2006-05-10
Apologies to those that read the posting from late last Friday night. Things happened. I was exceptionally down, and unusually self pitying. And inevitably drunk.
There you go, there it went. I’m OK-ish now and grateful to those who have been in touch with kind words. For once, I’ll leave unsaid what the problem was, suffice it to say it had nothing to do with the long-running theme of this and the preceding diary.
But this does. Jo called yesterday morning, back in the UK for only twelve hours and sounding, I have to say, rather good. She’s not certain she will be back at work next Monday: there’s rather a lot to arrange between now and then in arranging nursery cover, getting some dental treatment she decided she couldn’t afford in America, and other things to do with her sadly deteriorated health. Generally she’s been keeping those problems at bay through the winter, but they certainly haven’t gone away. We discussed how she’s going to manage to do her physiotherapy while she’s here – this seems to involve lying down and somehow massaging her lungs (I can’t even picture how that’s done! Although part of me wants to try). There is a sick room in the basement but I don’t know what the facilities are.
And then we talked about what work she might be doing. And I told her how I’d thought of one distinct area she might tackle alone, although it might mean working at another office in the city for a day a week or so.
J: ‘That might help things at home a bit’
K: ‘I wondered if it might.’
J: ‘It’s already been mentioned today as a problem’
Meaning, of course, that Dave’s been making his feelings (understandably) felt (?) about her coming back to work near me. I’m sure she won’t want him knowing that we’re next to each other. And as a measure of her fear she started asking about practical things like how she can control who picks up the phone when she’s not at her desk – there were problems before with Mike being a bit cavalier when answering the phone to Dave.
So all in all an arrangement where she worked somewhere else would suit him better, and as it’s a place that has scope for parking might help her out in childcare arrangements.
And why am I thinking along these lines? Why am I doing anything other than trying to have her here as much as I can? I think it’s because I’m scared.
Scared? Well apprehensive certainly that we won’t find an amicable way to be less than we were, because both of us know that after a year apart, and six months of cooling before that, we can never go back to that. I’m scared that the problems that her being here will cause at home will start her back down the (justifiable) path of being angry with me. Worried too that any tension between us will spill over into the way others around us react – I just don’t want to go back to all that feeling of them against us if there is no discernible ‘us’ to help us both through it. And obviously I’m concerned about unwanted contact with Dave.
But of course more than anything I want to do anything that prevents him treating her badly. Her life may have been a little lonely in America, and I don’t know anything of how the relationship turned out while they were there, but I suspect the fact that I was thousands of miles away will have eased the pressure on one front at least. Now I’ve become an issue again. And that could cause pain.
So I’ll do what I can to help, even if it means I’ll see less of her. We didn’t get into whether we can still go for walks at lunchtime (I fear not – now we’re in the centre of town she’ll be scared that there will be friends of Dave’s who might potentially see us), or how we can be friends to each other in any sense.
But the effect of her voice in my ear was the same as it always was.