Therapy

threatening to sue for divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. “As you know, adultery and unreasonable behaviour are the only grounds for an immediate divorce,” he said. I asked him what constituted unreasonable behaviour. “A very good question,” he said, joining his fingertips and leaning forward across the desk. He launched into a long disquisition, but I’m afraid my mind wandered and I suddenly became aware that he had fallen silent and was looking expectantly at me. “I’m sorry, would you just repeat that, please?” I said. His smile became a trifle forced. “Repeat how much?” he said. “Just the last bit,” I said, not having a clue how long he had been speaking. “I asked you, what kind of unreasonable behaviour Mrs Passmore was likely to complain of, if she were under oath.” I thought for a moment.
    “Would my not listening when she was talking to me count?” I said. “It might,” he said. “It would depend on the judge.” I got the impression that if Shorthouse were judging me himself, I wouldn’t stand much chance. “Have you ever physically assaulted your wife?” he said. “Good God, no,” I said. “What about drunkenness, verbal abuse, jealous rages, false accusations, that sort of thing?” “Only since she walked out on me,” I said. “I didn’t hear you say that,” he said. He paused for a moment before summing up: “I don’t think Mrs Passmore will risk lodging an unreasonable behaviour petition. She won’t qualify for legal aid, and if she were to lose the costs could be considerable. Also she would be back to square one as regards the divorce. She’s threatening this to bring pressure on you to co-operate. I don’t think you need worry.” Shorthouse smirked, obviously pleased with his analysis. “You mean she won’t get a divorce?” I said. “Oh, she’ll get it eventually, of course, on grounds of irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. It’s a question of how long you want to make her wait.” “And how much I want to pay you to delay things?” I said. “Quite so,” he said, glancing at the clock. I told him to carry on delaying.
     
    Then I went to see Dudley. Drawing up outside his house I thought wistfully of all the previous occasions on which I had visited him with nothing more serious to complain of than a general, ill-defined malaise. A wide-bodied jet thundered overhead as I rang the doorbell, making me cringe and cover my ears. Dudley told me it was a new scheduled service to New York. “Be useful to you, won’t it, in your line of work?” he remarked, “You won’t have to go from Heathrow any more.” Dudley has a rather exaggerated notion of the glamour of a TV scriptwriter’s life. I told him I was living in London now, anyway, and the reason. “I don’t suppose you have an essential oil for marital breakdown, do you?” I said. “I can give you something for stress,” he offered. I asked him if he could do anything about my knee, which had been playing up badly on the M1. He tapped away on his computer and said he would try lavender, which was allegedly good for aches and pains and stress. He took a little phial out of his big, brass-bound case of essential oils, and invited me to smell it.
    I don’t think Dudley can have ever used lavender on me before, because sniffing it triggered the most extraordinarily vivid memory — of Maureen Kavanagh, my first girlfriend. She’s been flitting in and out of my consciousness ever since I started this journal, like a figure glimpsed indistinctly at the edge of a distant wood, moving between the trees, gliding in and out of the shadows. The smell of lavender drew her out into the open — the lavender and Kierkegaard. I made a note some weeks ago that the symbol for the double aa in modern Danish, the single a with a little circle on top, reminded me of something I couldn’t pin down at the time. Well, it was Maureen’s handwriting. She used to dot her is that way, with a little circle instead of a point, like a trail of bubbles above the lines of her big round handwriting. I don’t know where she got the idea from. We used to write to each other even though we saw each other every morning at the tram stop, just for the thrill of having private letters. I used to write her rather passionate love-letters and she would send back shy little notes of disappointing banality: “I did homework after tea, then I helped Mum with her ironing. Did you listen in to Tony