“Have you ever had counseling before, Miss Oliphant?” she said, taking out a notebook from her handbag. It had, I noticed, several accessories attached to it, key rings and the like—a pink, fluffy monkey, a giant metallic letter M, and, most hideous of all, a tiny, sequinned red stiletto shoe. I’d come across the type before. Ms. Temple was “fun.”
“Yes and no,” I said. She raised a quizzical eyebrow, but I declined to elaborate further. There was a silence, in which I heard the lift clattering again, although no further sound or evidence of human occupation followed. I felt marooned.
“OK then,” she said, brightly, too brightly. “I think we’ll get started. Now, first of all, I want to reassure you that everything we discuss in here together is absolutely confidential. I’m a member of all the relevant professional bodies, and we adhere to a very strict code of conduct. You should always feel comfortable and safe in this space, and, please, ask me anything, at any time, especially if you’re not clear about what we’re doing, or why.” She seemed to be waiting for some sort of response, but I had none to offer her. I shrugged.
She settled into her chair and began reading from her notebook. “You’ve been referred here by your GP, I see, and you’ve been suffering from depression.”
I nodded.
“Can you tell me a bit about how you’ve been feeling?” she said. Her smile had assumed a slightly fixed quality.
“I’ve been feeling a bit sad, I suppose,” I said. I stared at her shoes. They resembled golf shoes, only without spikes. They were gold. Unbelievable.
“How long have you been feeling sad, Ele— Miss Oliphant?” She tapped her enormous teeth with her pen. “Actually, would you mind if I called you Eleanor? It would just, you know, help the discussion flow a bit more freely if we were both on first-name terms, I think. Would that be OK?” She smiled.
“I prefer Miss Oliphant, but yes, I suppose so,” I said graciously. Titles were better, though. I didn’t know her from Adam, after all. She wasn’t my friend; she was someone who was being paid to interact with me. A bit of professional distance is highly appropriate, I feel, when, for example, a stranger is examining the back of your eyeballs for tumors, or rooting around in your dentin with a hooked instrument. Or, indeed, poking around in your brain, dragging out your feelings and letting them sit there in the room, in all their shameful awfulness.
“Great,” she said brightly, and I could tell that she had realized I was most decidedly not “fun.” We wouldn’t ever be going bungee jumping or to a fancy dress party together. What else is supposed to be fun? Sing-a-longs. Sponsored runs. Magicians. I’ve no idea; personally, I like animals and crosswords and (until very recently) vodka. What could be more fun than that? Not belly dancing classes in the community hall. Not murder mystery weekends. Hen dos. No.
“Was there something in particular that led you to seek help from your GP?” she said. “An incident, an interaction? Telling someone how you’re feeling can be a very difficult thing to do, but it’s great that you took such an important first step.”
“A friend suggested that I see my doctor,” I said, experiencing a tiny frisson of pleasure as I used the “F” word. “Raymond,” I clarified. I rather liked saying his name, the rhotic trill at the start. It was a nice name, a good name, and that at least seemed fair. He deserved some luck—after all, given his meager physical blessings, he already had enough to contend with, without being lumbered with, say, Eustace or Tyson as a first name.
“Would you like to tell me about the events leading up to your decision to visit your GP? What prompted your friend to make the suggestion?” she said. “How were you feeling, then?”
“I was feeling a bit sad and things got on top of me, that’s all. So my friend suggested that I should see my GP. And the GP said I had to come here, if I didn’t want to take the pills.”
She looked intently at me. “Could you tell me why you were feeling sad?” she said.
I released a sigh that was longer and more unintentionally histrionic than I had been expecting. I felt my throat constrict at the end of the breath, tightening with tears. Don’t cry, Eleanor. DO NOT CRY IN FRONT OF THE STRANGER.
“It’s quite boring,” I said, trying my best to sound nonchalant. “It was just . . . a sort of love affair that went wrong. That’s all. A perfectly standard situation.” There was a lengthy silence. Eventually, purely to try and get this over with as quickly as possible, I spoke again. “There was a misunderstanding. I thought . . . I misinterpreted some signals. It turned out that I had very much got the wrong impression of the person concerned.”
“Has this happened to you before?” she asked, quietly.
“No,” I said.
There was another lengthy silence.
“Who was this person, Eleanor? Can you talk a bit more about what happened to make you . . . how did you put it . . . misunderstand the signals? What were the signals?”
“Well, there was a man that I took a bit of a liking to, a little crush, you might say, and I got slightly carried away, and then I realized that, actually, I’d been a bit silly. We weren’t going to be together. And he—well, it turned out that he wasn’t even right for me anyway. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. I felt sad about that, and I felt extremely stupid for getting it all so wrong. That’s all it was . . .” I heard my voice trail off.
“OK, well . . . there are a few things I’d like to unpick in all of that. How did you meet this man? What was the nature of your relationship with him?”
“Oh, I never actually met him,” I said.
She stopped writing in her notebook, and there was a bit of an awkward pause. I think, in theatrical terms, it’s called a beat.
“Right . . .” she said. “So how did your . . . your paths cross, then?”
“He’s a musician. I saw him perform and—well, I fell for him, I suppose you’d say.”
Maria Temple spoke cautiously. “Is he . . . is he famous?”
I shook my head. “He’s local. He lives here. Near me, in fact. He’s not famous, as such. Yet.”
Maria Temple said nothing and waited for me to continue. She didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Nothing. I realized that I may have given her a slightly misleading impression of my behavior.
“To be clear,” I said, “I’m not some sort of . . . stalker. I merely found out where he lives, and I copied out a poem for him, which I didn’t even send. And I tweeted him once, but that’s all. That’s not a crime. All of the information I needed was in the public domain. I didn’t break any laws or anything like that.”
“And you’ve never found yourself in this sort of situation before, Eleanor, with anyone else?” So she thought I might be some sort of obsessive, serially fixated on strangers. Charming.
“No, never,” I said firmly and truthfully. “He was just . . . he caught my eye, piqued my interest, that’s all. He was, you know, handsome . . .”
There was another long pause.
Finally, Maria Temple sat back in her chair and began to speak, which was a relief. It was exhausting, answering all these questions, talking about myself and worrying whether I sounded as stupid, as embarrassingly na?ve as I thought I did.
“Here’s a scenario. I’ll run it by you and you can see what you think. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Eleanor, that you had developed a crush on this man. These sorts of feelings are generally a sort of emotional “trial run” for a real relationship. They’re very intense. Does that sound reasonable, plausible so far?” I stared at her.
“So,” she went on, “there you were, quite enjoying your crush, feeling the feelings. Tell me, what happened to bring this to an end all of a sudden? What crushed the crush, as it were?”