Perversities
1
He told the story as if searching for its ending, aware that there was more to the telling than he could presently convey. Five of us were sitting outside, around a small table at a pub in Marchmont. It was mid-summer, and the weather was as warm as we could ever recall. We were all in tee-shirts commenting on the weeks of dry, windless heat, and, of course, couldn’t help wondering if this was the future: pleasant and terrifying simultaneously. We might, for the moment, accept a parched season so that we could be outside drinking cool beers, but in ten years’ time, would this beverage be a glass of water that we would be so happy to imbibe, aware of its limited availability? This had been the topic initially, as we all agreed that Scotland was surely one of the last countries to suffer intolerable temperatures and water shortages, but what did we know? Apart from Nicholas, none of us was anything more than a layman when it came to comprehending the environment, no matter if, increasingly, there were many, with no scientific training, happy to inform the public of exaggerated fears over the planet. We were ignorant but modest, and could do little more than say a bit about our own experiences of extreme heat that summer. This is how Nicolas began telling us about his week in Seville. It was so hot that he would lean against a railing, and his hand would react as if he’d put it on a hot ring. He felt he was in a constant state of dehydration, as though his body was frequently in danger of running out of liquid. He imagined an identity crisis as H20 deprivation. After all, if we are 60 per cent water, who would we be without it?
But he added that wasn’t the only pressing matter in Seville. He went with a friend whom he wondered might potentially be a lover, but assumed any sexual assignations would have to wait, or that the very invite was an indication there would never be anything sexual between them. She announced before going that the person they would be staying with in his two- bedroom apartment was a friend who had long fancied her. She insisted she wasn’t interested, but the friendship was dear to her, and she would try to see him often. He would visit her. She would visit him. He could come with a friend; she could take a friend with her when she went to Seville. On this occasion, Nicholas assumed he was this friend.
However, around halfway through their stay, Nicholas found Emily becoming increasingly hostile towards him. He first noticed it when they were walking back from a cafe next to the river that passes through the city. They were returning to the southern part of Seville, where Esteban was living, and she said that she was tempted to push him into the water. He turned to her, expecting to see a smile on her face, and instead he was met with a scowl. He said he didn’t understand, and she replied that he wouldn’t, would he. As they walked on in silence, he tried to recall what might have created this mood and thought of a gesture he had offered the previous evening. Esteban had gone to bed early (just as he hadn’t come out this evening at all), and Nicholas was sitting on the couch, and she was seated in front of him when she rolled her neck, and he asked if she needed a massage. I would love one she added, and for ten minutes he kneaded his hands into her neck as she said, if he could do this for long enough, eventually all the stress of her job would be released from her body.
He knew a little about her job: that she worked for the university and was already well on her way to a professorship. She wasn’t yet in her mid-thirties, and admitted sometimes she felt overwhelmed, and what mattered at that moment was that the job was stressful and he was alleviating that stress. There was the added tension, she admitted, of buying a big flat with a large mortgage and trying to pay for it by renting out three of the rooms. She was both an academic and a businesswoman, she supposed, and on too many occasions had come home from work only to find herself dealing with a problem in the flat: a leak in the bathroom, a busted bed leg, a tenant moving out. Nicholas proposed that if he managed to remove all the stress in her body, he would surely be entitled to a free room in the flat. She said this might not be so silly an idea, and maybe someday they would live together.
We asked if he was naive. There he was giving this person a massage, and she was also telling him she wanted him to potentially share a place, even if they hadn’t even slept with each other. How did he react, we asked, and he said by doing nothing. Eventually, she went off to the spare room, and he slept on the couch – as he had done since they’d arrived. Maybe, he added, he hadn’t managed quite to convey the tone of the conversation, which contained within it a detached element somewhere between a joke and a performance. It was as though they were both characters in a show, well aware of the audience’s expectations that they would end up in bed together, and delaying that demand as if aware of the audience’s insistence on it.
Nicholas said that what they seemed to share that night wasn’t the intimacy of the burgeoning couple, but a role they were going to play until one or the other insisted they drop it. He had no interest in taking things further while they were in Seville, believing that throughout their stay, Esteban had been far too hospitable to be treated with the contempt that such an action would entail. If Esteban was in love with Emily, then if that dream would eventually be smithereened, he wasn’t going to be the person doing it in the man’s home city.
Yet while there, on several occasions, Emily was more tactile than he would have liked, even if he might not have disliked it had it taken place in Edinburgh. Once, Esteban, Emily and Nicholas went to the cinema, and during the screening, on several occasions, Emily grabbed Nicholas’s hand during a hardly scary horror film. She was sitting between Nicholas and Esteban, and Nicholas thought she would, at least sometimes, go for Esteban’s, and give the impression that she was so lost in the movie that she would squeeze whoever’s hand was available. But no, at no stage did she seem to take Esteban’s, and he was relieved to see that Esteban hadn’t appeared to notice.
2
One of us asked Nicholas if he didn’t think it strange that someone who might have been interested in us romantically would be inclined to invite us on a holiday where it would have been difficult for an entanglement to take place, and Nicholas replied that, as he said, he did entertain the notion that the trip was an unusual way of saying they wouldn’t be having a sexual relationship. Yet while there, it seemed simultaneously that she wanted one and accepted it was prohibited. What made it seem odder still is that at no stage did Esteban show any jealousy towards him, or look suspiciously at the interactions between Nicholas and Emily.
What added to this oddness was that, when they returned to Edinburgh, something in the friendship had changed. Before going, in the months they had known each other, Emily would be kind and generous, talking him up and wishing him well. After they returned, she became inclined to undermine him, he said, or even laugh at something he did wrong.
He recalled that about a fortnight after the trip to Seville, they went for a walk up round the Braid hills, seeing if they could pick some raspberries that turned out not yet to be ripe, and she chided him for dragging her off on a fool’s errand, saying he should have known that they needed another couple of weeks. Nicholas said he thought this year that the fruit would be ready earlier than usual because of the warm weather. It may have been a fool’s errand, but hardly a foolish notion. He added that the point anyway was the walk, and the fruit-picking no more than an augmenting of it. He said it in a tone indicating that he was mildly hurt by her remark and her scathing tone, and she responded by saying he might have done a degree in environmental science, but that he didn’t seem to know much about the environment at all. Only two months earlier, he remembered her telling him her that if he applied himself to it, he could be a leading figure in the field, as she insisted he should do a PhD. Working in admin at the university, she said, might be giving him a regular income, but it was wasting his talents. There she was two months later, saying he didn’t have any talent at all.
3
As he thought about this instance, and a couple of similar ones, he couldn’t quite work out whether he was more hurt, humbled or disturbed, and suspected it was a combination of all three. He was hurt because he was being undermined by someone to whom he had felt affection, humbled by the fact that she had boosted him up and was now taking him down, and disturbed since Emily seemed increasingly to be a different person from the one he knew before the Seville holiday.
As he asked us what we thought, the consensus was that he should quietly find a way to cease contact, but I might have been the only one who wished he didn’t because I was intrigued by this person, couldn’t help but see in her a case study of various symptoms my own research in psychology often found manifest. Yet while I often saw it in my work, I rarely found it in my life, in my relationships and friendships, in my family and my colleagues. Most were normal enough, and for all the talk of mental health circulating in the culture, people I knew often had stressful marriages and jobs, difficult situations with their children, and sometimes strained moments with their friends. But usually it was explicable, and yet Emily seemed either not to know herself at all, knew herself too well, or at least knew how to manipulate others enough to make them feel good about themselves when they had her approval, and less so when they didn’t.
I asked Nicholas a bit more about her profession, since she seemed to take this question seriously enough to judge him on the basis of it. She was an archaeologist and expected to be a full professor by forty; she had published more than a dozen articles already, and received her PhD when she was twenty-five. She probably saw him as a failure, even if she’d yet to use that word. He suspected that if he kept hanging out with her, it would come up soon enough. He said this with more dejection than cynicism, and I understood why the others reckoned he should extricate himself from the situation. But I sensed Nicholas wasn’t quite ready to do so, and this might have revealed an aspect of his personality I wouldn’t have recognised were it not for his present predicament.
4
Nicholas wasn’t my closest friend in this small contingent, which was part of a bigger one, and so it wasn’t common for us to meet up ourselves, though we all shared in a texting group, often using it to suggest gigs and films any of the others wanted to see. If we did meet alone, there was always a premise. After the two of us went to a jazz concert, I asked him, during the break, how things were. He apologised for monopolising the discussion when we were all last out, and I said not at all – the situation was odd, even fascinating. While I think we were all intrigued by how it would develop, he would have known my interest might have been more than informally curious, and he asked if I would be able to categorise what he saw as her strange behaviour. I said I wouldn’t want to apply a label hastily, and added I was really interested on the human level, as I briefly explained that, in my work, I was more interested in stories than diagnoses. A diagnosis I believed was just a useful (and sometimes useless) generalisation. What mattered was gathering information to understand someone in as many contexts as possible. I didn’t necessarily think there was anything wrong with her (whatever that might mean), but I did believe the situation seemed anomalous, and added that I didn’t think Nicholas was merely its victim, but also its perpetrator. Perhaps I didn’t know him well enough to make such a remark, but I surmised he knew me well enough to recognise it was the sort of comment I’d make amongst the group when someone would turn to me and say: Let’s hear what Dr Thomas thinks. I would offer a remark that might be serious; might be facetious, but in both instances I’d be recognising my status as the psychologist in the group. All I wanted to propose to Nicholas was that I would be playing up my role if that is what he wished me to provide, but that equally I’d be willing to listen as a friend if he wanted to divulge more. If I sensed he desired to play the former, it may have been simply because he didn’t believe there was enough of a friendship there for me to perform the latter.
He didn’t say much more that evening, but he did admit that he was still in contact with Emily, despite the recommendations offered that night. As he said this, I wondered if, when we discussed Emily and his time in Seville, in the pub as a group, he had wished for our thoughts on her. I wasn’t so sure now if he also wanted me to see that he was potentially as anomalous in his actions since getting back, as she had been when they were in Spain. As the gig started again, I said he should just text me directly, and we could have a proper chat. I realised, as I said this, that I was offering it with the air of professional authority more than the concern of a friend. But if I did so, it was only because that seemed to be the type of relationship with me he wished to have. As the music started to play again, I would occasionally glance across at Nicholas, and I sensed he was both concentrating on the music and, at the same time, musing over his predicament. Was that part of its genius: that if it had been a film or a play, I’d assume he was distracted. Instead, it was as if the music was giving a backing track to his musings.
5
Nicholas didn’t contact me over the next couple of weeks, and the next time I saw him was once again as part of the group. It was now early October, the temperature was cooler, and we were seated around a table in a basement bar that seemed to lend itself towards intimacy for couples and disclosures between friends. Maybe it was the candles on the table, or the music that was always played at a level too quiet to kill conversation, but loud enough to make eavesdropping difficult. Even amongst a group around the table, it was hard to discern what was said a couple of feet away, and this might have been why, while on the previous occasion sitting outside, Nicholas offered the Seville anecdote to us all, now he discussed what had happened since only with me.
He apologised for failing to get in touch; it was a busy period at work, made all the more so by distractions that had nothing to do with it. I asked if he meant Emily, and he nodded his head. He paused for a few moments, taking more than one sip of his ale, and then said he didn’t know whether he wished to talk about it or wished not to, and wasn’t sure if he wanted to because he was determined to get certain thoughts out of his head, or didn’t wish to because he was worried they were too jumbled and incoherent to be articulated. I think Nicholas offered this as a defence against confession, before almost immediately realising that he was in the midst of one. I said I sometimes think we read books to understand what we are thinking without feeling responsible for those thoughts, and hoping also that the writer can make better sense of them than we can. And then things happen in our life, and we don’t know about the book that might make sense of it, and we have to make sense of it on our own. It seemed he was going through one of those experiences.
He was indeed, he immediately admitted, and started to tell me what had happened between him and Emily since he had last talked to the group about it. A few days after that, he met up with her, aiming to discuss the Seville trip and its awkwardness, when she said, after he suggested this, that she didn’t understand what he was on about. He said to her that he thought the trip seemed fraught with subtext, with unsaid feelings and explicit slights, and he assumed these slights might have been based on those feelings that weren’t expressed.
They were taking a coffee on the terrace at a place looking out onto Mid-Meadow Walk, and the light rain pattered against the canopy. She asked whose feelings he believed went unexpressed, and he said he wasn’t quite sure. Emily insisted that the only person whose feelings he could talk about were his, and he said that might be true, but that didn’t make things any clearer. That was the problem he suspected: the messiness of the Seville trip appeared a combination of his, hers and Esteban’s. She said she didn’t know what he was talking about, but if this was his attempt at a declaration of intent, there were easier ways of going about it. Emily said this, Nicholas believed, with no indication that she would respond with a yes, nor that she would say no, and instead emphasised what she saw as the exasperating inability of Nicholas to speak his mind. He believed he wasn’t doing so, not out of shyness or procrastination, but was finding it difficult to say what he thought and felt, believing he was caught in a nexus he couldn’t quite comprehend. He didn’t believe that if he simply wanted to ask Emily out, he would have had any problems doing so. This hadn’t been difficult with previous girlfriends, as I wondered if, on this occasion, it had been different since he had started to know Emily as a friend. He thought not – that was quite often how he started seeing someone. There would be attraction, but that could wax or wane, ebb or flow, according to the dynamic between them. Some friendships that might have become relationships never did, some became important friendships; with other people, they became no more than acquaintances and then strangers. I joked that maybe he had been relationship-zoned, as I gave an example from a friend of mine who might have been deemed to have missed the boat he didn’t want to catch, only for the woman he had befriended to believe that he was fully on board, even though nothing had happened. And yet that wasn’t the end of it.
6
Nicholas asked me to say more about this, and I said I only brought it up as an aside, but he wanted to hear what happened to this friend, as I realised he was looking for an extension of the notion I offered shortly earlier. That just as we read books to articulate predicaments we wouldn’t otherwise quite comprehend, so sometimes a story a person offers can not so much chime with our own, but can nevertheless illuminate it.
I told him a friend was seeing someone long-distance after he recently started a new job in Glasgow, and she was still working in Bristol. He rented a flat a few miles outside the city, near where he lived as a boy, and when he joined a fitness club at the gym that would meet once a week, the instructor seemed a bit familiar, and then became more so when he realised that they knew each other from school, though had never been friends, and he wouldn’t perhaps even have known her name. She had divorced years earlier, had no children and was of course the same age as he was: thirty-seven. Most would go for a drink after the class, often at a pub that could accommodate their various quirks and demands, as Flora said it was a place that knew it was the community’s hub, and so offered oat milk cappuccinos along with its range of single malts. Those who joined the club chiefly for fitness would opt for soft drinks and hot beverages; a few others consumed far more calories in beer than they had expended in working out, but didn’t much care. They wanted the social life; if they were a bit fitter along the way, then all to the good.
Flora and my friend chatted for an hour that evening, but while she discussed her divorce, my friend said nothing about his partner in Bristol. On the next two occasions after the session, other topics were addressed, and by then, he had clearly given the impression of being a single man. He didn’t know whether Flora was interested in him, but he did start to believe that to tell her he wasn’t single would have been unfair, even though he would have known that not to tell her was unfairer still, at least within the emotional logic he’d set up in his head. If she wasn’t interested, he had no reason not to tell her, and if she was, he had reason to tell her as soon as possible. Even if he only wished for a friendship, the longer it took him to tell her, the more she might assume that when he did, this innocuous friendship she was happy to have with him was based on a desire he had for her that he hid, along with hiding the fact of a partner.
Instead, he told her about sometimes going to Bristol, and hoped she would understand that this was for personal reasons that could have incorporated a partner, children, house hassles or residual work commitments. She never asked, and he wasn’t sure if this was out of indifference or trepidation. If she were interested, maybe she would prefer to hope for the best rather than have him express the worst. He supposed it would all sort itself out when his partner came to visit, and in this village of 3,000 people, Flora would see him with her, or someone who knew Flora would, and mention it.
Yet during those first six months, his partner never visited at all, since she had various important deadlines at her job. He would go down once every three weeks and, on two occasions, they went away for long weekends elsewhere. When she did finally arrange to come up, it was a weekend after a difficult moment with Flora. While the friend befriended other members of the gym group, even occasionally going for drinks at the weekend with two of the men in the group who didn’t have commitments, the person he saw the most between joining the gym and his partner’s visit was Flora. They sometimes went hiking around hills and would get lunch at various pubs, and while they talked about many things, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say he had a partner. When she said he was a good listener, he wondered whether he was more, with her, a reluctant talker. He did feel lonely living alone, and all he wanted from the people in the community was to alleviate that feeling. But nobody was more companionable during this time than Flora. He might have believed he didn’t tell her because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but he should also have admitted to himself that he didn’t wish to hurt his own need to develop friendships.
And so it was that Flora invited him around for dinner and he accepted. If, when she offered the invitation, he had told her he had a partner, he believed he would have been doubly cruel or merely presumptuous: he could have been announcing the fact just as she was offering a date, or claiming he shouldn’t come on the assumption that she was suggesting one when all she was proposing was dinner.
7
Yet when he arrived, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he was met at the door by Flora wearing make-up and a dress. As he walked through the hallways of a surprisingly large house, with rooms off the hall to the left and the right, so they proceeded into the capacious kitchen where the dining table was set and where candles had been lit. Not only on the table but also around the room. He was used to seeing Flora in robust contexts when they were alone. Those hills had no need for high heels, and sunscreen was more useful than make-up. In other circumstances, in the circumstances he supposed Flora had created under the false impression that she had invited round a single man, he might have been able to enjoy himself. He did find Flora attractive, clearly liked her company, and was happy listening, but that night, the gap between the romantic scenario she had created and his need to tell her that this was based on a belief that was untenable made the evening one of the most awkward in his life.
Perhaps he should have told her as soon as he saw the candles, well aware that he wouldn’t have been presumptuous in announcing he had a girlfriend, even if the cruelty would have been all the greater. Instead, he said nothing, commented on the wonderful aroma as he asked what she had cooked, and she proposed he would find out, as all good things come to those who wait. It was a flirtatious remark that he countered in his mind with an awareness that sometimes bad things happen to those who wait, and Flora, realising he had a girlfriend, would be one of them. But not only did he stay for dinner, but he also kept Flora in a dark far greater than the darkened atmosphere of the kitchen that was reliant exclusively on the candles after the dinner was served, and she turned the light off from the extractor above the cooker.
Over dinner, he asked her lots of questions, and this wasn’t just idle chatter. He did want to know how she came to live in so large a house. All he knew was that she was divorced, her ex-husband had a property business, and he might have believed this was part of that little empire that a divorce settlement insisted should go to her. But no. It was her house, and she bought it herself outright. And by the age of twenty-one. He was intrigued. He knew she had run a talent agency in Glasgow, but that had been a more recent development.
She was, she supposed, a one-hit wonder, as she started to sing him a song he had heard many times on the radio and in cafes and pubs. He wasn’t so interested in music and would have felt no need to have found out who this singer was, but there she happened to be across from him at the dinner table, and a few memories of others came to his mind as she was singing the hit. Had he kissed or held hands with someone while listening to this song that was played so often during a period of about eighteen months? He couldn’t recall, but there was an atrocious irony that on this evening, where Flora perhaps hoped it would be part of seduction, a song that many people would have become intimate over, and would have kissed and held each other while listening to it, now was yet another detail that could add to the devastation of a rebuff.
How could he tell her that night he had a partner? And so he didn’t, instead saying, as they parted at the door, that he had complications in his life, and he needed to sort them out. If he were letting Flora down gently, he was surely betraying his partner, who had no idea that he was dining with another woman, and would have been surprised to hear that their relationship had become complicated. Flora looked at him with disappointment on her face that seemed halfway between anger and yearning, contempt and affection, and he suspected that if he couldn’t quite read her response to what he had just said, he supposed she knew her thoughts no better than he did.
As he walked the fifteen minutes back to his place, at the beginning of the walk, he felt bad for Flora, but by the time he arrived, he believed he had betrayed his partner, and not even especially because he found himself in another woman’s house, and a romantic setting. It was because he implied that he was potentially in the process of breaking up with her. While what he offered may have sounded vague to Flora, he could imagine if his partner had overheard what he’d said, that this was his inexorable move from one woman to another. That he wasn’t going to cheat on her, but he was in time going to find a way of finishing with her so he could start something new with this other woman. This wasn’t what he planned to do at all, but he realised that too often, when in Flora’s company, while he hadn’t acted on her feelings, he had protected them to the detriment of his own partner’s.
He thought during the week of contacting Flora and saying that perhaps he had allowed a misunderstanding to develop, and that, while he had let Flora down, perhaps he might have seemed to be leading her on as he was leaving, as he offered comments that could have seemed like a betrayal of his partner. He could claim that he hadn’t told her because he enjoyed her company, but she might understandably reply that he needed her company: that he used her as a surrogate in the absence of his partner. She would reveal a double betrayal, and did he want to face that possibility?
No, as he decided instead that he wouldn’t say anything, and that when his partner visited, Flora would see he wasn’t single if she saw them on the street, or somebody else would see them in the small town and pass the news on to Flora. This is what he hoped would happen, and indeed this is what came to pass.
8
Nicholas asked was that all. Did Flora accept with equanimity that this man had allowed months to pass and a potential affair to develop without telling her he had a partner, only for her to find out so long afterwards and indirectly? I said that she did indeed seem to take it well. While he might have expected someone who knew Flora to come and tell him how terrible he had acted, instead, someone from the gym club (that he had stopped going to after that night at Flora’s house) said they were relieved to see he had a partner, and that Flora had a habit of stringing men along. There were several in the town she would do this to, all the while she had a lover in Glasgow. He felt more relief than indignation when he heard this, and yet for months afterwards was puzzled by that night in her house. Would she have rejected a pass had he made one, or would she have slept with him and announced it was a fling and nothing more? Would she have told him of her Glasgow lover? He didn’t know and, during the time, he gave some thought to the unusual situation he had found himself in, gave up the lease on his flat, and found another in the west end of Glasgow. I had heard his partner was going to move up, having found a job in the city as well.
Nicholas understandably asked why I was telling him all this, and I said maybe because we project onto other people, thoughts and feelings they may or might not have, and only a concrete situation gives us a better understanding of what could have been going through their minds. I said that while he was speculating over Emily’s motives, all he was probably doing was thinking through his own. He was feeling confused, just as his friend had been feeling guilty over Flora, and out of his emotional state, he projected onto hers. Was Nicholas doing the same? Things were perhaps very clear to Emily; Nicholas just didn’t have the information necessary to understand that clarity, and assumed a complexity that might not be evident.
He said what I was saying might be right, but he also reckoned that Emily was part of a story he was in that, at the same time, he was trying to follow, and while he could cut off all contact, this would be a little like giving up on a book that was at the same time a page turner. I said, while I understood the analogy, over the years I’d seen plenty of clients who found that the book they were reading, that was also the life they were living, had been slapped shut in front of their face. They never knew the outcome of the story, but did feel incapacitated by the abruptness of someone else deciding when a tale was going to come to an end. It was often this that left them in a traumatised state, and I sometimes wondered if, in their need for narrative certitude, which fiction so often provides, clients would apply to their own lives, finding less unhappy endings than no ending at all. Or rather, unhappiness in the absence of these endings. Nicholas said that if curiosity killed the cat, should the cat have been less curious? Should we be killing our curiosity to protect ourselves from emotional pain?
I didn’t have an answer to this question, and knew that Nicholas, seeing I had no theoretical, therapeutic answer to it, was all the more likely to continue pursuing a narrative one. I could hardly blame him.
9
On the next two occasions when we met up as a group, Nicholas was absent. I commented on this, hoping that those who knew him better than I did might have an explanation, but one of the others simply said that he had been preoccupied of late, an ambiguous remark that nevertheless we all took to mean embroiled in his affair with Emily. Nobody had met up with him for more than a month, but the one who offered the remark, Simon, did say he stopped and shared a few words with him on the street. He was with Emily, and this was the first time Simon had met her. We were all eager to hear about his impressions, since none of us had seen her and had relied on Nicholas to tell us what she was like. Now we had what we assumed was a more objective account.
Simon said that it perhaps wasn’t a reliable impression, as they seemed in a hurry. They said they were going to a market in Stockbridge. Simon spoke to them around midday near the Royal Mile, and they wanted to get there before certain items sold out. It did seem to Simon a dubious excuse as he sensed a greater need to get away from him than to rush somewhere else. The image she presented was quite Gothic as she was wearing dark purple lipstick, a lighter shade of purple eyeliner, a black velvet jacket, a dark purple skirt, and Doc Marten boots. Her hair looked naturally very dark, and if there is such a thing as a natural Goth, she might have been it. Her skin was pale without any make-up lightening it, and he scrutinised her hair for a moment just to make sure it seemed natural rather than dyed. He was sure it was. Next to her, Nicholas seemed inconspicuous, though we all knew he was handsome enough and wasn’t afraid to spend money on expensive haircuts and would-be designer brand clothing. But if he often looked distinguished, in that moment, he didn’t at all look distinctive. Emily did.
What Simon also noticed was that she came across as a little bit more assertive than we usually expect when meeting someone through someone else. In the four or five minutes they talked, she announced that they were in a hurry, rather than Nicholas, as she said they were going to the market in Stockbridge, and she also noted it might not be the best market in the city, but it had the best bread and cheese options. These were all remarks he felt would typically be voiced by Nicholas, and not at all because he was a male, but because the friendship was between Nicholas and Simon. It was as though, as she talked, she wished to excise Nicholas from the chat as soon as he had introduced her, like a public speaker taking over after the necessary intro. I’d interjected as Simon said this, wondering, despite Simon’s earlier claim, if he just noticed Emily’s assertiveness since she was a woman, and it would have gone unnoticed if she had been a man. He thought not, but didn’t doubt there was a prejudice nevertheless. Having heard about her, he was probably pre-emptively hostile towards her. Yet he also believed she lived up to his prejudicial assumptions.
10
It was the first time I’d thought of the potential misogyny involved: there we had been several months earlier, a group of men sitting around a table discussing a woman. Yet I assumed we weren’t talking about Emily, but about Nicholas’s predicament. On this occasion, and with Nicholas absent, we were talking of a woman one of us had briefly met, and it was troublesome, as I was sure Nicholas wouldn’t have been very happy with us talking about him as a weak individual, and this person he knew as a stroppy harridan.
Did I voice my thoughts to the others? No, but less out of fearing conflict than the desire to make sense of my intuitions. I am sure if I had offered reservations about our tone, the others would have accepted the possible truth of my claim. But I was more interested in what Nicholas had to say, and needed to wait a couple more weeks before further news.
It was the first time he contacted me directly, and when he asked if we could meet, I realised I was hesitant, though curious. He was a friend, or at least part of my social circle, and while others in the group sometimes nicknamed me Shrink, none of them had quite ever come to me as if I happened to be their therapist, though some could have done so for nothing. Not only Nicholas but a couple of the others worked at the university, and I was employed there two days a week. Staff could access this therapy for free, up to six sessions. Some had talked to me about personal things, and I had done the same in return. But any advice they asked for always seemed couched in the language of friendship, and not quite therapeutic expectation. Even the friend whose story I described to him had offered it to me anecdotally, with no therapeutic demand. It was an example of someone messing up, and we all do so. I may even have told it to Nicholas as a way of keeping him therapeutically at bay, and would have offered one of my own if it had occurred to me.
When we met, I tried to ask him how things were without the gravity I would offer when asking a client, but I was also more interested to know how he was than I would be when enquiring of a patient’s well-being. It would be unfair to say most clients bored me. But neither did they always have stories to tell, and would often concentrate on the minutiae of a work situation or a domestic issue. These would be underpinned by very specific emotional feelings, and it was these that interested me, not the anecdote that contained them. I said this to Nicholas as I explained that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t wish to provide him with, anything resembling professional advice, though I couldn’t pretend that the complicated situation he seemed to be in wasn’t of interest to me. Nevertheless, I had to see him as a friend with a story to tell. He said he understood and that he reckoned he wanted to speak to me more than to the others because I seemed good with intimacy. He clarified by saying he suspected this was twofold and probably had nothing to do with my profession. I seemed interested in people’s subjectivity, and created the space for its exploration. I found it odd that he thought this had nothing to do with my professional role, yet he might have been right, and over the years, I have sometimes wondered if I’d have been happier as a storyteller, taking down the details of people’s lives only when it became a narrative instead of a psychological problem.
Nicholas said that he had ceased contact with Emily and that Esteban was presently visiting her. A week earlier, she had said to Nicholas that she wouldn’t have much time over the next ten days and that friends were around. She didn’t say who, and he assumed it couldn’t have been Esteban; otherwise, why shouldn’t she have said so? But a couple of days ago, he ventured out to the Christmas market on Princes St, and who did he see there but Emily and Esteban.
As usual in early December, it was a hectic muddle of bodies, a mixture of tourists and locals, people looking to buy overly-priced jewellery and jam for loved ones, and others hanging out, determined to get a bit of Scottish Christmas spirit, one that was, of course, simply channelling Teutonic festivities. He said it with the misery of someone who probably usually had no problem with such an event, but could see in it a mixing of cultures that no doubt made him think of Esteban and Emily. A writer once claimed that unhappiness makes us moral. At the moment, it was making Nicholas xenophobic. What he noticed was that Emily was as tactile with Esteban as she had been with Nicholas in Seville, and yet she hadn’t been touchy-feely with him in Edinburgh, and hadn’t been so with Esteban in Spain.
He looked at me perplexed, and I looked at him bemused. He might have hoped for a more professional expression on my face (do therapists have professional expressions?). But I was as confused as he was, and thought about the story I’d told him of the friend. It wasn’t a confusing story to me because I had the friend’s perspective, but it may have been if I’d been hearing the story from Flora, no matter how the story concluded. Certain phrases may have come to my mind, diagnostic terms which have entered popular consciousness, like malignant narcissist, or narcissistic exhibitionist, and so on. But I couldn’t deny I was more intrigued than anything, lost in the intricacy of the story, over feeling any need to offer therapeutic conceptualisation. I was as baffled as Nicholas, but without the emotional instability that this giddy adventure was generating.
He assumed they hadn’t seen him, even though he risked their gaze falling upon him as he sought a better view. He stood on a low plinth that nevertheless added a metre to his height and allowed him to better survey the market. A dozen others were standing on it as well, and he believed he remained inconspicuous, helped along by a woolly hat and sunglasses. It was a perfect combination for inconspicuousness, but entirely generated by the weather conditions, even if the sun was now beginning to set. To wear them for much longer would have made him stand out.
Watching them move in the crowd, stopping at various stalls, and at one moment seeing Esteban place a necklace around Emily’s neck, before deciding that it wasn’t worth the price or didn’t suit her, Nicholas didn’t know whether to feel horribly jealous or merely confused. It would have been bad enough (and perhaps worse) to see one’s partner with another man, but this was at least as inexplicable as it was devastating. He just didn’t quite know what to make of it, and he supposed that was why he was talking to me.
I said it seemed he needed a detective as much as a therapist, well aware that in some ways therapists are detectives: proper armchair sleuths, perhaps, where all they have to work with are the thoughts and words of the person sitting opposite them. I guess the therapist is an inviting presence, the detective often an intrusive one. The therapist explores time as the individual addresses aspects of their past; a detective chiefly explores space and wishes to detect signs in it that will reveal the culprit. Was Emily a culprit, and if so what was her crime?
I offered these thoughts to Nicholas that day, and added that while I didn’t think I was of much use professionally, I couldn’t pretend that what he was saying was without interest. However, while with my friend, I only really needed to understand him, not Flora; with Nicholas, I felt I needed to understand Emily, and not Nicholas. I said he might be relieved to hear that he was of little therapeutic interest to me, and that I was giving him a clean bill of health.
11
I am not so sure if he was so healthy, but then, at certain moments and from certain perspectives, who is, and while some would insist he should have ceased all contact with Emily, even I was intrigued to know more. He had the added incentive of emotional involvement and not just curiosity. To tell him to walk away might have been good advice, but humans are rarely so simple, and I have always been suspicious of therapeutic forms that propose we are. Before parting, I asked if he wanted what he’d seen on the mound to remain between us, and he said not at all. He didn’t doubt he would tell others; he just thought I might have something to offer others didn’t. I apologised for failing to be more helpful, and he, in turn, apologised, saying that wasn’t what he meant to say at all. It was more that he wanted to know if there was anything unusual in Emily’s behaviour from a therapist’s perspective. I confirmed it was as odd to me as it was to him, and that he needed more information, and others might prove more useful than I.
A week or so later, I met up with Simon for a film and, afterwards, over a drink, we discussed aspects of the movie that shared similarities with Nicholas’s predicament, as we found ourselves moving between the work we had seen and the life of a friend. Simon knew Nicholas much better than I did, and I asked him if Nicholas might be susceptible to those who weren’t ideal relationship material. I offered it facetiously, and Simon took it seriously. He said he didn’t think he was betraying his friendship by saying that Nicholas liked the chase more than he liked the catch. Or rather, that there were catches and there were chases. There were the one-night stands and brief flings, and chases that lasted far longer than the catches. I said it sounded like he needed to see a therapist. Simon said he knew one already. I reckoned that might be the problem: I didn’t know him too well as a friend, but far too well to provide therapy. He needed someone who didn’t know him at all.
In the film, a young man believed he was in love with two women and resolved it by chasing a third who wasn’t interested in him. When, at the end, he discusses with a friend why he did so, he believed it was because the woman he couldn’t have was the one who concentrated his mind, and gave him a goal, however improbable. It allowed him to escape a crisis he couldn’t resolve with either of the two women who wanted to be with him. The friend said what would have happened if this uninterested woman had been interested, and the film ends with a distraught look on the character’s face that wasn’t there a moment before the question. This was how Nicholas came into the chat, as Simon said the character resembled him and explained why. Simon added that when we were all sitting in the pub discussing the situation Nicholas found himself embroiled in while in Seville, he wondered if Emily had been playing games with Nicholas, as she began to understand not that he was playing them but that his psychological make-up meant she had to protect herself. It was as if, perhaps, she knew that Nicholas wasn’t straightforward, and she shouldn’t be either, or at least that she should be wary of letting him into her life emotionally. He might not have liked what he heard about Emily, but he did feel he might just about be able to understand her.
I decided to withhold from Simon what Nicholas had told me, even if he didn’t say it in confidence, about seeing Emily and Sebastian. But I did wonder how this additional information might fit in with what Simon had been saying. Nicholas presented seeing them as a terrible moment of revelation (even if he didn’t quite know what it revealed), while maybe Simon would have seen it as a situation that increased Nicholas’s desire for Emily, as he would have been in a variation of the chase: the voyeur looking on, unable to access what he desired, and thus exacerbating it. There was nothing especially revelatory in any of this from a psychological point of view. The very writer I have already mentioned, who talked about unhappiness making us moral, wrote often enough about characters who desired desire, and sometimes didn’t know what to do with it when it was satisfied. Yet many people find satisfying lives with partners, and I didn’t believe Nicholas was so damaged that he couldn’t have been one of them. I sensed that Nicholas’s problem was more one of misunderstanding than psychological complexity, and if I seem now to be countering what I said to Simon that evening, it rests on a twist in my story that might seem implausible, but statistically wasn’t so unlikely.
12
Emily became my client, coming along for those six free sessions. I didn’t know for sure who she was, but that her name was Emily and that she just about matched Simon’s description made it likely. When she said she was an archaeologist, was perhaps a little too wedded to her work, and wondered if she liked working with bones shed of their flesh over living, breathing humans, I was in no doubt this was her.
What was I to do? In a court, if you find yourself chosen for a jury in a case where you have some knowledge of it, and you are removed, but while a therapist professionally must retain strict confidentiality, there is no equivalent rule. I feigned unawareness of her predicament when, in the second week, she discussed a situation she found herself in, or created, over the last three years. She announced that this really was the reason why she chose therapy – she didn’t think there was any great underlying problem (though she might be wrong there, she admitted). But she might be trying to avoid emotional involvement because she thought it would hinder her work. Though a lot of her recent research had been based in and around Scotland, her PhD covered field work in Central America, and there were other parts of the world she would still like to explore. Would it be possible to sustain a long-term relationship in such circumstances? She didn’t know the answer to this, but suspected that she was sabotaging her relationship chances, perhaps because she felt it would impinge on the choices she would make in her profession. One that she had lived by and for over the last ten years.
As she sat across from me, I saw someone who wasn’t quite the Gothic figure Simon detailed, nor one who offered the archaeological look that I might have expected. She was dressed, I suppose, as the lecturer she was, and I discovered that she came to the session shortly after her Wednesday morning lecture. She may have lived for her job, but she didn’t dress as someone who did so, as I imagined for some silly reason that she should have come to the sessions with mud on her boots.
I asked her to tell me about this predicament she was in, and the story she told took up most of the next three sessions. She started by saying that three years ago, she had been at a conference in Seville when, on the final evening, she and several others went into a bar. It was a quiet night during the week, and she found herself chatting with the barman for about thirty minutes. He asked when she was returning to Scotland, and she said she was in the city for another day. He said he had a day off and could show her around. She had wondered when she booked the flights why she wished to stay for a day longer, and while it might have been to see various tourist sites, that didn’t quite make sense. She didn’t like tourist sites. It was, she decided, to have a brief fling with this attractive man. The next day, they did do the sites, but it was as though they were doing so as a ruse, with this man telling her about the Plaza de Espana, Parque de María Luisa, and Barrio Santa Cruz. As they wondered through the former with its tumble of periods all combined in one architectural location, with Esteban discussing the art deco of the 1920s when it was built, commingling with Renaissance aspects and neo-Baroque elements, so she wondered when he might first kiss her, and he offered a peck on her cheek as a reward for a photograph he took of her next to the north tower. By the early evening, that peck had become a smooch, and by the end of it, they were inevitably in her hotel room. She even managed to get him a free breakfast at the hotel.
During it, and with only hours before her flight, he said it was the most wonderful day and evening he had had in years. He also said that they should see it as a fling. He wanted to remain single and to focus on photography and travel. She said this was fine by her, and realised as she said it, her voice was resentful, even if she had seen it as a one-off. Yet she knew that the previous day and their night together couldn’t end so quickly, when she’d had relationships that had gone on for months predicated on far less intense feelings. They both agreed that it was a fling, and maybe they would have another in the future. In Scotland, in Spain, in some country where he might be travelling, and where she would join him. It seemed both hopelessly provisional and wonderfully tantalising, and yet they met up four times over the next eighteen months: in Edinburgh, in Istanbul, in Amsterdam, and again in Seville, where she returned for the annual conference, staying with Esteban rather than in a hotel. On that second trip to Spain, and after four nights together that were as passionate as any, he said they should no longer be lovers and try to be friends. She agreed, but again there was resentment in her voice, and in the weeks afterwards, she tried to understand why. She would miss the sex, yes – but that didn’t seem to be why she was resentful. No, it was because Esteban always set the terms, and there he had been doing it again.
Emily told me that Esteban wasn’t physically striking. He had sparse hair, a skinny physique, and was of modest height. Yet he had the ability to make himself disappear in front of your eyes and become a presence rather than a body. Whether this was during sex, out walking, or in conversation, he managed to make the conventional standards of the world unimportant next to the atmosphere he could create. Yet at the same time, she knew he was insecure about aspects of his appearance, even if he was so absorbed in looking at the world that he seemed rarely to be preoccupied with himself. Nevertheless, occasionally he talked about vain things, and had thoughts about a hair transplant, and had considered bulking up a bit.
13
About ten months after that visit to Seville, she started seeing someone she liked without thinking of him sexually, perhaps because she was still thinking so much of Esteban. She and this person would go and see films together, sometimes exhibitions and concerts, and he seemed happy to see the situation as platonic. After knowing each other for six weeks, she had an idea. The annual conference in Seville was soon, and she wondered if he fancied joining her. It was probably too late to apply for funding for the trip, but flights were cheap, and they could stay with a friend of hers in the city. Nicholas thought why not, and while she admitted to herself that she had an ulterior motive, and that she might be using Nicholas, it was in a manner that needn’t hurt him and, were he to know about it, even flatter him.
Nicholas was good and handsome company, and she did wonder if, in doing things with him, her feelings were no longer so strong for Esteban, even if there weren’t any developing between them. If she wasn’t at all in love with Nicholas, and he appeared not at all to be in love with her, then why not go to Seville and make Esteban a little jealous, show Nicholas around a town she knew quite well, and also spend a couple of days at the conference? I asked if she would have cooked up the plan if she believed Nicholas was strongly attracted to her, and she shook her head several times. What she did wasn’t fair, she admitted, but neither was it cruel. After all, one man no longer wanted to be with her, and the other showed no interest in her. Yet she did wonder if just a bit of jealousy on Esteban’s part, without harming Nicholas, might be all to the good.
As she described those few days in Seville, she reiterated some of the details I’d already heard months earlier, and it was, of course, an uncanny feeling hearing what an acquaintance had described as a mystery being offered all over again by a client as a revelation. Emily said that she knew shortly after arriving that she was no longer interested in Esteban, and that he assumed since she was coming with someone else, that she accepted the friendship. She wasn’t even disappointed that he wasn’t jealous of Nicholas, and when they chatted together while Nicholas went off to the swimming pool, Esteban said he was relieved he no longer had feelings for Emily, otherwise he might be intolerably jealous of him. It was bad enough that he envied him, as he commented on Nicholas’s hair and build. She gave him a hug after he said this, saying he was a more honest person than she was, without quite divulging that she had originally hoped to make him jealous.
During those days in Seville, Emily started to notice that she was attracted to Nicholas, and more than just for his build and his hair. If one of the things she had liked in Esteban was that he acknowledged his thinning thatch and his fragile build, what she found herself liking in Nicholas was that he seemed not to acknowledge his hair and build, and didn’t seem to care too much whether he was seen as handsome or otherwise. He appeared vulnerable without quite being insecure, and maybe it was that vulnerability which stopped him from becoming narcissistic. Anyway, during the trip, she made one or two overtures, but Nicholas, she believed, was resistant, and, when they returned, she saw that she had become resentful. She supposed it came from feeling rejected by two men in quick succession, and yet she also wondered if Nicholas might have noticed that she and Esteban had been intimate in the past, and that in failing to divulge this, he had become wary.
Yet her own insecurities got the better of her, and this, she supposed, was why she came to see me, as she found herself doing to Nicholas what she had been intending to do to Esteban: by hoping to make him as jealous of Esteban as she wished before that Esteban would have been jealous of Nicholas. She did this one day when she saw Nicholas observing them at a Christmas market, and became performatively affectionate with Esteban.
14
The events she described, as I well knew, happened a couple of months earlier, but what I didn’t know was that Nicholas had ceased contact with Emily since that day, and though she had tried to contact him several times, he only texted back with the briefest of replies, and with a claim he was too busy to meet up. She was far from idle herself, as she had to write up a paper and was preparing a new course that she would teach in the autumn term. But Nicholas preoccupied her, and she didn’t quite know whether it was because her feelings for him were strong, or her sense of herself so weak that she needed to make men jealous so that they might love her.
By the end of the six weeks of therapy, she still hadn’t met up with Nicholas and believed that she did at least think she was in a better position than when she started coming to me. She thought that she understood better the form her insecurities took, even if she didn’t believe she was likely to eradicate them any time soon. She wished she could be as confident in love as she was in her work: when colleagues talked about their nerves before giving a paper, she showed sympathy but never quite shared their disquiet over delivering one. As far as she was concerned, the work spoke for itself, and she was merely the messenger. In love, she did have to speak for herself, and therein lay the problem.
During those six weeks, I saw Nicholas twice, but on both occasions as part of the group, and I was relieved he didn’t ask me for more advice about Emily. Before, I was an intrigued acquaintance with professional competence, but aware that, however concrete the problem was for Nicholas, it was impersonal to me. Now it had become, if not personal, at least revelatory, as I now had the other side of the story, and would be forced to pretend I knew less than I did, or betray Emily’s trust for the sake of an honest friendship. Professionally, that would have been an appalling breach, and I was relieved that the dilemma turned out to be so minor: Nicholas wasn’t a close friend, and he no longer seemed to wish me as a confidant.
15
That would have been how I’d left if it weren’t for a social gathering a few months after Emily’s last session. It was late summer, even warmer than the day all of us sat around and heard Nicholas talk about his Seville trip, and Simon hosted a party in the garden at his ground-floor tenement flat. There were about thirty guests by the late afternoon. The atmosphere was a quiet hum of chatter, and distant sounds of music playing from various open windows in apartments could be heard (including that song by Flora), as well as excited talk of students just back for the new term. Simon asked people to arrive whenever they liked, saying that the afternoon would lead into the evening and perhaps even into the night. When I first arrived at 330 there were friends with young kids who left at about 6, and others came as they were leaving. Among these newcomers were Nicholas and Emily, and while Simon and his partner expressed no surprise, I wondered if this was due to advanced knowledge or the ability to look unfazed. I wasn’t sure what expression I had on my face, but I was, for a while, reluctant to say hello, and busied myself in a conversation that meant I had my back to them for a while.
It wasn’t until around 7.30, when the numbers thinned out before another batch of people came at 8, that it became difficult to avoid pleasantries. I was standing over the barbecue when they came towards it. I said hello to Nicholas, and he introduced me to Emily. I offered to cook them a couple of sausages and some haloumi when Emily said she was a vegetarian. It would have been humanly justified to tell Nicholas there was no need for introductions. But this would also have been professionally violating, as I nodded and waited to see if Emily, as was her right, wished to acknowledge that she knew me. She didn’t, and for the rest of the evening, it created a complicity within ambiguity. Who was this complicity with? Was it between Emily and me, as we knew what Nicholas didn’t know, or had she disclosed to Nicholas, after they arrived, that this person she could see on the other side of the garden with his back to them had been briefly her therapist? Or had Emily disclosed to Nicholas that she had been to university counselling at all? It would make sense that she would have told him this, since he had been reluctant to see her again, and maybe only a revelation that she had tried to deal with what she had called in the sessions her ‘perversities’ had won him back, though they of course hadn’t even been together. If she had mentioned it, Nicholas would have known well that there was a strong chance the therapist she would have seen was me. If so, the complicity was between them, and I suppose at my expense, trapped as I was inside my professional capacity from saying anything about it. Maybe she hadn’t told Nicholas about the university counselling, but he had told her about his friends, and that one of them was a therapist who also worked as a part-time counsellor for the university. She would have had no need to express surprise when seeing me at the party. But if she hadn’t disclosed this to Nicholas, the complicity was more between Emily and me, and I did wonder if at any stage, during that evening, she might come over just herself and say very quietly that she appreciated the sessions, and maybe even that it helped her form what looked like an affectionate and loving relationship with Nicholas, one that I was seeing for the first time with my own eyes.
But there was no moment like this, and I came to suspect that Nicholas didn’t know and never would, and that she would never show any sign that I had been her therapist. It left me thinking, as I was about to leave the party, that I might have also become part of those perversities Emily couldn’t resist playing. But such a claim, no matter if it was a feeling, was based on too many assumptions. As I was putting on my light jacket to leave, she came out of the bathroom and asked if I was going. I said yes. It was almost 1 in the morning. Instead of saying goodbye, she said thanks. I wondered if, at that moment, she was thanking me for the therapeutic help or just for putting a veggie option on the barbecue. It was acknowledged as the latter, as Nicholas came into the hall and she said to him that she was just thanking me for the haloumi. I said to the pair of them, it was the least I could do, well aware that I may have done a lot more.
Walking back to my flat, with the night so balmy I had no need of even the lightest of jackets, I remembered aspects of the evening and that Nicholas said he was applying for a PhD. I suspected we would need all the environmental help we could get if nights like the present one were going to become common, in even so mild a climate as Scotland’s. I also thought of a comment Emily made about her work while I was flipping the haloumi. It was a variation she made about bones and flesh to me, and I wondered if she made it knowing I would recall that earlier remark. She was pleased she worked with long-dead bones and not living minds, that my work sounded like a mind-field, she said, pleased at her play on words. I replied that it can be indeed, and perhaps, if I had my time again, I would have preferred to dig up the dead from centuries earlier, rather than digging around the thoughts of the living. In the calm, still night, as I walked through the Meadows, I heard in the middle distance a strum of a guitar. As I got closer, I caught the smell of weed, and the sound of hushed voices interrupted by a siren along the main road. Living flesh.
© Tony McKibbin