Therapy

raining. We had some trouble locating the grave, and when we did find it it was a bit of a let-down, like the room in the museum. It’s a little patch of ground enclosed by an iron railing, with a monument to Kierkegaard’s father in the middle and two stone tablets propped up against it with the names of his wife and children including Søren carved on them. That’s Kierkegaard’s first name, Søren, with one of those funny crossed-out Danish os. But you probably knew that already, didn’t you? Sorry, darling. We stood in the rain for a few minutes in respectful silence. Tubby took his hat off, and the rain ran off his bald pate and down his face and off the end of his nose and chin. We didn’t have an umbrella, and I soon began to feel rather damp and uncomfortable, but Tubby insisted on looking for Regine’s grave. He’d read somewhere that she was buried in the same churchyard. There was a kind of index to all the graves on a noticeboard near the entrance, but Tubby couldn’t remember Regine’s married name so he had to look through columns and columns until he came to a Regine Schlegel. “That’s her!” he cried, and charged off to look for the plot — 58D or whatever it was — only he couldn’t find it. The plots are not very well marked, and there was nobody around to ask because it was Sunday and pouring with rain, and I was getting more and more fed up squelching about in sopping wet clothes and shoes with water dripping off the trees and running down the back of my neck and I said I wanted to go back to the hotel, and he said rather crossly, all right, go, and gave me some money to take a taxi, so I did. I had a long hot bath and used two clean towels and threw them both on the floor and had tea from room service and a miniature bottle of cherry brandy from the minibar, and began to feel in a better humour. Tubby came back about two hours later, soaked to the skin. And despondent because he hadn’t managed to find Regine’s grave and there wouldn’t be time to go back the next morning and ask somebody because we had to catch an early plane.
    The evening followed the same pattern as before: dinner in the hotel restaurant followed by a proposal from Tubby that we retire early — to our own rooms. I couldn’t believe it. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me, like bad breath, but I checked as I was getting ready for bed and it was sweet and fresh. Then I took off all my clothes and looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn’t see anything wrong there either, in fact I thought to myself that if I were a man I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off me, if you follow. I was beginning to feel rather randy, to be honest, out of sheer frustration, and not a bit sleepy, so I decided to watch an adult movie on the hotel’s in-house video channel. I got a half-bottle of champagne out of the minibar and sat me down in front of the telly in my dressing-gown and tuned in. Well, my dear, what a surprise I got! I don’t know if you’ve ever watched one of those movies in a British hotel. No? Well, you haven’t missed anything, believe me. I used to watch them occasionally when I stayed at the Rummidge Post House on the chaperoning job, just for a giggle. One of my duties was to make sure the little Harrington brat couldn’t watch them. The hotel reception used to put a bar on the set in his room, much to his disgust. In fact, those films have nothing more explicit in them than many programmes you see on network television, indeed less so, the only difference being that the so-called adult movies consist entirely of sex scenes, and look incredibly cheap, and are incredibly badly acted and have incredibly silly story lines. And they’re extremely short and full of clumsy jump-cuts because all the really raunchy bits have been censored for hotel distribution. Well I was hoping that the Danish ones might be a bit more daring, but I wasn’t prepared for hard-core pornography, which was what I got. I switched on in the middle of the film and there were two men and a girl naked on a bed together. Both the men had absolutely enormous erections and one was being sucked off voraciously by the girl, as if her life depended on it, while the other one was doing her from behind, you know, doggy-fashion. I couldn’t believe my —
    What? Oh. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t talking to you. Well, I can’t help it if your hearing is unusually good. If you don’t want to eavesdrop on other