Therapy

me. Then on the way back, when we were nearly at the cottage, Jane said abruptly, “Why don’t you just give Mummy what she wants? You’d still have plenty to live on, wouldn’t you?” I said it was a matter of principle. I didn’t accept that Sally could walk out on me just because she found me difficult to live with, and still expect me to support her in the style of life to which she’d become accustomed. Jane said, “You mean, she was being paid to put up with your moods?” I said, “No, of course not. ” But in a way I suppose Jane was right, though I wouldn’t have put it quite like that. She’s a shrewd girl, Jane. She said, “I think your making all that money from The People Next Door had a bad effect on both of you. You seemed to worry more than when you were hard up. And Mummy became jealous.” I had never thought before that Sally might be jealous of my success.
    Although both Jane and Adam tried to be impartial, I felt that privately they were both on Sally’s “side”, so I didn’t seek them out again after those two meetings. Also I was plotting to take Amy to Tenerife and afraid they might find out and tell Sally.
     
    Tenerife was certainly a disastrous choice, but really the whole enterprise was doomed before it began. While I had kept Amy under wraps, as it were, never attempting any contact more intimate than a friendly kiss or cuddle, I invested her with a certain glamour, the glamour of the forbidden, the self-denied. Once I had her naked on a bed she was just a plump little lady with rather hairy legs which I hadn’t noticed before because she always wore stockings or tights. She also had a body distinctly lacking in muscle tone. I couldn’t help comparing her physique unfavourably with Sally’s, and reflecting that something seemed to have gone seriously wrong with my strategy. What on earth was I doing in this shitty hotel room in this godawful resort with a woman considerably less desirable than the estranged wife I was trying to get even with? It was hardly surprising that Tenerife was an erotic disaster. As soon as I got back — indeed, even before — I began to thumb through my mental backlist of female acquaintance in search of a likely partner younger and more attractive than Amy. I came up with Louise.
    Within days I was airborne again, en route for Los Angeles. Another fiasco. Indeed, a double fiasco, if you count the blind date with Stella which Louise fixed up for me after she shattered my hopes. Some hopes. I knew, really, even as I booked my flight to L.A. (open ticket, Business Class; it cost the earth but I wanted to arrive in good shape) that the likelihood of Louise still being unattached and available after all those years was remote in the extreme, and simply suppressed the knowledge because I couldn’t bear the thought of failure. It was like Kierkegaard going back to Copenhagen a year after breaking off his engagement, fondly imagining Regine would still be unattached and grieving for him, and then discovering that she was engaged to Schlegel. The attraction of Louise was precisely that she was someone I could have had in the past, and had foolishly, perversely, denied myself. It was the lure of Repetition, the idea of having Louise offer herself to me again, making possession doubly sweet, that impelled me to travel all those thousands of miles.
    Stella, on the other hand, was just a potential one-night stand as far as I was concerned. I had a day and a night to kill before the next available flight back to London, so when Louise called me the morning after our outing to Venice to say that she had a friend who was dying to meet me, I agreed. I met her in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire and took her to dinner in the hotel’s ludicrously expensive restaurant. She seemed quite attractive at first sight, blonde and slim and groomed to a high polish. I blinked in the glitter and dazzle of her teeth, hair-lacquer, nail-vamish and costume jewellery. But her smiles lasted just a fraction of a second longer than seemed quite natural, and her facial skin had a tightness under the pancake make-up that suggested it had been lifted. She didn’t beat about the bush, saying over our pre-dinner Margaritas, “Louise tells me we have a lot in common: we’ve both been betrayed and we both want to get laid, right?” I laughed uneasily, and asked her what she did for a living. It turned out that she owns a boutique on Rodeo Drive where Louise shops sometimes.