The Course of Love by Alain de Botton Page B

relationship, however, a warning light had come on.
    It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes—hopes which will thereby be endangeredall the more.
    Rabih resigns himself to being partially misunderstood—and, unconsciously, to blaming his wife for not accepting those sides of his nature that he lacks the courage to explain to her. Kirsten, for her part, settles for never daring to ask her husband what is really going on in his sexual mind outside of her role in it, and chooses not to look very hard at why it is that she feels so afraid to find out more.
    As for the raven-haired subject of Rabih’s fantasy, her name doesn’t come up in conversation again for a long while, until one day Kirsten returns with some news after having a coffee at the Brioschi Café. Antonella has moved up north to work as the head receptionist at a small luxury hotel in Argyll, on the western coast, and has fallen deeply in love with one of the housekeepers there, a young Dutch woman to whom—much to her parents’ initial surprise but also eventual delight—she plans to get married in a few months’ time in a big ceremony in the town of Apeldoorn, information that Rabih receives with an almost convincing show of complete indifference. He has chosen love over libido.

Transference
    Two years into their marriage, Rabih’s job remains precarious, vulnerable to an unsteady workflow and clients’ sudden changes of mind. So he feels especially pleased when, at the start of January, the firm wins a large and long-term contract across the border in England, in South Shields, a struggling town two and a half hours southeast of Edinburgh by train. The task is to redevelop the quayside and a derelict hodgepodge of industrial sheds into a park, a café, and a museum to house a local maritime artifact, the Tyne , the second-oldest lifeboat in Britain. Ewen asks Rabih if he will head up the project—a distinct honor, yet one which also means that for half a year he will have to spend three nights a month away from Kirsten. The budget is tight, so he makes his base in South Shields’s Premier Inn, a modestly priced establishment sandwiched between a women’s prison and a goods yard. In the evenings he has supper by himself at the hotel restaurant, Taybarns, where a side of mutton sweats under the lamps of a carving station.
    During his second visit there, the local officials prevaricate onassorted issues. Everyone is too terrified to make big decisions and blames delays on a range of incomprehensible regulations; it’s a miracle they have even managed to get this far. There’s a vein in Rabih’s neck that throbs at such moments. Shortly after nine, pacing the plastic carpet in his socks, he calls Kirsten from his maroon and purple room. “Teckle,” he greets her. “Another day of mind-numbing meetings and idiots from the council causing trouble for no good reason. I miss you so much. I’d pay a lot for a hug from you right now.” There’s a pause—he feels as if he could hear the miles that separate them—then she replies in a flat voice that he has to get his name put on the car insurance before the first of February, adding that the landlord also wants to speak to them about the drain, the one on the garden side—at which point Rabih repeats, gently but firmly, that he misses her and wishes they could be together. In Edinburgh, Kirsten is curled up at one end—“his” end—of the sofa, wearing his jumper, with a bowl of tuna and a slice of toast on her lap. She pauses again,