What She Left: Enhanced Edition (26 page)

Larry,

Remember I told you years ago about that shrink, the supercilious fellow with the Roman nose and bird-like shoulders? Well, I’ve been re-examining the notes I made
from our meetings. He actually had the gall to accuse me of not liking him very much.

‘Don’t take it personally,’ was my riposte. ‘It’s
people
I don’t much like.’

‘Curious,’ he said, ‘to hear that from an anthropologist.’

‘To an anthropologist, existence
is
curious,’ I informed him. ‘Curious and baffling.’ It was like intellectual tennis. ‘Accept it,’ I said, ‘you’re fundamentally incapable of mending me.’

‘It’s not about mending you; it’s about you acquiring a deeper understanding of yourself. How about you elaborate on why you’ve chosen to visit me, Jeremy?’

His repeated use of my first name irked me. After a pause, doubtlessly of exactly the length he’d have been taught at some second-rate polytechnic, he shrilled, ‘There are no incorrect answers here.’

‘There’s not a huge amount else to do on Wednesday afternoons. The students play sport.’

It was the second consecutive Wednesday I’d trooped like a battle-beaten soldier into this supposedly highly regarded and discreet practice in a residential suburb of Winchester, despite my opinion of shrinks being far from positive. I’d been taught to take an evidential-based approach and they’re so bloody woolly. Not that she’d have cared, but Fliss was gloriously oblivious, as she had been to where I’d spent so many previous Wednesday afternoons when the students played sport: locked away in tawdry hotels with the latest recruit to the English faculty: Elizabeth Mullens.

He scratched his mangy beard, crossed and uncrossed his legs. Clearly gay. In the silence that ensued, it enveloped me again: that dense, cloudy anger at his probing and at me – for
needing
to be here with a diminutive, forensic man approximately five years my junior with tiny round
spectacles, worn presumably in a bid to convey gravitas. ‘She thinks I’m playing squash,’ I said. ‘Fliss does. My wife.’

‘Why does she think that?’

‘Because that’s what I told her.’

‘Does she always think what you tell her?’

‘Believe me, she hardly
ever
thinks what I tell her.’

‘Should she?’

‘Of course not. She has her own mind.’

‘Does that worry you?’

‘Not as much as the tyranny of Ayatollah Khomeini, or these bloody trade unions.’

Even then, it dawned on me how redundant I was rendering the exchange. It had been the evening after the party when my wife had confronted me. She’d been washing up when I’d arrived home and when I’d said, ‘Hello, darling, how was your day?’ she didn’t turn round, as she didn’t when I said, ‘You’re up late’ or ‘I’m off to bed, I’m bushed’, but when she finally did she was crying. ‘Martin rang,’ she said.

I froze.

‘He mentioned he bumped into you yesterday evening – how
was
the party?’

I should have cut my losses there and then, Larry, admitted it. That might have counted in my favour: mitigation. But I’d pressed on. ‘Boring. Typical academic get-together. You know what they’re like.’

‘Actually, I don’t. Explain to me.’

‘Pearce is still on the brink of resigning, Shields remains convinced he’s about to get the call from Nobel, Mills is clinically incapable of having a seminal idea.’

Some men cover their tracks naturally well, Larry, others teach themselves – I fell into neither camp; I sounded ridiculous – as if my wife had asked, ‘What shape is the
earth?’ and I’d responded ‘cuboid’. ‘Boring academics blowing smoke up each other’s arses,’ I added.

‘Boring academics from the English department?’

Behind me, a clicking from the Aga, my wife’s pride and joy.

‘Yes.’

‘How’s that new girl getting on?’ she asked. ‘The one who was profiled in the newsletter, Liz Mullens?’

‘Fine, I gather.’ The wooden table, the dog in her basket, a box of cereal and two bowls on the side, ready for the morning. As an environmental consultant, my wife frequently referred to the notion of ‘habitat’.
This is mine
, I thought.
Ours.
Without this, without her, what would I be, what would I do?

‘You promised you’d look after me for ever.’

Larry, that scruffy shrink, a budding Bolshevik if ever there was one, was relentless. ‘How about I get to ask you some questions?’ I asked to interrupt the bombardment.

‘We won’t make much headway that way.’

‘Please, one.’

‘Ultimately it’s your money.’

I could have hugged him in that instant, my skinny adversary with the string of worthless letters after his name, because contempt wasn’t a sentiment I was typically displayed, at least not to my face. ‘What
is
sex?’

‘Right now, I’m sensing it’s an area we should explore.’

‘Exploring it’s what’s got me into trouble.’

‘You can’t blame sex. Whatever you’ve done, you’ve managed all by yourself.’

His response made me want to reach out and give his pigeon face a sharp slap, like I might a child who’d misbehaved, if we’d had one.

‘You still haven’t explained why you’re here.’

‘Because it’s like seeing a prostitute. There are no consequences, it’s entirely transactional.’

‘There you go again, back to sex.’

I loathed his relentless picking. But he was right: I was thirty-five years old and part of me was broken. Silence, and the spectre of one of my greatest fears, inarticulacy, clung to me like wet fog.

‘Would you like to share with me who she was?’

I hadn’t at that point directly confessed to my infidelity, so he must have filled in the blanks. ‘Why, fancy giving her a call? You could hook up; she’s not choosy!’ I heard the petulance and spite, and cringed.

‘Are you still in contact?’

‘She threatened to put a carving knife between my shoulder blades if I ever went near her again.’

It came back to me: how I’d once dropped to my knees before Liz and she’d cradled my head in her hands as she might have a child’s, or as if I were a piece of pottery she was shaping, and the sharp absence of her stung me: her taste, her smell, a coppery tang on my tongue, a low-down ache in the pit of my stomach, my balls. Bet you’ve never felt that, have you, I almost spat.

Fliss had recounted the details of her and Martin’s conversation with a dispassionate disinterest, like she was relating a scene from a novel: Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children
perhaps, or the latest theory on one of the genus of flowers in which she specialized. ‘After he called, I had a rummage around in your jackets.’

‘You did
what
?’ I said, my righteous indignation never sounding more ill-conceived.

She handed me a piece of paper, a restaurant receipt. Her lip quivered. ‘How
could
you?’

‘How are you feeling?’ my shrink asked.

Wet on my cheek; the sod, he’d made me shed a tear. ‘Well done, you’ve earned your money today. Damn perplexing behaviour, the shedding of tears,’ I said, scrabbling into the familiar architecture of a debate, ‘the function of which remains the source of much debate in scientific circles.’

‘Throw me a bone here, Jeremy – one professional to another.’

‘I’m sick of feeling as if life’s escaping me. Can you stop that, Dr Richard Carter? Can you? Please.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Only you can do that.’

‘No one’s faithful these days,’ I said, aware it wasn’t an entirely unfounded observation, because with the exception of brain-dead, cockless old stiffs like Devereux, the whole campus was at it. ‘It’s the Eighties, everyone’s shagging everyone else.’

‘I can assure you they’re not.’

‘Are you married?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Never taken a wife, eh?’ I heard myself and it was with chagrin. The man who extolled the benefits of discussion and debate, who believed that the human species was set apart by a handful of attributes, one of the key ones of which was our ability to communicate, reduced to using that gift as a child would. She’d thrown a colander at me. Fliss had. Sounds amusing now – the sort of scene that might feature in one of those dreadful soap operas – but I can assure you it wasn’t then. It had connected with my forehead and split the skin, freeing a sticky string of blood.

‘Surely, intelligence,’ my shrink said, ‘is the ability to make yourself and those around you happy. You’ve clearly failed in that respect.’

He had me; the little shit had me.

‘How is the woman who’s not your wife dealing with the situation?’

‘She tried to kill herself.’

How’s that walking of yours on the common?

 

The lord said justice is mine.

 

Enjoy your Italian meal last night?

 

Nice hairdryer you got for Christmas.

 

That picture of flowers on yr bedroom wall new?

 

Like to party, pretty girl?

 

Coming to get you.