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In fact in every way they’re antithetical. Sally is a blonde, blue-eyed English rose, tall, supple, athletic. Amy is the Mediterranean type (her father was a Greek Cypriot): dark, short and buxom, with a head of frizzy black curls and eyes like raisins. She smokes, wears a lot of make-up, and never walks anywhere, let alone runs, if she can possibly avoid it. We had to run for a train once at Euston: I shot ahead and held the door open for her as she came waddling down the ramp on her high heels like a panicked duck, all her necklaces and earrings and scarves and bags and other female paraphernalia atremble, and I burst out laughing. I just couldn’t help myself. Amy asked me what was so funny as she scrambled breathlessly aboard, and when I told her she refused to speak to me for the rest of the journey. (Incidentally, I just looked up “paraphernalia” in the dictionary because I wasn’t sure I’d spelled it right, and discovered it comes from the Latin paraphema, meaning “a woman’s personal property apart from her dowry.” Interesting.)
    It was one of our very few tiffs. We get on very well together as a rule, exchanging industry gossip, trading personal moans and reassurances, comparing therapies. Amy is divorced, with custody of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Zelda, who is just discovering boys and giving Amy a hard time about clothes, staying out late, going to dubious discos, etc. etc. Amy is terrified that Zelda’s going to get into sex and drugs any minute now, and distrusts her ex-husband, Saul, a theatre manager who has the kid to stay one weekend every month and who, Amy says, has no morals, or, to quote her exactly, “wouldn’t recognize a moral if it bit him on the nose.” Nevertheless she feels riven with guilt about the break-up of the marriage, fearing that Zelda will go off the rails for lack of a father-figure in the home. Amy started analysis primarily to discover what went wrong between herself and Saul. In a sense she knew that already: it was sex. Saul wanted to do things that she didn’t want to do, so eventually he found someone else to do them with. But she’s still trying to work out whether this was his fault or hers, and doesn’t seem to be any nearer a conclusion. Analysis has a way of unravelling the self: the longer you pull on the thread, the more flaws you find.
    I see Amy nearly every week, when I go to London. Sometimes we go to a show, but more often than not we just spend a quiet evening together, at the flat, and/or have a bite to eat at one of the local restaurants. There’s never been any question of sex in our relationship, because Amy doesn’t really want it and I don’t really need it. I get plenty of sex at home. Sally seems full of erotic appetite these days — I think it must be the hormone replacement therapy she’s having for the menopause. Sometimes, to stimulate my own sluggish libido, I suggest something Saul wanted to do with Amy, and Sally hasn’t turned me down yet. When she asks me where I get these ideas from, I tell her magazines and books, and she’s quite satisfied. If it ever got back to Sally that I was seen out in London with Amy, it wouldn’t bother her because I don’t conceal the fact that we meet occasionally. Sally thinks it’s for professional reasons, which in part it is.
    So really you would say that I’ve got it made, wouldn’t you? I’ve solved the monogamy problem, which is to say the monotony problem, without the guilt of infidelity. I have a sexy wife at home and a platonic mistress in London. What have I got to complain about? I don’t know.
    It’s three-thirty. I think I’ll go back to bed and see if I can get a few hours’ kip before sparrowfart.
     
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    Wednesday 11 a.m. I did sleep for a few hours, but it wasn’t a refreshing sleep. I woke feeling knackered, like I used to be after guard duty in National Service: two hours on, four hours off, all through the night, and all