Ordinary Miracles (24 page)

‘Yes. And he kept asking people round to dinner without
consulting me and – and he fucked his mistress in our bed.’

The counsellor, a Mrs Swan, nodded encouragingly.

‘And – and when he had a shower he always draped the wet towel over the bath, even though I’d told him
hundreds of times it would only dry if put on the shower
rail.’

Mrs Swan nodded again. ‘And what did that behaviour
mean to you, Jasmine?’ she asked gently.

I looked at her fiercely. ‘That he doesn’t love me. That he
doesn’t care at all about my feelings.’

This confession induced a paroxysm of sobbing. Bruce
watched wretchedly. Then he reached for my hand but I snatched it away. Mrs Swan did not intervene. She sat and
waited. After a while the sobs subsided.

‘He just sees me as a servant,’ I whimpered, twisting the paper handkerchief between my fingers. ‘Lots of times when
I needed to talk with him about something he just sat there and said nothing. He wasn’t – he isn’t,’ I groped around for
some appropriate word from my self-help psychology books,
‘he isn’t emotionally available.’

Mrs Swan turned to Bruce. ‘And how do you feel when
you hear Jasmine say these things Bruce? Is there something
you’d like to say to her?’

Bruce squirmed uncomfortably. ‘I – I suppose I’d like to
say I do love her and I’m very sorry I didn’t show it.’

‘And is there anything else you’d like to say?’

‘Well I think that is pretty much the way I feel.’ Bruce’s
voice sounded hollow, and sad.

Silence followed this statement. A silence that went on for
some time until Bruce added, ‘I’d also like her to know I don’t
see her as a servant. I see her as an intelligent, attractive
woman. I should have said that to her.’

‘And why didn’t you say that to her, Bruce?’ asked Mrs Swan.

‘I suppose I thought she knew it. I just assumed she knew it.’

‘And are there things you wish Jasmine had said to you?’

Bruce looked down at his hands and appeared most
reluctant to answer this question. Eventually he said, in a
small voice, ‘I suppose I wish she’d said she loved me.’

I looked at him in astonishment, but Mrs Swan’s expression, as she gazed at him, remained studiously calm and
non-judgemental.

‘Excuse me,’ I interjected self-righteously. ‘I did say I loved
him. I frequently said I loved him.’ I paused for these brownie
points to register fully. ‘It’s typical of him to try to put the
blame onto me.’

‘I’m not trying to blame you for anything, Jasmine.’ Bruce had assumed his ‘reasonable’ voice. ‘I’m just stating a fact. Yes, early in our marriage you used to say you loved me – but you haven’t done so for a long time now.’

I almost catapulted vertically from my seat in rage. ‘So,
you think I should have been professing my love for you
even though I knew you were fucking someone else!’ I looked
towards Mrs Swan.

‘This is typical,’ I told her. ‘Just typical.’

‘No, I don’t mean just recently,’ Bruce said wearily. ‘I mean
long before all that happened. And you haven’t enjoyed sex
with me for years. You’ve made that pretty plain.’

Bruce was sounding rather angry himself. As Mrs Swan
shifted her glance forwards and backwards from him to me
she began to look like someone with a prime seat at centre court. I could almost hear her mentally register ‘Deuce’. I’d
thought this was going to be such an easy match, and now
it looked like it could go to a tie-break.

‘And what exactly makes you believe I haven’t enjoyed sex
with you?’ I lobbed. ‘Go on – explain.’

‘Well I don’t know if I want to go into details just now.’ Bruce looked uneasily at Mrs Swan and back at
me. ‘It was something I just knew. I could see it on your
face.’

‘Go on. I don’t mind,’ I said, as I clenched the armrest of
my chair.

Bruce took a deep breath. ‘Well, there are numerous examples I could give.’ He hesitated before delivering his top spin backhand. ‘For example that time when, in the
middle of love-making, you got a faraway look on your face.
I thought it might be some fantasy that we could share – that
might make sex more exciting for you. I asked you what you
were thinking and you said you’d just realised we should have
pine shelving in the conservatory.’

‘It just occurred to me,’ I protested. ‘These things can occur
to you at odd times.’

‘Well it’s not the kind of thing I thought about when I made
love with you,’ Bruce sighed. ‘It really would have been one
of the furthest things from my mind.’

I shifted uneasily in my chair. ‘The thing about you, Bruce, is
that you don’t realise sex is tied in with everyday emotions. I
mean, if I felt angry with you about something it might make
me more distant with you in bed. I have a book with a whole
chapter devoted to that very subject.’

At this point we took a break, and though we did not reach
for lemon barley water or throw towels over our heads and
stare at the floor, I for one certainly felt like doing so. We
just sort of slumped exhausted in our chairs.

‘So – would either of you like to tell me a little more about
Avril?’ Mrs Swan asked cautiously.

‘She’s a farmer. She falls in love with a man accused of espionage while collecting seaweed,’ I replied wearily.

This was clearly not the answer Mrs Swan expected.

‘Avril’s a character in a television drama I’ve just made. Sorry. I should have explained that,’ Bruce said.

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Swan. ‘It’s just that I thought…When you phoned you’d said…’

‘The name of the woman you’re referring to is Cait,’ I
interrupted in a steely voice. ‘Cait Carmody.’

This was my cue to rant and rave about Cait Carmody
while snuffling and sobbing into my Kleenex. I’d snuffled
and sobbed about her so many times before it began to
seem like lines I’d learned for an Australian soap opera. I
even punched my armrest with considerable vigour at least
four times.

‘You’re very angry, aren’t you Jasmine?’ Mrs Swan said at
last.

‘Yes I am.’

‘And is there anything you’d like to say to Bruce now?’

‘No. I’d just like to hit him.’

‘And how do you feel when you hear that Bruce?’

Bruce squirmed uncomfortably again. ‘I understand why
Jasmine feels that way. But – but it also makes me a bit nervous.’

And it was then that the little smile came to my lips. The little smile that Bruce noticed because he smiled back.

‘And when did you first begin to feel you might be drifting
apart?’ Mrs Swan asked. She was looking at us in a rather puzzled way, prompted no doubt by our changed facial
expressions.

‘I’m really not quite sure,’ said Bruce.

‘Neither am I,’ I corroborated.

Suddenly we were behaving as though we’d been sum
moned to the headmistress’s office and were trying to obscure
the gravity of some misdemeanour.

Mrs Swan waited patiently, so I eventually said, ‘It’s been happening for quite a while, but I suppose it came to a head around the time our daughter, Katie, left for college.’

‘And why do you think that was, Jasmine?’

‘I suppose she was a focus for us really. Once she’d left
there was a vacuum.’

‘And did you feel this too, Bruce?’

‘Yes. I suppose I did.’

And then Bruce started to cry. He did it very quietly, almost
as if he hoped we wouldn’t notice. He was desperately trying
to regain his composure, but the tears kept running down his
cheeks. Mrs Swan pulled a couple of paper tissues from the
box and handed them to him.

‘Why are you crying?’ she asked gently.

‘I don’t know,’ Bruce whispered forlornly.

‘Is it something to do with Katie?’

‘Maybe.’ He blew his nose. ‘I think – I think it’s the whole
thing really.’

‘What whole thing?’

‘Everything – everything we’ve been saying. I feel some
thing ending…and I don’t know how to stop it.’

As he said these words tears came to my eyes too and my
heart ached for him and for myself. We both cried quietly – neither of us wanting to upstage the other. Suddenly it wasn’t a matter of point scoring any more. It had gone far
beyond that.

Bruce talked about his affair then. When it started he had
been very depressed, he said. He’d been depressed about his
work because it looked like he mightn’t get funding for
Avril.
And he was depressed because I seemed to care more about
factory-farmed animals than him. And there were other things
too. Things that were harder to name but drifted together to
form a general feeling of pointlessness, of time wasted.

I was the one who talked about feelings in our marriage,
he said. When I talked about feelings I often got angry and
seemed to blame him for everything. He said that when he
started to have all these feelings himself he didn’t know where
to turn. He tried to talk to me about them once or twice,
but we ended up having a row instead. Then one evening
he confided in Cait. Cait listened and he was grateful. And
then, as the weeks passed and they both shared more of their
thoughts, he began to feel something more than gratitude. He
felt an excitement. A complicity. He felt like he’d woken up
out of a kind of stupor.

When they made love, as they eventually did, he said it had been such a relief to feel her acceptance and enjoyment. He knew that the affair wasn’t going to last. There wasn’t love in it really, but there was a tenderness, a passion. And for a while he needed those things so much he would have risked almost anything for them. We had those things in our marriage once, he said. He wanted
them back.

He wanted them back because he was no longer prepared
to be in a relationship without them.