Read Online Therapy by David Lodge - Free Book Online

workers who stopped for a drink on the way home and decided to make a night of it, and the actors and catering workers and buskers and policemen and beggars and newspaper vendors — their gaze will slide over me without clicking into focus, nobody will recognize me, nobody will greet me or ask how I am, and I don’t have to pretend to anyone that I’m happy.
     
    Amy came to the flat straight from work and we had a couple of g & t’s before going round the corner to Gabrielli’s for a bite to eat. Sometimes, if she comes here from home, she brings one of her own dishes from her deep-freeze, moussaka, or beef with olives or coq au vin, and heats it up in my microwave, but usually we eat out. Very occasionally she invites me to dinner at her house and lays on a super spread, but it’s always a dinner party, with other people present. Amy doesn’t want Zelda to get the idea that there’s anything special about her relationship with me, though I can’t believe the kid doesn’t suspect something, seeing her mother sometimes going out in the evening dressed to kill and carrying a container of home-made frozen food in one of her smartly gloved hands. “Because I hide it in my handbag, stupido,” Amy said, when I raised this question once. And it’s true that she carries an exceptionally large handbag, one of those soft Italian leather scrips, full of female paraphernalia (or should I just say paraphernalia?) — lipsticks and eyeliner, face-powder and perfume, cigarettes and lighters, pens and pencils, notebooks and diaries, aspirin and Elastoplast, Tampax and panti-liners, a veritable life-support system, in which a plastic container of frozen moussaka could be concealed without much difficulty.
    I was replacing a phutted lightbulb when Amy buzzed the entryphone, so I was slow to push the button that brought her comically distorted face, all mouth and nose and eyes, swimming into view on the videoscreen in my microscopic hall. “Hurry up, Lorenzo,” she said, “I’m dying for a pee and a drink, in that order.” One of the things I like about Amy is that she never calls me Tubby. She calls me by a lot of other familiar names, but never that one. I pushed the button to open the front door, and moments later admitted her to the flat. Her cheek was cold against mine as we embraced, and I inhaled a heady whiff of her favourite perfume, Givenchy, eddying round her throat and ears. I hung up her coat and fixed drinks while she went to the bathroom. She emerged a few minutes later, lips gleaming with freshly applied lipstick, sank into an armchair, crossed her fat little legs, lit a cigarette, took her drink and said, “Cheers, darling. How’s the knee?”
    I told her it had given me one bad twinge today, in the train.
    “And how’s the Angst ?”
    “What’s that?”
    “Oh, come, sweetheart! Don’t pretend you don’t know what Angst is. German for anxiety. Or is it anguish?”
    “Don’t ask me,” I said. “You know I’m hopeless at languages.” “Well anyway, how have you been? Apart from the knee.”
    “Pretty bad.” I described my state of mind over the last few days in some detail.
    “It’s because you’re not writing.” She meant script-writing.
    “But I am writing,” I said. “I’m writing a journal.”
    Amy’s black eyes blinked with surprise. “What on earth for?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. It started with something I did for Alexandra.”
    “You should write something that will take you out of yourself, not deeper in. Is there going to be another series?”
    “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “I had lunch about it with Jake. How was your day?”
    “Oh awful, awful,” she said grimacing. Amy’s days are invariably awful. I don’t think she’d be really happy if they weren’t. “I had a row with Zelda at breakfast about the pigsty state of her room. Well, c’est normal. But then Karl’s secretary called to say he couldn’t see me today because of a sore throat,