Free Remedy is None by William McIlvanney

on the rich curtains, the plush carpet, the expensive furniture that reflected the light in polished patches. This was hers. And Peter’s. This was their house. A bungalow. Her mind inventoried its rooms smugly, emphasizing special features as if for an advertisement, refrigerator, stainless steel sink-unit, garage with room for two cars. She was very fortunate. Peter was good to her. What cause did she have to feel dissatisfied? One closed door away, Peter was sitting in the lounge, talking with Raymond and Eleanor, their guests. What was there to trouble her? Unless it was the past.
    She shied away from the thought. She had got over everything by now, she told herself. She had known that there were things she would miss terribly. She had known she would have to adjust. And she had adjusted. She had lived with herself for a long time by compromise, by a tacit and gentle self-deception, the studied exclusion of certain thoughts. She knew that you could only gain certain things by forfeiting others, that, where the achievement of one desire precluded another, you had to choose, that to possess was to relinquish. That had been her lesson, a hard lesson. Surely she had learned it by now. She had thought she had. She had tried, certainly. She owed Peter such an effort. It seemed unjust that old longings she had ascetically starved to death should resurrect their hunger in her heart. After so long. After so very long.
    Yet something of those longings had survived. She knew it had. She knew that what troubled her was a gap that remained from the past, a need that the years between had not fulfilled. They had been good enough years and they had brought everything she had hoped for, except their own self-sufficiency. She had hoped that her life with Peter would absorb her entirely, leave nothing of her over to be a prey tonostalgia or regret. There had been times when nostalgia had almost incapacitated her, like a recurring illness. Sometimes she had lived through a whole week in which every day seemed to focus exclusively on the past, and it was like being in a house which had windows at the back only. But she had learned to live with this, and she could cope with it when it came. She simply administered to herself gradually increasing doses of hard work and altruism until immunity had been re-established.
    But the feeling as it affected her now no longer responded to such treatment. Perhaps it was just that her complaint had reached its secondary stage. It was more tenacious than it had been, and it had assumed a subtly different nature. Before, she had recognized it simply as an intensified form of the nostalgia that becomes a part of all people as they grow older and the past begins to outweigh the future. She had thought of her own feeling as merely a highly particularized species of that general tendency, intenser for her because it was localized in one particular place and personalized into a few particular people. But now that no longer adequately accounted for it. Now it was not properly nostalgia at all. It was not a retrospective look at an irrecoverable past, something made poignant by the very fact of its being irredeemable. It was no longer content to have that pittance of time with which the present pensions off the past. It seemed determined to encroach upon the future. She had found herself lately seriously considering the possibility of making some sort of vague undefined contact with that part of her past that she had foresworn. Every time the realization of what she was doing came upon her she felt shocked at herself and determined not to do it again. What did she hope to gain from it? Even if she did reopen that door, what did she expect to find there that belonged to her? There was nothing for her there. She had seen to that. This was where she belonged. In this house with Peter. Everything that she had any right to was here. There was nothing for her anywhere else. Then why was she not content? What was it that