I think it’s worth trying. And I’m committed – I hope you’re convinced of that.
Yes, I am – but why put yourself through all this?
I’m not sure. I only know that it feels right.
Perhaps we should get started.
I’m ready. Oh – I only have a short time today. I do apologize, but the Institute is moving into new premises and I have to supervise. Where shall we begin?
Perhaps before we attempt to impose a chronology on the events, you might tell me what kind of a man your husband was.
That’s a big question.
Just a thumbnail sketch, so I can get a picture in my mind.
He was a fairly ordinary man – not to me, of course, but he was decent, conventional, dutiful, middle-class. He was hard-working, he worried quite a lot, particularly about money, he was irascible when he was tired. What can I say? He read the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, but didn’t buy into their world-view entirely. Still, he shared the prejudice that things were going to the dogs. He played squash, he watched his weight – not particularly successfully. Loved his kids, loved me – but we all drove him up the wall occasionally. Regularly. Not much time for friends after work and family duties were completed. Slumped in front of the telly at about ten o’clock most nights, often fell asleep in front of Newsnight or some undemanding movie, preferably without subtitles. Read about four novels a year, not terribly good ones. Felt a bit hard-done-by. Probably was a bit hard-done-by. Drove a Volvo, bought lots of insurance. Didn’t bother much about clothes – I chose most of his stuff for him. Liked a glass of wine. Loved a cigarette. Hated giving them up. Wasn’t a bad cook. Honest, tidy, worried about order. Big on cleanliness, too. Um. That’s all I can think of at the moment. Above all, he was an unsurprising man – which makes what happened even more incredible, I suppose. But, then, he had started to change, I think, some time before all this happened.
So you’d noticed he was behaving oddly before he installed the cameras?
Not oddly, exactly, but he wasn’t quite himself.
Was there a crucial moment at which you noticed a difference?
It’s hard to put an exact time on it. Like everything that happens, you can trace the roots back a long way, or you can take a shorter view.
He’d been unhappy, though.
For some time – probably several years. I can’t say when, exactly, only that I had noticed a change. He was more tense, more moody. But my getting pregnant might have been the catalyst for all that followed. It was a bit of a shock for all of us. We thought we’d put all that behind us. I was delighted. But Alex… well, it was always hard to tell with him. He was pleased, but I think he also anticipated an enormous amount of pressure. You know what it’s like with very young children.
I do. I’m not very good at it. Do you like The Simpsons?
Everyone does.
One of my favourite moments is when Bart rushes up to Homer and says, ‘Dad, something terrible’s happened.’ Homer’s face falls and he says, ‘Your mother’s pregnant?’
[Laughs.] I think Alex felt the same. I knew he’d love the baby in time. But we were struggling financially, and I had made the decision to give up my work with Jackdaw. I wasn’t going to miss out on my new baby’s early years, as I’d had to – or, at least, chosen to – with Victoria and Guy. Alex agreed, but he was beginning to worry about the weight that would fall on his shoulders. I don’t suppose I was very helpful. Just told him to sort himself out and get on with it. All my thoughts were for the baby. Not fair on Alex, but there you are. Anyway, it’s an oversimplification to say that Alex began to change exactly. He was the same – just more distant. As if he was gradually drifting outside everything. It’s hard to put into words. I think he felt he didn’t know us any more. Children turning into adults. Wife reverting to a nursing mother. And he was becoming something he could barely understand or countenance.
What?
I can only guess that he had started to feel he was a failure. Which terrified him.
How old was he when you first noticed this?
He would have been approaching fifty. One of those ‘landmark’ ages.
You’re telling me.
You’re surely nowhere near fifty, are you?
This is why I love PRs.
No, really. You don’t look it. Alex didn’t either, but he felt it. He was a very good-looking man, and I suppose the ravages of time were showing – crows’ feet, sagging belly, loosening chin. The standard middle-age spread. Not that he was a vain man, but he took pride in his appearance. I think he felt that the fading of his looks symbolized something.
The end of youth?
Actually, I think he had accepted the end of youth quite a long time before. The end of… romance, perhaps. Not in the sexual sense. It wasn’t anything to do with us as a couple. It was… the romance of life that I think he was grieving for. Of ideals. And of a certain kind of potency – yes, potency. As life progressed… or passed, Alex felt more and more helpless in the face of… what? Circumstance. Circumstance becomes so big when you get older. So confining. So belittling. Maybe that was why he got involved with Sherry Thomas. Maybe that was why he started watching us. To take a swipe at that… blind unstoppability. In some ways it’s understandable. I’ve felt something similar myself. It’s universal, I expect.
Was he generally a faithful man?
You don’t feel the need for kid gloves, do you? Even after all I’ve been through.
I apologize if I’m being tactless. You asked me to try to get at the truth. That’s what I’m attempting to do.
I know. It’s just that it’s painful. The whole thing is painful.
Would you like me to change the subject?
No. No, it’s OK. Was he faithful? Well, there was the matter of that woman at the surgery, of course, but otherwise, yes. Always. I’m sure of it.
The woman at the surgery being Pamela Geale?
Pamela. His receptionist. Yes.
Did you believe him when he said he’d not had an affair with her?
I did. As I’ve already suggested, he was a highly moral man. Sounds strange, given what he did, but it’s true. Then there was his Christianity. He was a Catholic, in fact – in a woolly, liberal, non-public way. His faith – or its residue – was important to him, although he never tried to impress it on other people and rarely talked about it to me. He was humble like that. Very private. So when he told me that he’d merely kissed her at that party…
Party?
To celebrate twenty years of Greenside. The practice he set up with his brother, Toby. It was in March last year.
Did you go?
I couldn’t make it. Polly was waking up all the time and demanding milk. Wouldn’t take it out of a bottle. Anyway, I believed him when he said it never went beyond a kiss. I also believed him when he told me she had become possessive and sloppy at work after the… what shall we call it? Dalliance? That was why he had to sack her.
So it was after Pamela Geale was sacked that she…
She started to threaten him. Which led to an intensification of the whole situation.
When did Alex actually turn fifty?
The year before that. Just after I found out I was pregnant.
So that was when it dawned on you that things weren’t quite right with him.
As I’ve said, I suspect things had begun to unravel before then – if we’re still looking for ‘the beginning’. Not that there were any obvious symptoms. Nothing big or dramatic, anyway. We’d had our problems. All families do. Guy and Victoria were at difficult ages – thirteen and fourteen respectively – when the situation boiled over. And the birth of Polly…
She’s – what? Eighteen months now?
Nineteen and a half. Her birth added to the other stresses. Polly was not an easy baby, and in those first six months she was getting us up three or four times every night. We were both tired. Alex was under increasing pressure generally in his job.
Wh
at kind of pressure?
Perhaps ‘pressure’ is the wrong word. But he was certainly experiencing a kind of disillusionment. He didn’t talk about it much, but I felt it. I think there’s a stage that GPs can reach in their career when they feel they’re not challenged any more. The same complaints, the same diagnoses, day in, day out. Alex was a clever man. A curious, inquisitive person. Also, there was a certain… well… Perhaps ‘disgust’ is too strong. A lot of the patients he found quite trying. The Greenside is an inner-city practice, after all, and he saw a lot of poor and desperate people. That was why he set it up in the first place – to help people. But as the years went by he felt less able to help them, beyond formulaic prescriptions and referrals. He was resentful that people saw him more like a car mechanic than a healer. Then there was the constant stream of skivers, wanting a note so they could pull a sickie. And they wouldn’t listen to his advice, or take any responsibility for their lives. It was like, ‘I’m ill, so fix me.’ They saw themselves as customers rather than patients. Many weren’t civil to him, let alone grateful.
Did he expect gratitude?
He would have denied it, of course, but I think he did.
And he was hurt that it wasn’t forthcoming?
A lot of things hurt Alex. There was always something of the martyr about him. There’s a certain emotional income in suffering, isn’t there?
It puts you incontrovertibly in the right, I suppose.
Perhaps I’m not being fair. He was a sweet man. I think he wanted to be good enough to work as a GP for its own sake, but I also think he had imagined that ‘doing good’ would have more of a payoff than it provided – especially given the income he had to forgo to remain in the National Health Service. He hoped for a payoff in gratitude or goodwill. Yes. But little of either was forthcoming. In fact, he irritated his patients, I think, by virtue of his special knowledge. They disliked him because they needed him. Whatever the case, some of the ideals he’d started out with had eroded. And there was the matter of his status. I think that concerned him.
In what respect?
It’s connected with what I was saying before. People with whom he went to university were earning three or four times his salary. We couldn’t afford to put our kids through private school. The house was shabby. Everything was a struggle.
Was his status lowered in your eyes?
[Samantha Seymour ignores this question.]
Somehow, in the last twenty years, respect for the medical profession in general has eroded. When Alex was a child, the local doctor was like a god: everyone looked up to him. Perhaps that was what Alex wanted.
Was that why he became a doctor, do you think?
Who knows? He always told me this story. A story his mother told him. Anyway, it seems that he had a pet – I can’t remember now whether it was a cat or a dog. This pet got sick, very sick. His mother took it to the vet, who told her that it was going to die. Something wrong with its head, a tumour or something. But Alex – so his mother said – wouldn’t stand for it. He was determined to make the pet better. He would sit there for hours, stroking its head, talking to it, rubbing it, caressing it. And you know what?
The pet got better?
It got better. Well, it didn’t die immediately. Toddled on for another year or so. Probably some natural remission, but his mother told him he had healing hands.
And that was why he became a doctor?
I don’t know. If this was a film, doubtless that would be a scene they would use to explain his ‘motivation’. But he had some kind of faith in himself as a healer.
And he lost it?
I think so. Many of his patients didn’t see him as a healer, anyway. He thought people took him for a mug. That was the word he used. ‘Mug’. ‘Muggins’. I remember something he said to me once, quite out of the blue – he just sat up in bed and said it: ‘Samantha. I’m bored. I’m so fucking bored.’ And he never swore. Never. I was shocked. I asked him if he was bored with me. He said no. It was bigger than that. It was like a great black whale about to swallow him up.
Like Jonah.
He did think in biblical analogies sometimes. Yes, like Jonah. A blackness was growing inside him. I didn’t know what to say to console him.
What did you say?
To be honest, I didn’t take him that seriously.
Do think boredom was behind this whole thing?
Yes. Yes, I do. Boredom… and age. And helplessness.
You’ve mentioned helplessness before.
That’s what we fear most, isn’t it? Or, at least, what I think Alex feared most. Perhaps that was why he became a doctor in the first place. To give him a sense of control. And I think, obviously, it had a connection with why he got involved in the taping. It gave him a sense of power while the world was drifting away from him.
How else was the world ‘drifting away from him’?
In all sorts of ways. The kids, of course.
Can you be more specific?
Victoria had always been his little girl. Our firstborn. He’d doted on her. I sometimes think his connection with her was what kept our marriage going through the most difficult times. They were very close. Or had been. She was growing up. She was fourteen, becoming a woman, wearing makeup, cropped tops, short skirts, that sort of thing. He found that difficult. It’s very primal, isn’t it, the father-daughter thing? Do you have kids?
Three daughters.
The oldest being?
Old enough for me to understand what you’re talking about.
There you are. So, Victoria was starting to have boyfriends. He found that problematic. He was nervous that she was going to get into things she wasn’t ready for.
You mean sex?
Yes. Not so much for what it was, but for what it represented. That she was no longer his. So when she and Macy…
Macy Calder, the boy in the first tape?
Yes. He’s a nice boy. Alex hated him, though, because he was trespassing on what Alex thought of as his territory. He wanted to keep Victoria pure. Any father would. He just went a bit too far in trying to protect her, I suppose.
Do you think that was how he saw it?
Without a doubt. I know some of the papers have tried to put a sexual slant on it, like he snooped on her for some kind of thrill, but that’s nonsense. Or if there was a thrill, it wasn’t sexual. It was the thrill of being able to keep tabs on her. That’s intrusive, I agree, and it’s wrong, but it wasn’t entirely for the wrong motive, I think.
Was the same true in Guy’s case?
I’m sure it was, although with Guy the fears were different. It’s paradoxical, I know, but as I’ve said, honesty was important to Alex.
Why is honesty the issue here?
Because he thought Guy was stealing. Which, as it turns out, he was. I’d always told him he was being paranoid. To some extent, my relationship with Guy acted as a counterpoint to his with Victoria. Not that I preferred Guy: I love all my children equally. It was just Alex’s thing with Victoria, their closeness. I felt I had to compensate for it so I tended to take Guy’s side. And it’s difficult to believe that your own son is a thief. Although, looking back on it now, it was obvious.
What kind of thieving?
Petty stuff. Coins down the back of the sofa. Bits and pieces that belonged to Victoria – magazines, pens, CDs. A packet of my cigarettes, although I don’t think he smoked them. I never know where anything is, so I just thought they’d been mislaid. But Alex was always meticulous, and he suspected from the beginning that Guy was pilfering. I suppose he was just doing it for attention, but Alex was outraged that Guy should be dishonest. I defended him, of course. I’d probably have defended him even if I’d known what he was doing. But at the time I just wouldn’t look at the facts straight. Always blamed it on someone else.
Who?
Miranda, the nanny. Or myself, or Vicky.
I suppose there’s a sense in which the hope of ‘looking at the facts straight’ motivated Alex when
he first went to see Sherry Thomas.
In a way. Yes, I suppose that’s right. The thing is, I believe a point came at which Alex felt he couldn’t see anything clearly any more. He wanted to get it all back into focus – to find a window on me, his children, himself. Himself most of all. He knew that in embarking on the course of action he adopted he might hurt himself – emotionally, I mean – but I don’t think he thought he would hurt us.
Not even when he became involved with Ms Thomas?
‘Involved’? I’m familiar enough with tabloid jargon to know what the word implies.
How would you put it?
I think she cast a spell on him.
Literally?
Obviously not. But he was at a weak moment in his life, and she took advantage of it. She had a talent for spotting weakness. In a sick way, a kind of genius for understanding the way people were. She misled him. She got him caught up in a situation he couldn’t find his way out of. She sensed his frustrations and exploited them.
A femme fatale?
Exactly that. In the most literal sense, as it turned out.
Author’s Note: Samantha Seymour begins to sob violently. Her hands fly up to cover her face, her whole body rocks back and forth, then from side to side, as if thrown by the four winds. She clutches herself, as if the circumference of her arms will stop her flying apart. I rise from my chair, thinking I should attempt to console her, but falter. She is, after all, a stranger. Registering my discomfort, she waves me away, and I sit down to wait for the storm to blow itself out.
Mrs Seymour…
Oh, this is absurd. Sorry.
I understand. I know this must be difficult for you. Shall we stop for a while?
No, no, it’s fine. This happens occasionally. On street corners, in supermarkets. At least this time it’s in relative privacy. Let’s get on.
Are you sure?
Please. I’m fine. Really.
[Samantha takes out a handkerchief from her bag, blows her nose, returns the handkerchief, then smooths down her slacks.]
Shall we talk a little more about Guy, then?
Guy… Well, Guy has always been a sensitive kid. I know that Alex thought he was bolshie and rude and selfish. Your basic teenager. But that was because Guy was angry. He knew who his father favoured.