8. Stoke-on-Trent, May
STOKE-ON-TRENT, MAY
About a month after I first started working for Anna, I began to be trusted with other jobs in her household.
They began as small favors, really: a request to print something out on the computer in her study.
To wait around and let a builder in, or to receive and then put away the luxurious groceries someone delivered every couple of days to the house, even when she was in London.
The menial tasks were not coordinated by Anna, but rather Clover, her PA, who was grounded at home with an ill child.
Clover thanked me profusely for helping her out.
Anna really likes you , she assured me over text. In a design meeting the other day she described a customer profile as edgy and cool. Sort of like Gus.
I replied with a single exclamation mark. The beat in my heart was running all over.
Speaking of customers , Clover continued, where are your invoices? Send them over or you won’t get paid!
When I ran into her, Anna seemed content with the quieter days she was spending at Bellinter, buried in her designs.
Bonamy was staying in London, but Anna said she was calmer, being away from the family home in London; there were fewer photographers and no social obligations to fake her way through.
As I worked out the rhythms of her working day, I adjusted my own schedule accordingly, sometimes walking Quill a little later in the hope of running into her as she returned home.
Depending on her mood, we might have a glass of wine together while she perched at the kitchen island, scrolling her iPad and monologuing about Mary or her lawyers, whom she was very critical of.
During those conversations, we slowly became closer, though, even when we chatted intimately, Anna’s tone could shift like quicksilver and she’d suddenly task me with something: Bin out; broccoli on.
Would you be an angel and shut off my machine?
Anna was paying for my obedience, so I had to bite my lip.
Like everyone else around her, I was obliged to agree with her on all matters.
Though it was exhausting, she always praised my candor.
Right up until the end, Anna used to say, You’re the only one who is honest with me.
The fact of it was, she hated to be told the truth about anything. I learned my lesson one crisp morning in May when we were out walking together.
“Can I ask you a question?” Anna asked. There was a bright sun overhead and a low mist lying upon the canal. Quill was trotting between us, his tail curled up like an aerial. I had run into Anna on my way out with him. At the last minute, she’d decided to join me. “A private question?”
My stomach always lurched when I heard that word, private . Still, I smiled cautiously, offering myself up to Anna’s needs.
“Always.”
“Have you ever done therapy?” She was breathing heavily.
“Couldn’t afford it,” I quickly answered, feeling my cheeks color. “Plus, it’s not really my thing.”
“What, speaking your feelings?”
“Having feelings.” I laughed.
“It’s bollocks, though, isn’t it?” Anna interrupted. “It’s not even a science. All this blaming other people for your problems; it’s just cowardice. I mean, my mother could be a perfect hag to me, but I recognize she was only ever doing her best.”
“It probably helps to talk about things openly—”
“Things you already know about, though,” said Anna, interrupting.
Little red flecks of bumpy skin had appeared on her neck above her Lycra sports vest: defensive colors, like a threatened lizard.
“You don’t go to therapy to uncover more bad crap.
You actively remember the bad things that have happened to you, right? ”
“Too readily,” I said, swallowing hard.
It was over a decade ago, yet the episode that got me kicked out of my school always hovered in my awareness.
The look of disgust on my parents’ faces.
I had risked their jobs. I had let them all down.
The sneer on Mr. Greening’s face as he described what I had done, and who I was, as unnatural.
The scene returned, often at night, in haunting detail, running through my mind like a black ribbon.
“I wish I could forget them,” I admitted.
“Precisely!” said Anna triumphantly. She gestured toward herself. “I was a female musician in the nineties. Some fucked-up things happened to me, and I recall plenty . If something that terrible happened to Mary—something dark —then we’d have known about it. She would have told me.”
Now, she claimed, they were going to try something different. A new strategy, to convince the courtroom that Mary was mad. Her legal team was seeking to organize a psychiatrist in the hope that Mary might allow herself to be assessed.
“A brilliant guy, ex–Home Office,” she gushed. “An independent expert in coercive control and ideological radicalization.” She saw it as key evidence for her case. “We’ve got to show the judge exactly what a fucked-up young woman Mary now is.”
“How is it independent, if you arranged it?” I was irritated by her elated tone, how she couldn’t see the irony in what she was trying to prove. Anna ignored me. “And what if they conclude that she’s flourishing? Living happily, or making good art?”
There was a pause. Anna turned and fixed me in a flinty stare. I immediately saw my error in challenging her, but I couldn’t back down, not when the point I was making felt so important. “That won’t happen.”
“Why not?” I countered.
“Because it’s not true.”
“But what’s this psychiatrist going to ask her?”
“It’s more that he observes. ”
I felt a squeezing in my chest. “Don’t you see how traumatizing the way you’re proceeding will be for Mary? Spying on her with private detectives, making out that she’s mad ?”
“I’m not implying she’s mad,” Anna retorted. “I’m proving it.”
“You’re pushing her further away!”
Anna made a frustrated noise and pointed. “Don’t you start this, too. Do you know how impossible it is to love someone and let them go?”
“Of course I do,” I muttered through gritted teeth.
“With respect, Gussie,” she sneered, “you don’t have the first idea. You’ve never had a child of your own. No. My daughter needs to know that I’ll fight for her.”
“But who knows? The sessions she’s undertaking, the search for self-improvement. Maybe it’s all just a phase?”
“You don’t know my daughter!” Anna cried. “This isn’t improvement and it’s not a phase. We’re not talking about her painting her bedroom black or getting one of her silly crushes on girls. She has a dangerous dependency on this woman.”
That phrase, silly crushes , irked me. My mind was still thinking of Mr. Greening. The frightening prospect of my own childless future. Quill pulled on the lead and I wrenched him harshly backward.
“But this is so public, Anna. You’ll humiliate her.
You’ll humiliate yourself. Just think, those lawyers will throw anything they like at you.
Accuse you of any number of things. I don’t understand why you won’t just settle it, like we discussed before.
There’s still time. It would be much smarter, especially if—” I paused.
This was delicate. Anna sat down on a nearby bench and leaned heavily on her elbows, knitting and unknitting her fingertips as I talked.
“If what?” She stared up at me. Her breathing had deepened, as if she was spooling for a fight. “We have nothing to hide,” she thundered. “Not me, not her father.”
I sat next to her, daring to rest a hand on her arm. “But every family has secrets. This whole ordeal will be so public. Aren’t you scared?”
“Of course, I’m terrified, Gussie!” Anna yelled, color blooming into her face as she got up and started walking.
“Of course we’re afraid of everything that will come out!
The witch records all sorts of collateral so she can blackmail people.
So, yes, I’m fucking terrified. And my whole career is probably on the line.
But you also know what? No secret is more important than bringing her home.
It’s worth it,” she said breathlessly. “My only daughter is worth it.”
A furious quiet hung between us. It stung to be shouted at, but it wasn’t Anna’s defensiveness that disturbed me most. It was her utter self-certainty.
I had never met anyone more obsessed with the maintenance of her public image, and yet she was willing to risk all of it.
Although we disagreed over her approach, I couldn’t help but admire her commitment, her maternal defiance.
We walked in silence for a while, and then I apologized, holding Anna lightly by the elbow.
“I wanted your advice, Gussie,” Anna responded, her mouth twitching with pain. “Your support. Not your judgment. ”
“I know,” I said soothingly. “And you know Mary better than anyone else.”
“Exactly.”
It was at that point that Anna abruptly stopped walking. Quill had made a mess. Anna stared pointedly toward the ground, then back at me. I squatted down as she looked away, her arms folded.
Weeks would pass before I dared to advise Anna again.