Therapy

by David Lodge

  Maureen observed all this, of course. The dumb pain I saw in her eyes gave me an occasional pang of remorse, but didn’t alter my cruel design, to bring pressure on her virtue by arousing her jealousy. Perhaps subconsciously I wanted our relationship to end. I was trying to crush something in myself as well as in her. I called it childishness, stupidity, naivety, in my own mind, but I might have called it innocence. The world of the parish youth club, which had seemed so enchanting when Maureen first introduced me to it, now seemed … well, parochial, especially in comparison with the world I encountered at work. From office gossip about affairs between actors and actresses, casting-couches and theatrical parties, I picked up a lurid and exciting notion of adult sexual behaviour against which Maureen’s convent-girl scruples about letting me fondle her tits (as they were coarsely referred to in the office) seemed simply absurd. I ached to lose my virginity, and it obviously wasn’t going to be with Maureen, unless and until I married her, a possibility as remote as flying to the moon. In any case, I had observed what married life on a low income was like in my own home, and it didn’t appeal to me. I aspired to a freer, more expansive lifestyle, though I had no idea what form it might take.

  The crisis came on the night of the last performance of the Nativity play before Christmas. It was a full house. The show had enjoyed great word-of-mouth in the parish, and there had even been a review, short but favourable, in the local newspaper. The review was unsigned and I would have suspected Bede Harrington of having written it himself if the writer hadn’t been particularly complimentary about my own performance. I think the backstage struggle of wills between myself and Maureen actually imparted a special intensity to our performances. My Herod was more muted than in the early days of rehearsals, but more authentically cruel. I felt a thrilling frisson, kind of collective shudder, run through the audience as I gave orders for the Massacre of the Innocents. And there was a tragic quality in Maureen’s Virgin Mary, even in the Annunciation scene – “as if,” said the anonymous reviewer, “she saw prophetically the Seven Swords of Sorrow that would pierce her heart in the years to come.” (Come to think of it, perhaps Father Jerome wrote that review.)

  We didn’t have a cast party, exactly, at the end of the three-night ran, but there was a sort of celebration with cocoa and chocolate biscuits and crisps organized by Peter Marello’s girlfriend Anne, our stage manager, when we had taken off our costumes and washed off our make-up and dismantled the set and stored it away for the final performance at Epiphany. Father Jerome blessed and congratulated us and departed. We were exhausted, but jubilant, and reluctant to break up the collective euphoria by going home. Even Maureen was happy. Her parents and her brothers and sisters had come back to see the show a second time, and she had heard her father shouting “Bravo!” from the back of the hall when we took our curtain call. I had discouraged my own parents from coming, but my Mum had attended the first night and pronounced it “very nice though a bit loud” (she meant the music, especially the “Ride of the Valkyries” which accompanied the Flight into Egypt) and my brother, who had accompanied her, looked at me the next morning almost with respect. Bede Harrington, his head quite turned by success, was full of grandiose plans to write a Passion Play for the following Easter. It was to be in blank verse, I seem to remember, with speaking parts for the various instruments of the Crucifixion – the Cross, the Nails, the Crown of Thorns, etc. In magnanimous mood, he offered me the part of Scourge without the formality of an audition. I said I would think about it.

  The conversation turned to our various plans for Christmas, and I chose this moment to announce that my boss had given me four complimentary tickets for his production of The Babes in the Wood at the Prince of Wales on Boxing Day. These were really intended for me to take my family, but some imp put it into my head to impress the company with a casually generous gesture, and to put Maureen to the test at the same time. I asked Peter and Anne if they would like to go with Maureen and me. They accepted readily, but Maureen, as I had anticipated, said that her parents wouldn’t let her. “What, not even at Christmas?” I said. She looked at me, pleading with her eyes not to be publicly humiliated. “You know what they’re like,” she said. “Pity,” I said, aware that Josie was listening intently. “Anyone else interested?” “Ooh, I’ll go, I love pantos,” Josie said promptly. She added, “You don’t mind, do you, Maureen?” “No, I don’t mind,” Maureen whispered. Her expression was stricken. I might as well have taken the dagger I wore on my belt as Herod, and plunged it into her heart.

  There was an awkward pause for a moment, which I covered by recalling a near-disaster with a sagging backcloth in the crib scene of our play, and we were soon engaged in a noisy and hilarious recapitulation of the entire performance. Maureen didn’t contribute, and when I looked round for her, she had disappeared. She had left without saying goodnight to anyone. I walked home alone, moodily kicking an empty tobacco tin ahead of me. I did not feel very pleased with myself, but I managed somehow to blame Maureen for “spoiling Christmas”. I didn’t join her at Midnight Mass as I had intended. Christmas Day at home passed in the usual claustrophobic stupor. I went through with the Boxing Day excursion to the pantomime, pretending to my parents that I only had a single ticket, and meeting Josie, Peter and Anne at Charing Cross station. Josie was dressed like a tart and had drenched herself in cheap scent. She daringly asked for gin and orange at the interval, nearly bankrupting me in the process, and laughed raucously at all the blue jokes in the show, much to the embarrassment of Peter and Anne. Afterwards I saw Josie home to her family’s council flat, and embraced her in a dark space under the communal stairs to which she led me without preliminaries. She thrust her tongue halfway down my throat and clamped one of my hands firmly onto one of her breasts, which was encased in a wired, sharply pointed brassiere. I had little doubt that she would have allowed me to go further, but had no inclination to do so. Her perfume did not entirely mask the smell of stale perspiration from her armpits, and I was already tired of her vacuous chatter and strident laugh.

  The next day I received a letter from Maureen, posted on Christmas Eve, saying she thought it would be best if we didn’t see each other for a while, apart from the last performance of the play. It was written in her round, girlish hand on the usual mauve notepaper smelling of lavender, but the is were all dotted normally, not with the little bubbly circles. I didn’t reply to the letter, but I sent one to Bede Harrington saying I couldn’t make the last performance of the play, and recommending that he ask Peter Marello to double as Herod. I never went to the youth club again, and I dropped out of the football team. I missed the exercise, and it was probably from that time that my waistline began to expand, especially as I was acquiring a taste for beer. I became friendly with a young man called Nigel who worked in the box-office of the theatre over which our office was located, and he introduced me to a number of Soho pubs. We spent a lot of time together, and it was months before I realised that he was homosexually inclined. The girls in the office assumed that I must be too, so I made little headway with them. I didn’t lose my virginity, in fact, until I was in the Army, doing National Service, and that was a quick and sordid business with a tipsy WRAC, up against the wall of a lorry park.

  I saw Maureen occasionally in the months that followed the production of the Nativity play, in the street, or getting on and off a bus, but I didn’t speak to her. If she saw me, she didn’t show it. She looked increasingly girlish and unsophisticated to my eyes, in her eternal navy-blue raincoat and her unchanging hairstyle. Once, just after I received my National Service papers, we came face to face in a chemist’s shop – I was going in as she was going out. We exchanged a few awkward words. I asked her about school. She said she was thinking of going in for nursing. She asked me about work. I told her I had just been called up, and that I hoped to be sent abroad and to see a bit of life.

  In the event I was trained as a clerk and posted to a part of North Germany where beetroot fields stretched to the
horizon and it was so cold in winter that I cried once on guard duty and the tears froze on my cheeks. The only escape I found from terminal boredom was through acting in and writing scripts for revues, pantomimes, drag shows and other home-made entertainments on the base. When I got back to civvy street I was determined to make my career in some branch of show business. I got a place in one of the less prestigious London drama schools, with a small scholarship which I supplemented by working in a pub at nights. I didn’t see Maureen around Hatchford when I went back to visit Mum and Dad. I ran into Peter Marello once and he told me that she had left home to train as a nurse. That was about thirty-five years ago. I haven’t seen or heard of her since.

  Sunday 6th June. It took me a whole week to write that, doing practically nothing else. I printed off the last few pages at ten o’clock last night, and went out to stretch my legs and buy the Sunday papers. Men were unloading them from a van onto the pavement outside Leicester Square tube station, like fishermen selling their catch on the quayside, ripping open the bales of different sections – news, sport, business, arts – and hastily assembling the papers on the spot as the punters thrust out their money. It always gives me a kick to buy tomorrow’s papers today, the illusion of getting a peep at the future. In fact, what I’ve been doing is catching up on the news of the past week. Nothing much has changed in the big wide world. Eleven people were killed when the Bosnian Serbs lobbed mortar shells into a football stadium in Sarajevo. Twenty-five UN soldiers were killed in an ambush by General Aidid’s troops in Somalia. John Major has the lowest popularity rating of any British Prime Minister since polling began. I’m beginning to feel almost sorry for him. I wonder whether it isn’t a cunning Tory plot to capture the low self-esteem vote.

  I didn’t buy any papers last week because I didn’t want to be distracted from the task in hand. I hardly listened to the radio or watched television, either. I made an exception of the England – Norway match last Wednesday, and regretted it. What humiliation. Beaten 2–0 by a bunch of part-timers, and probably knocked out of the World Cup in consequence. They should declare a day of national mourning and send Graham Taylor to the salt mines. (He’d probably organize his chain-gang into a 3–5–2 formation, and have them all banging into each other like the England team.) It spoiled my concentration on the memoir for at least half a day, that result.

  I don’t think I’ve ever done anything quite like it before. Perhaps I’m turning into a book writer. There’s no “you” in it, I notice. Instead of telling the story as I might to a friend or somebody in a pub, my usual way, I was trying to recover the truth of the original experience for myself, struggling to find the words that would do maximum justice to it. I revised it a lot. I’m used to that, of course – scriptwriting is mostly rewriting – but in response to the input of other people. This time I was the only reader, the only critic, and I revised as I went along. And I did something I haven’t done since I bought my first electric typewriter – wrote the first drafts of each section in longhand. Somehow it seems more natural to try and recover the past with a pen in your hand than with your fingers poised over a keyboard. The pen is like a tool, a cutting or digging tool, slicing down through the roots, probing the rockbed of memory. Of course I used a bit of licence in the dialogue. It all happened forty years ago and I didn’t take any notes. But I’m pretty sure that I’ve been true to the emotions, and that’s the important thing. I can’t leave the piece alone, though: I keep picking up the printed-out sheets, re-reading them, tinkering and revising, when what I should be doing is tidying up the flat.

  The kitchen looks like a tip, heaped with soiled plates and empty takeaway food containers, there’s a pile of unopened mail on the coffee table, and the answerphone has stopped receiving messages because the tape is full. Grahame was quite disgusted by the state of the place when he came in to watch the England match. He has higher standards of housekeeping than me – sometimes he borrows my dustpan and brush to sweep his little square of marbled floor in the porch. I fear his days of occupation may be numbered, though. The two American academics in number 4 are over for the summer vacation, and they entertain a lot. Understandably they object to having a resident bum in the entryway over whom their arriving and departing guests must step. They told me in the lift yesterday that they were going to complain to the police. I tried to persuade them that Grahame was no ordinary bum, but without making much impression. He doesn’t help his cause by referring to them contemptuously as “them yank poofters”.

  What reading and re-reading the memoir leaves me with is an overwhelming sense of loss. Not just the loss of Maureen’s love, but the loss of innocence – hers and my own. In the past, whenever I thought of her – and it wasn’t very often – it was with a kind of fond, wry, inner smile: nice kid, first girlfriend, how naive we both were, water under the bridge, that sort of thing. Going back over the history of our relationship in detail, I realized for the first time what an appalling thing I had done all those years ago. I broke a young girl’s heart, callously, selfishly, wantonly.

  I’m well aware, of course, that I wouldn’t feel this way about it if I hadn’t recently discovered Kierkegaard. It’s really a very Kierkegaardian story. It has resemblances to “The Seducer’s Diary”, and resemblances to K’s own relationship with Regine. Maureen – Regine: the names almost rhyme.

  Regine put up more of a fight than Maureen, though. When K sent back her ring, she rushed straight round to his lodgings, and, finding him not at home, left a note begging him not to desert her, “in the name of Christ and by the memory of your deceased father.” That was an inspired touch, the deceased father. Søren was convinced that, like so many of his siblings, he would die before his father – there seemed to be a curse on the family that way. So when the old man popped off first Søren thought he had in some mystical sense died for him. He dated his religious conversion from that time. So Regine’s note really shook him. But he went on nevertheless pretending to be cold and cynical, breaking the girl’s heart, perversely convinced that he “could be happier in unhappiness without her than with her.” I just looked up his record of their last interview:

  I tried to talk her round. She asked me, Will you never marry? I replied, Well, in about ten years, when I have sowed my wild oats, I must have a pretty young miss to rejuvenate me. – A necessary cruelty. She said, Forgive me for what I have done to you. I replied, It is rather I that should pray for your forgiveness. She said, Kiss me. That I did, but without passion. Merciful God!

  That “Kiss me” was Regine’s last throw. When it didn’t work, she gave up.

  Reading that, I recalled again Maureen lifting her unhappy face to me, blue under the streetlamp’s bleak light, and saying, “You can kiss me once,” and my walking away. Did I ever embrace her after that, or did I continue to spurn the offer of a single chaste goodnight kiss? I didn’t keep her last letter, and I can’t remember what she said exactly, but the words were pretty banal, I’m sure. They always were. It wasn’t anything she said, it was her presence that I remember: the swing of her hair, the shine in her eyes, the way she wrinkled up her nose when she smiled … I wish I had a photograph of her to hand. I used to carry a picture of her around in my wallet, a black-and-white holiday snap taken in Ireland when she was fifteen, leaning against a drystone wall, smiling and squinting into the sun, the breeze plastering her cotton skirt to her legs. The photo got creased and dog-eared from constant handling, and after we split up I threw it away. I remember how easily it tore in my fingers, the paper having lost all its gloss and spring, and seeing the scattered fragments of her image at the bottom of the wastepaper basket. The only other photographs I have of her are in a shoebox somewhere in the loft at home in Hollywell, along with other juvenile souvenirs. There aren’t very many of them, because neither of us owned a camera in those days. There are a few snaps taken by other members of the youth club on rambles, and a group photo of the cast of the Nativity play. If I could be sure of picking a time when Sally is ou
t, I’ve a good mind to drive up to Hollywell tomorrow and have a look for them.

  6.30 p.m. Shortly after I had typed that last sentence, and switched off the computer, and as I was rolling up my sleeves preparatory to starting on the washing-up, I had an idea: instead of searching my attic for photographs of Maureen, why not try to find Maureen herself? The more I think about it, and I’ve thought of little else all afternoon, the more I’m taken with it. It’s slightly scary, because I’ve no idea how she will react if I manage to trace her, but that’s what makes it exciting. I’ve no idea where she is, or what’s happened to her since we last met in the chemist’s shop in Hatchford. She could be living abroad, for all I know. Well, that’s no problem, I’d travel to New Zealand if necessary. She could be dead. I don’t think I could bear that, but I have to admit it’s possible. Cancer. A road accident. Any number of things. Somehow, though, I’m sure she’s still alive. Married, probably. Well, certainly, a girl like Maureen, how could she not be married? She married a doctor, I expect, like most good-looking nurses, and stayed married to him, being a devout Catholic. Unless she stopped believing, of course. It does happen. Or she might be widowed.