Free Therapy by David Lodge

remember much about it. I know that Harriet’s latest clanger was sending the wrong actress to an interview at the BBC, causing great offence and embarrassment all round, but I’m afraid my mind wandered fairly early on in the relation of this story, and I failed to register the surname of the actress, so that when I came to again, and Amy was saying how furious Joanna had been, I didn’t know which Joanna she was talking about and it was too late to ask without revealing that I hadn’t been listening. So I had to confine myself to nodding and shaking my head knowingly and making sympathetic noises and uttering vague generalizations, but Amy didn’t seem to notice, or if she noticed, not to mind. Then she talked about Zelda, and I don’t remember a word of that, though I could make it up fairly confidently, since Amy’s complaints about Zelda are always much the same.
     
    I didn’t tell Amy the whole of my conversation with Jake. At the end of the meal, while we were waiting for the waiter to come back with the receipted bill and Jake’s platinum credit card, he said casually, fast-panning round the room and waving discreetly to Stephen Fry, who was just leaving, “Any chance of borrowing your flat next week, Tubby?” I assumed he had some foreign client arriving whom he wanted to put up, until he added, “Just for an afternoon. Any day that suits you.” He caught my eye and grinned slyly. “We’ll bring our own sheets.”
    I was shocked. It’s less than two years since Jake’s marriage to Margaret ended in an acrimonious divorce and he married his then secretary, Rhoda. Margaret had become a kind of friend, or at least a familiar fixture, over the years, and I’ve only recently got used to Jake going to functions or staying for the occasional weekend accompanied by Rhoda instead. He could see from my expression that I was disturbed.
    “Of course, if it’s inconvenient, just say so...”
    “It’s not a matter of convenience or inconvenience, Jake,” I said. “It’s just that I’d never be able to look Rhoda straight in the eye again.”
    “This doesn’t affect Rhoda, believe me,” he said earnestly. “It’s not an affair. We’re both happily married. We just have a common interest in recreational sex.”
    “I’d rather not be involved,” I said.
    “No problem,” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Forget I ever asked.” He added, with a trace of anxiety, “You won’t mention it to Sally?”
    “No, I won’t. But isn’t it about time you packed it in, this lark?” “It keeps me feeling young,” he said complacently. He does look young, too, for his age, not to say immature. He’s got one of those faces sometimes described as “boyish”: chubby cheeks, slightly protuberant eyes, snub nose, a mischievous grin. You wouldn’t call him good-looking. It’s hard to understand how he manages to pull the birds. Perhaps it’s the eager, puppyish, tail-wagging energy he seems to have such endless reserves of. “You should try it, Tubby,” he said. “You’ve been looking peaky lately.”
     
    When we sat on the sofa together to watch News at Ten, I put my arm round Amy’s back and she leaned her head against my shoulder. It’s the furthest we ever go in physical intimacy, except that our goodbye kiss is always on the lips; it seems safe to go that far when we’re parting. We don’t neck while we’re sitting on the sofa, nor have I ever attempted any squeezing or stroking below the neckline. I admit that I sometimes wonder what Amy would look like naked. The image that comes into my mind is a slightly overweight version of that famous nude by whatsisname, the Spanish bloke, old master, he did two paintings of the same woman reclining on a couch, one clothed, one naked, I must look it up. Amy is always so dressed, so thoroughly buttoned and zipped and sheathed in her layers of carefully coordinated clothing that it’s hard to imagine her ever being completely naked