Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers

by Marika Cobbold

  He looked mournfully at her abandoned fish. It was getting cold and he had really made an effort, trying out a new recipe involving a freshly made warm tomato relish and some deep-fried parsley.

  ‘So you have nothing to say?’ Melanie picked up a piece of buttered leek with her fingers and put it into her mouth.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what we’ve been talking about. About how you’re never home. I mean do you realise that you’ve been working for the past two weekends, and the weekend before that you were with Susannah?’

  ‘We went to the cinema last Saturday.’

  ‘That was three weeks ago and the film was about furry creatures living in a magic wood.’

  ‘Susannah is six; what would you have taken her to? The Lives of Others?’

  ‘That was on ages ago.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ Melanie asked him again.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, but …’ The sight of Melanie picking at the leeks and leaving the fish uneaten irritated him so that instead of apologising, which had been his plan, he said, ‘… Well, someone has to pay the mortgage.’

  Melanie opened her bright eyes wide and shook her head.

  ‘You’re unbelievable, do you know that? Unbelievable: rubbing my nose in the fact that you’re the main earner. I mean do you think I enjoy being financially beholden to you? Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, finishing his fish and speaking in a low, reasonable voice. ‘But I bet it beats working for a living.’

  He was put on notice.

  ‘If you want us to have any chance of surviving as a couple then there’d better be some changes, fast.’

  As the restless night turned into a wakeful dawn he decided he was not ready to give up on his relationship with Melanie. He had been so sure when they had first got together that this time it would work out and that Melanie would be the woman with whom he would build the next phase of his life. He had imagined them having children, brothers and sisters for Susannah. He had loved her energy and resolve, her willingness to try new things, her way of confronting problems head on, banner flying. This time, he had told himself, he would only have himself to blame if it did not work out.

  So was it him? Was Melanie right? Not just a little bit right about little things but was she generally right about him and his shortcomings? Maybe the truth was that if he could not make even this relationship work then he might as well resign himself to being on his own.

  He got up, determined to stick with his therapy and to work on what Rupert Daly termed his ‘relationship skills’. There, he thought, as he shampooed his hair under the shower, he had even managed to use that phrase with only the barest hint of irony. He rinsed his hair, finished showering, dressed and walked off whistling towards the tube.

  Then a letter arrived from Rupert Daly saying that he had received an offer to work at a world-renowned clinic in Houston, and that he had decided to accept. It was all rather sudden, he acknowledged, ‘But I’m pleased to recommend my successor, Dr Angie Bliss, bla bla bla …’

  ‘That seems to be it then,’ John told Melanie.

  ‘What do you mean that seems to be it? We’ve been through all this. And if this other person is as good as Rupert says she is then there’s no reason not to continue with the sessions.’ She was on her way to the kitchen window box with the watering can and she paused briefly to give him a smile and to push his hair back from his forehead. ‘Don’t look so worried. I really feel we’re getting somewhere at last.’

  John left his room in Chambers to walk the few blocks to his therapist’s offices. He strode along the Strand, his gaze raised, as if he were scanning some faraway horizon, not just a London street in the afternoon rush hour. Quite a few women and a couple of men glanced as they passed him on the pavement. John did not notice: as usual he was deep in thought. The sessions with Rupert Daly had increased his ability to control his OCD but there were still times, usually when he was allowing himself to relax, read something not work-related, watch some TV, catch up on the newspapers, that he would be sucked down the drain of obsessive thoughts. When he surfaced, exhausted and frustrated, he would find that a whole precious hour had passed whilst he was weighing up the likelihood of having caused an epidemic of blindness in children by failing to remove the large dog turd deposited outside his gate.

  Right at this moment, however, he was deep in what he termed ‘legitimate thought’, going over the meeting he had just had with a new client. He tried to do at least one case a year for the Bar pro bono unit, although it was getting increasingly difficult to find the time; his recent and public successes had meant that more instructions for ever bigger cases were coming in than he could possibly deal with and the clerks were not best pleased when he turned some down in favour of the unpaid work. ‘You’ve done your bit,’ they kept telling him. ‘More than most, in fact.’

  And John would mutter something about how you could never do enough for those in need. But it was all about his own private trade-off: doing unpaid work bought him immunity from OCD. In his mind it went something like this: ten hours spent working for free for someone unable to afford to pay his fees allowed him to ignore the dog-turd-blinded-children, the little-old-ladies-run-over-by-his-big-car-without-him-noticing, the danger-to-Susannah-from-his-reliance-on-the-wireless-network, and the rest of the pack of feral thoughts that invaded his mind; allowed him to shove them to the back of his brain, where they belonged – for a while at least. But try explaining that to your clerks.

  The latest case he was doing pro bono involved a father, Derek O’Connor, whose ex-wife maintained that the couple’s three children, all girls, no longer wished to visit their father and his new girlfriend. The father was convinced that his ex-wife was poisoning the children’s minds and was appealing a judgment awarding his former wife sole custody.

  Mr O’Connor had left his wife for another woman with whom he had now set up home. Mrs O’Connor was seeking to block her husband’s access to their three daughters unless he agreed not to bring them into contact with his girlfriend, ever, claiming that the girls returned from visits to their father’s home in ‘a hysterical state’ pleading with their mother not to make them return. Mr O’Connor argued that the reason the girls were hysterical was because their mother had painted such a negative picture of his girlfriend, and lately himself. ‘So they would be, wouldn’t they?’

  Mrs O’Connor was a pretty woman, slim with a neat haircut and pleasantly dressed in black trousers and a dark-pink jacket, but the moment the name of her ex-husband’s girlfriend was brought into the conversation her eyes turned into black bullets and her chin jutted, causing two deep lines to form on either side of her mouth.

  ‘I’m not having that woman, that tart, contaminating my children.’

  John looked away. He never quite got used to the visceral quality of the anger of someone whose illusions had been shattered. Abigail O’Connor was crying now, hoarse shuddering sobs, and her husband, his client, barely looked at her, turning instead to the file in front of him, making some notes and passing them to John. That was another thing he found hard to get used to: the way you could end up so far removed from the person you had once loved, the person you had promised your entire life to, the person in whose arms you went to sleep at night and wished to see first in the morning, that their deep distress blended into the white noise of everyday life.

  Mrs O’Connor had stopped crying and blew her nose.

  ‘The man I knew would not have been capable of doing such a thing.’

  They all said it: the person to whom I gave my heart and my trust and who alone knew each and every soft part of my soul could not have done this to me. It was that woman/man/trollop/bastard.

  This time, however, John’s sympathy was tempered by the particulars of the case. He had to stop himself pointing out that her husband’s betrayal should not be a complete surprise, seeing that he had begun his relationsh
ip with her when he was still married to the first Mrs O’Connor.

  ‘And that bitch, with no conscience, no morals …’ She turned directly to John, ‘You’re saying I should put my little girls in the care of someone like that?’

  It was Mr O’Connor who replied.

  ‘I won’t have you talk about Roxy like that.’

  This was not the wisest thing he could have said, John thought. To defend your new love against your old betrayed and wounded one was not a good idea, not if you wanted to make peace.

  ‘Ah, poor, defenceless little Roxy. What kind of name is that anyway? Roxy. Then again I suppose it was just right for the lap-dancing club where you found her.’

  ‘She is not a lap-dancer, as you well know.’ He turned to John. ‘Roxy is a dance teacher. She teaches children. She’s very experienced with young people, actually.’

  ‘Very experienced, full stop,’ Mrs O’Connor snarled. ‘Maybe I should let the parents of those children know exactly what kind of –’

  ‘You see?’ Her ex-husband had slammed his fist down on the table. ‘This is the kind of rubbish she feeds our daughters.’

  ‘The truth hurts. She is a tart and a home-wrecker and if you think you and your fancy lawyer are going to be able to silence me –’

  Her own counsel put a steadying hand on her arm.

  ‘No one’s trying to silence you, Abigail.’

  John said, ‘Love, or should that be infatuation, does have a way of making us forget our principles.’

  Mrs O’Connor looked at him as if he had just dropped a rat at her feet.

  ‘I can see what you’re thinking. I suppose you’ve heard all about it from him.’ She turned her gaze on her husband; mixed with the dislike was something soft. ‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes still fixed on him, ‘he was married when we met. And now he’s trying to convince himself and everyone else that what this woman is doing is no different from what I did back then. But it was, it was …’ She started sobbing again. ‘It was completely different. For a start, everyone knew their relationship was on the rocks. This, us, was totally different. We were happy until she came along. We were happy until she took it all away.’

  John sighed. Of course it’s different when the pain’s your own.

  The new therapist, Angie Bliss, was running late. Rupert never ran late. As John waited, leafing through the Standard, he was already regretting having come. Apart from the fact that he could ill afford the time, he was annoyed at having to see someone new. It had taken him months to get on top of the sessions with Rupert.

  Melanie, when he mentioned this, had turned on him, exasperated.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be on top of it. That’s the point: for once you’re supposed not to be in control. God, you’re such a freak!

  So he waited.

  Finally the door to the consulting room opened and a man about John’s own age appeared. His face bore a glazed look making John wonder if he was on some kind of medication. He had little sympathy with the mentally afflicted. That, at least, was normal, he thought, not nice but normal; you most dislike the flaw in others that you recognise in yourself.

  The new therapist appeared. Her voice as she called his name was melodious with a slight, untraceable accent. He got to his feet, looking pointedly at his watch, but the therapist did not seem to notice.

  Angie Bliss wore glasses, heavy-framed and rectangular, which made John think of Clark Kent. Her fair hair was scraped back in a ponytail and she wore no make-up.

  He followed her into the room.

  ‘You’ve redecorated?’

  Rupert’s warm sunshine-yellow had been substituted for a bright Aegean-blue, the chairs were reupholstered in jade-green and a vase of red roses was placed on the desk next to a large bowl of fragrant apples.

  The therapist looked around her with faint surprise.

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Someone has,’ John said. The woman was a complete space cadet.

  Angie Bliss had seated herself on the desk chair rather than the armchair Rupert Daly had favoured. She glanced at some papers in front of her then swivelled round to face him.

  ‘Do you not think it’s time you stopped flitting from relationship to relationship?’

  John had been sitting back, practising his courtroom faces, currently exaggerated attentiveness with one eyebrow raised. He had been about to change to ill-concealed boredom with stifled yawn but instead he sat forward in the chair, his jaw dropping in surprise.

  The therapist continued.

  ‘You’re forty-three years old. Aren’t you risking becoming an object of ridicule, as well as setting a very poor example for your children?’

  John, still taken aback by the turn the session was taking, could only retort with a, ‘Child. One. Daughter,’ while casting a meaningful glance at the open folder in front of her, which he assumed contained his notes and therefore all the relevant information as to family status, number of children etc. But he was wasting meaningful glances.

  ‘Whatever,’ she said, inspecting her shell-pink nails. What she saw seemed to please her. She brought her attention back to John. Crossing one sleek bare leg over the other, she asked, ‘Is it sexual, your problem?’

  He raised an eyebrow to feign incredulity but this had no effect other than to make the therapist ask her question again.

  This time he replied with a simple, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, that is good.’ She seemed relieved. ‘So what is it, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think that I have such a lot of problems, actually, other than the OCD, which, as I’m sure my notes say, could be worked on further and my handling of it improved. And I believe Melanie and I are getting back on track.’

  ‘It won’t last.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said it won’t last. You’ll be at each other’s throats again before you can say break-up. She’ll be weeping or threatening or both. You’ll be alternately defensive and apologetic then cold and sarcastic. It’s going to end so why not save time and further misery by getting on with it?’

  ‘Did Rupert tell you all of that?’

  ‘Rupert? Oh Rupert. No. Yes.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware I had put things in that way.’

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  ‘Anyway,’ John said, ‘the sessions with Rupert had moved on – I’m sure that’s in my notes too. We were dealing mainly with my OCD.’ He paused.

  ‘And you think your OCE –’

  ‘D. It’s OCD. I presume you are familiar with the condition?’

  Angie Bliss gave a little laugh, high and clear.

  ‘Of course I am. But I would like to hear how you experience it. So why do you think your DCT is affecting your ability to maintain a decent long-term relationship?’

  ‘OCD. You are trained in that area, are you not?’

  ‘Of course I am. Would you like to see my diplomas?’

  On receiving the letter from Rupert Daly, John had spoken briefly to him and Rupert had told him, ‘Don’t be fooled by first impressions. She might come across as a bit ditzy but trust me: her qualifications are amongst the most impressive I’ve ever seen.’

  John was no stranger to the unorthodoxy in his own work. It could be that Angie Bliss’s apparent flakiness was actually part of a deliberate strategy. He decided to relax and go with her for the rest of the session.

  The therapist was engrossed in reading what he assumed were his notes. It was all very well to trust her but surely she should have been better prepared? To him, not to be prepared was the worst kind of professional solecism.

  ‘You are familiar with OCD?’ he asked again.

  Angie Bliss swivelled back round.

  ‘Of course I am familiar with it. After all, is it not elementary in today’s thinking on these matters?’

  He was about to ask, ‘Which matters, exactly?’ but he could hear Melanie’s voice in his head. ‘For God’s sake, you’re not in court now.’

  Angie Bliss conti
nued.

  ‘Obsessive-compulsive disorder’ – There followed the briefest of pauses, as, looking pleased with herself, she cocked her head to one side as if she were listening for something, applause, perhaps? – ‘and the way it affects your relationships is, however, something that I need to approach in my own way.’ She relaxed back in the chair, kicking off her gold ballerina shoes.

  ‘As I told Rupert, I don’t involve my partner in my problems. If I have difficulties maintaining relationships it’s not because of the OCD.’

  The therapist was smiling at him in the manner of a fond mother watching her child playing make-believe and, disconcerted, he continued, ‘I might be a little more tense because of it and that perhaps has a kick-back effect on my behaviour and I suppose one of the ways I deal with it is to keep busy, to work hard and not waste time. But all those things fall within the boundaries of normal …’

  ‘I can’t believe you have any difficulties picking up women.’

  ‘What? No. Not as a rule.’

  ‘So it’s keeping them that’s the problem?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think it is, not in that way. As it happens I tend to be the one who leaves.’

  The therapist clapped her slender pale hands together.

  ‘Well, aren’t we a big clever boy.’

  At this point he laughed, he couldn’t help it. He decided that Angie Bliss was really rather attractive although not his type; he preferred the more athletic, gamine look to the therapist’s voluptuous, Pre-Raphaelite one. Again, he heard Melanie taking him to task, for being sexist, lookist and probably patronising.

  ‘One thing leads to another and all roads, in the end, lead to the same place,’ the therapist said. ‘Now, wouldn’t you like to find your soul-mate and settle down?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘Tell me what you are looking for.’

  John leant back in his chair, a small smile softening his square jaw.

  ‘Someone who is a true partner, someone who understands what I’m trying to do and who would support me in reaching my goals. Someone who had her own goals and dreams and who would appreciate my support in that same way. Someone to share it all with, the rewards and the struggles.’ He stopped, surprised at how much he had ended up saying.