The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

part of the grown-up Rabih and Kirsten insists that the beloved must control far
more of the world than any human being in an adult relationship possibly could,
which is what generates such anger and frustration when problems nevertheless
arise.
Kirsten takes Rabih into her arms. “If only I could do something, I would,”
she says, and Rabih looks sadly and kindly at her, recognizing as if for the first
time an essential solitude he is faced with that remains utterly impervious to
love. He isn’t angry with her; he is panicked and battered by events. To be a
better husband, he recognizes, he will have to learn to place a little less of the
wrong, destructive sort of hope in the woman who loves him. He must be readier
to expect to be, where it counts, all alone.

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Teaching and Learning
Rabih’s job carries on, though proper security remains elusive. Most of his and
Kirsten’s friends get married and start to have children, and their social life
evolves to become ever more concentrated around other couples. There are half
a dozen or so that they see on a regular rotating basis, usually at one another’s
houses over supper or for lunch (with babies) on the weekend.
There is warmth and companionship among them but also, beneath the
surface, a fair amount of comparison and boasting. There are frequent
competitive allusions to jobs, holidays, house-improvement plans, and the first
children’s milestones.
Rabih affects a defiant, thick-skinned stance with regard to the jostling and the
scorekeeping. He frankly concedes to Kirsten that they aren’t the highest-status
couple, but then quickly adds that it doesn’t matter in the least: they should be
pleased with what they have. They don’t live in a small gossipy village; they can
go their own way.
It’s almost one in the morning on a Saturday, and they’re in the kitchen,
clearing up the dishes, when Kirsten remarks that she learnt over pudding that
Clare and her husband, Christopher, are going to be renting a place in Greece for
the whole summer: a villa with its own pool and a garden with a sort of private
olive grove. She’ll be there the whole time, he’ll commute down. It sounds out
of this world, she says, but it must cost a bloody fortune—unimaginable, really;
it’s astonishing what a surgeon can earn these days.
For Rabih, the comment niggles. Why does his wife care? Why aren’t their
own holidays (in a small cottage in the Western Isles) enough? How could they
ever afford anything even approaching the cost of a villa rental on their salaries?
This isn’t the first such statement she’s made in this vein. There was something a
week or so ago about a new coat she’d reluctantly had to renounce; then an
admiring account of a weekend in Rome that James had invited Mairi on; and,
only yesterday, an awestruck report about two friends’ sending their children to
private school.
Rabih would love for her to relinquish this tendency. He wants her to take
pride in herself without reference to her place in a meaningless pecking order,
and to appreciate the nonmaterial richness of their life together. He wants her to
prize what she has rather than ache for what is missing. But because it’s well

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past his bedtime and this is an inflammatory topic around which he has plenty of
his own anxieties, his proposal comes out in a less nuanced and less persuasive
form than he might have wished.
“Well, darling, I’m so sorry I’m not a high-rolling surgeon with a villa.” He
can hear the sarcasm in his voice—he knows at once the effect it will have, but
he cannot stop himself. “Shame you’re stuck here in the slums with me.”
“Why are you having a go at me? And so late as well,” retorts Kirsten. “I was
just saying they’re going on holiday, you dober, and immediately, out of
nowhere, in the middle of the night, you switch to attacking me—as if you’d
been waiting to pounce on me. I remember a time when you weren’t always so
critical of things I said.”
“I’m not critical. I just care about you.”