Therapy

Santiago, saying little, concentrating on the road unwinding in my headlights. Back in the Reyes Catolicos, we fell asleep quickly in each other’s arms, too tired, or too sad, to make love.
     
    I had plenty of time on the ferry to ponder Maureen’s advice, and by the time we docked in Portsmouth I had determined to give it a shot. I phoned Sally just to check that she would be in, and drove straight to Hollywell without stopping. The crunch of my tyres on the gravel of the drive brought Sally to the front door. She offered me her cheek to kiss. “You look well,” she said.
    “I’ve been in Spain,” I said. “Walking.”
    “Walking! What about the knee?”
    “It seems to be better, at last,” I said.
    “Wonderful. Come in and tell me all about it. I’ll make a cup of tea.”
    It felt good to be home — I still thought of it as home. I looked round the kitchen with pride and pleasure in its sleek lines and smart colour scheme. Sally looked in good shape too. She was wearing a red linen dress with a long slit skirt that showed an occasional flash of tanned leg as she moved about the kitchen. “You’re looking well yourself,” I said.
    “Thank you, I am. Have you come to pick up some of your things?”
    “No,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. I coughed and cleared it. “I’ve come to have a talk, actually. I’ve been thinking, Sal, perhaps we should have a go at getting back together. What d’you say?”
    Sally looked dismayed. That’s the only word to describe her face: dismayed. “No, Tubby,” she said.
    “I don’t mean straight away. We could go on with separate living arrangements in the house for a while. Separate bedrooms, anyway. See how it goes.”
    “I’m afraid it’s impossible, Tubby.”
    “Why?” I said, though I knew the answer before she spoke. “There’s someone else.”
    “You said there wasn’t.”
    “Well, there wasn’t, then. But now there is.”
    “Who is he?”
    “Somebody at work. You don’t know him.”
    “So you’ve known him for some time, then?”
    “Yes. But we didn’t... we weren’t... ”
    Sally for once seemed at a loss for words. “We haven’t been lovers till — till quite recently,” she said at last. “Before that it was just a friendship.”
    “You didn’t tell me about it, though,” I said.
    “You didn’t tell me about Amy,” she said.
    “How did you know about Amy?” I said. My head was spinning. “Oh, Tubby, everybody knows about you and Amy!”
    “It was platonic,” I said. “At least it was until you walked out.”
    “I know,” she said. “When I met her I knew it must be.”
    “This chap at work,” I said. “Is he married?”
    “Divorced.”
    “I see.”
    “We’ll probably get married. I expect that will make a difference to the divorce settlement. You probably won’t have to give me so much money.” She gave me a wan smile.
    “Oh, fuck the money,” I said, and walked out of the house for ever.
     
    It was a nasty shock, of course — to have my carefully prepared offer of reconciliation brushed aside, rendered redundant, cut off at the knees, shoved back down my throat almost before I’d uttered it. But driving back down the M1 through dwarf forests of cones, I began to see a positive side to the reversal. It was obvious that Sally had begun to lean towards this other bloke years ago, whatever the exact nature of their relationship. It wasn’t, as I had thought ever since Brett Sutton turned out to be innocent, that she’d left me simply because she would rather be lonely than married to me. I found that curiously reassuring. It restored my self-esteem.
    The day’s shocks weren’t over though. When I got back to London and let myself into the flat, I found it completely empty. It had been stripped bare. There was nothing movable left in it, down to the light bulbs and the curtain rails. The chairs, tables, bed, carpets, crockery and cutlery, clothes and household linen — all gone. The only thing that was left, very neatly placed in the middle of the bare concrete floor, was my computer. It was a thoughtful touch on Grahame’s part: I had explained to him once how precious the contents of my hard disk were, and he didn’t know that I had deposited a box of back-up files with my bank before I left for Spain. I don’t know how he and his friends got in, because they hadn’t damaged the door and had carefully locked it behind them when they left. Perhaps Grahame had taken an impression of my