A Gift of Poison Read online

  ‘Of course it is, it’s a cancellation. We’re very lucky to get it.’

  ‘And I’m very lucky to have this job. I’ve been out of teaching a long time. Another evening, all right?’

  His tone makes it clear that’s the end of it. She supposes it’s a kind of victory that he’s promised to go with her at all. She says, ‘Yes, all right. And this time I shall go by myself.’

  * * *

  Inge likes him on sight. Perhaps she is so desperate, she thinks, that she would like anyone who might help her. But it feels like more than that. There is something reassuring about him, even something familiar. She has never met him before yet he seems like someone she already knows. It’s a strange feeling.

  ‘Hullo,’ he says, in a very casual, friendly way. ‘I’m Michael Green.’ He is rather thick-set with dark receding hair that is turning grey. She thinks he must be about fifty. When he stands up to shake hands with her he is scarcely taller than she is, so she doesn’t have to look up at him. They are on a level with each other. His eyes are dark behind horn-rimmed glasses.

  ‘I’m Inge Morgan,’ she says, and they shake hands. He has a very firm handshake, but then so does she, perhaps especially so today. Even as she shakes hands with him she thinks it is like grabbing hold of a life raft.

  ‘Have a seat. Maybe Dr Shaw has explained, I’m not a doctor, I’m a counsellor and psychotherapist. I’m not here to tell you what to do, but sometimes it can help to talk about how you feel, and look at the choices you have, maybe make some changes if you want to. How would you like to start?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m very nervous.’

  ‘Take a deep breath.’ He smiles encouragingly. ‘That usually helps me when I’m nervous.’

  She tries but it doesn’t. ‘Well, it’s my husband. He couldn’t come tonight, he’s a teacher and he had a meeting at school. But he’ll come next time. He promised.’

  ‘So you’re hoping you’ll both be here in future but tonight you have a chance to talk to me on your own.’

  ‘Yes. Only I don’t know what to say. I’ve been so anxious to get here but…’

  ‘How are you feeling right now, apart from being nervous?’

  Suddenly tears well up and spill over. She’s so surprised she can’t speak.

  ‘Yes, you’re very sad, aren’t you?’

  She nods. She cries for what feels like minutes and she can’t say anything at all. It is such a relief. She hadn’t realised how hard she had been trying not to cry.

  ‘We don’t make love at all,’ she says, when she can finally speak. ‘There’s been nothing since he came back. That’s three months. That’s too long, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, it’s too long if it makes you unhappy and it obviously does. What I think doesn’t matter. Some couples make love every day and others never do. There are lots of variations in between. The feelings are more important than the frequency.’

  ‘I don’t think he loves me any more,’ she says despairingly.

  ‘You sound really hopeless when you say that.’

  ‘Yes, I am. Did Dr Shaw tell you about us? I told him he could, I thought it would save time.’

  ‘Just the basic facts. Tell me if I’ve got them right. You were married ten years, you have two teenage sons, you separated ten years ago and your husband remarried. Then you got back together in April.’

  ‘I don’t know why he came back,’ she says.

  ‘Have you asked him?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid. He said he didn’t know if it would work. I thought if I was patient… But I have been and it doesn’t help.’

  Michael Green leans back in his chair. ‘D’you have any physical contact at all? Are you affectionate with each other?’

  ‘Oh, he hugs me sometimes. Or he kisses the top of my head. That’s all. He never touches me as a woman. There’s no desire.’

  ‘And you feel very sad about that. D’you feel anything else?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hesitates. ‘Sometimes I hate him. He came back but he doesn’t want me. It’s not fair. He shouldn’t have come back if he doesn’t want me.’

  ‘You sound very angry with him.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to kill him sometimes.’ She’s quite shocked to hear herself say that. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it?’

  ‘It would be a terrible thing to do,’ he says calmly, ‘but it’s all right to have the feeling. Any feeling. You’re not actually going to go home and kill him, are you?’

  ‘No. But I tried to kill myself twice. I cut my wrists when he left me and I took an overdose when he married the cow. But it didn’t work.’ She smiles faintly. ‘Here I am.’

  ‘Did you really want to die when you did that?’

  ‘Yes, I was so unhappy but I wasn’t very efficient. I wanted to die but I wanted him to come back more, so maybe… I don’t know. It’s a long time ago now. I’ve waited so long for him to come back and now he has but he doesn’t want to touch me and I can’t bear it. I know you can’t make him want to but if he never does we’re going to break up again, aren’t we? I mean we can’t live like this for ever. It’s not a marriage. And I’ll have been through all this for nothing.’ She hears herself sounding desperate and she’s terrified. ‘I don’t know what to do. You’re my last hope.’

  ‘Well, some people agree to have marriage without sex. But you obviously don’t want that.’

  ‘No. It’s like being tortured.’

  ‘So sex is very important to you.’

  ‘Yes, I love it. I think it’s magic.’

  ‘Is it just with your husband you feel like that?’

  ‘No, it’s special with him, well it was, it’s so long ago, but I had lovers after he left me and I always thought it was wonderful, even though I didn’t love them. But I can’t do that when we’re together. I don’t want to. So I’m trapped. I have to live with nothing.’

  ‘So you’ve got a lot of intense feeling invested in this marriage. And the way you see it, if you don’t make love you’re bound to break up again.’ He looks thoughtful. ‘That must put a lot of pressure on both of you.’

  ‘Yes, it does, but what can I do? That’s how I feel.’

  ‘Well, is there any way we can take a bit of the pressure off? Say we had a time limit, another three months perhaps, when you knew there was no chance of making love?’

  ‘There’s no chance now.’

  ‘No, but it sounds as if you’re constantly hoping and being disappointed, and your husband must be aware he’s disappointing you, on a daily basis. It’s very hard to live like that. You need time to build up some goodwill, don’t you, instead of all this pressure. And at the same time you could be thinking about the options. If you start making love again and you stay together, fine, that’s your ideal. You say you don’t want a marriage without sex and you don’t want lovers, so those are two options you’ve considered and rejected. What about the final option of breaking up, because there are only these four options, really, aren’t there?’

  She shivers. ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’

  ‘I can see it’s very painful for you. But is it the worst thing that can happen? After all, it’s happened before and you survived. As you said, you’re here.’

  ‘You think it’s going to happen again, don’t you?’

  ‘I think it’s too early to say. But it might be a relief to you if you could think about it as something possible that you can tolerate, although it would be very sad. Otherwise it’s a bit like thinking about death all the time, it stops you doing anything else. You’re so sad and angry about not making love and you’re so frightened of breaking up that you’re sort of squashing yourself to death between these two options.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, amazed. ‘That’s exactly how it feels.’

  ‘It’s quite natural to feel like that, of course,’ he says, ‘but it doesn’t leave you much room to manoeuvre. D’you think you can ease up on yourself a bit?’

  ‘How?’ she says.
‘How can I do that? I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Well, your husband has agreed to come with you, so that’s hopeful. And there’s no time limit on this, you know. You’re not going to be shot if you don’t have a sexy marriage within a certain time. And if you do break up eventually you’re not going to kill yourself, are you?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘So your life must have some value to you, even if it’s not very happy at the moment. Can you hang on to the idea of that value, of you as a person, quite independently of your husband? Can you try doing that, as an exercise? Concentrating quite deliberately on the idea that you are important, whether or not you are having sex or staying married.’

  * * *

  When she gets home Richard is already back from the PTA meeting. She wonders how long he has been in and whether he could have come with her after all. He doesn’t say anything when she comes in so she says, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how I got on?’

  ‘I can see you’ve been crying, so he probably feels very sorry for you and thinks you’re married to a pig. I expect you had a lovely time telling him how badly I treat you.’ She’s shocked. ‘It wasn’t like that. He was very nice. He’s there to help us, not to take sides. He said at the end that you can go by yourself next time if you like, so that we’ll both have had some time alone with him. That’s very fair, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t want any time alone with him. I said I’d come with you and I will but I don’t want to talk about it now.’

  ‘Well, we have another appointment in two weeks. You’ll have broken up by then, won’t you, so you won’t have another PTA meeting.’

  * * *

  ‘When you’ve been apart for ten years,’ Richard says, ‘three months doesn’t seem very long to get used to each other again. At least it doesn’t to me. I can’t perform to order. I thought you as a man would understand that.’

  ‘Is that what you feel you’re being asked to do – perform to order?’

  ‘Isn’t that why I’m here?’

  ‘I thought you agreed to come with your wife to talk about how you feel in the marriage.’

  ‘Oh really? You make it sound like a tea-party.’

  ‘You sound very angry,’ Michael Green says calmly.

  ‘That’s probably because I am.’

  ‘And you felt I as a man would understand.’

  ‘Well, you obviously don’t.’

  ‘What are you angry about? What exactly d’you want me to understand?’

  ‘Christ, you know what this is all about, so don’t pretend you don’t. My wife wants me to make love to her and I can’t. All right? It’s very embarrassing and very humiliating, but it’s a fact, so there we are.’

  ‘Have you actually tried?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you tried to make love to your wife?’

  ‘No. I’m sure she told you that. Didn’t she?’

  ‘She is here. You could ask her.’

  ‘So I could. Inge, did you tell him I haven’t even tried?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You see? We actually agree about something. Are you playing games?’

  ‘No, I’m trying to find out if you think you have. If maybe you feel you’ve made an approach and been rejected, either of you. Sometimes two people can see these things very differently, particularly when they’re emotionally involved.’

  ‘Which you’re not, of course.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to be able to help you help yourselves, that’s what I’m here for. It doesn’t actually make much difference to my life if you make love to each other or not, if you stay married or not. But it might make quite a big difference to your life.’

  There is a silence in the room. Richard feels his anger has nowhere else to go. He can feel it wearing out, like an insect battering itself against the glass.

  ‘You see,’ Michael Green says, ‘there’s an obvious difference between trying and failing, or being rejected, and not trying at all. Between being afraid to try and not wanting to try. I’d like to get a clear picture of what’s actually happening before I make any assumptions. If you haven’t tried then you haven’t failed and you haven’t been rejected either. Inge, have you tried to make love to Richard?’

  She hesitates. ‘Not really. Well, he knows I want to. I’ve tried to be affectionate, of course.’

  ‘Well, so have I. For God’s sake, Inge, be fair.’

  ‘D’you actually feel affectionate, Richard?’ Michael asks.

  ‘Not always, no. Sometimes.’

  ‘Inge?’

  ‘Yes, usually. Well, sometimes I feel angry and miserable. It’s hard to feel affectionate all the time when you’re not touching very much.’

  ‘Have you talked to each other about how you feel?’

  ‘Well, not really. It’s difficult. We’ve had rows more than we’ve talked, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we have.’

  ‘Well, rows or silences.’

  ‘All right, hold it there a minute. That’s only the second time you’ve actually spoken to each other this session without me asking you to. Is there anything you’d like to say to each other here that you can’t say at home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. I’d like to ask him—’

  ‘He’s here. Ask him.’

  She turns. ‘Richard, why did you come back?’

  A long silence. He knows he has to lie. He feels the lie screaming into the silence, announcing itself as a lie.

  ‘Because I wanted to try again.’ It could have been worse. She might have asked him if he still loves Helen. He might not have been able to manage that lie. He wonders if the slimy therapist can tell he’s lying.

  ‘Then why don’t you ever make love to me?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m tired. I’m not ready. It’s too soon.’

  ‘So at this stage we don’t really know if it’s fear of failure that’s stopping you, or lack of desire, or something unresolved from the past. There’s no question of blame in any of this, of course. It’s not anyone’s fault. D’you see that?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘Some people feel sex in marriage has more to do with duty than pleasure, anyway, and that puts them off. Do either of you feel that?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘D’you notice how often your answers are opposite – when one says yes, the other says no? And yet you’re here together. Might there be a positive side to this conflict? D’you think perhaps you need each other to express things you can’t quite manage for yourselves?’

  ‘D’you mean like attraction of opposites?’

  ‘Something like that. D’you remember why you got married in the first place?’

  ‘We fell in love.’

  ‘It was a very strong sexual attraction. A bit ironic now we’re here.’

  ‘And I got pregnant, of course.’

  ‘So maybe you got married faster than you would have done?’

  ‘Well, obviously. And we were very young.’

  ‘Is there anything Inge could do now that would help you, Richard?’

  ‘Yes. Leave me alone. Give me a bit of peace. Give me some space, some more time. I don’t know how much I need. I had a sort of nervous breakdown earlier this year.’

  ‘That must have been tough. Would you like to tell me some more about that?’

  ‘No. It’s private. It’s irrelevant to all this, anyway. It just explains why I haven’t got much energy. As well as the new job, of course.’

  ‘So that’s an area you’d like to keep to yourself. And you’re feeling quite burdened at work. Okay. Inge, if you try to ease up on Richard a bit, what could he do in return to help you?’

  ‘I need him – sorry. Richard, I need you to touch me more often. If I really thought you cared about me, maybe I wouldn’t even mind if we don’t make love for a bit longer.’

  ‘All right, so you want very different things fro
m each other. You, Inge, want loving and touching more than anything, and you, Richard, want more time and space and peace. Those are very different things and yet you’re together in the marriage and you’re both here. Is there any way you could meet each other, so you each get a little of what you want? If we rule out the possibility of sex for the moment, to take off the feeling of pressure, could you trade each other a bit of peace and space for a bit of touching? We’re coming up to the August break, so I’m going to suggest a few things you might like to try in the meantime, things some people find helpful. It’s entirely up to you, of course. Nobody can force you to do anything you don’t want to do. But you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something to change.’

  He outlines his suggestions and they both listen in silence.

  ‘How does that sound?’ he says when he has finished. ‘D’you think you could manage any of that and let me know how you get on?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure we could.’

  ‘Worth a try, I suppose.’

  When they all stand up to say goodbye Richard notices that he is several satisfying inches taller than Michael Green: he could even spit on his head.

  * * *

  ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’ Inge says on their way home. ‘He really understands. And he doesn’t mind if you’re rude to him.’

  ‘I think he’s revolting,’ Richard says. ‘He probably gets off on other people’s sex lives.’

  ‘Oh Richard, please don’t hate him. He’s trying to help us.’ She puts her arm through his. ‘I’m so glad you came with me.’

  * * *

  August passes slowly. The boys are out a lot or away staying with friends, so they are often alone in the house. It feels strange, like being young again, before they were parents.

  When Inge caresses him he thinks of Helen and feels the stirring of desire. He has to tell her to stop before she notices what is happening. Reluctantly, when he can’t put it off any longer, he strokes Inge’s back, her neck, her shoulders, her arms. Safe in the knowledge that she can’t see him, he looks at her helpless human body with pity not rage, her freckled skin, her brown hair spread out across the pillow. She could be any woman, not just Inge, whom he has injured. If he shuts his eyes he can imagine she is Helen, and waves of longing and loss sweep over him. He opens his eyes quickly.