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Chapter 5

She was due to arrive at three o’clock, and by two-thirty he was in a noticeable state of agitation. He kept pacing back from the terrace to the main room, glancing at his watch and mumbling to himself. And his anxiety could not have been reduced much by the sound of the vacuum cleaner, which a stout and disapproving housekeeper was humping around the flat. She made a great deal of the full ashtrays and unwashed glasses, clattering them to show her hostility. And I must admit that I was not without a certain sympathy for her, even though she made it quite clear that she considered me to be one of the enemy camp. She hunted me from chair to chair, wherever I fled to escape her infernal machine.

With such a noise conversation was impossible, but even had we been in the most silent of soundproofed rooms, I had the feeling that he would not have spoken or paid any attention to me whatsoever. He had said his piece and was now anxious to get on with the next business, whatever that was to be, and somehow for all my thoughts on the subject, I could not for the life of me see how it could include me. I joined him on the terrace where he was leaning over a balustrade, flicking matches over the side and watching them float to the street below. I suspect he was timing the fall with his watch.

‘Perhaps I ought to go,’ I said.

His reply was short and rather irritable. ‘No, you stay. Have a drink or get yourself something to eat from the fridge. Mrs Lot’ll cook you something when she’s finished.’ He placed another match between finger and thumb and fired it streetwards.

‘But why do you want me to stay?’ I insisted.

He leaned both elbows onto the balustrade and stared down.

‘I want your opinion. You know something about women and psychiatry. Jesus!’ he exclaimed. The last being prompted by the sight of a taxi cab that as it were in slow motion had steered itself maniacally into the side of a Morris Minor in the street below. There was the usual squeal of brakes and that awful hollow crashing sound of impact, rather like a sack of scrap iron dropped onto an empty steel drum. The head of the driver of the Morris was poking bloodily through the windscreen and I moved away, unable to watch any longer.

I returned to the living room, which was now silent and orderly. Mrs Lot washed dishes in the kitchen. If anything, his enigmatic answer to my question had succeeded in confounding me all the more. What on earth did he mean by ‘You know something about women and psychiatry?’ I racked my brains to find some clue to the origins of this strange assumption.

It is true that I had undergone a somewhat abbreviated form of psychoanalysis. For two years, three times a week, for fifty-minute sessions, I had lain on a couch rambling on about my life and my dreams, waiting for the mysterious ‘transference’ to take place, and whether it did or not to this day I am uncertain. I retain the greatest respect for my analyst, who seemed a patient if mainly silent man and endured with gravity the boredom of my life and the occasional scandals, but whether his insights or mine finally gave me ‘freedom of choice’ is debatable both in a personal sense and, even more so, in a philosophical one. I will say that the chronic anxiety states that gripped me, the floodings, the sleeplessness, the palpitations of the heart, the sweating palms and the fear of death did abate somewhat.

And I suppose that this was not entirely coincidental, but after two years I arrived at the conclusion that possibly it was less expensive, more beneficial and certainly less solipsistic to confront the reality of the objective world such as I understood it, rather than rely upon the somewhat narrow confines of the thrice-weekly sessions as the central axis of my experience. In analysis all roads seem to lead to the couch. However, taking my fragile psyche into my hands, I terminated the treatment with hardly any protests from the mild voice that had made occasional pronouncements literally behind my back. We shook hands finally and at length tentatively looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. His face bore all the marks of the most terrible depressions and I suspect he had somewhat less faith in the analytic process than I had. In any case, I think he gave the practice up and the last I heard of him, he was living in a sleeping bag in the depths of Epping Forest, finding therapy in a rather less scientific way in communion with nature.

As to a knowledge of women, I can speak only with the rather plaintive and exhausted voice of failure. Most of my earlier experiences with the opposite sex were based, or so it seemed to me, on the most elementary of misunderstandings. In their minds my sole raison d’être, so to speak, was to answer their every whim and uncertainty, whereas I on the other hand wanted nothing so much as to be left contentedly alone with my own preoccupations. What I never understood is how I always seemed to single out the same kind of girl. Put me in a room full of women and, to be sure, drawn by some magnetic process in the ether, madam would seek me out, the kind who wanted Jesus Christ and Mephistopheles rolled into one, who wanted the world’s knowledge placed at her disposal in one palatable ball that could be assimilated without effort or curiosity, who wanted advice and insight into what was to be her eventual role in life, and who saw every independent action on my part as a threat to her own security.

From this I can deduce that all women are exactly the same, or behave in exactly the same way with me. Or else for whatever inner motives, and I suspect it was really little more than fatigue, I colluded with that particular archetype.

Needless to say, all these qualities were honed to perfection in the woman I chose to marry. Madeline had a deep-rooted conviction that my one ambition in life was to destroy her. I could do this by reading a book, not speaking at breakfast, shaving, conversing with friends, or lecturing at schools to keep her in the style to which she was unaccustomed. She retaliated in myriad aggressive ways too numerous and, for me, painful to recount, but I will say by way of a hint that it is remarkable how much hostility can go into the frying of an egg. It lasted five years and in that time she bore me two sons, who then, I regret to say, and if you will forgive the pun, bored me. They were noisy and artful and refined blackmail into an art form. Needless to say, Madeline used them as weapons against me. I remember once when Toby was four: he had taken to blowing down a piece of bent gas pipe, producing a sound not dissimilar to a bugle. In one of my sporadic efforts to simulate the interest of a father, I said, ‘Do you want to play the trumpet when you grow up?’ He looked me straight in the eye and said without a trace of even juvenile irony, ‘I want to do everything.’ Frankly, I found his Oedipus complex tiresome. For all I cared, he could have his mother, lock, stock and barrel.

It was little erosions like this that prompted me finally into some form of action. Academia I couldn’t stand, its enclosed and vicious pretentiousness, the anxiety states that shook me nightly and that Madeline in her wisdom would cite as only further proof of my lack of devotion to her.

And then one morning I woke up early with the kind of throbbing erection that I hadn’t experienced for years, and it was with some sense of horror that I realised that I would like to direct it between the thighs of almost any woman in the world other than the one beside me. I packed my bags and left, gave up my lectureship, took a room and lived on the dole, which I have been doing for the last five years.