Therapy

it. I might well have driven past her in the street.
    The house is quite an ordinary large inter-war semi, with a long back garden. They moved there early in their married life, Bede said, and extended it, building on top of the garage, and out at the back, and converting the loft, to accommodate their growing family, instead of moving. They have four children, all grown-up and flown the nest now, it appeared. Bede was on his own in the house, which had an unnaturally clean and tidy look, as if most of the rooms hadn’t been disturbed since the last visit of the cleaning-lady. I peeped into some of them when I went upstairs to use the loo. I noticed that there were twin beds in the master bedroom, which gave me a silly satisfaction. Aha, no sex any more, I said to myself. Not necessarily true, of course.
    Bede hasn’t changed much except that his coarse unruly hair has turned quite white, and his cheeks are sunken. He still wears hornrimmed glasses with lenses like bottle ends. But apparently I’ve changed a lot. Although I arrived at the time appointed, he greeted me uncertainly when he opened the front door. “You’ve put on weight,” he said, when I identified myself. “And lost most of my hair,” I said. “Yes, you had rather a lot of hair, didn’t you,” he said. He led me into the sitting-room (where, I was amused to note, the curtains matched the loose covers) and invited me rather stiffly to sit down. He was dressed like a man who has spent most of his life in a suit and doesn’t know quite what to wear in retirement. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket with leather patches, and a checked shirt with a woollen tie, grey worsted trousers and dark brown brogues — rather heavy clothes for the time of year, even though it was a cool, blustery day.
    “I owe you an apology,” he said, in his familiar pompous way. “I was speaking to my daughter on the telephone this morning and she informs me that your programme — what is it called? — is one of the most popular on television.”
    “The People Next Door. Does your daughter watch it?” I asked. “She watches everything, indiscriminately,” he said. “We didn’t have a television when the children were growing up — I thought it would interfere with their homework. The effect on Teresa was that she became completely addicted as soon as she left home and was able to get a set for herself. I have come to the conclusion,” he went on, “that all effort to control other people’s lives is completely futile.” “Including government?” I asked.
    “Especially government,” he said. He seemed to regard his career in the civil service as a failure, in spite of the OBE. “The educational system of this country is in a much worse state now than when I joined the Department,” he said. “That isn’t my fault, but I was unable to prevent it. When I think of all the hours I spent on committees, working-parties, writing reports, writing memoranda... all completely futile. I envy you, Passmore. I wish I’d been a writer. Or at least a don. I could have done a postgraduate degree after I got my First, but I took the Civil Service exam instead. It seemed the safer bet at the time, and I wanted to get married, you know.”
    I suggested that now he was retired he would have plenty of leisure to write.
    “Yes, I always used to think that is what I would do in my retirement. I used to write a lot when I was young — poems, essays... ”
    “Plays,” I said.
    “Quite so.” Bede allowed himself a wintry reminiscent smile. “But the creative juices dry up if they’re not kept in circulation. I tried to write something the other day, something rather personal about... bereavement. It came out like a White Paper.”
    He left me for a few minutes to make some coffee in the kitchen, and I prowled round the room in search of clues to Maureen’s existence. There were a number of fairly recent family photographs on display-graduations and weddings and one of Bede and Maureen together outside Buckingham Palace with Bede in morning dress — in which she appeared as a proud, smiling, matronly woman, her hair grey and cut short, but with the same sweet heart-shaped face I remembered. I stared greedily at these images, trying to reconstruct from them the missing years of her life (missing for me, I mean). Propped up on the mantelpiece was a brightly coloured picture postcard of St Jean Pied-de-Port in the French Pyrenees. On the other side was a brief