The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna Page B

private practice alongside his position as a senior clinical psychologist at a London hospital. In his mother’s regard, he had outdone himself. Adrian, though, felt his career oscillate just short of its tipping point.
    Meanwhile there were new developments. Stress inoculation. Rewind technique. A practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming made his name with the publication of a theory he named emotional freedom technique. In America a woman psychologist developed a method called eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. Some among the fraternity dismissed it as quackery, though Adrian wondered if this wasn’t, at least in part, because the originator of the technique was both a woman and based in California. Adrian read all the available writings including those of the dissenters. The results, as published, were dramatic and nobody, not even the psychologist herself, whose name was Francine Shapiro, could entirely account for them. Out of sight of his colleagues Adrian attended a training course and on occasion had even practised the technique upon his private clients.
    Yet despite investing every effort in keeping abreast of new developments as his chosen field grew ever more populated, increasingly it felt to Adrian that the momentum of his career had dissipated.
    So when he saw the advertisement in the back of a professional journal for a government-sponsored psychologist to work overseas, Adrian had mailed an application to the address of the international health agency the same afternoon. He hadn’t mentioned it to Lisa. The post was for a six-week project. In the event his application failed and he’d not bothered Lisa with news of that either. Then, one Friday night, a voice faintly on the telephone from Rome. The successful applicant had been taken ill. Was Adrian free to go at short notice?
    Why there? Lisa had asked him, when he finally told her. She’d seemed neither pleased nor displeased, simply baffled. A civil war had placed the country in the news in the last year or so. Several times in the conversation Lisa transposed the name of the country to ‘Sri Lanka’ where a civil war was also being fought, though on an entirely different continent.
    The team had stuck together. Beneath a still surface upon which people shopped at the markets and went to work violence bubbled, erupting from time to time in the rural areas. There was a curfew from eight to eight. Nobody left the capital. Adrian enjoyed the camaraderie, the sensation of remote danger. On his return to England he had applied for a further posting and been accepted. When he told Lisa he included, in his account, the impression his return had been requested. She had not been happy and yet it could not be said she had been happy – for several years.
    The second time the plane was crowded. Groups of Europeans held conversations outside the toilets, in the aisles, across the backs of the seats. The Africans, for the most part, remained seated. Adrian knew nobody, though one or two among them ventured to ask his business. Or more precisely, with which agency he was working. Adrian’s brief amounted to not much more than the name of a hospital and the information they had requested an in-house psychologist. The hospital administrator, a woman in her forties, with hair pulled back into a knot from which it escaped at spiky angles, was new to her job and seemed unprepared for his arrival. Her brisk manner conveyed less regret at her own lack of readiness than a sense that his coming at this time was something of an inconvenience.
    Why? Lisa had asked him. Why this place? He had shrugged and told her there had been no choice. And that was partly the truth. The real truth was he’d always known this country’s name, never made the mistake of confusing it with an island nation thousands of miles away. When, for a few weeks one year, the country was briefly in the news, he knew a little more about it than most, at the very least he knew its