Therapy

scrupulously abstained from the third on principle. And what was my reward? To be put out to grass when I had served my turn, when my sexual powers were on the wane.
    That last thought threw me into a panic. How many years did I have left to make up for lost opportunities in the past? I recalled what I had written in my journal a few weeks earlier: “You won’t know it is your last fuck while you’re having it, and by the time you find out you probably won’t be able to remember what it was like. ” I tried to remember when Sally and I last made love, and couldn’t. I looked back through the journal and found it logged under Saturday, 27th February. There wasn’t any detail, except that Sally had seemed surprised when I took the initiative, and complied rather listlessly. Reading that fuelled my suspicions. I leafed back further to the conversation with the boys at the tennis club: “You want to watch your Missus, Tubby... Good at other games, too, I’m told... He’s certainly got the tackle... ”The solution to the mystery burst inside my head like a flare. Brett Sutton, of course! The tennis lessons, the new sports clothes, the sudden decision to dye her hair... It all fitted together. My head became a blue-movie house, flickering with lurid images of Sally naked on the couch in the Club’s First Aid room, throwing back her head in ecstasy as Brett Sutton shafted her with his enormous cock.
    I discovered I was mistaken about Brett Sutton. But the need to have sex myself, as soon as possible — for revenge, for compensation, for reassurance — became an all-consuming preoccupation. Naturally I thought first of Amy. For some years our relationship had had all the marks of an affair — the secrecy and regularity of our meetings, the discreet restaurant meals, the covert telephone calls, the exchange of confidences — everything except the act of intercourse. I had refrained from crossing that threshold out of misplaced loyalty to Sally. Now there was no moral reason to hold back. So I argued to myself at the time, the immediate postbombshell time. What I didn’t consider was (a) whether I really desired Amy and (b) whether she desired me. We discovered in Tenerife that the answer to both questions was “no”.
     
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    Wednesday 26th May. Letters from Jane and Adam this morning. I didn’t feel like opening them — just recognizing the handwriting on the envelopes turned my stomach over — but I couldn’t settle to anything until I did. Both were short notes asking how I am and inviting me to visit. I suspect some kindly collusion: the coincidence of receiving them on the same day is too blatant.
    I saw each of them separately after Sally walked out of the house, but before she moved back. Adam and I had lunch in London one day, and then I went down to spend a weekend in Swanage with Jane and Gus. Both were uncomfortable occasions. For the lunch with Adam I chose a restaurant I’d never been to before, so I wouldn’t be recognized. It turned out to be full, with tables much too close together, so Adam and I couldn’t speak freely even if we’d wanted to, and had to communicate in a kind of elliptical code. If anyone was eavesdropping they probably thought we were discussing a rather unsuccessful dinner party rather than the break-up of a thirty-year-old marriage. I preferred that, though, to the weekend in Swanage, when Gus kept tactfully leaving Jane and me on our own to have the kind of heart-to-heart conversation neither of us really wanted, because we’d never had one before and didn’t know how to do it. Jane’s relationship to me has always been a humorously scolding one, getting at me for environmentally unsound forms of consumption, like bottled mineral water, coloured paperclips, and hardwood bookshelves, or for sexist jokes in The People Next Door. It was a game we played, partly for the entertainment of others. We didn’t seem to have a routine for talking intimately.
    On the Sunday afternoon Jane and I took their dog for a walk along the crescent-shaped beach, exchanging desultory observations about the weather, the tide, the windsurfers in the bay. The baby is due in October, apparently. I asked her how she was feeling as regards the pregnancy, and she said she was over the morningsickness period thank God; but that topic fizzled out too, perhaps because it was uncomfortably connected in both our minds with the terminal row between Sally and