SHE SEEMED ANXIOUS TO ASSURE ME THAT IT WASN’T SEX which detained them. It’s a funny thing, but in my job you don’t take much interest in sex. Or rather, the interest you take is of a pretty disinterested kind. Like any other topic it can lose its appeal if it becomes a staple of your trade. I am not speaking about my personal experience, you understand.
Extensive sexual expertise is not something I can boast of. Bar was probably my most rewarding partner. It doesn’t always follow that character is consistent in the bedroom. I’ve known mousy-looking women who were tigers once they had their clothes off, and vice versa. But Bar in bed was a reflection of Bar out of it: uncloying, considerate, appreciative, kind. Olivia had none of these graces, indeed the very opposites by turn, which, I’m sorry to own, may be what attracted me to her. It is a peculiarity of the human male that the poison which can destroy us has this pernicious allure. The shrewd Elizabethans were aware of this: it’s not for nothing that their slang for orgasm was ‘to die’.
In any case, it was with no diminished interest, rather the reverse, that I heard my patient, wrapped in the borrowed bathrobe, had done no more than talk to this stranger, for, she calculated, over three hours. Only when he said, ‘You should get dressed, you’ll get cold like that,’ did she think about doing so, while he left the flat promising to be back soon.
She didn’t even go upstairs to her own place to change into something more presentable than the dull skirt and sweater she’d been wearing, or to put on the make-up she was conscious of lacking after the bath. She was too worried that he might return and, finding her gone, give up on her.
‘It sounds stupid but I prayed.’
‘You weren’t in the habit?’
‘I prayed to something, I don’t know who or what.’
Whoever her prayer was addressed to it was answered. Thomas returned with shopping bags filled with food.
‘Did you cook?’
‘He did. I couldn’t have done a thing.’
‘What did he cook?’
In fact, it was shortly after this that Maguire was dispatched for sandwiches, the description of that first shared meal activating a sudden vicarious appetite in my patient’s single audience. I could picture her hungry—not merely for the omelette that had miraculously been prepared for her, but hungrier still for the affection she had been denied—leaning, on Bainbridge’s kitchen table, towards the myopic stranger, upon whose somewhat thick lenses the light spun, in dancing dazzling points, in the tall London house, in the flat where neither belonged.
It was this air of not-quite-belonging which had so characterised her for me and it came to me that it must have filled her with extraordinary delight, but a delight of the kind that is freighted with tension, seemingly to have commanded, with so little effort, this intense focus. To be paid such unusual attention was a cordial to her famished heart, which might well have given wings to almost unbearable hope.
But it is a hallmark of the damaged that when it comes to their own desire instinctively, ruinously, they tend to court its opposite. So at the point when it dawned on her how much it mattered that he should stay, she suddenly asked, ‘Shouldn’t you be going? Haven’t you things to do?’
And Thomas looking at his watch said, ‘Oh hell! Damn and blast, I should.’
Even so, he didn’t go at once but lingered further over the table, still talking.
‘He talked better than anyone I had ever known. Not that what he said then was anything I could easily reproduce, but I don’t know…’
‘I expect you do.’
‘It was as if…’ Again she stalled.
‘It cancelled the loneliness?’
She appeared to consider this before saying, ‘It was as if I were meeting someone whom I had known intimately and from whom I had been separated for a very long time.’
‘And he felt the same?’ It crossed my mind that this was what I would feel were I to meet Jonny.
She made the wounded-bird gesture with her hands.
‘How could I tell? I’d never talked so comfortably to anyone before. He seemed to like me, and to want to go on talking. But how could I know he wasn’t like that with everyone? He seemed so easy, so fluent I couldn’t imagine that had much to do with my being there.’
Of course she couldn’t. Your average egotist is armoured against disappointments for, to the egotist, he or she is the undisputed centre of the whole world. That my patient had been given sight of something rarer and more compelling than this, I understood. We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.