Therapy

holiday hotel. I dread to think what a one-star hotel in Tenerife is like. My heart sank — and it was already somewhere near my knees — when we walked into the lobby and took in the vinyl-tiled floor and the plastic-covered sofas and the dusty rubber plants wilting under the fluorescent ceiling lights. Laurence checked in and we followed the porter up in the lift in silence. Our room was bare and functional, clean enough, but smelling strongly of disinfectant. There were twin beds. Laurence looked at them with dismay and told the porter he had ordered a double room. The porter said all the rooms in the hotel had twin beds. Laurence’s shoulders slumped a few degrees lower. When the porter had gone he apologized dolefully and vowed vengeance on the travel agent when he got home. I said gamely that it didn’t matter and opened the sliding windows to step out on to the little balcony. The swimming pool was spread out below — a random shape, like a blot in a Rorschach test, set among artificial rocks and palm trees. It was lit from under the water, and glowed a brilliant blue in the night. The pool was the only thing we had seen so far that was remotely romantic, but the effect was spoiled by the powerful public-baths odour of chlorine that rose from the water, and the thump of the bass notes from a disco still in deafening progress on the far side. I closed the shutters against the noise and the smell and turned on the air-conditioning. Laurence was dragging the beds together, making a frightful noise as the bed-legs squeaked on the tiled floor and revealing that the room wasn’t quite as clean as it had first looked because there was dust behind and underneath the bedside cabinets, and discovering that the leads on the bedside lamps weren’t long enough to stretch to the new positions, so we ended up putting the beds back where they were. I was secretly relieved because it made it easier to suggest that we went straight off to sleep. It was late and I was exhausted and I felt about as sexy as a sack of Brussels sprouts. I think Laurence felt much the same, because he agreed readily enough. We used the bathroom decorously, one after the other, and then kissed chastely and got into our respective beds. Immediately I could feel through the thin sheets that my mattress was plastic-covered. Can you believe it? I thought only babies and elderly incontinents were given plastic-covered mattresses. Not so — package tourists too. I can tell you’re fidgeting, Karl — you want to know whether we DID IT in the end, or not, don’t you? Well, you’ll just have to be patient. This is my story and I’m going to tell it in my own way. Oh, is it? Already? Well, till tomorrow, then.
     
    Well, what do you think has happened? You’ll never guess. Sally has moved back into their house in Rummidge and announced that she’s going to stay, living separate lives. Yes, that’s what it’s called, “separate lives”, it’s a recognized legal term. It means you share the marital home while divorce proceedings are going on, but you don’t live together. Don’t cohabit. Laurence got back home yesterday — he spent the night in his London flat — to find Sally waiting for him with a typewritten sheet of proposals about how they should share the house, who should have which bedroom, and what hours they should each have the use of the kitchen and what days use of the washing machine. Sally was very explicit about not doing Laurence’s laundry. She’d already bagged the master bedroom with the en suite bathroom, and had a new lock fitted on the bedroom door. He found all his suits and shirts and things had been very carefully moved and neatly put away in the guestroom. He’s absolutely furious, but his lawyer says there’s nothing he can do about it. Sally chose her moment well. She’d asked if she could collect some clothes from the house last weekend, and he said yes, any time, because he’d be away, and she had her own keys to the house of course. But instead of taking her clothes away she moved back in, when he wasn’t there to try and stop her. No, she doesn’t know that he was in Tenerife with me. In fact, she mustn’t know.
    Oh yes, where was I? Well, nothing happened the first night, as I said, except that we slept in our separate beds — till quite late, in spite of the incontinents’ mattresses, because we were both so tired. We ordered breakfast in our room. It wasn’t encouraging: canned orange juice,