Her therapist
‘I used to draw pictures,’ Clara says. ‘Of strangers.’
There’s a dreamlike quality to her voice, as if she’s remembering something that doesn’t feel real.
Anita leans back in her chair. ‘Why?’ she asks.
‘Restless hands, I guess.’
Anita gives her that look that says: I’m going to need an actual answer.
‘I liked it,’ Clara sighs. ‘And I guess I was making a point. That everyone’s up for interpretation. That we’re always being watched. Our whole lives have an audience, but everyone sees everyone differently. Which is your true self? The one you see, or the one other people see?’
‘Which is it for you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Clara says. ‘I haven’t felt like myself in a long time.’
Another look. This one says: go on.
‘I used to like being alone,’ Clara says. ‘Now I’m never alone. Always playing the role of me. I belong to other people, now. To the viewers. To—’ Her eyes flicker downwards. ‘You’re the lead in your own life,’ she says. ‘Until you’re not.’
Clara is chewing her hair, something she does when she knows she’s letting her guard down.
In these moments, it’s easy to see the teenage her, which is her at her most vulnerable, or at least as vulnerable as she’ll ever be in front of Anita.
When they first spoke on Zoom last winter, Clara’s hair was cut dramatically short.
Now it’s growing back, Anita can almost see the woman that Clara was before.
She makes jokes, now. Just recently, she said that the worst thing about being pregnant was that she hadn’t been allowed to use peroxide, that she’d had to let her natural colour come out.
Another of her favourites: I should have stuck to working with puppets.
‘And that’s why you’re doing it?’ Anita asks.
‘I’m doing it because it’s my job.’
‘You don’t think it’s too soon?’
Clara stops chewing her hair. ‘It’s a movie,’ she says. ‘They come and they go.’
‘What about—?’
‘I had a life,’ Clara says, firmly. ‘Before.’
‘I understand,’ Anita responds. ‘But moving to Italy?’
‘For a few months.’
‘You’re not running away?’
Clara starts chewing her hair again. ‘What would I be running away from?’
It was Clara’s sister who recommended she see a therapist. Clara didn’t see the point, but back then she didn’t see the point in anything.
She arrived on Anita’s screen, and later in her Harley Street office, like a fog of existential malaise, gathering such gloom that Anita almost felt the need to crack a window.
Here was a woman in crisis. Here was a woman Anita could help.
‘And where is Nora in all this?’
Clara’s daughter is exactly where she always is: attached to her mother, clinging on with a grip so tight that it looks like it might tear the fabric of Clara’s linen shirt.
Clara is the first to admit that parenthood hasn’t come naturally to her.
She still treats Nora like a stranger with whom she is forced to make conversation, a guest who has overstayed their welcome.
She told Anita that she wasn’t meant for this, that she’d assumed it couldn’t happen.
She’d tested late. She was indecisive, even before the baby.
She’d once wanted this, or had at least tried to convince herself that she did.
Listlessness made it too late to change anything.
Clara had been three months pregnant when the world went into lockdown, and as countries across the globe began to blink out like lights on a switchboard, she was dimming, too.
Cee had moved her sister in with her own family, found her support groups that eventually helped kick her habits.
As Clara gave birth to the little girl who would become Nora, it was Cee who’d held her hand.
‘Do you think of harming the child?’ Anita had asked, on that first call, because she’d had to.
‘No,’ Clara had said, and it had seemed like she meant it. ‘But I’d be fine if she just… went away.’
Back then, while the country was singing sea shanties and sailing straight into lockdown round two, Clara told Anita that she felt like she was drowning.
Nora’s sleep began terribly and got even worse, regression piled on top of regression.
Clara had insisted on returning to her own flat, and no support bubble could carry her through this.
After Clara had stopped sleeping, she’d stopped eating, and after she’d stopped eating, she’d stopped crying.
She’d dissociate to the sound of white noise blaring through speakers while Nora writhed at her feet, clinging to the legs of her jeans and craning her livid red face upwards, screaming at the injustice of not being held by a woman whose arms were in tatters and whose brain was sliced to ribbons.
On Anita’s screen, Clara sobbed childlike tears.
She said that she couldn’t look after herself, let alone a baby.
She longed for an umbilical cord of her own.
‘Blink and you’ll miss it,’ well-meaning old ladies would say to Clara in cafés, when the world began to open up again.
If Clara used to be spiky, this had made her downright terrifying. ‘I’m blinking,’ she’d reply, a milk-white splotch on her shoulder, purple bags under her eyes. ‘I’m not missing a thing.’
Some things take an army. Making a film.
Raising a child. Nora is sixteen months old now, and those solitary days have left their mark.
She sticks to her mother, finds it hard not to share the same space.
Anita is glad that Clara still comes to these sessions.
That she’s accepting her sister’s help again.
Who else can she turn to? She has told Anita about the friends she’s lost along the way.
Maisie, bundled out of a Hyde Park hotel by heavy-handed security guards.
Ren, left crying in the rain outside an Amsterdam auditorium.
Neither of them knows about Nora. Cee is a force of nature, and has done her best to shelter Clara from the prying eyes of the world.
But people will talk, when Clara comes back out into the open.
Ever since The Sons, she’s been pulled apart between gossip blogs and sanctimonious rebuttals.
Everyone knows a different version of the story. No one knows Clara’s.
‘If I’m not working, I’ll always be what they say I am,’ she says, to Anita, now. ‘The director who had an affair with her star. All the work, all the awards, everything I sacrificed and poured into that film, and all I have to show for it is a bunch of headlines calling me a whore.’
Clara will not be a victim. Jacob didn’t make her do anything.
She wasn’t even going to tell him about the baby, but Anita had advised one short conversation.
Though Clara never shared with Anita exactly what went down that day in Battersea, it’s clear she came away with the closure she needed.
Nora’s father hasn’t been mentioned since.
‘That’s not all you have to show for it.’
Where is Nora in all this? They both look down at the little girl, who is busy buttoning and unbuttoning the chest of Clara’s shirt.
Clara seems momentarily ashamed, either at her language or at something larger.
She raises a stiff finger to one of Nora’s tiny ringlets, and as she does so, they talk about how the girl will adapt to being away, on a film set, far from the security and the routine she holds so dear.
It’s like Clara hadn’t even considered that Nora would have to come with her.
Anita sees the idea creating a frisson of panic behind Clara’s previously fierce eyes.
A film crew’s prying eyes upon her daughter.
Whispers about the girl’s unruly tangle of conspicuously ginger hair.
So, Anita takes calming measures. She asks not what Clara dreads, but what she’s excited about.
‘Filming at Cinecittà,’ Clara says, without hesitation. ‘It’s always been a dream of mine.’
Clara is happiest when she’s talking about directing.
She has told Anita that her most sacred time is spent on the storyboards, which she draws herself.
Peaceful days of turning her words into exact images, costumes and sets and close-ups all configured in her mind’s eye.
The script changes entirely at this point.
These images become her bible. The work itself, Clara says, is all angles, all repetition.
She spends her life studying masters, overs, closers, and in that same way she’s become an expert at studying her own life in retrospect, replaying everything from all angles.
She zooms in on her mistakes, repeats them over and over in her head. One gets more screentime than the rest.
‘Do you still draw?’ Anita asks her. ‘Not storyboards. People.’
Clara smiles sadly. ‘Who has the time?’
‘We could find the time.’
‘I try, sometimes,’ Clara says. She adjusts her daughter on her knee. ‘I always end up staring at a blank page.’
They’re still searching for the old Clara.
They try things like this: a thought exercise, useful for a client who loves to talk while hiding the things she really wants to say.
Anita asks Clara to indulge her, to excuse her for being morbid.
Imagine you were in an accident, she says.
Imagine you were in a coma, and you woke up in hospital after a while.
You’re in a ward, flooded with dappled sunlight.
You’re safe, you’re well, and you look to the door. Who do you see walking through it?
Clara’s answer is progress in itself.
‘Nora,’ she says.
Nora has only just started walking. She’s still unsteady on her feet.
Anita adjusts the question: who’d be holding Nora’s hand?
This one takes a little longer. The thin curtains flutter gently, the light on Clara’s lap undulating as she twists the rings on her thin fingers.
Then she gives an answer, and the answer leads Anita to a question she’s been waiting to ask for a while.
‘Who is Seb?’