July 9, 2023
Well, I’ve spent the two days wondering if I’m brave enough, and it turns out I am.
I’ve just given my fake name to Olly’s receptionist, and now I’m sitting in his waiting room in Cambridge, impersonating his newest patient, Jenny Judge.
I liked the alliteration when I thought of the alias, and liked even more that the surname doubled as a declaration of intent.
I’m here to judge Olly. That’s stage two, though.
Stage one is persuading him to tell me the truth.
He works from a tall, rectangular house (I assume it was once a family home) called the Cedarwood Centre – yellow bricks, glossy black-painted door and windows – which sits set back from a busy A-road south of Cambridge city centre, behind a wall that looks much too small for the building that’s behind it.
Olly shares the centre with several other therapists, three of whose doors are visible from where I’m sitting, names and specialisms proudly displayed on brass plaques.
There’s an acupuncturist, a homeopath and a cranial osteopath.
Olly’s room must be on one of the higher floors.
Three little trees in pots stand beside the staircase’s glass banister, as if guarding it.
The whole reception area is full of greenery – large ferns, grey-green rubbery stalks, flat leaves like oversized hands with holes in them – and there’s a sharp gingery-orange smell coming from a reed diffuser on the reception desk.
I wonder if Olly comes down here to greet his clients or if I’ll be sent up to knock on his door when the time comes.
If I were a psychotherapist, I’d make the effort for a brand-new patient and come and collect them, escort them upstairs.
My guess is that’s what Olly will do too – he was always charming and polite – which means we’ll end up having the ‘Yes, it’s me, I lied about my name’ conversation in front of the receptionist. Shortly after that, I imagine I’ll be asked to leave.
There’s a chance I won’t get to see Olly’s therapy room at all.
No. He’d never throw you out, whatever you’d done. He loves you.
I’ve no idea why I’m so sure Olly’s feelings for me haven’t changed after more than a decade of no contact, but I am – and nearly as strong as my certainty is the fear that I’m about to find out I’m wrong.
I’ll love you for as long as I’m alive, Jemm. You know that, don’t you? I’ll never settle for anyone else. I’d rather be alone forever. That’s what he said the last time I saw him, immediately after I made him promise never to contact me again.
I used a fake name today not because I had to but because I wanted to, and my dishonesty doesn’t even begin to settle the score. For more than ten years, Olly has known how completely in the dark I am, and he’s left me there.
I hear footsteps on the stairs and a man appears: jowly, gangly and round-shouldered, eyes red and puffy. There’s a good chance that Olly has spent the last hour making him cry.
Eventually, I’m told to go up. ‘Mr Mayo’s name is on the door – he’s on the second landing.’
I expect my legs to feel wobbly and hollow once I’m on my feet, but instead a surge of energy launches me forward, and I have to stop myself from running, leaping up the steps two at a time.
What if …?
It won’t happen. For a second, I had a vision of Olly and me falling into each other’s arms.
Like I said: won’t happen. I hereby forbid myself to fall into his arms, even if they happen to be outstretched in my direction.
His door is open a little. I knock twice, then push it and walk in.
He’s writing something, leaning forward over his desk.
Everything feels suddenly magnified, louder, brighter.
Oh, my God, he’s still gorgeous: flawless skin, big brown eyes, beautiful glossy dark hair, cheekbones sharp as knife blades.
My stomach somersaults. He could easily pass for five years younger than he is, which I’m not sure is true of me and certainly isn’t true of Paddy.
Olly is dressed immaculately too: smart shirt, brilliant best-possible-summer blue, and grey trousers. I want to scream and run at him and hit him and … and …
I’m not going to do any of those things.
I might still be in love with him, but I’m also angry and I want answers.
And it’s probably not technically possible to be still in love with someone you haven’t seen or spoken to for so long.
It’s not that far removed from being in love with someone who doesn’t exist.
Without lifting his eyes from his paperwork, Olly welcomes me and tells me to take a seat.
‘Jenny Judge, isn’t it?’ he says.
I hope he doesn’t want a response. The sound of his voice has robbed me of mine, temporarily.
Finally, he looks up, and the change in his demeanour makes me want to cry. I have to dig my nails into my palms to make sure I don’t. It’s as if he’s just opened his eyes and realised he’s in heaven.
I am his heaven.
‘Jemma!’ he stammers. ‘I … I can’t … Can we … Jemma, I’ve got a client—’
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘I have.’ He frowns.
‘There’s no Jenny Judge. It’s me. I used a made-up name.’
‘Oh.’ I can’t blame him for needing to take a few moments to consider this. ‘Why?’
‘I wanted to talk to you. And I wanted to lie to you. So I did.’ Lowering myself into the armchair opposite his desk, I drop my bag on the floor and look around the room.
I don’t want to miss a single detail. The ceiling is high with lots of tiny lights embedded in it; there’s a brass dimmer switch near the door.
Tall lamps stand in two corners: one wooden, straight and tall with a square, grey shade; the other shiny metal with a forward-bending head, like a gold robot praying.
A large rectangular sash window takes up most of one wall.
The view is of a wide, white building across the road with excessive stucco curls protruding from its exterior, partly covered in builders’ scaffolding.
Behind Olly’s brown leather wing-back chair there’s a glass-fronted bookcase full of books about psychology and therapy.
He was always an obsessive reader. I still remember the titles of the four books he brought with him when he came with us to the Cotswolds for Christmas in 2005: Mr Wakefield’s Crusade, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, An Instance of the Fingerpost, and the weirdest one of all: Compositional Bonbons Placate.
At the centre of Olly’s therapy room is a large wooden desk with nothing on it but a small laptop and a boastful mug that reads: ‘As I Suspected, I Was Right About Everything’.
A small coffee table with a white marble-effect top and dark orange painted legs stands on a white rug that’s bunched up on one side.
No photos, I notice, thinking of Marianne’s eviscerated study and her claim that it had once contained lots of photographs of me.
I have no way of knowing if that’s true or not.
‘Jemma, I can’t be your psychotherapist.’ Olly’s voice cuts into my thoughts. ‘There are ethical—’
‘I’m not here for therapy.’
‘Oh. Then … I mean, you know what I’ll start to imagine if you sit there saying nothing for too long.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I tell him.
‘I’ll imagine that you’ve finally decided to leave Paddy. That you want to be with me. You’ve chosen me.’ His voice grows louder and more intent as he goes on. I’m relieved when he says more quietly, ‘But … I can see from your face that I’m wrong. That’s not why you’re here.’
That’s right. Not why I’m here. Good. Nothing scary is going to happen today, nothing irreversible, today or ever. It’s too late for me and Olly. It has to be.
‘So what do you want?’ he says.
‘You’d take me back, then?’ I ask, nervous even though I think … no, I’m sure I know what he’s going to say. ‘Even now?’
‘You know I would. I’ve never stopped loving you, Jemm.’
My heart wants to leap out of my body and dance around the room, bounce off the ceiling, in between the tiny star-stud lights.
‘Why haven’t you?’ I ask, determined that he shouldn’t have an easy time of it. ‘I chose Paddy over you, more than once.’
‘You were twenty-one,’ says Olly. ‘And you weren’t thinking straight.’
‘I was twenty-one the first time. Twenty-five the second time, twenty-seven the third.’ Only now does it occur to me that Olly might not think of it as three separate rejections.
Perhaps he sees my picking Paddy over him as a single event that went on and on.
There was the initial choice in 2006, then my unwillingness to end my marriage after my one-night stand with Olly in 2010.
Then in 2012, once Olly had been declared no longer ‘of interest’ in Marianne’s attempted murder case, he got in touch to tell me his feelings for me hadn’t changed, and to ask if I’d leave Paddy now.
If I would, he promised to love Lottie and take care of her as if she were his own daughter.
At that point, if I hadn’t been convinced he was withholding something about the night Marianne was attacked, I think I’d have said yes, but I wasn’t going to break up my daughter’s home for the sake of someone I believed was lying to me.
‘I’m thinking straight now,’ I say, not at all sure that’s true. ‘I need you to tell me the truth, Olly. About 2012. Was it you who tried to kill Marianne?’
His eyes dart to the left, then back to me. He’s clever enough to know that avoiding eye contact isn’t the way to quell my suspicions.
‘I know you’ve got no reason to believe me,’ I say, ‘but I swear I won’t tell anyone. I won’t go to the police. And I’d forgive you – you know I would.’
His eyes widen.
‘I hate her, Olly. If it weren’t for her, I’d have left Paddy years ago, when I decided I couldn’t bear not being with you for a single day longer.
It all kind of … erupted one day, all my unhappiness, and I ended up telling Marianne everything.
She kind of forced it out of me. And then …
I was so confused and felt so helpless for so long – as if I didn’t have the power to make anything happen at all, even in my own life.
And then before I knew it, I’d agreed to let Marianne send me and Paddy to a stupid posh hotel in London every Thursday for nearly a year. God!’
Olly shakes his head. ‘Thursday. My least favourite day of the week.’
‘Why?’
He seems reluctant to answer. Averting his eyes, he mutters, ‘There was a client I used to see every Thursday. Bit of a nightmare.’
Why did that sound so made-up? Is he lying?
‘Well, whoever he was, I’d rather spend my Thursday evenings with him than in that hideous hotel with Paddy,’ I say.
‘Marianne paid a fortune for it, and I hated it. Everything was maroon or purple or red. It was like spending the night inside an aneurysm. Dinner booked for us by Marianne at 7.30 in the blood clot restaurant – it wasn’t called that, but it was decorated like one.
She never asked us what time we wanted to eat, or if we might prefer to go to a different restaurant occasionally.
And we just … we accepted it.’ I look up at Olly.
‘I’ve never really understood why she was so relentlessly determined that our marriage had to work.
I’ve been thinking that you might understand it better than I do? ’
‘What do you mean? I’ve no idea.’ He’s clearly flustered by the question, wasn’t expecting it.
What magic combination of words might make a dent in his determination to keep whatever he knows to himself? ‘Olly, she told me you were the one who’d attacked her. “Oliver” – it was a whisper, but she managed to say your name very clearly.’
Olly shifts in his chair. Stares down at his feet. ‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Then, if that’s not the secret you’re keeping, what is?’
White patches have appeared on his cheeks. His Adam’s apple leaps up and down in his throat.
‘Now’s your chance,’ I tell him. ‘If you want me to leave Paddy, and for you and me to be together—’
‘Do you really mean it? Don’t …’ He stops and exhales slowly. ‘Please don’t say it unless you mean it.’
‘I have no fucking idea whether I mean it or not!’ I start to cry.
‘Just, please, tell me what you’ve been keeping from me all these years, you and your partner in deception.
And yes, I mean Marianne. I’ve worked it all out, Olly.
Well, not all, but enough. I know you and Marianne are in it together, whatever it is.
And … the next words out of your mouth had better be a full explanation of what you’ve been hiding, and why.
Start whenever you’re ready. I’m listening. ’