Therapy

by David Lodge

  I’ve never regretted it. The car is a joy to drive. I’m only sorry that Mum and Dad aren’t around any more, so I can’t give them a spin in it. I feel the need for someone to reflect back to me my pride of ownership. Sally’s no use for that – to her a car is just a functional machine. Amy has never even seen the vehicle, because I don’t drive to London. My children, on their occasional visits, regard it with a mixture of mockery and disapproval – Jane refers to it as the “Richmobile” and Adam says it’s a compensation for hair-loss. What I need is an appreciative passenger. Like Maureen Kavanagh, for instance, my first girlfriend. Neither of our families could afford to run a car in those far-off days. A ride in any kind of car was a rare treat, intensely packed with novel sensations. I remember Maureen going into kinks when my Uncle Bert took us to Brighton one bank holiday in his old pre-war Singer that smelled of petrol and leather and swayed on its springs like a pram. I imagine driving up to her house in my present streamlined supercar and glimpsing her face at the window all wonder; and then she bursts out of the front door and bounds down the steps and jumps in and wriggles about in her seat with excitement, trying all the gadgets, laughing and wrinkling up her nose in that way she had, and looking adoringly at me as I drive off. That’s what Maureen used to do: look adoringly at me. Nobody ever did it since, not Sally, not Amy, not Louise or any of the other women who’ve occasionally made a pass at me. I haven’t seen Maureen for nearly forty years – God knows where she is, or what she’s doing, or what she looks like now. Sitting beside me in the car she’s still sweet sixteen, dressed in her best summer frock, white with pink roses on it, though I’m as I am now, fat and bald and fifty-eight. It makes no kind of sense, but that’s what fantasies are for, I suppose.

  The train is approaching Euston. The conductor has apologized over the PA system for its late arrival, “which was due to a signalling failure near Tring”. I used to be a closet supporter of privatizing British Rail, before the Transport Minister announced his plans to separate the company that maintains the track from the companies that run the trains. You can imagine how well that will work, and what wonderful alibis it will provide for late-running trains. Are they mad? Is this Internal Derangement of the Government?

  Actually, I read somewhere that John Major has a dodgy knee. Had to give up cricket, apparently. Explains a lot, that.

  Wednesday 10.15 p.m. Amy has just left. We came back to the flat from Gabrielli’s to watch “News at Ten” on my little Sony, to keep abreast of the global gloom (atrocities in Bosnia, floods in Bangladesh, drought in Zimbabwe, imminent collapse of Russian economy, British trade deficit worst ever recorded), and then I put her in a cab back to St John’s Wood. She doesn’t like to be out late if she can help it, on account of Zelda, though her lodger, Miriam, a speech therapist with a conveniently quiet social life, keeps an eye on the girl when Amy is out in the evenings.

  Now I’m alone in the flat, and possibly in the whole building. The other owners, like me, are only occasionally in residence – there’s a long-haul air hostess, a Swiss businessman whose job requires him to shuttle between London and Zürich, accompanied by his secretary and/or mistress, and a gay American couple, academics of some kind, who only come here in university vacations. Two flats are still unsold, because of the recession. I haven’t seen anybody in the lift or hall today, but I never feel lonely here, as I sometimes do at home during the day, when Sally is at work. It’s so quiet in those suburban streets. Whereas here it is never quiet, even at night. The growl and throb of buses and taxis inching up the Charing Cross Road in low gear carry faintly through the double glazing, punctuated occasionally by the shrill ululation of a police car or ambulance. If I go to the window, I look down on pavements still thronged with people coming out of theatres, cinemas, restaurants and pubs, or standing about munching takeaway junk food or swigging beer and coke from the can, their breath condensing in the cold night air. Very rarely does anyone raise their eyes from the ground level of the building, which is occupied by a pizza & pasta restaurant, and notice that there are six luxury flats above it, with a man standing at one of the windows, pulling the curtain aside, looking down at them. It isn’t a place where you would expect anybody to live, and indeed it wouldn’t be much fun to do so three hundred and sixty-five days a year. It’s too noisy and dirty. Noise not just from the traffic, but also from the high-pitched whine of restaurant ventilator fans at the back of the building that never seem to be turned off, and dirt not just in the air, which leaves a fine sediment of black dust on every surface though I keep the windows shut most of the time, but also on the ground, the pavement permanently covered with a slimy patina of mud and spittle and spilt milk and beer dregs and vomit, and scattered over with crushed burger boxes, crumpled drinks cans, discarded plastic wrappers and paper bags, soiled tissues and used bus tickets. The efforts of the Westminster Borough street-cleaners are simply swamped by the sheer numbers of litter-producing pedestrians in this bit of London. And the human detritus is just as visible: drunks, bums, loonies and criminal-looking types abound. Beggars accost you all the time, and by 10 p.m. every shop doorway has its sleeping occupant. “Louche” was Amy’s verdict on the ambience (or, as she would say, ambiance)when I first brought her here, but I’m not sure that’s the right word. (I looked it up, it means shifty and disreputable, from the French word for squint.) The porn and peepshow district is half a mile away. Here second-hand bookshops and famous theatres jostle with fastfood outlets and multicinemas. It’s certainly not your conventional des. res. area, but as a metropolitan base for an out-of-towner like me, the situation is hard to beat. London is a midden anyway. If you have to live here you’re better off perched on the steaming, gleaming pinnacle of the dunghill, instead of burrowing your way up and down through all the strata of compacted old shit every morning and evening. I know: I’ve been a London commuter in my time.

  When we moved to Rummidge from London twelve years ago, because of Sally’s job, all my friends regarded me with ill-concealed pity, as if I was being exiled to Siberia. I was a bit apprehensive myself, to be honest, never having lived north of Palmer’s Green in my life (apart from Army Basic Training in Yorkshire, and touring when I was a young actor, neither of which really counts as “living”) but I reckoned that it was only fair to let Sally take the chance of a career move from schoolteaching to higher education. She’d worked bloody hard, doing an M.Ed. part-time while being Deputy Head of a Junior School in Stoke Newington, and the advertisement for the lectureship in the Education Department at Rummidge Poly was bang on the nose of her research field, psycholinguistics and language acquisition (don’t ask me to explain it). So she applied and got the job. Now she’s Principal Lecturer. Maybe she’ll be a Professor one day, now that the Poly has become a University. Professor Sally Passmore: it has a ring to it. Pity about the name of the University. They couldn’t call it the University of Rummidge because there was one already, so they called it James Watt University, after the great local inventor. You can bet your life that this rather cumbersome title will soon be shortened to “Watt University”, and imagine the conversational confusion that will cause. “What university did you go to?” “Watt University.” “Yes, what university?” “Watt University.” And so on.

  Anyway, I was a bit apprehensive about the move at the time, we all were, the kids too, having always lived in the South-East. But the first thing we discovered was that the price we got for our scruffy inter-war semi in Palmer’s Green would buy us a spacious five-bedroomed detached Edwardian villa in a pleasant part of Rummidge, so that I could have a study of my own for the first time in our married life, looking out on to a lawn screened by mature trees, instead of the bay window of our lounge with a view of an identical scruffy semi across the street; and the second thing we discovered was that Sally and the kids could get to their college and schools with half the hassle and in half the time they were used to in London; and the third thing we discovered was that people were still civil to each other
outside London, that shop assistants said “lovely” when you gave them the right change, and that taxi-drivers looked pleasantly surprised when you tipped them, and that the workmen who came to repair your washing-machine or decorate your house or repair your roof were courteous and efficient and reliable. The superior quality of life in Britain outside London was still a well-kept secret in those days, and Sally and I could hardly contain our mirth at the thought of all our friends back in the capital pitying us as they sat in their traffic jams or hung from straps in crowded commuter trains or tried in vain to get a plumber to answer the phone at the weekend. Our luck changed in more ways than one with the move to Rummidge. Who knows whether The People Next Door would have ever seen the light of studio if I hadn’t met Ollie Silver at a civic reception Sally had been invited to, just when Heartland were looking for a new idea for a sitcom …

  When Jane and Adam left home to go to University we moved out to Hollywell, a semi-rural suburb on the southern outskirts of the city – the stockbroker belt I suppose it would be called in the South-East, only stockbrokers are rather thin on the ground in the Midlands. Our neighbours are mostly senior managers in industry, or accountants, doctors and lawyers. The houses are all modern detached, in different styles, set well back from the road and bristling with burglar alarms. It’s green and leafy and quiet. On a weekday the loudest noise is the whine of the milk float delivering semi-skimmed milk and organic yoghurt and free-range eggs door-to-door. At the weekend you sometimes hear the hollow clop of ponies’ hoofs or the rasp of Range-Rover tyres on the tarmac. The Country Club, with its eighteen-hole golf course, tennis courts, indoor and outdoor pools and spa, is just ten minutes away. That’s the main reason we moved to Hollywell – that and the fact that it’s conveniently close to Rummidge Expo station.

  The station was built fairly recently to serve the International Exhibition Centre and the Airport. It’s all very modern and hi-tech, apart from the main Gents. For some reason they seem to have lovingly reconstructed a vintage British Rail loo in the heart of all the marble and glass and chromium plate, complete with pee-up-against-the-wall zinc urinals, chipped white tiles, and even a rich pong of blocked drains. Apart from that, it’s a great improvement on the City Centre station, and is twelve minutes nearer London for me. Because, of course, if you’re in any branch of show business, you can’t keep away from London entirely. Heartland record in their Rummidge studios as a condition of their franchise – bringing employment to the region and all that – but they have offices in London and rehearse most of their shows there because that’s where most actors and directors live. So I’m always up and down to Euston on good old BR. I bought the flat three years ago, partly as an investment (though property prices have fallen since) but mainly to save myself the fatigue of a return journey in one day, or the alternative hassle of checking in and out of hotels. I suppose at the back of my mind also was the thought that it would be a private place to meet Amy.

  Lately I’ve come to value the privacy, the anonymity of the place even more. Nobody on the pavement knows I’m up here in my cosy, centrally-heated, double-glazed eyrie. And if I go down into the street to get a newspaper or pick up a pint of milk from the 24-hour Asian grocery store on the corner, and mingle with the tourists and the bums and the young runaways and the kids up from the suburbs for an evening out and the office workers who stopped for a drink on the way home and decided to make a night of it, and the actors and catering workers and buskers and policemen and beggars and newspaper vendors – their gaze will slide over me without clicking into focus, nobody will recognize me, nobody will greet me or ask how I am, and I don’t have to pretend to anyone that I’m happy.

  Amy came to the flat straight from work and we had a couple of g & t’s before going round the corner to Gabrielli’s for a bite to eat. Sometimes, if she comes here from home, she brings one of her own dishes from her deep-freeze, moussaka, or beef with olives or coq au vin, and heats it up in my microwave, but usually we eat out. Very occasionally she invites me to dinner at her house and lays on a super spread, but it’s always a dinner party, with other people present. Amy doesn’t want Zelda to get the idea that there’s anything special about her relationship with me, though I can’t believe the kid doesn’t suspect something, seeing her mother sometimes going out in the evening dressed to kill and carrying a container of home-made frozen food in one of her smartly gloved hands. “Because I hide it in my handbag, stupido,” Amy said, when I raised this question once. And it’s true that she carries an exceptionally large handbag, one of those soft Italian leather scrips, full of female paraphernalia (or should I just say paraphernalia?) – lipsticks and eyeliner, face-powder and perfume, cigarettes and lighters, pens and pencils, notebooks and diaries, aspirin and Elastoplast, Tampax and panti-liners, a veritable life-support system, in which a plastic container of frozen moussaka could be concealed without much difficulty.

  I was replacing a phutted lightbulb when Amy buzzed the entryphone, so I was slow to push the button that brought her comically distorted face, all mouth and nose and eyes, swimming into view on the videoscreen in my microscopic hall. “Hurry up, Lorenzo,” she said, “I’m dying for a pee and a drink, in that order.” One of the things I like about Amy is that she never calls me Tubby. She calls me by a lot of other familiar names, but never that one. I pushed the button to open the front door, and moments later admitted her to the flat. Her cheek was cold against mine as we embraced, and I inhaled a heady whiff of her favourite perfume, Givenchy, eddying round her throat and ears. I hung up her coat and fixed drinks while she went to the bathroom. She emerged a few minutes later, lips gleaming with freshly applied lipstick, sank into an armchair, crossed her fat little legs, lit a cigarette, took her drink and said, “Cheers, darling. How’s the knee?”

  I told her it had given me one bad twinge today, in the train.

  “And how’s the Angst?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, come, sweetheart! Don’t pretend you don’t know what Angst is. German for anxiety. Or is it anguish?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. “You know I’m hopeless at languages.”

  “Well anyway, how have you been? Apart from the knee.”

  “Pretty bad.” I described my state of mind over the last few days in some detail.

  “It’s because you’re not writing.” She meant script-writing.

  “But I am writing,” I said. “I’m writing a journal.”

  Amy’s black eyes blinked with surprise. “What on earth for?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It started with something I did for Alexandra.”

  “You should write something that will take you out of yourself, not deeper in. Is there going to be another series?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “I had lunch about it with Jake. How was your day?”

  “Oh awful, awful,” she said grimacing. Amy’s days are invariably awful. I don’t think she’d be really happy if they weren’t. “I had a row with Zelda at breakfast about the pigsty state of her room. Well, c’est normal. But then Karl’s secretary called to say he couldn’t see me today because of a sore throat, though why he should cancel just because of a sore throat I don’t know, because sometimes he doesn’t say anything by choice, but his secretary said he had a temperature too. So of course I’ve been on edge all day like a junkie needing a fix. And Michael Hinchcliffe, whose agent told me he was ‘technically available’ for that BBC spy serial, and would have been wonderful in the part, has taken a film offer instead, the sod. Not to mention Harriet’s latest clanger.” Harriet is Amy’s partner in the casting agency. Her long-standing relationship with a man called Norman has just broken up and she is consequently unable to think straight and is apt to weep uncontrollably when speaking to clients on the phone. Amy said she would tell me about Harriet’s latest clanger when I had told her about my lunch with Jake, so we went out and settled ourselves at our usual table in Gabrielli’s first.

  Jake En
dicott is the only agent I ever had. He wrote to me when he heard a sketch of mine on the radio, yonks ago, and offered to take me on. For years nothing much happened, but then I struck oil with The People Next Door and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was his number one client now. He had booked a table in the back room at Groucho’s, under the glass roof. It’s his kind of place. Everybody is there to see and be seen without letting on that that’s what they’re there for. There’s a special kind of glance that habitués have perfected I call the Groucho Fast Pan, which consists of sweeping the room with your eyes very rapidly under half-lowered lids, checking for the presence of celebrities, while laughing like a drain at something your companion has just said, whether it’s funny or not. I had imagined it was just going to be a social lunch, a bit of gossip, a bit of mutual congratulation, but it turned out that Jake had something significant to report.

  When we had ordered (I chose smoked duck’s breast on a warm salad of rocket and lollo rosso, followed by sausage and mash at a price that would have given my poor old Mum and Dad a heart-attack apiece) Jake said, “Well, the good news is, Heartland want to commission another two series.”