A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George Page B

bad, there had been mornings when he’d managed to muster enough energy to shove from his chest the hundredweight that seemed to flatten him to the mattress. On those days, he did go out. And while he found himself largely incapable of meeting with clients, he was able to walk the streets, to stare at his surroundings, and to try to make sense of stories he read in discarded broadsheets and tabloids on the occasions that he stopped for a coffee. But what he read, he quickly forgot, just as he also forgot where he had been and what he had seen.
    Life continued around him. Traffic roared into the City in the morning and out of the City in the afternoon. Pavements were crowded with office workers, shop assistants, and skulking young men in black hoodies and jeans. The markets in Middlesex Street and Goulston Street continued to thrive. All of this seemed so curious to Charlie. His own life had ground to a halt, so it was difficult to take in the reality that for everyone else, the struggle went on.
    That’s what it was, he’d decided. An eternal struggle to come to terms with realities that shifted from day to day. One day you were going about your business, secure in the illusion that you had arrived at the exact point for which you’d been aiming. The next day, you found yourself on a runaway train about to derail. He had known this was possible, of course, considering the years of study that had goneinto his making as a psychotherapist. But the level at which he knew it was the level at which he applied it to other people and not to himself. Yet he should have understood all along how fragile was the ice on which he had established his life because every human being’s life was a fragile thing. He should also have been prepared that at any moment his world would tilt on its axis in such a way that only by clinging desperately to a few familiar items within it would he keep himself from sliding off his personal planet and into oblivion.
    After Will’s death, he’d clung to India. Then, when she’d left him, he’d clung to his remaining clients. When those tortured souls had finally moved on to find someone who actually listened to their weekly tales of woe instead of observing them blankly, he’d begun to cling to his home.
    Art Deco, India had called it. Charlie, Charlie, we must have it! The smallest flat they’d seen, it was perfect crown mouldings and stunning bookshelves. It was pristine railings and hardwood floors and glossy tiles. It was Egyptian revival and razzle-dazzle, and they should have walked out of the place the moment after they had walked in. But she’d been desperate for it, and he’d wanted to please her after the extremes she’d gone to just to please him. To please his mother, actually. For it had seemed so crucial at the time that Caroline Goldacre approve of India.
    What anyone else thought of Charlie’s choice of mate didn’t matter to him. But Caroline’s approval had been paramount. India had questioned this, but not enough.
Why
had she been so docile? he wondered. Why hadn’t she tried to fight him?
    But he more or less knew the answer to this. One always ended up living to please his mother. One didn’t even see the change in oneself as pleasing her became a way of life.
    He was thinking of this when he heard a key unlock the door to the flat. He was in the kitchen, where on the wall he had mounted a small whiteboard on which he kept a record of his daily activities. Prior to Will’s death there had been need for this, for Charlie was an inveterate volunteer on mornings or afternoons or evenings when he had no clients. He walked dogs from the Battersea home, he worked a suicide hotline—wasn’t
that
a bloody good joke, he thought—heread to pensioners with failing vision in care homes, he helped a group of disadvantaged kids maintain an allotment south of the river. But these pursuits had become too overwhelming. One at a time, he’d given them up and when the flat door