The Other Side of the Screen - part 11

The waiting room is painted with the colour of calm.

She recognises the intention behind it... the soft sage green, the low lighting, the chair that is comfortable without being that comfortable you might fall asleep, the small waterfall feature on the side table making its gentle, deliberate sound. Everything in this room has been chosen to say: you are safe here, you can say things here, nothing you say here will be used against you.

She sits with her hands folded in her lap and her coat still on, which she is aware says something about her, and she thinks about leaving.

The door opens and the therapist appears. Lizzie's first thought is that she is younger than she expected... mid-forties perhaps, dark hair cut practically short, wearing the kind of unassuming clothes that are designed not to distract. Her second thought is that her eyes are the kind that take things in without appearing to.

"Lizzie? I'm Dr. Ashworth. Sarah." A warm, unhurried handshake. "Come through."

The room is an extension of the waiting room's philosophy. Two chairs are angled slightly towards each other. Centrally there's a low table with a box of tissues placed with careful casualness. A window with the blinds half-drawn stares into the grey March light. No desk between them. No barrier.

Lizzie sits. She keeps her coat on for another ten seconds and then takes it off, because keeping it on any longer would be too much of a statement.

"Thank you for coming," Sarah says, settling into her chair with the ease of someone who has sat in it ten thousand times and is still entirely present in it. "I know it takes something, the first time."

"It takes quite a lot, actually," Lizzie admits, and then immediately worries this sounds like a complaint.

Sarah smiles.

"Good. That's an honest answer. I'd rather have honest than comfortable." She pauses. "Before we start... just so you know how I work. Nothing you say leaves this room. Not to your husband, not to anyone. What you tell me is yours. I'm not here to make judgements or take sides. I'm just here to help you find out what you think." Another pause. "Does that feel all right?"

"I think so," Lizzie says.

"You don't have to be sure yet." Sarah picks up a notepad, sets it in her lap without opening it. "Let's start simply. How are you feeling, right now, in this chair?"

Lizzie looks at her hands.

"Exposed," she says. "Like I'm about to say things out loud that I've only... things that have only ever been in my head. And once they're out I can't..." She stops.

"Can't put them back," Sarah says.

"Yes."

"That's a very accurate description of what this is." Sarah's voice is even, slow-paced, the verbal equivalent of the room. "Let's go gently, then. Tell me, in your own words and in whatever order feels natural, what's brought you here."

Lizzie tells her about the affair first, because it feels like the only honest place to start, the wound that precipitated everything. She tells it plainly, without excessive detail, watching Sarah's face for the flicker of judgement she is braced for. It doesn't come. Sarah listens, makes a note or two, and when Lizzie has finished there is a brief silence.

"When you say affair," Sarah says carefully, "can you help me understand what that looked like?"

"It was online. We never... we were never in the same room. We never even... it was video calls. Chat." She pauses. "And photographs."

"Intimate photographs?"

"Yes."

"How long did it go on?"

"Only seven days," Lizzie says with particular emphasis as if the low number somehow makes it less of a betrayal. She watches Sarah absorb this. "I know... It sounds... I know how it sounds."

"How does it sound?"

"Like it can't have been significant. Like it was just... a fling. A mad digital... something. Not worth all of..." She tries to minimise it even more, gesturing vaguely at the room, at the situation.

"Was it significant?"

The question sits there, simple and without obligation.

Lizzie hesitates, visibly nervous, her gaze alternating between the window and the library on the opposite wall.

"Yes," Lizzie confesses quietly. "It was the most significant thing that's happened to me in years. Which I know makes it sound worse."

"It doesn't make it sound worse," Sarah reassures her. "It makes it sound like something worth understanding." She makes a small note. "Can you tell me something about how it started? Not the mechanics of it, but... what you were feeling before it began."

And this is where it begins to open.

Slowly, reluctantly, with the frequent friction of someone who has been trained to minimise, Lizzie talks about the loneliness. Not the affair-loneliness, the precipitating loneliness, the loneliness that had been there before Michael and would, she supposes, be there after. The loneliness of the flat and her brainless job and the four walls and the invariable years. The particular loneliness of being alone inside a marriage.

"Tell me about your day," Sarah says. "A typical day."

Lizzie describes it. The data entry. The flat. Don leaving and the door closing and the silence that follows. The hours that are all the same. The work that is not what she imagined her working life would look like.

"What did you imagine it would look like?" Sarah asks.

And here is the first moment when Lizzie hesitates.

"I was studying," she says. "Before. Geology. I wanted to specialise in gemmology... precious stones. I've always loved them. The way they're formed, the way they hold light, the... " She stops. "It's silly."

"It doesn't sound silly. It sounds like something you cared about very much."

"I gave it up," Lizzie says. "When I moved in with Don. I was twenty." She pauses. "He was twenty-five, already working, he had his flat. And it just seemed... he said it made more sense. Practically. The commute would have been difficult, and we wanted to be together, and he said I could always go back if I really..." She trails off.

"But you didn't go back," Sarah says.

"No."

"Did you try?"

A longer pause.

"I mentioned it a few times," Lizzie says carefully. "Early on. But it never seemed like the right time. And Don would... he didn't forbid it or anything like that. He just... he had a way of making it seem impractical. Every time I raised it there was a reason why now wasn't quite the moment. The money, or the timing, or..." She stops again. "And eventually I stopped raising it."

"How old were you when you stopped raising it?"

Lizzie thinks. "Twenty-three, maybe. Twenty-four."

"So within a few years of giving it up, you'd stopped trying to go back to it."

"Yes."

Sarah writes something. "How did that feel? At the time."

"I told myself it was fine," Lizzie says. "I told myself lots of things were fine." She pauses. "I was good at that."

"Let's talk about your support network," Sarah says, after a while. "Who do you have around you? Friends, family?"

"My mum is in Brighton," Lizzie says. "An hour away. We speak on the phone but I don't see her as often as I'd like. She's... we're close. Or we used to be closer."

"What changed?"

"Moving. Don's flat is... our flat is far enough that it's always a whole thing. And Mum and Don have never... " She chooses the words carefully. "They've never really warmed to each other."

"Tell me about that."

"She was upset when I left university. She never quite... she never said it directly, but I could tell she thought it had been a mistake. And she blamed..." Lizzie stops. "She formed opinions about Don quite early on that she's never really revised."

"What opinions?"

"That he was too... demanding. That he'd... that he'd pulled me away from my own life." She says this very neutrally, the voice of someone reporting another person's view. "She's protective. She tends to see things in rather black and white terms."

"And friends?" Sarah asks.

"I have Caro. She and her husband Jamie are... they're our friends, as a couple. She's lovely. But I find it... it's harder, when your friends are couple-friends. There are things you can't say."

"Things you can't say to Caro," Sarah says. "Because she's also Don's friend."

"Yes."

"So when things are difficult at home," Sarah says, and her voice is very measured, "there's no-one you can speak to freely."

Lizzie opens her mouth to qualify this, to find the reassuring counterexample, and finds she can't.

"No," she says. "I suppose there isn't."

Sarah writes something and Lizzie has the uncomfortable sensation of a shape being outlined that she has not quite seen clearly until this moment.

"You mentioned that Don forgave you," Sarah says, a little later. "After the affair came to light. Can you tell me how that conversation went?"

Lizzie gives the managed version first... the shock, the hurt, his tears, the genuine pain she had caused. She describes it with the slightly rehearsed pitch of a story told to protect its subject.

Sarah listens. Then: "You mentioned his tears. How did that affect you?"

"It... I'd never seen him cry before. Not in ten years." Lizzie pauses. "It made me feel... the guilt was already enormous, but seeing him like that... I couldn't... anything I might have said about my own..." She stops.

"Your own what?"

"My own reasons," Lizzie says quietly. "For why it happened. I had them all. I knew why I was so lonely, I knew what had built up, and then he was sitting there crying and all of it just... it seemed so... small. My reasons seemed so insignificant against his pain."

"So his pain made your reasons feel invalid."

"It made them feel selfish," Lizzie says. "Like I was trying to make it about me."

Sarah pauses for a moment, and Lizzie has the sensation again of a shape being drawn, something she can almost see.

"Can I ask you something?" Sarah says. "And I'd like you to think about it honestly." She waits. "In all the time you spent that evening... the conversation about the affair, about Michael... did Don ask you why you were lonely?"

Lizzie thinks.

She thinks about the kitchen and the tears and the photograph and do you love him and the blocking while he watched.

"No," she says.

"Did he ask about the loneliness at all? What had led to it? How long it had been there?"

Lizzie is quiet.

"No," she says again.

"What did most of the conversation focus on?"

"On what I'd done," Lizzie says, and hears, as she says it, how it sounds. "On the affair. On..." She pauses. "On how it had made him feel."

Sarah writes something. She says nothing, and Lizzie both appreciates and slightly dreads the silence.

"He's promised things will change," Lizzie says, and it comes out with a defensive undertone she hadn't intended.

"What kinds of things?"

"Just... being more present. More... he said he knows it hasn't always been easy. That he'll do better." She looks at her hands. "He seems genuine."

"Do you believe him?"

A long pause.

"I want to believe him," Lizzie says carefully.

Sarah nods. This, her nod seems to say, is important information.

"Tell me about Michael," Sarah says. "If you're comfortable."

Lizzie shifts in her chair.

"I don't... I'm not sure how relevant he is now. It's over."

"He might still be relevant to understanding what was missing," Sarah says. "Not to reopen it. Just to understand."

Lizzie looks at the window again, the half-drawn blind, the grey light.

"He was kind," she says. "That's... I know that sounds... but it was the thing. He was kind in a way that I'd..." She stops. "He listened. He asked questions and then actually listened to the answers. He said things that..." She presses her lips together. "He told me I deserved to be seen. That I should be... that was the word he used... worshipped. Every day."

"How did that feel to hear?"

"Like something I didn't know how to receive," Lizzie says. "I kept deflecting it. He'd say something... kind, generous, something I'd have given anything to hear from..." She stops herself.

"From Don," Sarah fills out the blank.

Lizzie says nothing.

"How old is Michael?"

Here is the thing Lizzie has been knowing was coming.

"He's..." She pauses. "He's forty-eight."

Sarah's expression doesn't change, but she makes a note. "And you're twenty-eight."

"Twenty-seven." A pause. "Nearly twenty-eight."

"Twenty years' difference, roughly."

"Yes." She looks at her hands. "I know how that looks. I know what it looks like..."

"What does it look like, to you?"

"Like I was looking for a father figure," Lizzie says, with the flatness of someone pre-empting a verdict. "I know that's the obvious reading."

"Is it the accurate one?"

Lizzie thinks. She thinks about it genuinely, without the defensive reflex.

"I think I was looking for someone older than my situation," she says slowly. "Someone with enough... perspective. Enough life in them to..." She pauses. "He wasn't a father figure. He was an equal. He just happened to be... he'd lived enough to know how to listen. To know what mattered." She pauses. "Don is five years older than me. He's never made me feel like that."

Sarah writes. The scratch of the pen is the only sound.

"When you talk about the things Michael said to you," Sarah says, "and the way he listened... you describe things that most people would consider basic elements of a relationship. Being heard. Being valued. Being told you're beautiful." She pauses. "Do you notice that?"

Lizzie looks at her.

"Yes," she says.

"These aren't extraordinary things Michael offered you," Sarah explains, gently but clearly. "They're ordinary things. The question worth sitting with is why they felt extraordinary."

The box of tissues is on the table, and Lizzie has been peripherally aware of it for the entire session with the slight defiance of someone who is not going to need them.

She reaches for one.

"I want to ask you about some specific things," Sarah says, towards the end of the hour. "Small incidents you might have half-forgotten. Sometimes the small ones are the most telling. Is that all right?"

Lizzie nods.

"You mentioned that Don once suggested you consider breast augmentation surgery."

"He said it would... he thought it would help. Between us." Lizzie's voice is very even. "He wasn't trying to be cruel."

"How did it make you feel?"

"Like I wasn't..." She stops. "Like I was a heap of components that weren't quite adequate."

Sarah writes.

"You mentioned an incident at a pub with friends. A story about going to... a flower show. A map."

Lizzie is very still.

"He told the story to our friends," she says. "Caro and Jamie. As though I'd been the one who was wrong. When I'd been..." She stops.

"When you'd been right," Sarah says.

"Yes."

"And you sat there and said nothing."

"Yes."

"How often do you sit there and say nothing?"

The question lands with the quiet precision of something very accurately thrown.

Lizzie opens her mouth. Closes it.

"More often than I should," she says.

"Have you always been that way? Or is it something that's developed?"

Lizzie thinks about the girl at a party in Lewes at seventeen, who had laughed twice in the first ten minutes, who had opinions and expressed them, who had a plan for her life that involved light moving through precious stones.

"It's developed," she says quietly.

Sarah closes her notepad.

"Lizzie," she says. "I want to say something before we finish, and I want to say it carefully." She pauses. "What you did... the affair... caused real hurt. I'm not going to minimise that. And the guilt you're carrying is real and understandable." Another pause. "But guilt also leads to certain dynamics. It keeps the focus on what you did rather than on what preceded it. It makes it very hard to ask questions or raise concerns without feeling you've forfeited the right." She lets this sit. "Over the next weeks, as we continue... and I hope you will continue... I'd like you to try to hold two things simultaneously. That what you did was hurtful. And that there were reasons it happened that have nothing to do with your character and everything to do with your circumstances." She pauses. "Can you try to do that?"

Lizzie looks at her.

"I'll try," she says.

"Good." Sarah smiles. The warm, direct smile of someone who means what they say. "Same time next week?"

---------

He arrives eight minutes early, which Sarah notes.

He is better-looking than she'd expected from Lizzie's careful, neutral descriptions... well-dressed without being overdressed, a man who understands the semiotics of presentation. He shakes her hand with the ease of someone accustomed to making good first impressions and settles into the chair with a relaxed, cooperative energy.

"I appreciate you seeing me separately first," he says. "I think that was the right call. To get the full picture."

"That's the idea," Sarah says pleasantly. "How are you feeling about being here?"

"Honestly?" He pauses, the pause of someone performing consideration. "Relieved. I think we needed this. I've been saying for a while that Lizzie needed to talk to someone."

Sarah notes this. Lizzie needed to talk to someone. Not we needed.

"Tell me about the past few weeks," she says. "In your own words."

He tells it well. He is articulate and self-aware in the way of intelligent people who have prepared for this, and he gives what sounds like a balanced account, acknowledging his own shortcomings with a frankness that would seem, in another context, genuinely disarming.

"I know I've not always been present," he says. "Work is... I carry too much of it home. I'm aware of that. It's something I genuinely want to work on."

"What does not present look like, for you?"

"My passion for horses, mainly. The TV news. My interest in what's going on in the World. Not always..." He pauses. "Not always giving Lizzie my full attention."

"Can you give me an example?"

The briefest hesitation... barely perceptible, but Sarah has been doing this for sixteen years.

"It was the day of the Derby," he says. "Lizzie said I'd come home later than usual. But the stakes were high. The excitement of the moment, you know? I had lost track of time. She felt... I understand why she felt sidelined."

"Did she tell you she felt sidelined?"

"Not directly. But I could tell."

"If she'd told you directly," Sarah says, "how would you have responded?"

A pause. Then the smile, self-deprecating, aware. "Probably defensively. I'm working on that."

Sarah writes.

"Tell me about Lizzie," she says. "How would you describe her?"

He thinks, and the thinking looks genuine. "She's... sensitive. Intelligent, though she doesn't always know it. She gets in her head." He pauses. "She's always needed quite a lot of reassurance. I don't always know how to give it to her in the way she needs."

She gets in her head. She needs reassurance. Sarah writes.

"Tell me about the affair," she says. "How did you find out?"

He tells this well too. The early return, the instinct, the phone. He describes his reaction with impressive emotional literacy: the shock, the hurt, the unexpected tears.

"I'm not a man who cries easily," he says. "But that... I won't lie to you, that broke something."

"Of course," Sarah says. "Discovering a partner's infidelity is genuinely painful." She pauses. "How did the conversation go, that evening?"

"We talked for hours. I wanted to understand... I needed to understand how we'd got there."

"Did you ask Lizzie about the loneliness she'd been feeling?"

A beat.

"She mentioned feeling lonely, yes."

"Did you ask her about it? Explore it with her?"

The beat is slightly longer this time.

"It was an emotional evening," he says. "There was a lot happening. I'm sure I could have... in retrospect I could have asked more questions." The smile again, rueful. "I was in shock, to be honest."

"Of course," Sarah says again. "You mentioned that Lizzie needs reassurance and gets in her head. How long have you felt that way about her?"

"It's always been part of who she is," he says. "I've never minded it. It's just... you learn how someone works."

"She gave up her university degree when you got together," Sarah says. "Geology, I believe."

Something passes across his face, brief, controlled.

"That was her decision," he says. "I suggested it might be practical given the circumstances, but she made the choice."

"She was twenty," Sarah says.

"Yes." Evenly.

"And you were twenty-five. Already established, with your own flat."

"I suppose so, yes." A slight wariness entering the cooperative ease.

"Do you think the power balance in that situation... in that decision... was equal?" Sarah asks.

He looks at her. She looks back.

"I think we made a practical decision together," he says, carefully. "I think she sometimes frames it as something that was done to her, and I understand why that's a comfortable narrative, but..." He stops. Recalibrates. "I've always encouraged Lizzie to pursue her interests."

A comfortable narrative. Sarah writes it down.

"She lives quite far from her family and friends," Sarah says. "Her mother, her close friends, all in Brighton, roughly. How did that come about?"

"That's where the flat is," he says, with a slight reasonableness that itself conveys something. "I was already living there when we met. It wasn't a conspiracy."

"Of course not. Does Lizzie see her mother often?"

"When she wants to. I've never stopped her."

I've never stopped her. "Has she wanted to, and not managed to?"

"She finds it... the relationship with her mother is complicated. I stay out of it."

Sarah writes. She has been writing quite a lot.

"Don," she says, and looks up from her notepad, "I want to ask you something directly."

He meets her eyes, and she can see him doing it, the settling in, the preparation of a man who believes himself to be good at this.

"What would you say Lizzie needs from this process?" she asks. "From the counselling. What do you hope she gets out of it?"

He doesn't hesitate. "Clarity," he says. "I think she needs to understand why she made the choices she made. What she was looking for. How to... how to be more open with me, rather than going elsewhere." He pauses. "I think she needs to learn to communicate better."

Sarah looks at him for a moment. She keeps her face professionally neutral, which takes a small but finite effort.

What Lizzie needs. What Lizzie should learn.

She has heard this construction before. She has heard it many times, in many sessions, from many people who come in as the wronged party with open hands and reasonable smiles and an absolutely consistent habit of locating all pathology, all deficit, all need for change in the other chair.

She writes a final note.

"Same time next week?" she says.

"Absolutely," Don says, with the smile of a man who believes the session went well.

---------

After he leaves, Sarah sits for a moment in the quiet of the room.

She looks at her notepad. She looks at the chair across from her, and she thinks of the two people who have sat in it today.

She thinks of Lizzie saying: it's developed. The voice of someone who has spent years becoming smaller in a specific shape.

She thinks of Don saying: she needs to learn to communicate better. The voice of someone who has never once asked himself why she stopped.

She closes her notepad.

Outside the window, March is making up its mind about whether to be spring yet, and she thinks about the work ahead, and she thinks about the woman in the grey flat, and she hopes, with the particular professional hope she has cultivated over sixteen years, that she will come back next week.

She thinks she will.

She thinks Lizzie is braver than she knows.