John

JOHN HAD BEGUN THERAPY at the behest of his girlfriend, Melanie Ingram, who had informed him, as they were cooking supper one evening, that he was ‘an emotionally stunted workaholic commitment-phobe’.

‘Is that all?’ he had replied, causing Melanie to throw a loaf of sliced bread at him.

As he picked the slices of organic wholemeal off his shoulders John realised that he was no longer in love. Yet he was tired of running. And maybe he asked too much of relationships? Maybe this, what he had with Melanie, was as good as it got? She wasn’t always angry, and when she wasn’t she was great fun. She was certainly pretty with her pert jogging body, clear blue eyes that looked confidently straight at you, her glossy blonde bob and her wide smile. She was bright too, and energetic. It was the energy that had first attracted him to her. John did not discount the possibility that she was right to be angry with him, yet part of him felt hard done by. Take work, for example; when they first met he had told her that he was aware that one of the problems he had when it came to maintaining a relationship was that between his work and seeing his daughter there was not a lot of time left for anything or anyone else.

Melanie had looked him in the eyes with that straight, earnest gaze of hers and said, ‘I couldn’t be with a man who wasn’t absorbed by his work. It’s a sign of passion, isn’t it?’ Her voice had gone down a note as she said the word ‘passion’ but her gaze had remained fixed on his. ‘I have friends who never stop complaining about their husbands or boyfriends coming home late or working weekends or whatever. I mean have they no lives of their own? I’m probably too independent but honestly I couldn’t cope with a guy who hung around all the time.’ As for him spending time with Susannah, Melanie had told him she thought there was nothing sexier than a man who was a good father.

John had spoken in earnest. He had assumed that Melanie had been equally candid. Yet these days when she sulked because he never seemed to get home from Chambers before nine or because he couldn’t join her to visit friends at the weekend because he was working or because Susannah was coming to stay and he reminded her of those early-day conversations she would stare at him, seemingly exasperated at his denseness.

‘For God’s sake, John, can’t you see that things were different then?’

When he told her that he did not feel that to be in any way a satisfactory reply, she rolled her eyes and said, ‘John, at least try to be human: we’re not in court now and I’m not some witness for you to cross-examine.’ Then she suggested therapy.

John wanted very much to be human. The suggestion that he was somehow not had been made a few too many times by his mother, his ex-wife, opponents in court and now Melanie for him not to consider that they might have a point. Maybe therapy would help. Maybe it would give him the missing part, the part that would stop women looking at him, at first with adoration and then with increasing frustration, before telling him he was not quite human.

Melanie thought he should see Rupert Daly. Rupert, she said, had worked with several of her friends, and everyone spoke highly of him. John had told her he would prefer to do some research and to find someone himself, but he had ended up submerged in a case so seeing Rupert Daly had seemed the simplest way forward. At the first session John had explained that what really concerned him when it came to relationships was that the women he had loved, and who had professed to love him, all seemed to end up disappointed.

‘So you have been left many times?’

‘No. They don’t leave, they stay and complain.’

‘I sense some anger here.’

‘Anger? No, I don’t think I’m angry.’

Rupert Daly did not pursue the point; instead, while scribbling on his notes, he said, ‘So you leave them?’

‘Sometimes parting is a mutual decision.’

‘But often it is you who instigates the parting?’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose so.’

‘In fact you have a habit of running away from conflict.’

John gave a dry laugh.

‘Hardly, I’m a barrister.’

Rupert Daly looked up from his writing.

‘I’m not talking about your work but about your private life. You find it hard to handle disappointment and anger at a personal level so instead you leave.’

‘I terminate …’ He paused, realising how clinical, inhuman you might say, that word sounded in the context. He tried again.

‘I end a relationship if I feel that the benefits are outweighed by the problems.’ That did not sound much better. ‘I don’t think I’m one of these men who change once I’m secure in a relationship. I don’t take people for granted or stop making an effort. I even shower at the weekends.’ He smiled and got a small smile back. ‘I am aware of my faults. I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not. I explain that my work often does come first and that I’m single-minded. I tell them that when I’m working up to a big case I shut off from everything else; I have to, in order to do my job properly. I admit that I’m useless at the romantic stuff … gosh, the list is endless … and they appear to listen, only to feel angry and let down when what I always told them turns out to be so.’

‘And how does that make you feel?’

‘Puzzled.’

‘I mean emotionally.’

John searched for clues in the therapist’s face but finding none he tried again.

‘Confused?’

Following this somewhat unpromising start the therapy sessions had begun to have a use beyond keeping Melanie happy. Halfway through their second meeting John had made a jokey reference to being obsessive.

Rupert Daly had not laughed.

Instead he had looked John deep in his eyes and said, ‘I was wondering when we would come to that.’

‘I’m not sure I follow …’

‘I was wondering when we would come to the real reason you’re here. Do you feel that your obsessive-compulsive disorder is the main obstacle to your attempts at achieving a lasting loving partnership?’

‘I’m familiar with the condition to which you’re referring,’ John said sitting back, an easy smile on his lips, though his fingers gripped the arms of his chair. ‘Howard Hughes, Dr Johnson … however, I really don’t think I can be accused of suffering from a full-blown mental illness.’

‘And I would never accuse anyone of suffering from any kind of illness.’

‘All right, I get your point. Still, as I mentioned last time, none of the women I’ve been with have had a problem expressing their concerns and being obsessive has only come up as a point of conflict in relation to my work. I of course would always make the point that I was merely being thorough.’

‘That’s a good little speech.’

‘I thought so.’

‘But actually I’m not interested in whether or not OCD is a problem for other people but whether it is a problem for you.’

John had been about to say that he still did not accept that he suffered from OCD when he found himself saying instead, slowly as if each word had to be fetched from a place far away, ‘Yes, it is. It’s a terrible problem.’

John did not find it easy to fit in the regular appointments but he managed, most of the time. In between he tried to apply the techniques shown to him by the therapist.

‘Don’t engage in a dialogue with your obsessions. Don’t carry out the rituals. Resist, resist, resist. You will feel uncomfortable, panicked even, but the more you don’t give in the fainter the discomfort. Think of it as going cold turkey. OCD is a form of addictive behaviour and should be treated as such. Now, if you were to find the time to join my six-week intensive programme ... all right, I can see you can’t, but if you were to, you would find recovering alcoholics, sex addicts, drug addicts, food addicts, as well as people with OCD. Now I know this is a somewhat controversial take on the subject, but I have achieved some truly excellent results.’

But progress was slow and John was growing impatient. He was pan-frying some sea bass in the kitchen of his two-up two-down in Primrose Hill, a house that seemed to have received all the makeovers his girlfriends would have loved to give him. (Right now the interior of the house was a tranquil space of dark wood and soft creams and whites, or, as his ex-wife called it, a triumph of beige over imagination.)

As he tipped the fillets on to the pre-heated plates he said, ‘I don’t know, darling. I really feel as if I’ve gone as far as I can with the therapy.’ As Melanie’s eyes narrowed and her mouth moved to speak, he added quickly, ‘Of course it’s taught me a lot, but that’s just it.’ He brightened. ‘I feel I’ve got the … the coping mechanisms now to manage myself.’ Then he made the mistake of adding, ‘And I really can’t keep going off in the middle of the afternoon like that.’

‘Five o’clock is hardly the middle of the afternoon. In fact, it’s at the end of most normal people’s working day.’

‘Well, it’s not at the end of mine.’

‘And that’s exactly why you need to go on seeing Rupert. You won’t tell me what the two of you discuss but I can’t believe that he hasn’t identified your total obsession with work as a serious obstacle to any kind of a normal, happy home life.’

John sighed. His working day had started at six, at ten he had gone into court, remaining there for most of the day, and then there had been a tricky conference with a new client. He had driven home hopeful that this evening Melanie might be a little less angry, a little less unhappy and resentful and that he would be able to sit down with a drink and relax, chat without having to search each word as if it might contain explosives.

‘I don’t think our home life is unhappy or especially abnormal,’ he said.

‘Well, that just shows how removed you are from reality.’

He slammed his fork down on his plate.

‘For Christ’s sake, Melanie, we’ve been through this a million times. You knew when we met that I worked long hours. What really gets me is that at the time you positively approved.’

‘Don’t raise your voice at me.’

‘I wasn’t …’ He stopped as, to his horror, she started crying. He wanted to go across to her and hold her and say he was sorry he’d upset her. But instead he just sat there looking over her shoulder at the fridge door as if his lines were written on the brushed-steel door.

‘You always bring that up,’ Melanie sobbed. ‘Why don’t you try to understand how I feel now, and respect those feelings instead of trying to … well, I don’t know … out-argue me. I mean don’t you want us to spend more time together?’

‘Well, of course I do. And that’s another reason why I want to stop these sessions: to give me more time.’

Melanie blew her nose noisily, looking at him over the tissue with moist, mascara-smudged eyes.

‘That’s just stupid. As if you’d spend that time with me rather than staying on in Chambers!’

John reached across the table and took her hands in his.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry on with the sessions if it means so much to you.’

She pulled free.

‘Don’t do me any favours.’

He quelled an impulse to snap at her, saying instead in his mildest voice, ‘I know it’s for my own sake and I’m grateful to you for pushing me to do it. You’re very good for me.’

‘What do you mean I’m good for you? How bloody patronising can you get?’

He met her angry gaze with a small smile and an expression of polite interest.

‘A lot more, I assure you.’

Her eyes overflowed once again and, pushing the plate with the uneaten sea bass away, she told him that he was hopeless and that their relationship was hopeless too.

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 relationship 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 continued.

‘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.

‘And this Melanie isn’t her, now is she?’

With a slight sigh he said, ‘I thought she might have been.’

‘But now you know better?’

He raised his chin.

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Fine. You’re in denial. We can work with that.’ She paused and giggled behind a slender hand. ‘De-nial is a river in Egypt.’

He looked at her.

‘Oh. Right. Yes.’ He laughed politely.

‘Does she need to be beautiful, this woman, your ideal?’ the therapist asked in the alert yet efficient voice of a shop assistant offering to pick out your perfect suit.

‘Beautiful? No, not really. It would be nice if she was good-looking, obviously. And I think enthusiasm is vital, passion – for something; it almost doesn’t matter what. I don’t like blasé or passivity. I like women who are self-sufficient, who don’t wait for me to make all the decisions. Someone who likes challenges and won’t stagnate.’ He paused to find Angie Bliss smiling and nodding her approval. Next she’ll stick a gold star next to my notes, he thought, not displeased. Melanie called him a try-hard. She was right, as it happened.

‘So, if we find you such a woman then you might do better?’

‘I was not aware that I had signed up to a dating agency. Anyway, I am still in a relationship.’

‘OK, OK.’ The therapist raised both hands in the air. ‘But basically you don’t want to face up to the gaping void in your life so you’re here fussing about this O … OCD.’

‘I’m fussing over it, as you call it, because I was encouraged to do so by your predecessor and because it’s a pain, a real pain. I don’t need the distraction. What I do need is to find a way of being able to give one hundred per cent to whatever I’m doing without these ridiculous, I mean really ridiculous, thoughts.’

‘But there’s no problem sexually?’

‘No, I’ve told you that already.’ He forgot about feeling awkward as he gazed into her eyes that were the turquoise of a Caribbean sea. He said, hesitating at first, ‘At least, there never used to be a problem but I suppose that lately … well, it could be better. I just put it down to the other problems we’re having at the moment. I’m pretty confident that it’s not a, well a … medical problem.’

‘Now that is a relief, isn’t it? Again I’m sure’ – she paused and looked him up and down – ‘I’m sure,’ she said again, ‘that you will have no problems once you’re with the right woman. Now, let’s see … yes, your mother: would you say she was possessive when you grew up and that this might have something to do with your problems in forming intimate, long-lasting relationships?’

‘I suppose she was a bit possessive, yes, but that’s understandable as it was just the two of us. My father left before I was born. He died not long afterwards. Anyway, I got the impression from Rupert that the key to OCD lies in the simple fact of brain chemistry rather than in childhood experiences and such things. He did mention Prozac or some other SSRI.’

Angie Bliss’s eyes turned the colour of thunder clouds.

‘Well, if you know so much about it why are you here seeing me? And I certainly would not recommend Prozac. Have you not heard about the side-effects? Reduction of sex drive, inability to climax. Would you like to add those to your list of problems?’ Then she smiled again and her amazing eyes softened to dove-grey. ‘I’m not saying that Rupert is wrong, only that opinion is divided. I would say that the very latest findings suggest that…’ She frowned and seemed to search for a word. ‘Yes, that regression therapy can be helpful... in some cases. That means we delve into your past –’

‘– Subconscious,’ John filled in. He had to remind himself again that the woman sitting opposite him was a renowned expert in her field.

‘But first we’ll just regress via your conscious,’ Angie Bliss said and there was renewed authority in her voice. ‘Now, your childhood.’

‘My childhood,’ John Sterling said. ‘There’s nothing much to tell. Nothing I haven’t been through with Rupert already.’

Angie Bliss frowned.

‘Well, I want to hear it for myself. And don’t roll your eyes. How old are you, twelve?’

John pulled a face.

‘There’s honestly not much to tell. I was born, on time more or less, so I believe, healthy and wanted.’

‘Your father didn’t want you.’

John’s amiable smile remained in place but his voice was icy.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He left before you were born. I would say that was a fair indication that he was not very keen on the idea of you.’

John coloured slightly but his voice was as controlled as ever when he replied, ‘All right, so maybe I was wanted by one instead of the more customary two parents. And yes, there was a time that this bothered me. But I was fortunate in other things so in the end it seemed like rather a petty concern. Then again, we humans distinguish ourselves by our petty concerns, don’t you agree, whereas the other animals confine their fretting to the real stuff: how to get fed, how to get laid, how to stay alive.’ He paused and looked at his watch. ‘Oh dear, my hour is up.’

‘That’s all right. No hurry.’

But John was already on his way to the door.

‘I’m sure you have other people to see?’

‘So I do.’ Angie Bliss swivelled the chair round so that her back was turned. ‘I’ve got you down for the same time next week.’

John was about to make some excuse but as he met the therapist’s azure gaze he found himself nodding and saying, ‘Yes, absolutely.’

On his way out, a good-looking young boy standing by the water cooler stopped him and asked in a faint American accent, ‘She free?’

John nodded.

‘Is she any good?’

‘I can’t really tell.’

‘That figures,’ the boy said. ‘I’d give her another go, though.’

‘Would you now?’ John said. He smiled. ‘Maybe I shall too then.’