Therapy

completely finito . I felt like a sponge that had been saturated and squeezed so often it had lost all its spring. And then, when I said I had to go home, he asked me to stay the night. He said it wasn’t for sex, but just so he could hold me. He hasn’t had any proper sleep since last Friday, and he does look quite hollow-eyed, poor sweet. He said, “I think it would help me to sleep if I could just hold you.”
    Well, of course it was out of the question. I mean, leaving aside whether I wanted to be held, and the risk of its developing into something else, I couldn’t possibly stay out all night without warning. Zelda would’ve been worried sick, and if I’d phoned her with some improvised story she would have seen through it immediately, she always knows when I’m lying, it’s one of her most irritating habits. Incidentally, it was Bad Breast time again this morning. Yes. We had a bitter row at breakfast, about muesli. Not just about muesli, of course. They didn’t have her usual brand at Safeways the last time I went shopping so I bought another kind and this morning the old packet had run out so I put this other one on the table and she refused to touch it because it had added sugar. A minuscule quantity, and brown sugar too, the healthy sort, as I pointed out, but she refused to eat any of it, and as it’s the only thing she ever has for breakfast, apart from coffee, she went off to school on an empty stomach, leaving me feeling incredibly guilty, exactly as she had intended, of course. Her parting shot was to say that I was trying to make her eat sugar because she’s slim and I’m fat, “disgustingly fat” was the phrase she used, do you think that’s true? No, I don’t mean about my being disgustingly fat, I don’t consider myself fat at all, even though I would like to lose a few pounds. I mean is it possible that I’m subconsciously jealous of Zelda’s figure? Oh you always bat these questions back at me. I don’t know. Perhaps I am a little bit. But I honestly didn’t know there was any sugar in the bloody muesli.
    Where was I? Oh yes, Laurence. Well, I had to say no, though I did feel badly about it, he looked so woeful, so pleading, like a dog that wants to come in out of the rain. I said, couldn’t he take a sleeping pill, and he said he didn’t want to because they made him so depressed when he woke up, and if he got any more depressed than he was already he was afraid he’d top himself. He smiled when he said that to show it was a joke, but it worried me. He did go and see his psychotherapist on Monday, but she doesn’t seem to have been much help. That may be Laurence’s fault, because when I asked him he couldn’t remember anything she’d said. I’m not sure he took in anything I said last night, either. All he wants to do is pour out his version of things, not listen to any constructive advice. I nearly said to him, you should try analysis, darling, that’s all I do, five days a week: pour out my version of things without getting any constructive advice. Just my little joke, Karl. Yes, of course I know that jokes are disguised forms of aggression...
     
    Well, things have gone from bad to worse. Sally’s moved out of the house, and Laurence is all on his own there. It’s a five-bedroomed detached, in an upmarket residential area on the outskirts of Rummidge. I’ve never been there, but he showed me some photographs. It’s what the estate agents call a modern house of character. I couldn’t say what character. French farmhouse crossed with golf club, perhaps. Not my taste, but comfortable and substantial. Set well back from the road, at the end of a longish drive, with a lot of trees and shrubs round it. He said to me once, “It’s so quiet there I could hear my hair growing, if I had any hair.” Yes, he’s bald. Didn’t I ever mention it? He jokes about it, but I think it bothers him. Anyway, I don’t like to think of him all on his own in that house, like a bead in a rattle.
    I gathered that last weekend was rather fraught. Sally told him she was prepared to talk, but there had to be a time limit on their discussions, not more than two hours at a time, and only one session a day. It sounded like quite a sensible idea to me, but Laurence couldn’t accept it. He says her college sent her on a management course recently and she’s trying to treat their marital crisis as if it were an industrial dispute, with agendas and adjournments. He agreed to the