Dr. Simms remained silent for a while, gazing our of the window, then she shifted in her chair and said, “Just be careful, Margaret. Just be careful. You seem to be under a lot of stress. Now, shall we begin? I believe last time we were talking about your family.”

Maggie remembered. It was their fourth session, and the first time they’d touched on Maggie’s own family background. Which surprised her. She’d been expecting Freudian questions about her relationship with her father right from the start, even though Dr. Simms had insisted she wasn’t a Freudian analyst.

They were sitting in a small office overlooking Park Square, a peaceful, elegant bit of eighteenth-century Leeds. Birds sang in the trees among the pink and white blossoms, and students sat on the grass reading or simply enjoying the sun again after yesterday’s rain. Most of the humidity seemed to have cleared away and the air was crisp and warm. Dr. Simms had her window open, and Maggie could smell flowers from the window box; she didn’t know what kind, but they were flowers, all right, red and white and purple. She could just see the top of the town hall dome over the trees and elegant facades of the houses on the opposite side of the square.

The place was just like a doctor’s office, Maggie thought, or at least an old-style doctor’s office, with a solid desk, diplomas on the wall, fluorescent lights, filing cabinets and bookcases full of psychological journals and textbooks. There was no couch; Maggie and Dr. Simms sat in armchairs, not facing each other, but at a slight angle so that eye contact was easy but not mandatory, cooperative rather than confrontational. Dr. Simms had been recommended by Ruth, and so far she was turning out to be a real find. In her mid-fifties, solidly built, matronly, even, and with a severe look about her, she always wore old-fashioned Laura Ashley-style clothes, and her blue-gray hair was lacquered into whorls and waves that looked razor-sharp. Appearances to the contrary, Dr. Simms had the kindest, most compassionate manner Maggie could wish for, without being soft. For she certainly wasn’t soft; sometimes she was downright prickly, especially if Maggie – whom she always called Margaret for some reason – got her defenses up or started whimpering.

“There was never any violence in the home when we were growing up. My father was strict, but he never used his fists or his belt to discipline us. Neither my sister Fiona nor me.”

“So what did he do for discipline?”

“Oh, the usual things. Grounded us, stopped our pocket money, lectured us, that sort of thing.”

“Did he raise his voice?”

“No. I never heard him yell at anyone.”

“Did your mother have a violent temper?”

“Good Lord, no. I mean, she might get mad and shout if Fiona or I did something annoying, like not tidying up our rooms, but it’d be all over and forgotten in no time.”

Dr. Simms put her fist under her chin and rested on it. “I see. Let’s get back to Bill, shall we?”

“If you like.”

“No, Margaret, it’s not for me to like. It’s for you to want.”

Maggie shifted in her chair. “Yes, all right.”

“You told me in our previous session that you’d seen signs of his aggressiveness before you were married. Can you tell me more about that?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t directed toward me.”

“Toward whom was it directed? The world in general, perhaps?”

“No. Just some people. People who screwed up. Like waiters or delivery men.”

“Did he beat them up?”

“He got mad, lost his temper, yelled at them. Called them idiots, morons. What I meant was that he channeled a lot of aggression into his work.”

“Ah, yes. He’s a lawyer, right?”

“Yes. For a big firm. And he wanted to make partner very badly.”

“He’s competitive by nature?”

“Very. He was a high-school sports star, and he might have ended up playing professional football if he hadn’t ripped his knee apart in a championship game. He still walks with a slight limp, but he hates it if anyone notices it and mentions it. It doesn’t stop him playing with the firm’s softball team. But I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

Dr. Simms leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Margaret, I want you to see, to understand, where your husband’s anger and violence come from. They didn’t come from you; they came from him. They didn’t come out of your family background in any way, either. They came from his. Only when you see that, when you see that it was his problem and not yours, will you start to believe that it wasn’t your fault, and will you find the strength and courage to go on and live your life as fully as you can, rather than continue in this shadow existence you have at the moment.”

“But I already see that,” Maggie protested. “I mean, I know it was his aggression, not mine.”

“But you don’t feel it.”

Maggie felt disappointed; Dr. Simms was right. “Don’t I?” she said. “I suppose not.”

“Do you know anything about poetry, Margaret?”

“Not much, no. Only what we did at school, and one of my boy-friends at art college used to write me stuff. Terrible drivel, really. He just wanted to get in my pants.”

Dr. Simms laughed. Another surprise, for it came out as a loud, horsey guffaw. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem called ‘Dejection: An Ode.’ It was partly about his inability to feel anything, and one of the quotes that has always stuck in my mind was when he wrote about looking at the clouds, the moon and the stars and ended up saying, ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.’ I think that applies to you, Margaret. And I think you know it. Intellectual awareness of something, through reason, does not guarantee emotional acceptance. And you are a very intellectual person, despite your obvious creative inclinations. If I were a Jungian, which I am not, I would probably classify you as the introverted, thinking type. Now tell me more about this courtship.”

“There’s not much to tell.” A door opened and closed out in the corridor. Two male voices rose and fell. Then only the birdsongs and the sounds of distant traffic on The Headrow and Park Lane remained. “I suppose he swept me off my feet,” she went on. “It was about seven years ago, and I was just a young art school graduate without a career, still wet behind the ears, hanging out with the artsy crowd in bars and arguing philosophy in Queen Street West pubs and coffeehouses, thinking one day some rich patron would appear and discover my genius. I’d had a few affairs in college, slept with a few boys, nothing satisfactory, then along came this tall, dark, intelligent, handsome man in an Armani suit who wanted to take me to concerts and expensive restaurants. It wasn’t the money. That wasn’t it at all. Not even the restaurants. I wasn’t even eating much then. It was his style, his panache, I suppose. He dazzled me.”

“And did he prove to be the patron of the arts you’d been dreaming of?”

Maggie looked down at the scuffed knees of her jeans. “Not really. Bill was never very much interested in the arts. Oh, we had all the requisite subscriptions: symphony, ballet, opera. But somehow I…”

“Somehow you what?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I’m being unfair. But I think maybe it was just some sort of a business thing. Being seen. Like going to a client’s box at the Skydome. I mean, he’d be excited about going to the opera, for example, take ages getting dressed up in his tux and fuss about what he wanted me to wear, then we’d have drinks in the members’ bar beforehand, rub shoulders with colleagues and clients, all the local bigwigs. But I just got the impression that the music itself bored him.”

“Did any problems manifest themselves early on in your relationship?”

Maggie twisted her sapphire ring around her finger, the “freedom” ring she had bought after she had thrown Bill’s wedding and engagement rings into Lake Ontario. “Well,” she said, “it’s easy to identify things as problems in retrospect, isn’t it? Claim that you saw it coming, or should have, after you’ve found out where things were leading. They might not have seemed strange at the time, might they?”