that it wasn’t true. He wasn’t on the board of hospital directors, as he claimed to the nurses that day, although I’ve no doubt he knew people who were. But twisting the truth – and telling outright lies – to get what he wanted was something he often did, and he must have been furious when his self-assured, bullying arrogance hadn’t had its usual effect and he’d been thwarted in his attempt to see me.
The other man’s voice I’d heard during the fracas with my father turned out to have been that of Dr Hendriks.
‘How dare you try to prevent me from visiting my daughter,’ my father had bellowed at him. ‘I demand to see her immediately.’
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, and I must ask you to leave – now,’ Dr Hendriks had answered. He always spoke in calm, measured tones, which I found reassuring, but they must have driven my father into a frenzy of fury – particularly in view of the fact that Dr Hendriks was someone my father would have referred to as ‘a bloody foreigner’.
I couldn’t begin to imagine how enraged my father must have been at being refused access to me, not to mention at being spoken to as if he was ‘just anybody’. He’d have heard on the grapevine that I was remembering things about my childhood, and he must have been anxious to find out what I was saying. I expect he wasn’t too worried, though, because, after all, who was going to believe the word of a crazy woman who’d been committed to a psychiatric hospital against that of a successful businessman, friend to the rich and famous, and well-known pillar of society? My breakdown must have seemed like a godsend to him.
After my father had stomped out of the hospital in a rage that day, a nurse handed me the huge, stupid bouquet of flowers he’d left for me. I rammed them into the bin, heads first, snapping their stems and scattering their petals on the floor around me.
I’d always been frightened of my father. Just thinking about him made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach start to churn painfully. But, for a moment, that fear had been replaced by hatred, and I felt a deep, childish satisfaction at the thought that, for once, he hadn’t got his own way. I was grateful to the nurses and to Dr Hendriks for standing up to him in a way I’d never seen anyone do before, and for making me feel, briefly, safer.
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