(1998) Denial Read Free Page A

better hope Amanda Capstick doesn’t get to see it.
    But she liked me. She did. She really did. So she had a date, so what?
    He would call her in the morning, he decided.
    She could always say no.

Chapter Two
    wednesday, 9 july 1997
    No one ever prepares us for death. It ought to be on the school curriculum. Instead, teachers make us learn that in a right-angled triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the two remaining sides. I’ve carried that nugget in my head for twenty-five years and never yet had any use for it. They make us learn how to ask the way to the town hall in French. I’ve got through thirty-seven years of my life without ever needing to do this
.
    But they don’t ever teach you how you are going to feel when someone close to you dies. And that is going to happen to all of us. It has just happened to me, and I’m all alone here, having to work this out for myself
.
    It seems there’s a whole sequence of emotions you go through. Shock. Denial. Anger. Guilt. Depression
.
    I’ve been through shock, ticked that one off. I’ve been through refusal to accept. Ticked that box, too. Now I’m at the anger stage
.
    I’m angry with a whole lot of people. But, most of all, I’m angry with you, Dr Michael Tennent
.
    You killed my mother
.

Chapter Three
    ‘Wednesday 9 July 1997. Report to Dr Gordon Sampson, Coroner, City of Westminster. From Dr Michael Tennent MD, MRC Psych.
Subject
: Gloria Daphne Ruth Lamark, deceased.
    ‘I had been seeing the deceased as a patient since March 1990. Prior to that she was a patient of my colleague, Dr Marcus Rennie, at the Sheen Park Hospital, intermittently from 1969 to his retirement in 1990. Her records show that she was under psychiatric care and on anti-depressant medications continually since 1959. (See attached schedule.)
    ‘My last interview with her, on Monday 7 July, was particularly unproductive. In recent months I had felt she was making some progress towards realisation of her difficulties, and towards acceptance that she was temperamentally unsuited to the disciplines required in the acting profession, and I was trying to encourage her to find other interests, particularly in the field of charity, where she could make a useful contribution to society and in so doing lead a more fulfilled existence.
    ‘In my opinion she was a deeply troubled woman, suffering from a personality disorder that prevented her from living an ordinary, socially interactive life, and led to her turning into a virtual recluse. This personality disorder was developmental from childhood or adolescence and the collapse of her promising career as a film actress during the mid 1960s was almost certainly a trigger for deterioration.’
    In his den at home, Michael rewound the tape on his dictating machine, listened to the beginning of his report, then continued. ‘She had major roles, including some asleading lady, in several films during the late 1950s and the early 1960s but these rapidly petered out while she was still only in her twenties. She blamed the collapse of her career on a combination of factors. The birth of her son, Thomas. The breakdown of her marriage. Underhand behaviour by some of her rivals, in particular the actress Cora Burstridge, whom she believed, obsessively, went out of her way to destroy her career for motives of jealousy and self-advancement.
    ‘In my opinion the root cause of the demise of the deceased’s career was her personality disorder. She was unable to accept or face any of the realities of life. She had a massive ego, which needed constant feeding, and would lapse into bouts of violent, uncontrollable rage when any aspects of her talents or abilities were questioned, frequently causing actual bodily harm to others.
    ‘She displayed manic depressive symptoms in characteristic mood swings, during which she would veer between a severely exaggerated opinion of her own talents, and extreme depression. To this end she