an eerie calmness, like lobotomized Van Gogh’s – no wild, swirly, passionate mayhem here. I like to think that behind the glass door that separates her office from the rest of the house, there lies an explosion of primitive phallic art and dangerous modern furniture in a riot of vivid colours. The chances are slim but I live in hope.
Mrs P is middle aged and German. Like me, her fashion sense lacks a certain savoir-faire. Today she’s wearing a cream-coloured skirt with a pair of knee-highs, and when she sits down, I can see where the elastic pinches her leg, causing a red, swollen roll of flesh just under the knee. The German thing doesn’t help. Every time she asks me something, I feel like we’re enacting a badly-scripted interrogation scene from a World War Two film. This may or may not be the root of our communication problems.
I sit there and she stares at me from behind her square-rimmed glasses.
We’ve come to the impasse: part of our weekly routine.
I grin sheepishly.
‘I think I’ll sit up today,’ I say.
Mrs P blinks at me, unmoved. ‘And why would you like to do that?’
‘I want to see you.’
‘And why do you want to do that?’ she repeats. They always want to know why; there’s not really a lot of difference between a therapist and a four-year-old.
‘I don’t like to be alone. I feel alone when I’m lying down.’
‘But you’re not alone,’ she points out. ‘I’m here.’
‘Yes, but I can’t see you.’ I’m starting to feel really frustrated.
‘So,’ she adjusts her glasses further back on her nose, ‘you need to “see” someone in order not to feel alone?’
She’s speaking to me in italics, throwing my words back at me, the way therapists do. I won’t be bullied. ‘No, not always. But if I’m going to talk to you, I’d rather be looking at you.’ And with that, I push myself back on the daybed so that I’m leaning against the wall.
I start to pick at the bobbles in the white chenille throw that covers the bed. (I’m intimately acquainted with these bobbles.) Three or four minutes drag past in silence.
‘You do not trust me,’ she says at last.
‘No, I don’t trust you,’ I agree, not so much because I believe it to be true but because she says it is and after all, she is my therapist.
‘I think you need more sessions,’ she sighs.
Whenever I don’t do what she wants me to do, I need more sessions. There were whole months when I had to come every day. This is normally as far as we get; for two years we’ve been arguing about whether or not I should be allowed to sit up on the daybed. But today I have something to tell her.
‘I bought a book yesterday. It’s called Elegance.’
‘Is it a novel?’
‘No, it’s a kind of self-help book, a guide that tells you how you can become elegant.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘And what does “becoming elegant” mean to you?’
‘Being chic, sophisticated. You know, like Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly.’
‘And why is that important?’
I feel suddenly frivolous and girly – like a female member of the Communist Party caught reading an issue of Vogue. ‘Well, I don’t know that it’s important but it’s worth striving for, don’t you think?’ And then I spot her beige, orthopaedic sandals.
Maybe not.
I take another tack. ‘What I mean is, they were always pulled together, never unseemly or dishevelled in any way. Every time you saw them, they were perfectly groomed, faultlessly dressed.’
‘And is that what you would like, to be “pulled together, never unseemly or dishevelled in any way”?’
I think a moment. ‘Yes,’ I say at last. ‘I’d love to be clean and chic and not such a terrible mess all the time.’
‘I see.’ She nods her head. ‘You are not clean. That makes you dirty. Not chic. That makes you unfashionable. And a terrible mess. Not just a mess, but a terrible mess. So, you feel you are unattractive.’
She makes everything sound so much worse than it is.
Still, she has a point.
‘Well, no, I don’t feel very attractive,’ I admit, wincing inwardly as I say it. ‘The truth is, I feel the opposite of attractive. Like it doesn’t matter what I look like.’
She peers at me over the top of her glasses. ‘And why doesn’t it matter what you look like?’
A thick wave of unconsciousness swims up to meet me. ‘Because … I don’t know … because it just doesn’t matter.’ I try unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn.
‘But surely your husband notices,’ she insists.
I wonder what she means by ‘notices’. Is this some kind of euphemism? Does her husband ‘notice’ her in her knee-highs and skirt?
‘No, no he’s not that way,’ I explain, pushing the unwelcome vision of them ‘noticing’ each other from my mind. ‘He’s really not interested in that sort of thing.’ My eyelids are at half-mast now; it feels like they weigh a ton.
‘And what sort of thing is that?’
‘I don’t know … bodies, appearances, clothes.’
‘And how does that make you feel?’ she persists. ‘That he is not interested in your body, your appearance, or your clothes?’
I think for a moment. ‘Tired,’ I conclude.