This Time Next Year(93)

Quinn nodded, as though it had been a case of temporarily forgetting the guy’s name, rather than having no memory of the conversation.

‘Can we step outside?’ Lucy said, lifting her glass towards the balcony behind the sliding glass door. Quinn pulled the door open and a sharp blast of cold air hit them both. He took off his jacket to wrap around Lucy’s shoulders.

‘Listen, I know we said we wouldn’t talk about it tonight, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what Carol said,’ Lucy said, hugging his jacket.

Carol was the relationship counsellor Lucy and Quinn had been seeing for the last month. Lucy’s idea. She decided Quinn had a ‘fear of intimacy, stopping him from taking their relationship to the next level’. She thought he needed therapy to ‘unpack unresolved issues about his childhood’. This was the problem with the internet; everyone fancied themselves amateur psychologists.

He and Lucy had been together for a year and three months. Lucy expected ‘I love you’ by six months, preferably three. Fifteen months meant there had to be something wrong with him. She had said it at six, to the day. He didn’t know many women who would drag someone to couples therapy just to get him to say those words, but she clearly thought he was worth trying to fix. Lucy was solutions-based; it was one of the things he liked about her.

The therapy with Carol was a warning siren pulsing through his temple, yet for some reason he had muted the sound for over a month. Why hadn’t he just ended it? He would never have tolerated such scrutiny or interrogation from past girlfriends. One answer could be that he did in fact love Lucy; perhaps he didn’t want to leave? She was beautiful, bright and confident – what was not to love? She had even been accommodating about his aversion to phone calls, something other women had never been able to tolerate. She didn’t need him, she wanted him – it was a dynamic that worked.

And yet, in the dimly lit periphery of his subconscious, Quinn was aware of a darkness lurking. If he ever shone his attention towards it, it would skulk back into the shadows, ungraspable. And yet. Only yesterday he had stared down that shadow for the first time. He had seen it for what it was and he had formulated it into words. Ever since Polly, he had been subconsciously attracted to women with unappealing qualities. It didn’t make sense, he didn’t understand it, but once he’d thought it, he couldn’t help looking back at his relationship history through this strange, murky lens. Jaya had been a narcissist, Eddie a compulsive liar, Anna hated dogs and Lucy was a snob who was rude to waiting staff. All these traits had been immediately visible to him and yet, strangely, were part of the attraction.

Why? When he tried to peer into this rabbit hole he started to feel anxious. What kind of psychopath would actively choose to go out with women who possessed traits he disliked? The anxiety made him feel as if he was his mother, that it was in his DNA, that he was not in control.

Back to the question in hand: why hadn’t he ended things with Lucy? The idea he might love her appealed to him. If this was love, this was manageable; this was not an earthquake waiting to destroy his foundation. If something went wrong in the future with Lucy, he would be sad, but he couldn’t imagine locking himself away for the rest of his life.

There might be another explanation for this stay of execution; that he had started to see value in the sessions with Carol. Growing up, Quinn came to think of therapy as akin to fixing bomb damage with wallpaper – it was something to take your mind off the fact that the walls of your house had been blown to bits. In the sessions with Carol, he’d found himself talking about his mother and father’s break-up, about his mother’s condition, his father’s disappearance. What had made him unload like that, heaping emotional coal into the filthy engine of therapy? Carol just listened, nodding in comprehension; she did not try to wallpaper anything.

At their fourth session, Carol said, ‘Now I know you have booked this as couple’s therapy, but if I’m honest, I feel Quinn could benefit most from some one-to-one sessions. You should only embark on one course of therapy at a time, so you’d have to do one or the other.’

Lucy looked disappointed. She liked being involved; she liked nodding sympathetically, as though if only he could unload all these words about his past, then at the bottom of the pile of words would be the three she was looking for.

‘Well,’ Lucy frowned, looking back and forth between Carol and Quinn. ‘We’ll have to discuss it. I felt we were making progress?’

Lucy leant forward in her chair, her usually taut face creasing into frown lines. She clasped her hands together and nodded both forefingers in Carol’s direction. Carol responded with one of her neutral, dental-advert smiles.

‘I think you were right to want to talk this through,’ she said to Lucy, ‘but what is becoming clear to me is that Quinn needs a lot more time to work through some issues independently.’ Then Carol gave Lucy one of her encouraging nods, the nod that made you feel you’d given all the right answers and were winning the therapy game show. ‘You’re doing a fantastic job being a supportive partner, Lucy.’

‘Well, I have a very secure attachment style,’ said Lucy, keen to out-therapy the therapist.

That had been over a week ago. They had said they would discuss it. Now Lucy was bringing it up at the party.

‘So what do you think we should do?’ Lucy asked, reaching out to hold Quinn’s hands. ‘I think you should ask to be referred to someone else. Carol’s supposed to be the best when it comes to relationships, so I’d rather we saved her for us, don’t you agree?’