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I’d been fine when I got up that morning. Quite chirpy really. Not even irritated when I couldn’t find the kettle because my husband, Greg, had hidden it. It’s the very things that so charm you about a man when you first meet him that subsequently cause you such intense exasperation. Greg’s uncle had got Alzheimer’s when he was thirty-two and, as a result, Greg had developed a pathological fear of his memory deteriorating and had set himself little memory tests from an early age. “The brain’s a muscle just like any other and needs exercising,” he’d say. Absolutely fine for him, but irritating for the rest of us who don’t feel that remembering where you hid the kettle from yourself is a major and necessary triumph in the muscle-taut memory stakes. But that morning I remember whistling as I hunted for it and giving an exultant and good-humored cheer when I finally unearthed it in the drum of the washing machine.
 
Greg remained oblivious. He was sitting at the kitchen table scratching out yet another furious letter in his illegible doctor’s handwriting with the quill pen I had jokingly given him some years before with which to write his many letters of complaint. (I was surprised that he didn’t write on parchment, use a wax seal, and get a liveried footman to deliver his missives by hand.) This current letter was to the council about a parking fine.
 
“Ha, Chloe, listen to this,” he said. “I’m demanding a reply from the councillor himself.” He stood up, held the letter as far from himself as his arm would reach (vanity forbade the use of reading glasses and concomitant recognition of middle age), cleared his throat, and, using the special voice he reserved for officialdom, read: “Upon examining the legislation, I am astonished to learn that the London Borough of Brent, or its agents, appears to be attempting to extort money from me in an unlawful manner. Please find enclosed an extract of the Bill of Rights Act 1689, enacted and formally entered into Statute following the Declaration of Rights 1689. I draw your attention to the following section: ‘That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void.’ ”
 
He looked up at me, delighted with himself, like a dog that has brought a far-flung stick back in record time to lay at his master’s feet. He reached for a slice of toast, which he spread carefully with a thin layer of cholesterol-busting Benecol.
 
“What does that mean? That they can’t enforce parking fines at all without convicting you of a crime?”
 
“Precisely,” he said, giving a smug little smile as he left the room. “First you have to be found guilty in a court.”
 
Leo, our fifteen-year-old son, made a lightning kitchen raid before my eyes, during the course of which he successfully snatched a chocolate bar from a tin that was supposed to be hidden in a top cupboard, swigged orange juice from a carton in the fridge, and left before anyone could shout at him. Bea, the Czech au pair, gave a characteristic scowl at the space he had briefly occupied before shrugging and returning to her careful task of assembling a platter of exotic fruits that I had bought specifically for that night’s supper. I said nothing, assuming it was for my twelve-year-old daughter, Kitty, who had recently announced that she was on a health kick and, as every parent knows, nothing and no one should stand in the way of any child who voluntarily eats fresh fruits and vegetables.
 
Just then Kitty came in, carrying a plate of half-finished instant mashed potato.
 
“I’ve got a tummy ache,” she said.
 
“I’m not surprised, eating that processed rubbish,” I answered unsympathetically. “What happened to the new health regime?” I realized then that the exotic fruit platter must be intended for none other than Bea’s own stomach; sure enough, Bea settled herself comfortably at the table while I tried not to watch as, delicately, with a knife and fork, she ate slice after slice of expensive mango, papaya, and guava. The sun was shining and I was determined to preserve my good mood. So with only the merest tightening of the jaw, I emptied the dishwasher and brushed Kitty’s hair. Really, everything was fine until I saw my third patient of the day.
 
I’m a psychotherapist, and our Queen’s Park house has a separate basement flat where I see my patients. “Most people put their nice harmless old mothers at the bottom of their houses, instead of using the space for a bunch of self-pitying whiners who bore on about their problems,” says Greg. The idea that Greg is able to put the words nice and harmless anywhere near the word mother is, in the light of his own female parent, frankly risible. Moreover, my “self-pitying whiners” helped see him through the last few years of medical school. But, being a GP, he doesn’t really have much patience for any sort of illness, and especially not for ones that have no obvious physical characteristics. The notion that people can feel better and happier by talking to a trained therapist causes him to roll his eyes in exasperated disbelief. “Why don’t they just talk to their friends instead of to a complete stranger like you?” We discuss my work as little as possible.
 
That morning, I’d said goodbye to Furious Frank, who has a little anger management problem we’ve been working on, and was enjoying the ten minutes between patients by looking out the window and watching feet crunch autumn leaves as they passed. Summer was over, but I didn’t feel my usual desolation in the face of the impending season of mists.
 
The doorbell rang with a familiar nagging insistence. It was Gloomy Gina, who has been coming to see me for five years.
 
(“Do you think they know about the names you give them?” my friend Ruthie recently asked me. “Of course not,” I’d answered. “You’re the only other person who knows. It’s just my gallows humor, an affectionate shorthand for differentiating between them.” I hadn’t always been so cynical. At twenty-eight, I’d been the youngest person to qualify at the British Association of Psychotherapists and had always been dedicated to my work. Just lately, though, the gloss seemed to have faded and I often felt I was only going through the motions.)
 
Gina is rarely able to see the good side of a person or a situation and makes me feel like Pollyanna in comparison. She’d been much happier recently, as she was soon to marry and hadn’t yet found much wrong with Jim, her fiancé, although, God knows, she’d tried. By her standards, she’d been positively jubilant for the past three months. That day, however, her pretty face had a pre-Jim look about it. Something was up.
 
“I’ve been thinking,” she began. Always a bad start with Gina. “This is it. I’ll never sleep with another man again. I’ll never know that excitement and mystery of discovering someone for the first time, of having that first kiss, of waking up together full of the wonder of newness.”
 
I wanted to say, Don’t be silly, he could die, you might get divorced, you could have an affair, but I didn’t. Instead, I suddenly realized, Oh, my God, I’ve never thought of marriage like that. In that instant, like a painful and unexpected blow to the head, the seed of betrayal took root in my own breast.
 
I’m afraid I barely listened to anything Gina said for the rest of that session. I even felt a twinge of guilt when I took her check, but only the slightest twinge; after all, she gets her money’s worth with all her after-hours phone calls and midnight panic attacks. Instead, I sat there nodding absently and staring at the wall behind her. The streaky, bubbling smears of the earth’s oozings that were rising damply up my basement wall mirrored my mood of growing unease perfectly. The day, which only moments before had felt bright and full of promise, now felt cloudy and damp. The sun had gone in.
 
Never again to feel the first kiss of a new lover? What was that e.e. cummings poem, something about liking your body when it’s with someone else’s, the thrill of “under me you so quite new”? I’ve always rather loved e.e., initially because he died the day and year I was born, September 3, 1962, which for an adolescent is a spooky coincidence, full of mystical significance. I felt we must have had an unique spiritual connection. For a while, I even thought that as his soul left his body at 1:15 A.M., the time of his death, it flew directly into mine as I opened my mouth to take my first breath at 3:23 A.M. Just over two hours seemed about the right amount of time for a soul to travel from the East Coast of the United States to Chalk Farm in London. Mainly I admired him because he was naughty enough to ignore capitals and muck around with grammar, something I was never able to get away with at my “grammar” school. I tried it, obviously, in my “the soul of e.e. cummings lives on in me and I’m going to be the world’s greatest living poetess” phase. But Miss Titworth, our English teacher, was a stickler for punctuation. She even made us verbally punctuate our spoken English. “Miss Titworth comma please may I be excused question mark.” This was the source of hours of witty schoolgirl repartee over crafty cigarettes in the cloakroom. “Miss Titworth comma how much are your tits worth question mark.”