don’t think head-on confrontation is the best way to go,” Steve said. “Some things are best approached by stealth, and a scientific attitude is never a bad thing. I need time to practice the relaxation techniques, and to bring them to bear on all the different aspects of my life in which they might be useful. This might be one race that slow and steady really can win.
“If that’s the way you want to do it, Steve,” Sylvia said, blandly, “that’s fine. I can’t talk about my other clients, as you know, but you wouldn’t be the first who wanted to talk all around his problem as a way of not facing up to it. You know, don’t you, how many psychotherapists it takes to change a light-bulb.”
“Yes I do,” Steve said. “Only one—and pretty much any one will do—but the light-bulb has to want to be changed.”
“Do you want to be changed, Steve?” the therapist followed up, relentlessly.
“My filament hasn’t gone yet,” Steve told her. “I know you’re used to working with the traditional brand of light-bulb they still sell in Sainsbury’s, but I’m the new sort—the low-energy, long-life, curled-up-radiant-tube sort. I’m not the reckless type, in spite of what Rhodri Jenkins may have told you about my love life.”
“I don’t talk to other clients about you, either,” Sylvia told him.
“Of course not,” Steve said, “but that doesn’t prevent your clients from talking about each other, does it? I bet he’s mentioned me to you, since he found out I took his advice—just by way of being helpful, of course. You might not be an orthodox Freudian, but he is, at least in the sense that he thinks that sex is the root of all psychological problems. He thinks I’m a Don Juan because I’ve had four of my female colleagues in the last two years, while he’s only had half a dozen of them in twenty, despite being made deputy head—and most of them were probably married ones bored enough to bonk anyone who could make them feel more attractive than a soggy chip. Actually, my attitude to sex couldn’t be healthier, and I’m perfectly happy with my current girl-friend. That has nothing at all to do with my phobias, or my classroom-induced stress.”
“Are you familiar with the quotation, ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’?” Sylvia asked him.
“It’s from Hamlet,” Steve said, relieved to be able to retain the intellectual high ground. “Shakespeare’s hymn of praise to methodical madness. I was just trying to make the point that my phobias aren’t symptomatic of some sexual hang-up, in spite of what you might suspect or Rhodri might have hinted to you.”
“Thanks for sharing that with me,” Sylvia said. “You’ll forgive me, I suppose, if I reserve my judgment until we can resume our attempts to get to the bottom of the problem.”
“It’s possible, isn’t it,” Steve said, “that some problems don’t actually have bottoms—that they’re just what they seem to be, and nothing more? And it’s possible, too, that some problems are better solved by whittling away patiently, rather than attempting to blast them open with dynamite?”
“Quite possible,” Sylvia conceded. “But I wouldn’t be doing my job, would I, if I didn’t explore all the possibilities available to us?”
Steve and Janine went to the first meeting of the survival course on the day after Steve’s second session with Sylvia Joyce, but it turned out to be a formularistic introduction session, with the standard icebreakers that now seemed to be universally accepted as “best practice” by teachers of every sort, although Steve loathed them. The icebreakers were followed by a long pep talk on the necessity of self-sufficiency in a fast-changing world.
On the Thursday night Janine went out with Milly and Alison, but Steve didn’t mind being deserted, because it gave him a chance to play poker on-line. He played for four hours, ending up thirty pounds down—an unusually bad result. He always played in low-stakes games that were too trivial to attract predatory sharks, and was usually able to come out ahead, but the competition had been atypically disciplined and the cards he’d been dealt had been profoundly unexciting.
On Friday he and Janine met up at the wine bar again to celebrate the beginning of the weekend.
“Did you have a good time last night?” he asked.
“Great,” she said. “And before you ask, we hardly talked about you at all. Milly told Alison how extremely good-looking you were, and that you were one more reason why she ought to start coming to AlAbAn meetings with us, but Ali didn’t seem impressed.”
“Her description obviously didn’t do me justice,” Steve observed. “I can’t imagine why Alison wouldn’t be prepared to go to the ends of the earth just to get a glimpse of me, if my magnificence had been properly explained. You must have run me down, so as to keep the opposition to a minimum.”
“It was me who suggested that we give Milly a lift to AlAbAn, remember?” Janine said. “I’d hardly have done that if I were afraid of opposition. Don’t worry—I’m sure you’ll meet all my friends eventually. You haven’t introduced me to any of yours yet.”
“They’re all cricketers and schoolteachers,” Steve said. “You’d find them incredibly boring. Besides which, I’m not as brave as you—I wouldn’t take the risk of introducing a girl as stunningly beautiful as you to any of my male friends. I may be a young Adonis—I’m quoting my deputy head there, so it must be true—but I’m too good a poker player to take that sort of reckless risk.”
“They’d probably find me boring,” Janine said. “I’m just a travel agent. I’m getting to the age now when I wish I’d tried a bit harder at school—sad, isn’t it? Milly was saying the same thing last night—she’s beginning to get a sense of unfulfilled potential. She never used to crack a book when we were at school, but she reads a lot nowadays. I told her that she ought to go to the tech and do A levels in the evenings. She might, if Ali or I would go with her—but Ali’s got a career path of sorts already mapped out for her in local government, and I’d be better off doing an in-house management training course. I’ve been thinking of putting in for one.”
“Why not?” Steve said. “Go for it. Might as well take advantage of any opportunities that are going.”
“Milly and Alison said the same. None of us is likely to get on to the property ladder any time soon unless we can bump our salaries up, even if we find a suitable partner.”
Steve was well aware of the problems of getting on to the property ladder, even if one could find a suitable partner with whom to bear the burden of a mortgage, but he didn’t want to start discussing his relationship with Janine in terms like that just yet. “Milly gave me the impression that your girls’ nights out were far too lewd for tender ears like mine,” he said. “It’s a bit disappointing to discover that you spend your time comparing salaries and promotion prospects.”
“Oh, we did the X-rated stuff too—not me, I hasten to add. They wanted all the lurid details, of course, but I maintained a diplomatic silence. Ali’s the one who usually provides that sort of entertainment, although Milly’s had her moments. Don’t let your imagination run riot, though…on second thoughts, maybe I should have let you carry on thinking that it was all shop talk. What do you talk about when you go out boozing after your cricket matches?”
“We talk about all the reasons why the umpire’s decision to give us out LBW was an absolute atrocity, how many times we nearly found the edge while bowling but didn’t quite, how many times we thought about hooking their fast bowler for six while batting, but decided
