Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection: Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets

‘Because nobody ever listens to me!’ said Emma, astonishing herself with the ferocity of her answer. ‘Nobody. No, Pete does but he’s the only one. My mother, Kirsten, my father – never! He just walks on me and thinks I’m stupid. I hate that, I hate him!’

She stopped in shock. She’d said it and the sky hadn’t fallen down, nobody had looked horrified and said she should be ashamed of herself. In fact, Elinor was merely listening quietly, as if many other people had sat in her armchair and said terrible things about the people they were supposed to love most in the whole world.

‘I can’t believe I said that,’ gasped Emma.

‘But you’ve wanted to?’ Elinor asked in her low, soothing voice.

‘Yes. You’ve no idea what it’s like living with them. I love Kirsten, really I do, but she’s their pet and I’m not. I’m not even close. It’s not jealousy,’ she said helplessly, wanting to explain properly. ‘Kirsten is amazing, she’s so pretty and funny, I’m not jealous of that. But I don’t understand what I have to do to make them accept me for what I am. For him not to bully me or make little of me – does that make sense?’

Elinor simply nodded.

‘I’m thirty-two years old and they still treat me like a child – a stupid child at that. I can’t seem to break out of it. You know,’ said Emma, sitting back in her chair and looking up at the cornice behind Elinor’s chair, ‘I envy those people who emigrate, because they can leave all the hassle behind. Nobody treats them like a child, people respect their opinions. I thought of telling Pete – he’s my husband, by the way – that we should emigrate, I don’t know, to Australia or America. But it wouldn’t be fair. I mean, he loves his family. I love mine too,’ she added hastily, ‘it’s just…’

‘You don’t have to qualify statements here,’ Elinor smiled. ‘This room and this hour in your week is for saying what you really think.’

‘I never do that,’ Emma said. ‘Except at work, and I’m a different person there. But I can’t imagine ever saying what I really think to my parents, never. I feel so stupid and sad.’

She began to cry and, for once, wasn’t embarrassed at crying in front of another person who she hardly knew. It was obvious what the tissues beside her chair were there for.

By the end of the hour, Emma was shattered. She sat quietly for a moment while Elinor looked in her diary to make a firm appointment for the following week.

‘This was a cancellation,’ she explained. ‘You’ll have to come at a different time next week. Would half-past five on Monday suit you?’

Just over an hour after she’d arrived, Emma found herself outside the front door, feeling a little shell-shocked by the whole experience. She’d spent an hour with a stranger and yet still knew nothing about Elinor. Meanwhile, seamlessly and expertly, Elinor had elicited information about Emma’s life. There had never been a sense of being questioned, just of telling someone who needed to know. Occasionally, Elinor wrote something down in her notebook, but she did it so unobtrusively that Emma barely noticed.

And she hadn’t talked about wanting a baby at all, which was weird. That was the most important thing in her mind and it hadn’t come up.

She drove home feeling more drained than she ever had in her entire life. Watching the soaps on telly would be beyond her, she felt so weak. And sad. Which was also weird. She’d thought that therapy was supposed to free you from past demons and make you into this wonderfully strong person. All she felt was miserable and exhausted. It could only get better.

It got worse. The following week, Emma was a bit more prepared for the emotional upheavals of talking to Elinor and determined not to cry. How pathetic to sob like a child. It was wasting valuable time when she could have been working on making herself stronger and more positive.

‘It’s about power, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I have power but I don’t use it, or I let them take it away from me.’

Elinor angled her head. She did that a lot, Emma thought with a grin. It meant ‘elaborate on that statement’, without actually saying anything.

‘I could say to my father to piss off but I don’t because, as soon as I see him, he makes me feel about four again.’

‘Would it make you feel better to say “piss off” to him?’ Elinor asked.

Emma rotated her right ankle as she thought about this. ‘Maybe not. He’d go ballistic but would it be worth it…? My friend Hannah’s father is an alcoholic and she’s told him to piss off on numerous occasions, but I think they have a very different relationship from my father and I.’

‘Hannah is one of your friends from the holiday?’ Elinor asked, pen poised to write down some factual information.

‘Yes,’ Emma said. ‘She’s pregnant.’

With that, the tears started rolling down her face. She wasn’t sobbing or weeping hysterically, just crying in silence as if the word ‘pregnant’ had been a signal to open a dam. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ she said stupidly. But she did know, of course she did.

‘You must go through a lot of tissues,’ she whispered, grabbing a handful.

Elinor let her cry. Eventually, she asked: ‘Have you cried about this in front of anyone else?’

‘Hannah and Leonie when we met on holiday. I was sure I was pregnant…Everybody asks do I have children,’ she said hoarsely. ‘In the supermarket last week, a woman asked me. On Sunday at my mother’s house, a relative arrived and she asked me when would I think about having children. I’m sick of it. I want to tell them all to fuck off.’

‘I think you need to work on saying what you want,’ Elinor said slowly. ‘You have to feel confident enough to say “this is what I want” and to know that if your needs upset other people or surprise them, that’s not your problem. How you feel is your problem. And how they react to that is their problem. You cannot be responsible for other people’s feelings.’

Emma sat in wonder. She never said what she felt. Then she realized that she had to say this out loud.

‘I never say what I feel or need, or only rarely and to certain people. I don’t know why.’

‘You’re trying to be approved of,’ Elinor said. ‘Even when it’s about something desperately painful to you, you say nothing. You wait and gauge what other people want, then you adjust your needs to that. So you know that when you speak, you’ll be saying what they want to hear. But why should you do that? What does that gain for you, other than making you sublimate your needs and desires for others? Think about it this way: do you know anyone who simply says what they think, no matter what? Someone who wouldn’t dream of saying they wanted a glass of white wine, purely because the white was opened, when they really wanted red?’

‘Kirsten. That’s Kirsten to a tee.’

‘Do people approve of her?’

‘Yes, people adore her. She’s mercurial but she says what she wants.’

‘Which means that you can do that and be loved and approved of. So why can’t you do it? Do you think you’re somehow less loveable than Kirsten? That she can get away with it but you can’t?’

‘Actually, yes. I do think that,’ Emma admitted. ‘That’s wrong, isn’t it?’

‘Right and wrong don’t come into it,’ Elinor explained. ‘But it’s not good for you. Being like that is having a negative effect. Tell me one thing: what did the doctors say about your infertility?’

Emma sat very still. ‘I haven’t seen any doctors,’ she confessed.

‘No?’ said Elinor in that pleasant, almost uninterested tone.

‘Well, it’s just that I haven’t ever wanted to talk to anyone about it…’ Emma tried to explain.

Elinor was still looking at her with a hint of expectation on her face.

‘Nobody has ever said I was infertile,’ Emma said finally. ‘I know I am, it’s simple. Some women can tell the moment they get pregnant; I know that I can’t ever be. I can’t explain it.’

‘Is that the reason you’ve never seen a doctor about it,’ Elinor asked, ‘because you know without any tests?’

‘It’s obvious I can’t have children,’ Emma said stubbornly.

‘Why?’

‘Because I can’t, because it’s been years and it hasn’t happened, that’s why,’ Emma replied in exasperation. ‘Didn’t you ever know something, Elinor? Know it without having to be told.’

‘Sometimes,’ Elinor said noncommittally. ‘Do you often know things without being told?’

‘Not really,’ said Emma tetchily. She felt irritated by this line of questioning. It was as if Elinor doubted what she was saying. She’d kill to be able to have a baby. She just knew she couldn’t.

Elinor’s clock struck the half-hour. Their time was up. She was glad to leave today.

Emma mulled it all over in her mind as she drove home. The one thing which struck her as odd about the whole experience was the fact that Elinor didn’t treat the whole baby thing as the main reason why Emma was seeing her. She hadn’t said, ‘Eureka, now we’re talking about the real subject!’