The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

particular honesty what he feels beneath the everyday turbulence. The plan is
hazy, but he is hopeful.
The family are all in the kitchen, where there’s a tense discussion unfolding
about fruit. Both of the children are flatly refusing to have any despite Kirsten
having been out to buy some blueberries especially and laid them out on a plate
in the shape of a smiling face. William accuses his mother of being mean, Esther
wails that the smell of the fruit is making her ill.
Rabih attempts a joke about having missed being in the asylum, ruffles
William’s hair, and suggests it might be time for stories upstairs. Rabih and
Kirsten alternate reading to them in the evenings, and tonight it’s her turn. In
their room she pulls them close to her, one on each side, and begins a story,
translated from the German, about a rabbit pursued by hunters in a forest. Seeing
them huddled against her reminds Rabih of how it used to be with his own
mother. William likes to play with Kirsten’s hair, pushing it right forward, just
as Rabih used to do. When the story is over, they want more, so she sings them
an old Scottish lullaby, “Griogal Cridhe,” which tells the tragic tale of a young
widow whose husband was taken prisoner and executed in front of her by her
own clan. He sits on the landing, moved, listening to Kirsten’s voice. He feels
privileged to have witnessed his wife’s evolution into an exceptionally
competent mother. She, at this point, would above all love a beer.
Rabih goes to lie down on their bed. Half an hour later he hears Kirsten enter
the bathroom. When she emerges, it is in the tartan dressing gown that she has

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had since she was fifteen and which she used to wear a lot when the children
were very small. He is starting to wonder how he might begin when she
mentions a phone call she had that afternoon with a friend in the United States
whom she knew as a student at Aberdeen. The poor woman’s mother has been
diagnosed with esophageal cancer; the verdict came out of the blue. Not for the
first time he senses what a good friend Kirsten is and how deeply and
instinctively she enters into the needs of others.
Then Kirsten mentions that she has been thinking about the children’s
university education. It is a long way off still, but that’s exactly the point. Now is
the time to start putting something aside: not much—they are squeezed—but
enough to build into a useful sum eventually.
Rabih clears his throat and, somewhere inside, becomes a little desperate.
We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would
happen only once, at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn’t
possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one
another, like marrying, securing a joint mortgage, buying a house, having a few
children, and naming each other in their wills.
Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren’t
exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there’s
been a break—a day away, a busy period, an evening at work—for every
interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we
are still wanted.
It’s therefore a pity how hard it is to find a stigma-free and winning way of
admitting to the intensity of our need for reassurance. Even after years together,
there remains a hurdle of fear around asking for a proof of desire. But with a
horrible, added complication: we now assume that any such anxiety couldn’t
legitimately exist. Hence the temptation to pretend that reassurance would be the
last thing on our minds. We might even, strangely, have an affair, an act of