His living room, which until then had always seemed rather too dark, nearly as dark as the rest of the place, was now too light for him. He settled that by pulling down the dark-green blind to its fullest extent. The grey dimness of a wet afternoon now prevailed and, reclining on the sofa in much the same attitude as Dr Peacock had taken up, he phoned Dr Cotswold. Or tried to phone her. The voice he got was the receptionist's, which said she was with a patient but she would pass on his message and ask her to call him back. The call didn't come for almost an hour, the longest hour Joel thought he had spent for years. And when she did phone, though Joel had supposed Dr Peacock would have given her a careful report by now, she knew nothing about what had happened during his visit.
Would she come and see him? He had a lot to tell her.
'Today won't be possible,' she said.
'Tomorrow, then.' When she didn't answer immediately he said, 'Please.'
'I think you should come to me, Joel. Shall we say 12.30 when my last patient will have gone?'
'I will be your last patient, won't I?'
He could hear very little in the flat; with the windows shut, not even more than a faint hum from the traffic. He fetched the earplugs he had bought and, working the wax with his fingers, moulding two cone shapes, he inserted them into his ears. The peculiar silence that descended was unlike normal quiet but made him feel rather as if he were being smothered. He had to make a conscious effort to breathe but gradually the feeling went and he appreciated his new deafness. Now he was enclosed, sightless and without hearing, and he fell asleep. When he woke, two hours later, remaining in his dark cocoon, he found himself thinking about what he would say to Dr Cotswold next day. He would tell her about Amy, about his father and what had divided them so terribly and irrevocably.
The netsuke lion and the monkey had turned up. Much to Eugene's gratification and gratitude, a shopkeeper in Westbourne Grove had found them in the gutter and handed them in at the police station. He wanted to reward Mr Siddiqui but the shopkeeper refused his offers and said being able to return these valuable objects to their owner was reward enough. A Crime Protection officer had made an appointment to come round to Chepstow Villas and advise Eugene on sensible measures that should be taken to make his house more secure.
'Keeping a light on in the garden, I expect they'll say,' said Ella, 'and putting bars on the french windows and making sure the side gate is bolted on the inside. Where's the side gate key, by the way? I can't find it.'
'Oh, God, I've no idea. That will be something else they'll bully me about, no doubt.'
'They won't bully you, darling. They're only being helpful.'
'If you say so, Ella. I shall hate having them poking about the place. Shall we talk about something else? Like our wedding?'
This had been provisionally fixed for October and since neither of them had been married before, why not have a church wedding?
'I'd prefer something quiet,' Ella said. 'Church would be a big affair, wouldn't it?'
'But I'd love a big affair. With me in a morning coat and you looking beautiful in a white frothy dress like a meringue and masses of flowers and all our friends and relations there. And a big lunch somewhere grand. Where shall we go for our honeymoon?'
'Italy?'
'Well, I was thinking of Sri Lanka,' said Eugene.
The robbery had been a setback. If his life had proceeded in tranquillity, everything pleasant and anxiety kept to a minimum, he was sure he could have kept up his abstinence. He had kept it up throughout their weekend and if he had drunk rather more than usual, so had Ella, and there had been something sweet and companionable about saying, 'I really mustn't have another one, darling,' yet having one just the same, and she replying, but with a laugh, that they must watch it or they would both be on their way to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Then they had come home to discover the burglary. From the first moment of being aware of the loss of his netsuke he had felt on his indrawn breath an urgent desire for a Chocorange. He needed it for comfort when he saw what was missing and, though he made light of it to Ella, remembered the large sum of money he had paid for the gold and peridot necklace. It was Sunday, nowhere was open – well, nowhere in the vicinity that sold the things. If Ella hadn't been there he would have been off to a Tesco or a Superdrug. The temptation, the longing, would have been too compelling to resist. Instead, he had had to suffer a worse deprivation than he had known at any previous time of Chocorange shortage. He craved, he longed. Secretly – but how secret was it really? – he took sips of whisky throughout the evening until he dared take no more.
The only way to handle it, he decided next morning, a hangover throbbing at his temples, was not to think. No thinking, just doing, and doing meant walking swiftly down to Elixir the moment they opened and stocking up with five packets of Chocorange. The relief was so great that he went on not thinking. No self-reproach, no recrimination, just abandonment to this wonderful solace. Next day he replenished his stocks in the kitchen drawer by a visit to the shop in Spring Street and the day after that up to Golborne Road. Packets inside plastic bags went into the bottom drawer of the cabinet in the guest bathroom and another lot in the drawing-room bookcase behind the novels of E. M. Forster. Far from troubling him, he laughed with delight when he counted twenty-two packets carefully stowed away for the future.
Euphoria lasted four days. On the fifth day, after asking himself (while Ella slept) if he was going mad, he resolved that this couldn't go on.
It was no use saying, as he had yesterday, that he would never be without them again. He must be without them. With the wedding set for October, he had four months and a bit to begin the phasing out. For phasing out was the way. His mistake had been this cold turkey business. If he had been gradually giving up, when he came back from his weekend away, there would have been, say, half a packet in the house and he could have allayed his stress by sucking one that evening and another perhaps in the night. That was the way. If the worst came to the worst he could just go away on his honeymoon with a single packet of Chocorange in his baggage to tide him over. Easy. Why, he might even have conquered his habit before that. Nothing, he told himself, sucking his twelfth of the day, could be more likely.
'How did you get on with Dr Peacock?'
'I don't know,' Joel said. 'She just made me tell her about Mithras coming back from hell with me and when I'd done she made me tell her all over again. I thought she'd ask me about my father. I thought they always asked people about their fathers.'
They were in Ella's surgery. She had been hoping to meet Eugene for lunch but this would have to be cancelled. Joel, who clearly had only a hazy idea of time, had been fifteen minutes late and evidently intended to spend a long time with her.
'Perhaps you should ask Dr Peacock if you can talk about your relations with your father.'
'I'd rather tell you.'
'Let me just make a phone call.'
Although it must have been plain to him that Ella was phoning her fiancé to tell him she couldn't keep their lunch date and plain too from Ella's responses that the fiancé was very disappointed, Joel showed no sign of intending to curtail his story or even postpone its telling. And when she put down the phone he launched straight into it. 'I want to tell you because you're sympathetic. You understand things. It happened like this, oh, years ago. I was sixteen…'
'Just a minute, Joel. I have to tell you again, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm a doctor of medicine. I'm not qualified to practise as a psychiatrist. You know that, don't you?'