Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ for him and he had fondled her breasts. She had been very frightened by this. Over the years she had tried to forget what had happened to her. She had begun to wonder whether it had really happened, especially when at college she had confided in a friend, only to be told that Freud had said that girls often had these kinds of fantasies about their fathers. She was sure that this was not a fantasy. When her marriage ran into difficulties she went to a counsellor, and her counsellor had helped her see how what her father had done to her had undermined her trust in men and so had affected her relationship with her husband.

      She had asked Mark whether anything had happened to him. Mark had said that it had, and that it had gone on for a long time. She wrote to Jenny about it, but not to Louise. Alice had always been very close to her little sister, and she was sure that nothing had happened to Louise. Her counsellor had advised her that the problem was not hers but her parents’, and that the only way she could rid herself of its effects was to return it to her parents. This she was doing, and, having done so, she left.

      Joy did not attempt to describe the pain and confusion Alice left behind. Coming to see me was her way of trying to sort out her confusion. As to most introverts, it was important to her to see things clearly, no matter how painful they might be. She had always been like that. I found in the notes I had made twelve years earlier that I had written of Joy: ‘She would puzzle over the problems our discussions raised, remember them to the next session, and try to find a solution.’ I had noted, ‘She said that she had a constant, nagging anxiety and a sense of imminent disaster from some unknown quarter.’ I had also noted Jack’s ‘reluctance to enquire deeply into personal matters’.

      Joy said she could not understand how it was that she had never noticed anything. Alice and Jack were always getting angry with one another, but Alice had always been an angry child, ever since she was little. Joy had spoken to Mark, and he had told her how Jack had engaged him in sexual acts for quite some while, stopping only when he thought there was a danger that she would find out. Jack defended himself. ‘It was just mutual masturbation, nothing else. Just like boys playing together.’

      Joy said, ‘What about Ray? He told me there were times with him too.’

      Jack shook his head. ‘I can’t remember.’

      Joy said to me, ‘This is what’s so terrible, he can’t remember. If he doesn’t remember what he did, what other things has he forgotten? Will he do it again? Can we trust him? You can see why Mark and Alice worry he might with our grandchildren.’

      Jack found it hard to speak. ‘I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. I know Mark and Alice don’t trust me. But I wouldn’t, not with my grandchildren.’

      Joy pressed him, reminding him of what he had done to Mark.

      Jack said, ‘It started when Mark asked me about sex. I never thought much about it. Just two males together. At the orphanage, everyone did it.’

      Jack went on to tell me about his life in the orphanage. After his father died his mother felt that she could not cope with him, so, at just eight years old, he was sent to a home for boys. There, he said, every new boy suffered ‘virtual rape from the older boys and from the masters. Everybody was involved in it. You learned not to complain because there was no one you could complain to. When you got older you did it to the younger boys. It went on in all the boys’ homes. When I got older I was sent to other homes we were shifted around a lot and I met up with boys from other homes and they did it.’

      Jack said that he had never thought about his time in the orphanage at all. ‘I can’t remember much about that time. I don’t remember anything before I was eight. I know my mother used to have lodgers. One of them used to take me out to the woods. I can remember he used to buy me ice cream. Perhaps something happened then. I don’t remember.’ He spoke of the terrible guilt he felt now. Before, ‘I didn’t think about it. I thought the children would have forgotten it.’

      Joy said, ‘When Alice was a child I told her not to let anyone do anything to her that she didn’t want and to tell me, even if it was someone close, like an uncle. Alice reminded me of this. She said, “I couldn’t tell you, Mummy, because there was someone, and you were always telling us what a good father we had.’”

      Joy told me how, over the past ten years, Jack had suffered several sudden, violent illnesses, sometimes necessitating him being admitted to hospital. The doctors had explained these in terms of a virus, but now she wondered whether the illnesses were connected with all this. Now these things were being discussed, the illnesses had stopped.

      Some weeks later, when we were arranging the next appointment, she said that in the three weeks between this meeting and the last she had thought she might go mad. All the structures she had built to form the world she lived in had now been revealed as fictions which bore little relation to reality, and she was no longer sure of what reality was. In those weeks she had felt that she had to hold all her thoughts very carefully in her mind, otherwise everything would fall apart. Jack threatened every part of her being. She was trying to hold it all together by continuing to be the good, patient, understanding, calm, unaggressive person she had always been, and by maintaining her faith that there was something beyond this life which would offer reparation for her suffering. However, Jack threatened even this. He would shrug his shoulders and say flatly, ‘This is all there is and when you’re gone, you’re gone.’

      When we met three weeks later, Jack agreed that he needed people. ‘I don’t like being on my own,’ he said. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. ‘What’s happened has happened,’ he said, ‘and I can’t change it. I’m sorry it happened, but I can’t do anything about it. If Joy could accept that we could get on with thinking about the future. That’s what’s important, not the past.’

      Joy could not do that. She needed to think about what had happened, to reinterpret much of what she remembered of the past years, and to understand, no matter how painful that process of understanding was. ‘Jack just accepts things without thinking about them,’ she said. ‘He just takes what someone says or what he reads in the paper without working something out for himself.’

      The way Joy would sit quietly, thinking, worried Jack very much. He felt that she had withdrawn from him and that he was in danger. He could not put this feeling into words. Instead he thought about leaving himself. He said, ‘Would it be best if I left? She’d be better on her own, without me.’

      I said, ‘We can’t work out what’s best to do until we understand what happened and why it happened.’

      So Jack reluctantly agreed to talk some more about his past. He described how he had been conscripted into the air force and posted to the Far East where, in the absence of women, many of the men found sexual relief with one another. ‘That’s all it was, just relief,’ he explained.

      I asked whether he considered himself to be a homosexual - that is, having loving relationships with men as the most important relationships of his life.

      ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live with a man. I like women.’

      His last sexual experience with another man had been when he came out of the air force and was living in Wales. He had later moved to the Midlands, where he had met Joy. None of these sexual encounters had been with children.

      Joy said, ‘Jack’s always seen sex as something very surface. When the children were little and he was working very hard, I wouldn’t see him until late and we’d no sooner get in the bedroom than he’d want to. I couldn’t get him to understand I wasn’t like that. I needed time to be with him.’ It was no good if Joy offered simply to oblige him. He wanted every sexual encounter to be passionate СКАЧАТЬ