Therapy

limp cardboard-flavoured croissants, jam and marmalade in little plastic containers — the continuation of airline food by other means. We tried eating out on our little balcony, but were driven inside by the sun, which was already surprisingly hot. The balcony faced east and didn’t have an awning or an umbrella. So we ate in the room with the shutters closed. Laurence re-read the Evening Standard which he’d bought the day before in London. He offered to share it with me, but I felt his reading over breakfast at all was not quite comme il faut, in the circs. When I made a little joke about it, he frowned in a puzzled sort of way and said, “But I always read the paper over breakfast,” as if it were a fundamental law of the universe. It’s extraordinary how as soon as you have to share space with somebody, you begin to see them in a completely different light, and things about them irritate you which you never expected. It reminded me of my first months of married life. I remember how appalled I was by the way Saul used to leave the toilet, with streaks of shit in the bowl, as if nobody had ever explained to him what a toilet-brush was for, but of course it was years before I could bring myself to mention it. Sharing the toilet in Tenerife was a bit of a nightmare, too, as a matter of fact, but the less said about that the better.
    We decided to spend our first morning lazing beside the — Oh, yes, you would want to know about that, wouldn’t you? Well, the bathroom was windowless, as they usually are in modern hotels, and the extractor fan didn’t seem to be working, at least it wasn’t making any kind of noise, so I made sure I used the bathroom first after breakfast. It won’t surprise you in the light of our previous discussions about toilet training that, how shall I put this, that when I manage to do number twos the stools are rather small, hard, dense little things. Are you sure you want me to go on? Well, the fact is that this Tenerife toilet simply couldn’t cope with them. When I pulled the chain they danced about merrily in the water like little brown rubber balls, and refused to disappear. I kept pulling the chain and they just kept bobbing back to the surface. Talk about the return of the repressed. I got quite frantic. I just couldn’t leave the bathroom until I got rid of them. I mean, it’s not very pleasant to find someone else’s turds floating in the toilet just as you’re going to use it, and it certainly puts a damper on romance, wouldn’t you say? I couldn’t bring myself to apologize or explain to Laurence, or make a joke of it. You have to be married to somebody for at least five years to do that. What I really needed was a good bucket of water to slosh into the toilet bowl, but the only container in the bathroom was a waste-paper bin made of plastic latticework. Eventually I got rid of my little pellets by pushing them round the U-bend one by one with the toilet brush, but it’s not an experience I would care to repeat.
    Well, as I say, we decided to spend our first morning lazing beside the pool. But when we got down there, every lounger and every parasol was taken. People were sprawled all over the place, soaking up the skin cancer. Laurence is very fair-skinned and he has an extraordinary amount of hair on his torso which soaks up suntan lotion like blotting-paper but lets all the harmful rays through. I tan easily, but I’ve read so many bloodcurdling articles in women’s magazines lately about the effect on your skin that now I’m terrified of exposing a single inch. The only bit of shade was a scruffy patch of grass right up against the wall of the hotel and miles from the poolside. We sat there uncomfortably on our towels for a while and I began to work up a grudge against the people who had claimed loungers by dumping their belongings on them and then buggered off for a late breakfast. I suggested to Laurence that we should requisition a pair of these unoccupied loungers, but he wouldn’t. Men are such cowards about things like that. So I did it on my own. There were two loungers side by side under a palm tree with folded towels on them, so I just moved a towel from one lounger to the other and made myself comfortable. After about twenty minutes a woman came up and glared at me, but I pretended to be asleep and after a while she picked up both towels and went away, and Laurence came over rather sheepishly and took the other lounger.
    This small victory put me