Sorrow and Bliss(65)

I turned back to the window and looked at the tree for a while, then rewrote the column, about the time I lost my eco-cup and had to drink takeaway coffee out of a cocktail shaker because I had said so many judgemental things to my barista about people still using disposable cups and it was the only substitute I could find.

That I was able to return to it at all, to put his email out of my mind and work until I was finished, was extraordinary to me. I could not send it then, because my editor would know it had only taken forty minutes to produce six hundred funnier & more first-person words. I saved it and started writing an email to Robert.

I wanted to tell him what had just happened. I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn’t known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn’t explain it properly. I didn’t feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found.

I deleted it all and sent one line to say I was feeling better and grateful and I was sorry for emailing him. Then I put his name into Google.

*

No matter what private morsel she could have inadvertently divulged in our countless hours together, I never would have parked outside Julie Female’s house in the hope of acquiring another precious fact about her life. I didn’t care who she was outside her converted spare room. But I thought about Robert constantly for days after that. I Google Image-searched him and clicked on photographs taken at conferences. I read journal articles he had written and watched a long presentation he had given to an audience of psychiatrists, on YouTube.

I imagined going back to London, to Harley Street, at a time when he might emerge from his rooms and knew that if I saw him pause on the curb, appraise the evening while doing up a raincoat, I would step back and watch him, wondering where he was going and who was waiting for him and whether on the train he would think backwards through his day, reconsidering each patient with his newspaper unread in front of him.

I was consumed by the desire to know what Robert thought of me; whether, after I came to see him, he had told the wife I had met and liked so much about a new patient, a woman he’d diagnosed with ——. It began to matter to me so much that Robert would have found me intelligent and amusing and original and that he’d recall me that way now, even though I hadn’t been any of those things in the hour I had been in his rooms.

As I was sending my column on Friday morning, he replied. My heart did a single thud when I saw his name. After a week of thinking about him in imagined terms, having the certain knowledge of what he’d been doing seconds ago was so exquisite, I screen-shotted my inbox and then the email after I read it. It said, ‘Wonderful, glad to hear it. Sent From My iPhone.’ Then I deleted them both, cleared my history and went downstairs. Robert’s name and his single line of reply should not feel so precious to me that I needed to preserve them. What I had been doing for so many days until then was the occupation of the mad, and I was not mad; I knew Robert was just a person.

But if I had been found out, I would have said it was because he had saved my life, and the only thing I really knew about him was that he once cut his hand slicing a tomato.

I cancelled my follow-up appointment because I didn’t have anything else to say.

Supposedly, my column was spot on.

*

Everything was normal after that. I was normal and I lived hyperaware of it. I broke something, accidentally, and responded the way a normal person would, with frustration that only lasted as long as it took to clean up. I burned my hand and felt a normal level of pain, and inconvenienced not enraged when I could not find the stuff to put on it. The house and objects in it were just objects, not imbued with menace or intent. Going out, I felt so normal I wondered if it was obvious to other people. I had conversations in shops. I asked a man if I could pat his dog. I said to a pregnant woman, ‘Not long to go,’ and she laughed and said, ‘I’m only five months.’

And I felt normal grief, commensurate with the discoveries I had made and the consequences of making them when I had. On which basis, my behaviour towards Patrick was also normal. Anyone party to it would have to admit that under the circumstances, a wife acting as if she hated her husband, it was all very normal.

*

On a day in November, Patrick came into the box room while I was writing the deadline my editor had given for my next column into my diary. At my desk, my back was to him. I sensed him walk up and stand behind me, looking over my shoulder.

I said, ‘Can you not?’

He pointed out that the deadline was a day before my birthday. He wondered why I hadn’t written it in.

‘Do adults usually write My Birthday in their diaries? Why did you come in?’

He said no reason and I thought he would leave then but instead, he retreated to a cane chair in the corner. It cracked when he sat down. Without turning around, I told him it wasn’t really a chair for sitting on.

‘Do you want to have a party?’

I said no.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not in the right place, re celebrating.’

‘It’s your fortieth though,’ he said. ‘We have to attack the day.’

‘Do we.’

‘Fine. Don’t then.’ The chair cracked again with his getting up. ‘But I’m going to organise something because otherwise we will get to the actual day with nothing planned and you will punish me for it.’