• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘You should have therapy yourself,’ she tells him, blowing smoke.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he replies. He knows enough, by now, not to disagree.

In fact he would not dream of going into therapy. The goal of therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he believes.

Nevertheless, he listens to Jacqueline as patiently as he can. He is the man, she is the woman; he has had his pleasure of her, now he must pay the price: that seems to be the way affairs work.

Her story, spoken night after night in overlapping and conflicting versions into his sleep-befuddled ear, is that she has been robbed of her true self by a persecutor who is sometimes her tyrannical mother, sometimes her runaway father, sometimes one or other sadistic lover, sometimes a Mephistophelean therapist. What he holds in his arms, she says, is only a shell of her true self; she will recover the power to love only when she has recovered her self.

He listens but does not believe. If she feels her therapist has designs on her, why not give up seeing him? If her sister disparages and belittles her, why not stop seeing her sister? As for himself, he suspects that if Jacqueline has come to treat him more as a confidant than as a lover, that is because he is not a good enough lover, not fiery or passionate enough. He suspects that if he were more of a lover Jacqueline would soon recover her missing self and her missing desire.

Why does he keep opening the door to her knock? Is it because this is what artists have to do – stay up all night, exhaust themselves, get their lives into a tangle – or is it because, despite all, he is bemused by this sleek, undeniably handsome woman who feels no shame in wandering around the flat naked under his gaze?

Why is she so free in his presence? Is it to taunt him (for she can feel his eyes upon her, he knows that), or do all nurses behave like this in private, dropping their clothes, scratching themselves, talking matter-of-factly about excretion, telling the same gross jokes that men tell in bars? Yet if she has indeed freed herself of all inhibitions, why is her lovemaking so distracted, so offhand, so disappointing?

It was not his idea to begin the affair nor his idea to continue it. But now that he is in the middle of it he has not the energy to escape. A fatalism has taken him over. If life with Jacqueline is a kind of sickness, let the sickness take its course.

He and Paul are gentlemen enough not to compare notes on their mistresses. Nevertheless he suspects that Jacqueline Laurier discusses him with her sister and her sister reports back to Paul. It embarrasses him that Paul should know what goes on in his intimate life. He is sure that, of the two of them, Paul handles women more capably.

One evening when Jacqueline is working the night shift at the nursing home, he drops by at Paul’s flat. He finds Paul preparing to set off for his mother’s house in St James, to spend the weekend. Why does he not come along, suggests Paul, for the Saturday at least?

They miss the last train, by a hair’s breadth. If they still want to go to St James, they will have to walk the whole twelve miles. It is a fine evening. Why not?

Paul carries his rucksack and his violin. He is bringing the violin along, he says, because it is easier to practise in St James where the neighbours are not so close.

Paul has studied the violin since childhood but has never got very far with it. He seems quite content to play the same little gigues and minuets as a decade ago. His own ambitions as a musician are far larger. In his flat he has the piano that his mother bought when at the age of fifteen he began to demand piano lessons. The lessons were not a success, he was too impatient with the slow, step-by-step methods of his teacher. Nevertheless, he is determined that one day he will play,