I will meet Luke for the first time this afternoon and my nerves are already
beginning to take hold. My impatience has interfered with every simple task that
I have attempted this morning and I have lost my temper with Alex, with myself
and even with inanimate objects in the kitchen while preparing Alex's lunch for
work, which is highly out of character. Leonard has painted such a vivid
impression of Luke, in my mind at least, that I am nervous about meeting him
for fear that he will fail to live up to my expectations. And I have no doubt
that Leonard has raised Luke’s expectations of me in the same way. I have
caught glimpses of Luke through Leonard’s work, but when browsing through his
sketches I feel like a medical student studying a cadaver; there are rough
sketches of his hands, his bare feet, maybe an eye. I can identify Luke’s body
from the prominent veins across his left foot but I would fail to recognise him
in the street.
Alex has detected that I am nervous and he has enquired several times
this morning about the cause of my agitation, but I cannot tell him the truth.
He is already uncomfortable with the fact that I am spending a considerable
amount of time with another man (even though I have assured him that Leonard is
elderly and harmless) and his persistent questioning each time I return from a
sitting has passed beyond a genuine interest in my day-to-day activities into
potentially controlling behaviour: ‘What time did you leave? What did you talk
about? What clothes did he ask you to wear?’. His aggressive hounding is
causing arguments, particularly when he mocks my work with Leonard in the presence
of our friends and trivialises my excitement about future projects. He even
refused to meet Leonard when the invite was recently extended. My friendship
with Leonard is an extremely sensitive subject at the moment and the presence
of a young man at our sittings would certainly give Alex sufficient reason to
bring my visits to Elmfield House to an abrupt end.
One other thing is bothering me and I’m a little embarrassed to mention
it, but here goes nothing. At times I feel like I am being watched. It’s not so
noticeable when I am in public because I am surrounded by the curious eyes of strangers
as expected, but several times when I have been sitting alone at home I have been
seized by the uncomfortable feeling that there are eyes peering down at me like
invisible security cameras in the high corners of the room and watching my
every move. I realise that this sounds bizarre, but on occasion it has creeped
me out to the point that I have turned on the TV or the radio to disguise the
unsettling feeling that I am not alone in the room.
