interesting or as sensitive as her… Annie simply hadn’t had the heart, or the necessary steel, to walk away, and she’d been enduring the spinning coins for two years now. She’d refused to entertain the notion of the swear box, which was why it was always Malcolm’s ten-pence pieces that got spun. Why he was so committed to the swear box at all, she had no real idea.
“Why are you so committed to the swear box?”
“We’re here to talk about you.”
“But don’t you ever watch TV? People say… that word all the time.”
“I watch television. I just don’t watch those programs. People don’t seem to feel the need to swear on
“You see, Malcolm, that’s exactly the sort of remark that makes me think we’re not right for each other.”
“What? Me saying that people don’t swear on the programs I watch?”
“But you have such a prissy way of saying it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to learn to be less prissy.”
He said it quietly, and humbly, and with a perceptibly self-flagellating tone. Annie felt terrible, as she often did when talking to Malcolm about nothing much. This was why she eventually ended up giving in, telling him the sorts of things she was supposed to share with a therapist, stuff about her parents and her hapless love life: it took them away from the depressing, awkward small talk.
“Humiliated,” she said, suddenly.
“Sorry?”
“You were asking me to do better in my description of how I’m feeling. I feel humiliated.”
“Of course you do.”
“Angry with myself, as well as him.”
“Because?”
“Because this was always going to happen. He was going to meet someone, or I was going to meet someone, and that would be it. So I should have got out ages ago. It was just inertia. And now I’ve been sh… dumped on.”
Malcolm went quiet. Annie knew that this was a technique analysts were supposed to use: if they waited long enough, then the person undergoing analysis would eventually shout out “I slept with my father!” and everyone could go home. She also knew that, with Malcolm, the reverse was true. If Annie waited for long enough, he would fill his own silences by saying something stupid, and they would argue. Sometimes they spent the entire fifty minutes arguing, which at least made the time go quickly. Malcolm’s interjections carried with them no disadvantage that Annie could see, as long as she succeeded in sloughing off the irritation of their inanity.
“It’s funny, you know, with your generation.” It was all Annie could do to stop herself from licking her lips in anticipation of the fuddy-duddy provocation that was almost bound to follow an introduction like that.
“What is, Malcolm?”
“Well, lots of people I know have an unhappy or frustrating marriage. Or a boring one.”
“And?”
“You see, they’re quite content, really.”
“They’re happy in their misery.”
“They put up with it, yes.”
Never before had Malcolm so neatly summarized the absurd paradox of his ambition, Annie felt. He was an Englishman of a certain age and class, from a certain part of the country, and Englishmen like him believed that there was almost nothing too grim to be endured. To complain was to show weakness, so things got worse and worse, and people became more and more stoical. And yet counseling was nothing without complaint. That was the basis of it, really, airing dissatisfactions and hurts in the hope that something could be done about them. Annie started to laugh.
“What have I said now?” said Malcolm wearily.
Annie could hear her mother’s voice in there somewhere. It was the tone she used when Annie had taken her to task for saying that the IRA killed people, or that children needed their fathers—actually, Annie could see now, relatively unobjectionable banalities that in the exotic political climate of the early eighties, had come to sound like incendiary fascist slogans.
“Do you really think you’re in the right job?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, the reason I come to you at all is because I don’t want to be quite content with my unhappy, boring, frustrating marriage. I want more. And you think I’m a bit of a crybaby. You’ll probably end up thinking that anyone who sits in this chair is a bit of a crybaby, really.”
Malcolm stared hard at the carpet, which was presumably where this conundrum had ended up somehow.
“Well,” he said. “I’m not sure that’s it.”
“So what is it? If it’s not that?”
“You said you don’t want to be quite content.”
“Yes. With. A. Rubbish. Life.” She said it as if he were deaf, which of course he might well have been. She became momentarily distracted while she tried to decide whether deafness might have played a part in the unsatisfactory nature of their sessions. When Malcolm didn’t seem to hear what she was saying, was it because he wasn’t able to?
“The context is important.”
“But people who are quite content don’t have a rubbish life,” he said.
Annie opened her mouth, ready to fire off the dismissive one-liner that always came to her whenever Malcolm offered any kind of observation, but to her surprise, there was nothing there. Her mouth was empty. Could he be right? Did the contentment count more than the life? It was the first time she’d thought about anything Malcolm had ever said to her.
She had never told Duncan that she went to talk about her problems on Saturday mornings. He was under the impression that she went to the gym, or shopping. He wouldn’t have been unhappy about it, if he’d found out. He’d have worn it as a badge of honor, even though he hadn’t been directly involved in the therapeutic battlefield: for him it would have been yet another example of the kind of thing that separated them from, raised them above, the rest of Gooleness. So that was one reason she kept it a secret. The other was that she didn’t really have any problems, apart from Duncan. That he wouldn’t have wanted to know, not at first—and then he would have wanted to know everything, and it would have been impossible. So she took her swimming things out with her, or came back with a secondhand book from the thrift shop, or a pair of cheap shoes, or a bagful of groceries, and Malcolm stayed a secret. When she left Malcolm’s house up near the elementary school and started to walk back into town, she realized that she didn’t need to buy anything to prove to Duncan that she hadn’t been telling a complete stranger how much he disappointed her. It felt strange, walking home empty-handed. Strange, a little risky, and, yes, of course, a little sad. It was lies like those that reminded her that she had someone to go home to. But when she got back to her newly empty house, Duncan was sitting in it, waiting for her.
“I’ve made us some coffee,” he said. “In a pot.”
The pot was significant, otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned it. Duncan thought that real coffee was a bit of a fuss, what with all the waiting and the plunging, and claimed to be happy with instant. This morning’s gesture was presumably intended as some kind of penance for his infidelity.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Why would I care what coffee you drink?”
“If I hadn’t slept with someone else you’d be pleased.”
“If you hadn’t slept with someone else you’d be drinking instant.”
Duncan conceded the point by saying nothing and taking a sip from his mug.
“You’re right, though. It’s much nicer.”
Annie wondered how many similar concessions Duncan would have to make before they’d have a relationship that might conceivably last them for the rest of their lives. A thousand? And after that, he could begin to work on
