Then, one day, in the middle of a session, she said something-something my ex-husband. I looked at her left hand. By that time I knew all Julie’s jewellery and Julie’s mugs and skirts and all Julie’s different pointy boots. The nestling ring set was gone from her fourth finger, now noticeably thinner than her other fingers below the knuckle.
Julie Female’s marriage had broken down while we were in her converted spare room doing good work. At the end, I told her that I had just remembered I wasn’t going to be able to make it the following week.
Patrick was home when I got back, in the kitchen, wiping something off his elbow with the dish sponge. I told him what had happened.
He said, ‘You can’t just not turn up from now on’ and suggested I call her. ‘You might change your mind and want to start seeing her again.’
‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘It’s like having a fat personal trainer.’ He frowned. ‘Sorry, it is though. I’m not being mean. It’s just, clearly you don’t understand what I’m trying to achieve.’
Patrick put the sponge down, went to the fridge and took out a beer. Opening it, he said, ‘Would you write a letter?’
‘Probably not.’
Now I wish Julie Female had told me to put ￡95 in a savings account twice a week and go for a walk.
25
INGRID HAS NEVER had postnatal depression but inexplicably after her second baby was born she started getting Botox. Thousands of pounds’ worth in her flawless, thirty-two-year-old face.
Hamish asked why, after a session that immobilised the central third of her forehead. She said it was because one, she was tired of looking like someone who had been disinterred, and two, paralysing her face muscles meant she couldn’t communicate the depth of anger she felt towards her waste of space husband just by looking at him.
In that case, he wondered if they should have marriage counselling. Ingrid said at best she would consider some sort of one-day thing but would not be doing weekly appointments. She did not need a therapist to excavate their problems while the babysitter’s meter ticked up in five-pound increments, since she already knew their issue was having two under fucking two.
The only one-day thing Hamish could find was a group workshop. In the conflict resolution module, the facilitator shared that sometimes, in the middle of an argument, he or his partner might say something along the lines of, ‘Hey, let’s have a time out! Let’s go and get burgers!’ He said that it worked in almost every instance, especially in conjunction with sticking to I statements, and asked if there were any questions.
Ingrid raised her hand and, without waiting, asked if say, a husband was constantly getting his wife pregnant – with boys – and provided as much help with them as someone with a secret second family, and the best me-time the wife had had in the last fourteen months was during an MRI, but the husband’s main worry was how much Botox his wife was having, not that she was so desperately exhausted and unhappy she fantasised all the time about being sent for another MRI, and they were always fighting, would the burger thing work then?
Hamish turned to self-help audio books after that.
*
Ingrid left him when their second son was six months old. The baby was with her, wailing inside his sling, when she knocked on the door of the Executive Home on a Friday night. Patrick and I had already gone to bed. As soon as she was inside, she dumped her bag and told me that she couldn’t do it any more.
We sat on the sofa and I held the glass of wine she had asked me to pour for myself, so that she could drink most of it but feel like technically she wasn’t drinking while breastfeeding. She told me that she had stopped seeing Hamish as a person. Now she only saw him as a source of ironing, and a sex pest because he still wanted to have sex with her. She would love to never have sex again, and if she had to, it wouldn’t be with him. I listened and a while later, Ingrid still talking, Patrick came through from the bedroom and said, ‘I’m not here,’ and went to work. I told Ingrid she could sleep in our bed with the baby.
She looked at the time on her phone. ‘Don’t worry. I have to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘Home.’ She sighed in anticipation of standing up.
‘But you just walked out.’
She emptied the rest of the wine into her mouth then said, ‘Martha. As if I would actually leave Hamish.’ She circled her hand above the sling. ‘As if I could do this by myself.’
‘But you said you have lost sight of him as a person.’