Behind Her Eyes

Back in Westlands, Adele tells Rob to be patient with his night terrors/lucid dreaming training and that soon he will be able to picture the door and go whenever he wants. He opens up a little and tells her about his “shitty” (118) home situation and that he took heroin because it feels good. He encourages her to try it and she decides she will, although she knows she will have to keep it a secret from David. Adele goes to meet her lawyers about her inheritance but doesn’t tell Rob what she is going to do.

Louise is on her way to work, feeling happy and in control because she has switched to e-cigarettes, lost weight, cut down on drinking, and is using a step-counting app, all of which are due to Adele’s influence. Louise just needs to get the lucid dreaming method to work. She muses on Adele: “so elegant and sweet and interested in me” (124). She feels a hint of guilt over David again but tells herself “the sex can’t last” (125) and it will stop as soon as Adam gets back. Louise allows herself to enjoy the thought of David’s touch and says he and Adele are both “bringing me back to life” (125).

At work, Louise’s colleague Sue perceives that she is hiding a secret—something about a new man—but Louise doesn’t give away anything. Instead, she reflects on how good she feels with David in her life and tells herself he may be protecting Adele rather than controlling her. She recalls their closeness the previous night, before “the familiar guilt soon settled in between our cooling bodies” (128). She unsuccessfully tries to convince herself it is only lust.

Anthony Hawkins calls the clinic in an agitated state and Louise administers his calls to David. She recognizes David’s regular daily call to Adele, which causes “a stab of envy” (130). At the end of the day, David leaves for home and the weekend and she feels jealous and cheap, doubting his feelings for her.

Adele is at home the following morning after David leaves for outreach work. She goes to the gym, then thoroughly cleans the house. A letter addressed to David arrives, detailing the expenditure on Fairfield—the house she inherited. She knows she shouldn’t have read it as David is in charge of the money. She is “the tragic wife who needs looking after” (135). She tells herself they will never sell the house unless they could be free of the secret it holds. In the evening, before David gets home, she decides she has a place to go, but she needs to be ready, prepared, and very careful.

At home alone with her wine on Saturday night, Louise unwillingly receives her friend Sophie’s advice to drop her relationships with both David and Adele. She justifies her wine drinking, as she needs it to sleep. Her night terrors have been worse lately. She opens the notebook and feels it is a link to the couple and their past, although she will read it to help her sleep. She knows she is lying to herself.

In the notebook, she reads Rob’s account of a terrible nightmare involving monstrous versions of his family, who chase him, calling out that they know his secret. He knows this dream is about guilt over his heroin habit. Before they catch him, he manages to visualize a door and step through it onto a paradisal beach featuring Adele, cocktails, and dolphins. Rob is ecstatic about his new ability to control his dreams but worries about how Adele is so important to his happiness. He wonders if David will like him and want him around when they leave Westlands. He reflects on his and Adele’s secret skill, which David doesn’t have.

Louise drops off to sleep while reading the last sentence for a second time.

It’s a new morning, and Adele and David have just had a terrible row. She spent thousands of pounds on goods from the shopping channel, using the credit card he gave her, which he destroys in front of her. He declares he is moving into the spare room, “Until we decide what we’re going to do” (146). Adele holds back her tears but reminds herself, “I’ve started down this path, doing things to push him away from me and towards her, and I have to stay on it” (146). He goes to his outreach work, but to her disbelief, locks her in the house. She feels her marriage—and her house—is a prison and wonders what would happen if there was a fire, like before. She has taken all the pills he gave her. She looks in the mirror at her bruised face and feels the ache in all her muscles from events of the previous night when she went out alone. Her secret is her only power over David. She feels “weighed down by my self-loathing and self-pity” (148-49), until she receives a text from Louise saying only: “I did it!!!!” (149). Feeling love for Louise and pride, Adele is revived.

Locked in the bathroom at Westlands, Rob and Adele smoke weed, and Adele feels free and fantastic. She reflects on Rob’s character: so clever, and different from David. She thinks about how they have deceived the therapists into thinking the end of Rob’s night screaming is their doing. She feels safe with Rob and happy that she has someone with whom she can share some of her secrets.

The same evening, David comes home, no longer angry, but dejected. He asks Adele why she painted the bedroom in those colors, and she denies their importance. He goes to his study, she assumes to secretly drink. She feels ashamed of her bruises and her failure the night before. Over the carefully prepared dinner, David asks her what is happening. His coldness causes her mixed feelings: “It’s all part of my plan, but it’s not what I want” (157). David refers to “[w]hat happened before we moved” (157). There was a woman in Blackheath, who was more than just a friend, though not a sexual partner. Adele apologizes for not adhering to their fresh start and says she will try harder. Then she threatens him: “You know you can never leave me, David” (158). He says he knows that. He goes to bed and Adele feels like crying, which she never used to do. The doorbell rings and it’s Anthony Hawkins, who Adele recognizes as a heroin user from the tracks on his arms. Anthony asks for David but she says he is in bed. She feels the boy’s attraction to her and provocatively acts in response. To his concern at her bruises, she urgently responds, telling him to leave, as David is coming. She is pleased with this encounter: “Maybe it’s all going to work out after all” (160).

On Wednesday of the following week, Louise sees Adele for the first time. David has been quiet at work and Louise feels rejected by both of them. She wonders if they have each confessed to their relationship with her. Now, shocked at Adele’s bruises, she considers whether David is violent to Adele, as well as being controlling.

Adele and Louise drive to Adele’s house for lunch. Louise’s feelings about David become even more very confused as Adele explains he bought her a treadmill as a gift, and she hit her face opening a cupboard door—clearly a lie. Louise shies from asking if David hit Adele, as she feels Adele would confess through guilt; Louise would lose them both if the answer was yes. Louise tells Adele about the door she opened in her dream and how much better she has slept ever since. She asks permission to continue reading the notebook and asks if Adele is still friends with Rob. Adele’s answer—that David didn’t really like him, and she doesn’t know where Rob is now—rings another alarm bell about David in Louise’s mind. She vows to keep reading the notebook, to learn more about “these two people who’ve become so important in my life” (169).

Adele receives a phone call from Dr. Sykes, David’s partner, asking her if David hit her. Anthony Hawkins told his parents about seeing the scared Adele with a bruised face and they followed up with the clinic. Adele reassures Dr. Sykes that David would never do that and the call ends. Adele is pleased that this interaction may work in one of two ways: to make David feel relieved, and thus send him back to Louise, or to give her a way to blackmail him by (emptily) threatening to ruin his career. In addition, she can use Anthony’s guilt at his parents’ interference in David’s life to get what she wants from the boy. She sends David a text to make him think Anthony is making things up, and “as a reminder to my husband that we are a team and always will be” (174).

At work, upset and nervous because David hasn’t talked to her, Louise hears that Anthony Martin says he saw David hit Adele. David refers Anthony to a new doctor, which supports Louise’s suspicion that the allegation is true. Drinking wine later at home, Louise answers the door to a stressed David. She smells alcohol on him, and he quickly drinks the wine she offered, causing her to wonder about his habit. He makes romantic comments, but she is defensive and asks him about Anthony’s accusation. He is shocked that she believes he could hit Adele. Louise expresses her anger at their relationship being so covert and tells him to get a divorce. They calm down and he tells her Louise is very important to him, but that he can’t tell her the problem with his marriage, or much about it in general. He says he wants to get rid of Adele. Seeing his contempt for his wife, Louise feels conflicted again, and tells him to leave: “Him and Adele are tearing me in two” (180).

After David leaves, Louise continues drinking wine and feeling confused about what is true or not in their abnormal marriage. She feels trapped and just wants to sleep, consoling herself with thoughts of Adam. She sleeps and dreams of a happy family scene with Adam and David, and a second door, but one without a handle. She wakes up feeling guilty that Adele wasn’t in her dream. She again thinks she should free herself of both David and Adele.

After a shower, Louise decides to read the notebook again. Rob’s next entry is about how Adele is always in his dreams. He feels protective over her in real life too and worries about why she trusts David, to whom she has signed over all her money. When it comes to money, Rob doesn’t trust David—nor anyone. He wonders what really happened to Adele’s parents and why David just happened to be driving by the night of the fire.

Later that morning, Louise asks David for the afternoon off, with a lie as her excuse. David apologizes for the night before but reassures her that he will sort out his marriage. Louise is cold to him, only concerned with seeing Adele as soon as possible to find out if her suspicions are true. David tells Louise he is falling in love with her, and she wonders “what kind of man he is, he really is, under the skin. In his head” (187). Louise rushes to meet Adele who immediately agreed to meet when Louise texted earlier that day about the second door in the dream.

Adele and Louise meet for lunch. Adele remembers the night before, when David went to Louise’s flat and what they said to each other. She is hurt about it but pleased Louise is looking prettier: “I feel very proud of her” (190). Adele feels stiff and achy: “I’m fading as she blooms. No wonder David is falling in love with her. The thought stings” (190). Louise tells Adele about the second door, but Adele says it has never happened to her. Louise asks whether Adele really signed over all her inheritance to David. Concerned, she presses to find out if he later signed it back to her. Adele elicits her sympathy, touching her bruise as she tells her that he didn’t, but that is fine. Adele knows Louise is worried about David’s hold over Adele and is starting to hate him. The two women see Anthony Hawkins lurking near the restaurant and Adele frightens him away with a fierce look, while Louise voices concern that he is following Adele, who thinks: “By tomorrow the last thing she will be thinking about is Anthony” (194).

That evening, at home, Adele is cooking and nervously waiting for David to come home, and for a phone call from the gym. David answers the call, which is about an extended gym membership for Louise Barnsley, arranged by his wife. Adele tells David they are friends, and she was lonely. He reads text messages on her phone between the two women, then storms out. Adele is relieved and exhausted. She decides she can’t sleep yet as she has to check for a package left by Anthony.

After a month at Westlands, Adele and Rob prepare to leave. Adele is excited about her freedom and marrying David but concerned about Rob who is not looking forward to going back to his old life at his sister’s. Rob tells Adele he is worried about her; she tells him they will stay in touch and that he should come and visit her. She loves both David and Rob, and wants them to love each other, but Rob thinks David won’t like him. Nevertheless, he promises to come and visit his “beautiful Sleeping Beauty princess” (202).

After leaving Adele, David goes to Louise’s flat and very angrily tells her he knows she has been friends with Adele. He is incredulous that she could lie to him all this time and that she hasn’t told Adele she works with her husband. Louise doesn’t correct him on that point, worried that it will incriminate Adele, who “hasn’t done anything wrong here” (204). Crying and desperate, Louise turns defensive and implies to David that he is the one who has been lying, playing with Adele’s head, and that he deliberately saved Adele to get her money. David is further enraged and tells Louise she knows nothing about his marriage. He claims he saved Adele and tries to calm Louise in her “torrent of emotion” (206). She continues, unable to stop, claiming she is Adele’s only friend. She asks David what happened to Rob: “What did you do?” (207).

David turns completely cold and tells Louise she is fired. He also tells her not to go to Dr. Sykes, as he will show Sykes the texts between Louise and Adele. Finally, David warns Louise to keep away from both him and Adele for her own good, and that he never wants to see Louise again. Louise is devastated but also worried that she cannot text Adele to let her know David is angry.

David comes home and Adele acts innocent about the friendship, asking why Louise’s name made him so angry. David says Louise is a patient, but doesn’t ask Adele any more details about their friendship. He suggests they go away for a few days, but Adele says no, they should stay and face their problems and David should “move this Louise patient on, like you did with that boy” (210). Going away would not fit Adele’s plans. She knows David doesn’t trust her and is ready to leave her, but that he will never be free of the past. She reminds herself, “I’ve always been one step ahead. My resolve hardens” (211).

Two days later, Louise is exhausted from lack of sleep. She sent her resignation email, citing family problems, but Dr. Sykes gave her a month to reconsider. She feels she doesn’t know David at all, but that Adele has been her friend and she feels the need to check on her. Louise remembers she can still log in to the clinic server and does so, checking David’s schedule. She plans to buy a cheap pre-paid mobile phone the next day and take it to Adele, who can hide it. She feels better for defying David.

At home the next day, in a “blissful haze” (217), Adele, drooling and unsteady, receives a visit from Louise, who believes Adele when she tells Louise she might have taken more of the pills than she should. Louise checks the pill cupboard and declares they are all antipsychotics. Adele explains that she had wanted control of her money after Blackheath, where David had an affair with a woman from a café called Marianne. David said she had to take the pills for a while to calm down. Adele goes on to tell Louise that in a rage, David brutally killed their cat. Despite this, she says, “‘I wish he would love me again.’ And I do. I really, really do” (221). Louise gives Adele the phone and tells Adele that David fired her. Adele takes all the blame. As Louise helps Adele upstairs for a sleep, Adele remarks to herself on her “stronger, firmer and tighter” (222) body: “I’ve created this new Louise” (222).

Adam comes home, and his father, Ian, compliments Louise on losing weight. She doesn’t tell him about losing her job. She says she’s happy for him and his new wife’s pregnancy. Louise reflects on the lies she is telling and those she will have to tell. In contrast, her love for Adam is “pure and clean and perfect” (224). Louise falls asleep, her mind full of questions after musing on David, Adele, losing her job, and the mess that her life has become. In her dream, she goes through the first door to the happy scene and then through the second door. She finds herself in Adam’s bedroom, where a glass of water has spilled over his Paddington bear. She can’t pick it up as her hands are not there. Frightened, she is pulled back through the door and wakes up in bed. She counts her fingers. She goes back to Adam’s room and sees that there is a spilled glass of water. Initially unable to make sense of what is going on, she convinces herself she must have been sleepwalking and half woke up in Adam’s room, then went back to bed.