It was my first brother, Anthony, who showed me my father's love–letters to our housemaid. He had rummaged them out of a cardboard box in the attic. I have no idea whether these love–letters were ever actually received; or whether, Victorian–style, they had been received and returned, betokening impossibility or rejection. Perhaps they had never been sent, and were simply my father's way of giving expression to his forbidden feelings.

My therapist, a tall, thin, basketball player of a man, holds me with his glittering eye. He exudes superiority, much as he tries to conceal it under a professional mien. His smugness tells me I am considerably below his level in the matter of figuring out and coping with life and society. Already I nurture strong feelings of hostility towards him which, if I revealed them, he would regard as an indication that the therapy is progressing well: the unconscious ‘transference’ on to him of my feelings towards my father is well under way. But somehow I know in my heart and soul that I dislike him for himself. I am also convinced that he dislikes me, because I am not compliant enough to his theories. I have told him that I see my life as a simple matter: I will struggle on, and then die. His professional ego, however, will be satisfied only by a transformation, an unleashing of buried potential, a change in the internal structure of my personality. If ever I get angry and aggressive in his clinic, it will be with him, not with him–as–my–father.

On the other hand, he has set me an interesting exercise in relation to my father's love–letters: to write about how I felt the day Anthony showed them to me.

I don't know if I had any emotion at the time. Certainly not a very clear one. Perhaps a dull or smothered feeling of disappointment, a sense that my father's rejection of me was once more confirmed. Perhaps I didn't want to believe the evidence or know what to make of it. How could it be that this was the world I was emerging into, a world where fathers were capable of betrayal, where my father was capable of betraying me, where children lived perpetually on the edge of betrayal?

I don't think that the question Will my father leave us and run away with Barbara? ever crossed my mind.