Therapy

to play singles and went for a drink after we’d showered. We carried our pints to a nice quiet corner of the Club bar. In spite of the occasional twinge of pain in my knee, I felt good, glowing from the exercise, almost like the old days, and relished the cool bitter, but Rupert frowned into his jar as if there was something nasty at the bottom of it. “I wish Joe wouldn’t keep on about Brett Sutton,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. It’s worse than embarrassing, it’s unpleasant. It’s like watching somebody picking at a scab.” I asked him what he meant. He said, lowering his voice, “Didn’t you know about Jean?” “Jean who?” I said stupidly. “Oh, you weren’t there, were you,” Rupert said. “Joe’s Jean. She had it off with young Ritchie at the New Year’s Eve do.”
    Young Ritchie is Alistair, son of Sam Ritchie, the Club’s golf pro. He looks after the shop when his father is out giving lessons, and does a bit of beginners’ tuition himself. He can’t be more than twenty-five. “You’re not serious?” I said. “Cross my heart,” Rupert said. “Jean got tight, and started complaining because Joe wouldn’t dance, then she got young Ritchie to dance with her, giggling and hanging round his neck she was, then some time later they both disappeared. Joe went looking for her, and found them together in the First Aid room, in a compromising position. It’s not the first time it’s been used for that purpose, I believe. They’d locked the door, but Joe had a key, being on the Committee.” I asked Rupert how he knew all this. “Jean told Betty, and Betty told me.” I shook my head incredulously. I wondered why Joe was making all these cracks about Brett Sutton being the club gigolo, if he himself had just been cuckolded by young Ritchie. “Diversionary tactics, I suppose,” Rupert said. “He’s trying to draw attention away from Ritchie and Jean.” “What possessed young Ritchie?” I said. “Jean is old enough to be his mother.” “Perhaps it was pity,” Rupert suggested. “Jean told him she hadn’t had it since Joe had his back operation.” “Had what?” “It,” said Rupert. “Sex. You’re a bit slow on the uptake today, Tubby.” “Sorry, I’m gobsmacked,” I said. I was thinking of our conversation in the indoor courts last week: it was disturbing to realize that what I took to be Joe’s harmless teasing had had this painful subtext. I recalled now that Rupert hadn’t joined in the banter, though Humphrey had. “Does Humphrey know about this?” I asked. “I dunno. I don’t think so. He hasn’t got a wife to pass on the gossip, has he? I’m surprised Sally hasn’t picked it up.” Perhaps she has, I thought, and hasn’t told me.
    But when I asked her later if she’d heard any scandal about Jean Wellington, she said, no. “But then I wouldn’t,” she said. “It’s a trade-off, that sort of gossip. You don’t get any dirt if you don’t dish some yourself.” I thought she would ask me for more details, but she didn’t. Sally has extraordinary self-control in that way. Or perhaps she just isn’t curious about other people’s private lives. She’s very wrapped up in her work at the moment — not only her teaching and research, but admin. There’s a lot of reorganization going on as a result of the change of status from Poly to University. They can make up their own degree programmes now, and Sally is chairing a new inter-Faculty postgraduate degree course in Applied Linguistics shared between Education and Humanities, as well as sitting on numerous committees, internal and external, with names like F-QUAC (Faculty Quality Assurance Committee) and C-CUE (Council for College and University English), and organizing the in-service training of local junior-school teachers to implement the new National Curriculum. I think she’s being exploited by her Head of Department, who gives her all the trickiest jobs because he knows she’ll do them better than anyone else, but when I tell her this she just shrugs and says that it shows he’s a good manager. She brings home piles of boring agendas and reports to work through in the evenings and at the weekends. We sit in silence on opposite sides of the fireplace, she with her committee papers, I connected to the muted television by the umbilical cord of my headphones.
     
    Severe twinge in the knee while I was watching the news tonight. I suddenly shouted “Fuck!” Sally looked up from her