A Fatal Attachment by Robert Barnard Page B

have happy times together as kids, Robert, you and I, didn’t we?”
    â€œWe did. Goodbye, Jamie.”
    She shook his hand, watched him as he went out to the battered old Volkswagen, which no longer seemed such an amusing little car, only a symbol of his failures, and then shut the door without a wave of the hand.
    She went back into the sitting room, and began to fix herself another drink. She rejected gin—somehow too maudlin a drink for her present mood—and poured herself a stiff whisky. Altogether a sturdier, more combative drink.Odd that Jamie should drink it now. Because he was one of nature’s wimps, and a human disaster-area to boot. She added a little water to the glass and stood reflectively by the mantelpiece.
    It did not please her that Jamie had come to live near her—did not please her at all. He was known in the area—they had spent their brief married life in a village not far from Bly, in a tiny house owned by her parents—and he had friends here, or had had. People would recognise him, and they would talk. She was one of the local notables: she was reviewed at length in the quality Sunday newspapers, and occasionally consented to be interviewed on radio or television. Hitherto she had been a writer with a brief marriage in her past. Now she was a woman with an ex-husband in the vicinity. It was not a change for the better, not a change that Lydia liked.
    Because Jamie was not only a failure—he was one of her failures. He would be living and ever-present proof of the fallibility of her judgment—and in the most important decision of her life, as many people would see it. She had faced this fact within days of marrying him: when he had told her that his “job in the City” had been merely a “taking on trial” by a brokerage firm for a salary hardly more than nominal. He had shared with her his feeling that the trial had not been a success, and his judgment was confirmed within a fortnight. He was out of a job. As he was to be twice again in their brief marriage.
    She had tried to give him backbone, perseverance, self-confidence. She had tried encouragement, exhortation, pushing, nagging. He had remained a well-disposed bumbler. If he’s like this at twenty-four, she had thought with dread, what will he be like at fifty-five? “You’ll never change him,” Robert had said to her, the night before he left to trek across the Central Australian desert. “He accepts the things that happen to him, he never makes them happen. You’ll have to take him as he is. He’s nothing like me.” The next evening she had told Jamie that their marriage had not been a success and she wanted him to move out. He had nodded and said she was probably right. Within a week he was gone, and for the next few years she had heard occasional pieces of news about him, mainly from his parents, whom he moved back with when he was down on his luck and out from when something turned up. For years she had heard nothing at all.
    Suddenly she remembered that she had been momentarily reminded, even now, of Robert. And then something else occurred to her: Jamie’s demeanour during their interview had not been at all what might have been expected. Hehad not been in the least apologetic or hangdog: there was nothing of the whipped cur, not in his carriage or his words. He had accepted his long log of failure with resigned dignity—even with amusement. When her words had been cutting he had registered them, but he had not been cut. He had not been in the least humble. He had smiled at her. Had he, even, smiled at her? Been, somehow, amused by her? Been showing tolerance of her and her ways? That was, somehow, what his style and stance had suggested. The idea was insupportable.
    Especially when coupled with another one: that Jamie, belatedly and astonishingly, had been brought to normality and maturity by another woman. That a