At the seventeenth tee they turned for the final approach to the clubhouse. Watson spent a long time, tee-ing and re-teeing his ball, then stiffly carved it high away to the right, where it clattered through branches and disappeared from view. Gregory, relaxed beyond caring, watched his slowly hit drive make its own straight way, bouncing over a dog-walkers’ path that crossed the fairway and running on towards the distant flag.
When they stood on the last tee the match was level. Watson clearly felt that this was not a fair reflection of the game and that somehow he had been defrauded. The last green was set between the clubhouse on one side and a large lake on the other; it was a short par four, almost reachable, like the first hole, in one.
Gregory hit a three iron to the left, a short, safe shot, that opened the green to his second. Watson controlled his nerve well enough to take a wood, which he hit to within thirty yards of the green. There was a little bounce in his step as he led the way forward.
‘Now you want to be careful not to hit the clubhouse from there,’ he said. ‘That window on the end is the ladies’ powder room. Very expensive nineteenth-century glass. I believe that when the Varsity match was played here the Cambridge captain salvaged a half by climbing on to the clubhouse roof, where his partner had put him, and laying the ball dead.’
With these pictures in his mind – a young man in a pale blue scarf crouched among roof tiles with a niblick; half-dressed ladies at their powdering startled by exploding glass – Gregory stood over his ball. It was a straightforward eight iron. His natural fade would keep him from the clubhouse or the tree that stood sentinel beside it. He glanced up the fairway and saw Ian Watson, waiting for him to play.
He looked at Watson’s eager face, its expression of friendly anticipation drawn sharper by his will to win. He thought of the similar expression on the face of Bill Dexter, climbing into his Spitfire for the last time; of Forster’s modest, colonial smile as he explained to an enraptured mess how he had made his first kill; of the rubbery grin of the Canadian, Jimmy Somers; of Borowski’s sharp-featured Polish friend whose plane had made such a crater in the Sussex Downs. Gregory felt a surge of anxious pity for poor Watson. As he stood over the ball he shifted his feet so that they were at forty-five degrees to the line of the shot; on the backswing he snapped his left elbow-joint open so that the club veered down from far outside the line, across the ball, and sent it, with all his strength, soaring, slicing high across the green, hanging still for a moment on the air, then plummeting down into the lake. Watson turned, his face lit up with incredulous delight.
Charlotte Gray was sitting in a leather armchair, sunk so deep that she could barely make her elbows reach up over the arms. Her eyes were following a line of book spines on a shelf: Gray’s Anatomy; Child Psycho-Analysis by Melanie Klein; Psycho-Analysis of the War Neuroses, Introduction by Sigmund Freud. Her eyes moved over the letters of the titles again and again, though she read without taking in the meaning of the words. Beneath the shelf was the head of the surprisingly young psychiatrist, Dr Burch; it was a head sleek with hair oil, with a bespectacled face of impassive curiosity. He occasionally tapped the end of his pen against the pages in the open folder on his lap. He wrote nothing.
‘Let’s talk about your parents. Are they happy?’
‘As far as I know.’ She thought of the windswept house, her father’s long absences at work, his awful wordless days, her mother’s nervously chattering complicity.
Dr Burch said nothing. Charlotte said nothing. She knew he expected her to be motivated, embarrassed even, by the silence into giving more details, and that the spontaneous first rush of information would be, by the nature of its self-selection, significant – either in what it chose to include or by what it chose to suppress.
So she said nothing.
Dr Burch smiled, a humourless, slightly reproving smile, as though to suggest that Charlotte was being difficult, or impolite. ‘Would you like to tell me a little more about them?’
‘It depends what you need to know. They’ve been married for a long time. They have two children of whom they’re fond. They have enough money. My father still works. They’re healthy. They certainly have every reason to be happy.’
‘But you’re not sure. Is that because you don’t see them much?’
‘Some rift, you mean? Not at all.’
‘And what about your childhood? Was your home life happy?’
Charlotte sighed. ‘We were a very ordinary family. I had an elder brother called Roderick. We had a dog and a couple of cats. My mother was a nice woman, a good wife and mother. My father was a serious man. He worked very hard. He was a doctor, a physician to begin with, but he became interested in psychiatry, I think perhaps partly as a result of his experiences in the Great War, though I’m not sure about the timing. He was very well read and would certainly have been aware of Freud and people like that quite early on, though of course they didn’t have the kind of acceptance then that they do now. People thought they were pornographic.’ She inclined her head in the direction of Dr Burch’s bookshelf.
‘Did he practise as a psychiatrist?’
‘Yes, he did eventually. It was odd, because he really rather despised most other psychiatrists. He thought a lot of it was rubbish. He hated all that talk about dreams. He was happier being a physician.’
Burch said nothing and Charlotte looked at him. He raised an eyebrow, but still did not speak.
Charlotte suddenly sat forward in the chair and gave him her fullest and most charming smile, smoothing her skirt down over her hips as she resettled. ‘This must be a thankless job for you, questioning all these young women about their past.’
Burch recoiled a little in the floodlight of her social manner. In re-establishing the artificial basis of their conversation he was impelled into a slight awkwardness. ‘We’re not here to talk about me, Miss Gray.’ Charlotte felt she had won a small victory.
‘Though you might make a more interesting subject.’
Her attitude was now bordering on the flirtatious. Burch became firmer. ‘You didn’t answer my question. Was your home life happy?’
‘Whom shall we call happy? It was all right.’
Her eyes travelled once more down the line of books and for the tenth time unreadingly traced the kicking spokes of the K in Klein. She was thinking of another doctor’s room: not that of Wolf, or Burch, but a cold first-floor sitting room in a granite house in Aberdeen.
She is seventeen years old, on the point of leaving school. Her hair is clipped back off her face in the neat combs of the Academy sixth form; her schoolgirl knees are pressed together. The spaces beneath her eyes are puffed outwards in damp pink swellings; she is gasping and heaving to catch the breath denied her by the repeated sobbing of her chest. She cannot hold the grief any more and bends her swollen, shiny face down into her hands with a great cry. She wants by that noise to blow the pathways clear to her lungs and to loosen, then expunge, the gripping memory of her betrayal.
The doctor to whom she speaks does not believe her.
‘I’m going to show you some pictures now,’ said Burch, ‘and I want you to tell me what each one reminds you of.’
He slipped his hand into the drawer of the desk and brought out a pile of folded papers. He opened the first one and passed it across to Charlotte, who had moved from the depths of the armchair to sit opposite him.
She looked at the symmetrical shapes made by the paper folded in on itself across a blob of black ink.
‘Tarantula.’
‘Are you frightened of insects?’
‘Averagely.’
‘This one?’
‘Ink on paper.’
‘This one?’
‘Wine on paper, paint on paper, black water on paper.’
‘This one?’
‘Castle in a forest.’
‘This one?’
‘Scrambled egg with truffles.’
‘All right. This one.’
‘Nothing really. Insects. Brambles. Patterns in the sand.’
‘This one.’
‘It’s like an archipelago, somewhere in the southern seas. Here’s the governor-general’s house with its shady verandah overlooking the sea.’
‘Charming. This one.’
‘Is a face. A gargoyle on a church.’
‘This one.’
‘Is another blot. We’re back to blots, I’m afraid. Ink on paper.’
‘Blot.’
‘This one.’
‘Blot. Vaguely canine, but still a blot. I have a feeling they’re all going to be blots from now on.’
Eventually Burch slipped the papers back into his desk. ‘All right. Now I’m going to say a word and I want you to say the first word your mind associates with it. I do want you to take this seriously. You must relax. Let your mind just take its own course. Go and sit back in the armchair and close your eyes.’
Charlotte sank down into the cushions, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The room had a churchy smell; she relaxed more than she expected. Burch squatted on the hard chair with a list on his lap. His eyes ran down the words.
‘Drink.’ ‘Water.’
‘House.’ ‘Garden.’
‘Mother.’ ‘Hair.’
‘Dog.’ ‘Legs.’
‘Apple.’ ‘Eve.’
‘Stick.’ ‘Beat.’
‘Father.’ ‘Sad look.’
‘One word, please. Try again. Father.’ ‘Waistcoat.’
‘Home.’ ‘Cold.’
‘Friend.’ ‘Girl.’
‘War.’ ‘Peace.’
‘War.’ ‘Planes.’
‘London.’ ‘Flat.’
‘Kiss.’ ‘Lips.’
‘Floor.’ ‘Board.’
‘Ceiling.’ ‘White.’
‘Bed.’ ‘Lie.’
‘Red.’ ‘Lips.’
‘Blue.’ ‘Uniform.’
‘Flowers.’ ‘Roses.’
‘France.’ ‘Roads.’
‘Sex.’ ‘Female.’
‘All right. You can open your eyes.’
Charlotte blinked. Burch laid the folder on his desk. On a low shelf was a rectangular basket containing some wooden blocks, like a child’s building bricks. Burch started to move his hand towards them, then saw Charlotte watching him. Something in her expression appeared to make him think better of it.
‘All right, Miss Gray,’ he said, standing up. ‘I think we’ve probably finished. Will you ask the next girl to come in, please.’
‘Have I passed? Are you going to recommend me for further training?’
‘I think so.’
As she passed the desk Charlotte glimpsed the notes he had made on a page headed ‘Ensign Charlotte Gray’. The only thing he had written was: ‘T.C. by 1/2’.