Therapy

do maximum justice to it. I revised it a lot. I’m used to that, of course — scriptwriting is mostly rewriting — but in response to the input of other people. This time I was the only reader, the only critic, and I revised as I went along. And I did something I haven’t done since I bought my first electric typewriter — wrote the first drafts of each section in longhand. Somehow it seems more natural to try and recover the past with a pen in your hand than with your fingers poised over a keyboard. The pen is like a tool, a cutting or digging tool, slicing down through the roots, probing the rockbed of memory. Of course I used a bit of licence in the dialogue. It all happened forty years ago and I didn’t take any notes. But I’m pretty sure that I’ve been true to the emotions, and that’s the important thing. I can’t leave the piece alone, though: I keep picking up the printed-out sheets, re-reading them, tinkering and revising, when what I should be doing is tidying up the flat.
    The kitchen looks like a tip, heaped with soiled plates and empty takeaway food containers, there’s a pile of unopened mail on the coffee table, and the answerphone has stopped receiving messages because the tape is full. Grahame was quite disgusted by the state of the place when he came in to watch the England match. He has higher standards of housekeeping than me — sometimes he borrows my dustpan and brush to sweep his little square of marbled floor in the porch. I fear his days of occupation may be numbered, though. The two American academics in number 4 are over for the summer vacation, and they entertain a lot. Understandably they object to having a resident bum in the entryway over whom their arriving and departing guests must step. They told me in the lift yesterday that they were going to complain to the police. I tried to persuade them that Grahame was no ordinary bum, but without making much impression. He doesn’t help his cause by referring to them contemptuously as “them yank poofters”.
     
    What reading and re-reading the memoir leaves me with is an overwhelming sense of loss. Not just the loss of Maureen’s love, but the loss of innocence — hers and my own. In the past, whenever I thought of her — and it wasn’t very often — it was with a kind of fond, wry, inner smile: nice kid, first girlfriend, how naive we both were, water under the bridge, that sort of thing. Going back over the history of our relationship in detail, I realized for the first time what an appalling thing I had done all those years ago. I broke a young girl’s heart, callously, selfishly, wantonly.
    I’m well aware, of course, that I wouldn’t feel this way about it if I hadn’t recently discovered Kierkegaard. It’s really a very Kierkegaardian story. It has resemblances to “The Seducer’s Diary”, and resemblances to K’s own relationship with Regine. Maureen — Regine: the names almost rhyme.
    Regine put up more of a fight than Maureen, though. When K sent back her ring, she rushed straight round to his lodgings, and, finding him not at home, left a note begging him not to desert her, “in the name of Christ and by the memory of your deceased father.” That was an inspired touch, the deceased father. Søren was convinced that, like so many of his siblings, he would die before his father — there seemed to be a curse on the family that way. So when the old man popped off first Soren thought he had in some mystical sense died for him. He dated his religious conversion from that time. So Regine’s note really shook him. But he went on nevertheless pretending to be cold and cynical, breaking the girl’s heart, perversely convinced that he “could be happier in unhappiness without her than with her.” I just looked up his record of their last interview:
     
I tried to talk her round. She asked me, Will you never marry? I replied, Well, in about ten years, when I have sowed my wild oats, I must have a pretty young miss to rejuvenate me. — A necessary cruelty. She said, Forgive me for what I have done to you. I replied, It is rather I that should pray for your forgiveness. She said, Kiss me. That I did, but without passion. Merciful God!
     
    That “Kiss me” was Regine’s last throw. When it didn’t work, she gave up.
    Reading that, I recalled again Maureen lifting her unhappy face to me, blue under the streetlamp’s bleak light, and saying, “You can kiss me once,” and my walking away. Did I ever