Wendy Perriam in 1979

I first consulted Robin in the 1970s, for marriage-guidance counselling, with my husband. However, after two or three sessions, the latter opted out, so I began seeing Robin on my own. Soon, I became completely obsessed with him, veering between ecstatic love, lustful longing and murderous fury. This was a very difficult period in my life, when I was struggling with depression, insomnia and infertility, while also trying to renovate a large wreck of a house (dry rot and no floorboards!) and be a loving mother to two stepchildren, whose own mother had multiple sclerosis and was in the Hospital for Incurables at Roehampton.

Eventually, I landed in hospital myself, partly due to the whole rollercoaster of psychotherapy itself and to Robin's disconcerting switches from intimacy to aggression. The only thing I salvaged from the experience was these, my "Robin" poems, written in a sort of creative madness.

To Robin D

marriage-guidance counsellor

You are the incarnation of kindness.
Softly, you blow blue smoke rings
across the charged room,
lassooing our anger.
With your cigarette scalpel
you gently probe wounds
too festering
for more sadistic surgery.

Quietly, you shake our life down,
like an overstuffed duvet.
Your slow smile
douses our snarl; your
lullaby fingers
straighten our bent lines
and, reluctantly, like tamed
but still predatory beasts,
we feed at your hand. 

As the butts topple the ashtray
(your lungs atoning for our lives),
you usher us tactfully away-
‘Same time?  Same day?'-
and I catch the pale, pained eye
of my enemy-husband.
Inexorably,
we are both re-sharpening
our knives.