Altered States Read Free

as part of our responsibility, and even Brian respects this. He would not dream of offering them more than an appreciative compliment. They in their turn are devoted to him, and are more at ease with him than they are with me. They seem to sense something not quite straightforward in my sternness, andthey are not wrong. The even landscape of my life became quite jagged for a time, and my equilibrium suffered for some time after that. It is not that they are frightened of me, rather that they are more at home with Brian and his affectionate and meaningless compliments. It is as if they sense that a compliment from me might have an undesirable weight. They are right. My conduct towards them is entirely proper, and I am not particularly interested in any one of them beyond their performance in the office. This confers on them a degree of immunity which they welcome. In this and other ways they negate my threat as a man, although they are clever enough to perceive this threat. It is as if they know that, left to myself, I could become a lonely fanatic. I believe that, apart from my mother, these excellent girls are the only ones to penetrate my disguise.
    But is it a disguise? I neither parade nor deny the fact that I suffered a grievous blow while still fairly young, and that I do not appear to be taking any steps to restoring my life to any sort of normality. This is what disconcerts me. They know that my wife died after only eleven months of marriage, and that our baby was stillborn. They know that I live alone in my flat in Wigmore Street and am quite kind to elderly acquaintances. They suppose my heart to be broken, although I give no sign of this, and they must surely be disarmed by the occasional bark of laughter that has been heard to issue from my office. This worries them, as well it might. They are more comfortable with my Robespierre-like impassivity as I wait patiently but without indulgence for female clients to put away their handkerchiefs. They have no access to my secret life, which is not one of licence, or sexual excess (would that it were!), but rather of emotional aberration. I have been in love, and was once in love for a very long time, but I claim no indulgence for these facts. I persuade myself that nobody knows about my love for Sarah, not evenBrian, but this is unlikely. Brian has always been supremely tactful; even at the height of my madness he had the grace to keep his comments to a minimum. Men are better at this than women. Perhaps it is an example of the sort of affection between men that women rarely understand.
    Although solitary by nature I should welcome a large family, the sort of panoply of odd relatives that surrounded me in childhood. Mad old ladies have never frightened me, although I have not had much success with younger ones. The first love of my life was my mother, a delightful woman by any standards, not merely my own. She was my father’s second wife, the first, always referred to as ‘poor Mary’, having died abruptly of a wasp sting to which she proved allergic. My mother was a friend of her daughter’s; her subsequent marriage to their father, many years older, was regarded as a scandal by the daughters, Sybil and Marjorie, and my mother was never truly forgiven, though relations of a kind were resumed some years later. The girls, as they were invariably known, seemed mysteriously older than my mother, although only a few years separated them, a consequence perhaps of the dreadful dignity they assumed whenever my mother tried to revive the friendship. But as they were incompetent they often had recourse to her counsel, particularly in later life, when my mother was a widow, a fact which seemed to mollify them.
    The girls were devoted to each other. Marjorie, who was lame and walked with a stick when I knew her, was presumably unrecognisable as the once dashing redhead she had been as a girl, when she owned and ran a dress shop in Dover Street. The day when she could no longer