Therapy

it a grenade, or a mortar shell, or was it a primitive kind of aerial bomb that they lobbed out of the open cockpits of the old biplanes? The dictionary isn’t much help) — after Sally burst into my study that Friday evening, and announced that she wanted a separation, I was too upset to be able to write anything, even a journal, for weeks. I was beside myself with jealousy and rage and self-pity. (Now there's a good cliché for you, “beside myself as if you’re so full of negative feelings that you shake your mind loose from your body, severing the connections between them, and the one is unable to voice the pain of the other.) All I could think of was how to get even with Sally: by being obstructive over money; by trying to track down and expose the lover I was sure she must have; and by having an affair with somebody myself. Why did I think that this last would bother her, I wonder? In any case, even if I’d succeeded I wouldn’t have been able to let Sally know, because then she could have sued for a quick divorce on the grounds of adultery. If I try and untwist the tangled and frazzled wires of my motivation at that time, I would have to say that I was trying to make up for lost philandering.
    What was most painful about Sally’s UDI was of course her rejection of me as a person, and the implied judgement that our thirty years together, or a good many of them, had been worthless, meaningless, as far as she was concerned. After she walked out of the house I sat on the floor of the living-room with all our family photograph albums, which I hadn’t looked at for years, spread out around me, and turned the pages with tears streaming down my cheeks. The unbearable poignancy of those snaps! Sally and the children grinning into the lens from deckchairs, pushchairs, swings, sandcastles, paddling pools, swimming pools, bicycle saddles, pony saddles, the decks of cross-Channel ferries and the patios of French gîtes. The kids gradually getting taller and stronger from year to year, Sally getting a little thinner in the face and greyer in the hair, but always looking healthy and happy. Yes, happy. Surely the camera couldn’t lie? I snivelled and wiped away my tears and blew my nose, peering intently at the brightly coloured Kodak prints to see if I could discern in Sally’s face any sign of the disaffection to come. But her eyes were too small, I couldn’t see into the eyes, which is the only place where a person can’t disguise what they’re thinking. Perhaps it had all been an illusion, our “happy marriage”, a smile for the camera.
    Once you begin to doubt your marriage, you begin to doubt your grasp of reality. I thought I knew Sally — suddenly I found I didn’t. So perhaps I didn’t know myself. Perhaps I didn’t know anything. This was such a vertiginous conclusion that I sheered away from it, and took refuge in anger. I demonized Sally. The breakup of our marriage was all her fault. Whatever truth there might be in her complaints about my self-centredness, moodiness, abstractedness, etc. etc. (and admittedly my inattention to the news about Jane’s pregnancy was an embarrassing lapse) they didn’t amount to grounds for leaving me. There had to be another reason, viz., another man. There were plenty of examples of adultery in our circle of acquaintance to support the hypothesis. And our lifestyle since the children left home would have made it very easy for Sally to maintain another relationship, with me being in London for two days a week, and her professional life a closed book as far as I was concerned. What particularly angered me was that I hadn’t taken advantage of the situation myself. “Anger” isn’t quite the word, though. Chagrin, or as Amy would say, chagrin , is better-it has the teeth-grinding, bottled-up, you’ll-be-sorry-for-this quality of resentment that had me in its grip. I was chagrined at the thought of all the women I might so easily have had in the course of my professional life, especially in recent years, if I hadn’t resolved to be faithful to Sally: actresses and production assistants and publicity girls and secretaries — all susceptible to the mana of a successful writer. Freud said, so Amy told me once, that all writers are driven by three ambitions: fame, money and the love of women (or men, I presume, as the case might be, though I don’t think Freud took much account of women writers, or gay ones). I admit to pursuing the first two ambitions, but