as she went under, into the soft seas of non-self.
Valerie suffers from emotion
I’VE NEVER FELT SEXUAL jealousy before. I have seen it in others, and despised it. What a lack of self-belief is here displayed, I have thought; what lamentable failure of nerve. I have noticed women at parties distracted and uneasy, seen them leave the group they’re in to join another, where their partner, they fear, is having too good a time, his attention too focused for comfort on another woman. Men do it too, of course, but I think women do it more often. Perhaps they are just more practised in forethought, especially if they have children. Act now, save trouble later! But this particular act is counterproductive: it brings trouble nearer. The man knows quite well what’s going on, sees his freedom restricted, his dignity insulted, his lust observed, if lust it is, and is angry and resentful either way. And how public—
Jealousy—destructive, pointless, pitiful, pathetic! Or so I thought, in the good days, the wonderful days, before I felt it. Now I see it’s the energy that makes the world go round. Mine, mine, you can’t have it! Hugo is mine, not Eleanor’s. Hugo is visiting Stef, his wife; I don’t mind that so much, not quite so much. Perhaps I acknowledge some former claim. Wives are boring things. How I must have bored Lou. Always there, never jealous. Never valuing him enough to be jealous, never arriving suddenly to catch him out, never finding his mail interesting enough to steam open! Nothing more insulting than a non-jealous partner.
‘So there you go, Lou, off to Amsterdam with the Philharmonic! Have a nice time. See you Wednesday.’ Never even thinking what sort of nice time. Isn’t she rather attractive, the girl harpist: has he noticed the bend of her white swan neck, the discreet flicker of her fingers; wondered how the neck would seem, the fingers flicker, in more intimate a situation? Or Lou, jealous of me? Is he jealous now? Does he suffer? I think not. This is what irks, what irritates. I have gone, and Lou doesn’t mind, hardly notices.
Lou and I have always presented a good public face: we make a happily married couple, a busy professional pair; she in the media—seen as a little suspect, a little too clever for her own good—he in the interpretive arts: sensitive, hard-working, dedicated: often away. Just as well, they say, that Valerie has the children and her work to keep her occupied. Perhaps, in retrospect, rather a dull pair to have at a dinner party. Lou and Valerie. Most of the friends are from the music world, not the media: they don’t mix easily. Orchestra talk is very different from newspaper talk, and, as so often, the husband’s occupation wins. Musicians are by their very naming good—media folk are noisy, rackety, flip.
Lou, Valerie, Sophie, Ben. One of the strangest things is how little I think of Sophie and Ben. As if I were not one person as I had always thought, but divide very simply and cleanly into two—the erotic and the maternal. The erotic has swept in and taken over: split the maternal off, like a tree split by lightning—one half stands and grows, the other simply falls and dies.
I say I do not mind Hugo visiting Stef but why is he so long away? It’s time he came home to me. I do not like the thoughts in my head. I need his presence to drive them away. He said it was to discuss the children but what was there to discuss? She will look after them, no doubt, as Lou will look after Sophie and Ben. Let him communicate with her by letter, if he must: let solicitors arrange money matters. Stef has a good job: she can support herself. She is a financial journalist with her own by-line. She is a cold, unfeeling and unresponsive woman: she must be, or Hugo would not have left her for me. She was his youthful mistake: she is in the past tense. She lives in time: Hugo and myself out of it. I wonder if I were to kill her, if she were dead, if she were knocked over by a car, would that make the jealousy, that mixture of anxiety, grief and fear of exclusion, simply stop? Is it Eleanor’s notion or mine that sex in itself is a drug: that its effects are like heroin? In which case I can see jealousy as