was the protective fence, or the safety net? They made it hard for you to jump off bridges, or to smoke, to own a gun, to become a gynecologist So how come they let you walk out on a stable, functioning relationship? They shouldn’t. If this didn’t work out, he could see himself become a homeless, jobless alcoholic within a year. And that would be worse for his health than a packet of Marlboros.
“I should qualify that. Yes, I’ve, I’ve, you know, yes, slept with her, as you say, but it may well have been a mistake. Can I ask you: do you find this very upsetting? Because I have to say, I do. I didn’t really think it through.”
“So why are you telling me about it?”
“Would it have been an option for you? Me not telling you?”
“It’s a choice that’s rather difficult to offer, though, isn’t it? It was an option for you. But you can’t really ask me whether I want to know whether you’ve slept with someone else or not. I’d have smelled a rat.”
“Unless I’d asked you when I hadn’t slept with someone else, I suppose. If I’d asked you right at the beginning, and then kept asking you…”
He jumped. She hardly ever shouted.
“Yes. Sorry. I got sidetracked.”
“Are you telling me you want out?”
“I don’t know. I did know. But now I don’t. It suddenly seems like a big thing to say.”
“And it didn’t earlier on?”
“Not… not as big as it should have done, no.”
“Who are you sleeping with?”
“It’s not… I wouldn’t use the present continuous. There’s been an, an incident. So ‘Who have you slept with?’ is probably the question. Or, ‘With whom did this possibly one-off incident take place?’ ”
Annie was looking at him as if she might kill him with her cutlery.
“She’s a new colleague at work.”
“Right.”
She waited, and he began to babble.
“She… Well, I was just very attracted to her immediately.”
Still nothing.
“It’s been a long time, in fact, since I’ve been as, as drawn to somebody as I am to her.”
Silence, but of a deeper and altogether more menacing quality.
“And she loved
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Sorry.”
He knew he should apologize, but he wasn’t entirely sure what for. It wasn’t that he was innocent of all charges, or even that he felt he had any kind of defense. It was just that he was no longer sure how many offenses he’d committed. Annie’s irritation at the mention of
“I do not want to talk about Tucker fucking Crowe in the middle of this.”
So that was probably it: he shouldn’t have mentioned Tucker at all. He could see that.
“Sorry. Again.”
For the first time in a couple of minutes, Duncan found the courage to look at Annie’s eyes. There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar—a house, a view, a partner. This was all ridiculous. He would have to extricate himself from the other situation. Surely, with the henna and the clunky jewelry, Gina must be used to one-night stands. Oh, that sounded terrible. He didn’t mean that. He just meant that she must have moved in circles where the one-night stand didn’t seem particularly shocking. She’d been in touring musicals, for God’s sake. He’d just ignore the whole thing, pretend it hadn’t happened and avoid her during coffee breaks.
“I’m not moving out of my home,” said Annie.
“No. Of course not. Nobody’s asking you to.”
“Good. As long as that’s clear.”
“Completely.”
“So what’s reasonable?”
“What’s reasonable? About what?”
“Tomorrow?”
“What’s happening tomorrow?”
He hoped that she was talking about a social arrangement he’d forgotten. He hoped that normal life was reasserting itself, and they could put this misfortune behind them.
“You’re moving out,” said Annie.
“Oh. Wow. Ha. No, no, that’s not what I’m talking about,” said Duncan.
“It may not be. But it’s what I’m talking about. Duncan, I have just wasted half my life with you. What was left of my youth, in fact. I’m not going to waste another day.”
She picked up her bag, drew out a ten-pound note, threw it on the table and walked out.
And how do you feel about that?”
“I feel shitty, Malcolm. How do you think I feel?”
“Define… that word.”
“Like shit.”
“You can do better than that, Annie. You’re an articulate young woman. And I’ll put ten pence in the swear box for you.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’ll let you off the first one, but the second was gratuitous. I don’t think it’s a good idea to break rules. Whatever the circumstances.”
Malcolm fumbled around in his pocket, found a coin and put it in the novelty piggy bank he kept on the bookshelf behind his head. The piggy bank was designed to spin the coin around and around before it came to its final resting place, so for the next minute or so there was silence; neither of them wanted to speak until the spinning had stopped. It seemed to take even longer than usual for the reassuring clink indicating that this ten pence had joined the others, all of them representing oaths uttered by Annie in extremis, none of them anything that would shock a ten-year-old.
A few months before, Annie had told Ros that, out of all her dysfunctional relationships, it was the one with Malcolm that caused her the most anxiety. Until the Friday-night curry, Duncan hadn’t been particularly troublesome; she only spoke to her mother for fifteen minutes a week, and saw her rarely since she’d gone to live in Devon. But Malcolm… Malcolm she saw every Saturday morning, for a whole hour, and every time she’d raised the subject of not seeing him every Saturday morning, or at any other time, he’d become visibly distressed. Whenever Annie thought about leaving town and her job for Manchester or London or Barcelona, the Malcomlessness of these places came up embarrassingly early in the fantasy—after the absence of Duncan, probably, but sooner than the attractions of food or weather or culture.
Malcolm was her therapist. She’d seen a business card on the bulletin board in the health center when she first started to become depressed about childlessness, but almost immediately she’d known that Malcolm wasn’t right: he was too nervous, too old, too easily shocked, even by Annie, who never did anything to shock anybody. When she’d tried to tell him that he wasn’t right for her, however, he had begged her to reconsider, and had dropped his fee from thirty pounds an hour to fifteen, and then, finally, to five. It turned out that Annie was his first and only client. He’d taken early retirement from the Civil Service to train, it had been his ambition for more than a decade, he would learn quickly, he was the only serious therapist in Gooleness anyway, he’d never find anyone as
