Therapy

write do I feel well. Then I forget all of life’s vexations, all its sufferings, then I am wrapped in thought and am happy.” — Kierkegaard’s journal, 1847. While I was writing the monologues I was — not happy exactly, but occupied, absorbed, interested. It was like working on a script. I had a task to perform, and I got some satisfaction in performing it. Now that I’ve finished the task, and brought my journal more or less up to date, I feel restless, nervous, ill-at-ease, unable to settle to anything. I have no aim or objective, apart from making it as difficult as possible for Sally to get her hands on my money, and my heart isn’t really in that any more. I’ve got to go up to Rummidge to see my lawyer tomorrow. I could instruct him to throw in the towel, settle the divorce as quickly as possible and give Sally what she wants. But would that make me feel any better? No. It’s another either/or situation. It doesn’t matter what I do, I’m bound to regret it. If you divorce you’ll regret it, if you don’t divorce you’ll regret it. Divorce or don’t divorce, you’ll regret both.
    Perhaps I still hope that Sally and I will get together again, that I can have my old life back, that everything will be as it used to be. Perhaps, in spite of all my tantrums and tears and plots for revenge — or because of them — I haven’t truly despaired of our marriage. B says to A: “In order truly to despair one must really want to, but when one truly wills despair one is truly beyond it; when one has truly chosen despair one has truly chosen what despair chooses, namely oneself in one’s eternal validity.” I suppose you could say I chose myself when I declined Alexandra’s offer to put me on Prozac, but it didn’t feel like an act of existential self-affirmation at the time. More like a captured criminal holding out his wrists for the handcuffs.
     
    5.30. I suddenly thought that as I’m going up to Rummidge tomorrow, I might as well try to fit some therapy in. I made a couple of phone calls. Roland was fully booked, but Dudley was able to give me an appointment in the afternoon. I didn’t try Miss Wu. I haven’t seen her since that Friday when Sally dropped her bombshell. I haven’t felt like it. Nothing to do with Miss Wu. Association of ideas: acupuncture and my life falling apart.
     
    9.30. I ate at an Indian restaurant this evening and came home at about nine, spicing the metropolitan pollution with explosive, aromatic farts. Grahame said a man had rung my doorbell. From his description I guessed it was Jake. “Friend of yours, is he?” Grahame enquired. “Sort of,” I said. “He asked me if I’d seen you lately. Didn’t give a very flattering description.” Naturally I asked what it was. “Fattish, bald, round-shouldered.” The last epithet shook me a bit. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly round-shouldered. It must be the effect of depression. How you feel is how you look. I don’t think it was only his childhood accident that made Kierkegaard’s spine curve. “What did you tell him?” I asked. “I didn’t tell him nothing,” said Grahame. “Good,” I said. “You did well.”
     
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    Friday 28th May. 7.45 p.m. Just returned from Rummidge. I drove, simply to give the Richmobile a run: I keep it in a lock-up garage near King’s Cross, and hardly ever use it these days. Not that there was much pleasure to be had on the M1 today. It had broken out in a rash of cones, like scarlet fever, and contraflow between Junctions 9 and 11 was causing a five-mile tailback. Apparently a car towing a caravan had contraflowed into a lorry. So I was late for my appointment with Dennis Shorthouse. He specializes in divorce and family litigation for my solicitors, Dobson McKitterick. I never had any dealings with him until the bust-up with Sally. He’s tall, grey-haired, with a spare frame and a lined, beaky face, and rarely moves from behind his large, eerily tidy desk. Just as some doctors keep themselves pretematurally clean and neat as if to ward off infection, so Shorthouse seems to use his desk as some kind of cordon sanitaire to keep his clients’ misery at a safe distance. It has an in-tray and an out-tray, both always empty, a spotless blotter and a digital clock, subtly angled towards the client’s chair like a taxi-meter, so you can see how much his advice is costing you.
    He’d had a letter from Sally’s solicitors,