Pulse(22)

I suddenly seemed not to care about anything any more, although I had started eating, albeit on a very limited basis and under duress. However, it had been simple curiosity that took me to my first therapy session, rather than any great urge to participate.

But that session was the start of my long journey to getting well again.

Not that I had realised it at the time.

Stephen had told me that there was another woman patient in her forties in the group and I wondered if she possessed the same feelings of hopelessness and guilt that plagued me, and there was only one way to find out.

I had initially only intended to listen – to sit there in silence – but it was like staring into a mirror of my own emotions.

Beth was the woman’s name, and I found myself warming to her, verbally agreeing when she spoke of her fear of letting people down, especially her mother and father. Like me, she’d had parents who were very ambitious for their daughter and their expectations had far exceeded her ability to fulfil them.

It forced me to think back to my own early life.

Fortunately, in my case, I had found my schoolwork relatively easy and had always been at or near the top of my class. Not that my parents ever gave me any praise for it. I presumed they believed it was my rightful place and they regularly criticised me for not doing even better.

Looking back, I realised that the lack of praise then was the beginning of the emotional chasm that still existed between my mother and me.

Even as a small girl, I had never been particularly close to either parent and my childhood home was not one I remembered as being filled with love and happiness.

My parents had both been serious academics. My father had been a lecturer in medieval archaeology at Oxford University and my mother had been a PhD student in the same department.

There had been an age gap of almost twenty years between them and, I now supposed, there must have been a touch of scandal at the time, but it was never spoken about. Flower power and free love were just about hanging on into the early 1970s, and people were perhaps more tolerant then of sexual peccadilloes between staff and students. Ten years earlier and the two of them would have undoubtedly been hounded out of the city. Ten years later and I would almost certainly have been aborted.

An aged aunt had told me stiffly and without elaboration at my father’s funeral that he had always chosen the honourable path in his life. His marrying of my mother due to honour rather than for love had obviously been my misfortune.

Consequently, I had been an only child and I’d spent most of my life convinced that my arrival had been a mistake, perhaps the result of a momentary sexual indiscretion at a departmental Christmas party that had ended up with my mother becoming pregnant. The date would fit.

Not that I ever believed that my parents had been purposefully unkind or cruel to me as a child. There had been no abuse, but precious little love either. They lived for their work and both were infinitely more interested in the long dead than in the living, and that included each other and their offspring.

Still, it had been listening to Beth and the realisation of how the emotional wilderness of her youth had so clearly impacted on her present state of mind that made me begin to understand who I was too.

It became the foundation of my climb back up to normality.

However, there were to be a few major hiccups on the way.

At the end of my second week in the hospital an assistant to the County Coroner had come to see me.

‘I’m not dead yet,’ I said to him as we shook hands in the ward kitchen.

He smiled wanly. It was clearly not the first time he’d heard that little joke.

‘No,’ he said, sitting down at the table and opening his briefcase. ‘I have come to ask you about a man who died at Cheltenham General nearly three weeks ago.’

‘The man found in the Gents at the racecourse?’

‘Quite so.’

‘Have the police found out who he was?’

‘No, they haven’t.’ He made it sound like they couldn’t have been trying hard enough. ‘That is our problem. The coroner opened an inquest last week and then adjourned it without establishing the identity of the deceased. Most unusual.’

From his tone of voice it was obvious that he considered it a major failing.

‘So how can I help?’ I asked. ‘I have no idea who the man was.’

‘Did he not say anything to you at all before he died?’ He was almost pleading for me to say yes. ‘Perhaps something you may have thought was not relevant at the time?’

I shook my head. ‘The man was unconscious when he arrived at the hospital and he never woke up.’

The assistant coroner sucked his teeth in annoyance. ‘I’ve never had this happen to me before. It’s very unsatisfactory.’ He made it sound more like poor service in a restaurant rather than the delicate matter of an anonymous corpse stretched out in a storage freezer at the county mortuary.

‘Did the police have no luck with his clothes? I was told that they weren’t available in this country.’

‘Both his suit and his shirt were made by a tailor in Singapore. His coat was from Hong Kong, and his shoes were handmade in Dubai.’

‘Won’t the Singapore tailor have records?’ I said. ‘Or the shoemaker?’

‘Enquiries are continuing along those lines.’

‘How about his underwear?’ I asked.