by David Lodge
“And what’s the bad news?” I asked.
“The bad news is that Debbie wants out.” Jake looked anxiously at me, waiting for my reaction.
It wasn’t exactly a bombshell. I knew that the present series was the last Debbie Radcliffe had contracted for, and I could well believe that she was getting tired of spending more than half of every year making The People Next Door. Sitcom is hard work for actors. It’s the weekly rep of TV. The schedule for The People Next Door is: readthrough on Tuesday and rehearse Wednesday to Friday in London, travel up to Rummidge on Saturday, dress-rehearse and record there on Sunday, day off on Monday, and start again with the next script on Tuesday. It wipes out the actors’ weekends, and if filming on location is required that sometimes takes up their day off. They’re well paid, but it’s a gruelling routine and they dare not get ill. More to the point: for an actress like Deborah Radcliffe, the character of Priscilla Springfield must have ceased to be a challenge some time ago. True, she’s free to do live theatre for about four months a year, between series, but that’s not quite long enough for a West End production and anyway Sod’s Law would ensure that the parts she wanted didn’t come up when she was available. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that she wanted her freedom. Jake, needless to say, didn’t see it that way. “The ingratitude of people in this profession …” he sighed, shaking his head and twisting a sliver of gravadlax on the end of his fork in a puddle of dill sauce. “Who ever heard of Deborah Radcliffe before The People Next Door, apart from a few people on the RSC mailing list? We made her a star, and now she’s just turning her back on us. Whatever happened to loyalty?”
“Come off it, Jake,” I said. “We’re lucky that we’ve had her this long.”
“Thank me for that, my boy,” said Jake. (He’s actually ten years younger than me, but he likes to play the father in our relationship.) “I pressured Heartland into writing a four-year retainer into her renewal contract, after the first series. They would have settled for three.”
“I know, Jake, you did well,” I said. “I suppose this isn’t just a ploy by her agent to up her fee?”
“That was my first thought, naturally, but she says she wouldn’t do it for double.”
“How can we have another series without Debbie?” I said. “We can’t cast another actress. The audience wouldn’t accept it. Debbie is Priscilla, as far as they’re concerned.”
Jake allowed the waiter to refill our wine glasses, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I spoke to the people at Heartland about that. David Treece, Mel Spacks and Ollie. Incidentally, this is completely confidential, Tubby. Are you going to rehearsal tomorrow? Then don’t breathe a word. The rest of the cast know nothing about Debbie leaving. Heartland want you to do a rewrite on the last script.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it. But you’re going to have to write Debbie out of the series.”
“You mean, kill off Priscilla?”
“Good God, no. This is a comedy series, for Chrissake, not drama. No, Priscilla’s got to leave Edward.”
“Leave him? Why?”
“Well, that’s your department, old son. Perhaps she meets another fella.”
“Don’t be daft, Jake. Priscilla would never desert Edward. It’s just not in her nature.”
“Well, women do funny things. Look at Margaret. She left me.”
“That’s because you were having an affair with Rhoda.”
“Well, maybe Edward could have an affair with someone to provoke Priscilla into divorcing him. There’s your new character!”
“It’s not in Edward’s nature either. He and Priscilla are the archetypal monogamous couple. They’re about as likely to split up as Sally and me.”
We argued for a while. I pointed out that the Springfields, in spite of their trendy liberal opinions and cultural sophistication, are really deeply conventional at heart, whereas the next-door Davises, for all their vulgarity and philistinism, are much more tolerant and liberated. Jake knew this already, of course.
“All right,” he said at last. “What do you suggest?”
“Perhaps we should call it a day,” I said, without premeditation. Jake nearly choked on his sautéd sweetbreads and polenta.
“You mean, kill the show at the end of this series?”
“Perhaps it’s reached the end of its natural life.” I wasn’t sure whether I believed this, but I discovered to my surprise that I wasn’t unduly bothered by the prospect.
Jake, though, was very bothered. He dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “Tubby, don’t do this to me. Tell me you’re joking. The People Next Door could run for another three series. There are a lot of golden eggs still to come out of that goose. You’d be cutting your own throat.”
“He’s right, you know,” Amy said, when I related this conversation to her over supper (in the light of the Groucho lunch, I confined myself virtuously to one dish, spinach canelloni, but poached from Amy’s dessert, a voluptuous tiramisu). “Unless you’ve got an idea for another series?”
“I haven’t,” I admitted. “But I could live quite comfortably on the money I’ve already earned from The People Next Door.”
“You mean, retire? You’d go mad.”
“I’m going mad anyway,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” said Amy. “You don’t know what mad means.”
When we had thoroughly discussed the ins and outs and pros and cons of trying to go on with The People Next Door without Deborah Radcliffe, it was Amy’s turn to tell me about her day in more detail. But I’m ashamed to say that now I come to try and record that part of our conversation, I can’t remember much about it. I know that Harriet’s latest clanger was sending the wrong actress to an interview at the BBC, causing great offence and embarrassment all round, but I’m afraid my mind wandered fairly early on in the relation of this story, and I failed to register the surname of the actress, so that when I came to again, and Amy was saying how furious Joanna had been, I didn’t know which Joanna she was talking about and it was too late to ask without revealing that I hadn’t been listening. So I had to confine myself to nodding and shaking my head knowingly and making sympathetic noises and uttering vague generalizations, but Amy didn’t seem to notice, or if she noticed, not to mind. Then she talked about Zelda, and I don’t remember a word of that, though I could make it up fairly confidently, since Amy’s complaints about Zelda are always much the same.
I didn’t tell Amy the whole of my conversation with Jake. At the end of the meal, while we were waiting for the waiter to come back with the receipted bill and Jake’s platinum credit card, he said casually, fast-panning round the room and waving discreetly to Stephen Fry, who was just leaving, “Any chance of borrowing your flat next week, Tubby?” I assumed he had some foreign client arriving whom he wanted to put up, until he added, “Just for an afternoon. Any day that suits you.” He caught my eye and grinned slyly. “We’ll bring our own sheets.”
I was shocked. It’s less than two years since Jake’s marriage to Margaret ended in an acrimonious divorce and he married his then secretary, Rhoda. Margaret had become a kind of friend, or at least a familiar fixture, over the years, and I’ve only recently got used to Jake going to functions or staying for the occasional weekend accompanied by Rhoda instead. He could see from my expression that I was disturbed.
“Of course, if it’s inconvenient, just say so …”
“It’s not a matter of convenience or inconvenience, Jake,” I said. “It’s just that I’d never be able to look Rhoda straight in the eye again.”
“This doesn’t affect Rhoda, believe me,” he said earnestly. “It’s not an affair. We’re both happily married. We just have a common interest in recreational sex.”
“I’d rather not be involved,” I said.
“No problem,” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Forget I ever asked.” He added, with a trace of anxiety, “You won’t mention it to Sally?”
“No, I won’t. But isn’t it about time you packed it in, this lark?”
“It keeps me feeling young,” he said complacently. He does look young, too, for his age, not to say immature. He’s got one of those faces sometimes described as “boyish”: chubby cheeks, slightly protuberant eyes, snub nose, a mischievous grin. You wouldn’t call him good-looking. It’s hard to understand how he manages to pull the birds. Perhaps it’s the eager, puppyish, tail-wagging energy he seems to have such endless reserves of. “You should try it, Tubby,” he said. “You’ve been looking peaky lately.”
When we sat on the sofa together to watch News at Ten, I put my arm round Amy’s back and she leaned her head against my shoulder. It’s the furthest we ever go in physical intimacy, except that our goodbye kiss is always on the lips; it seems safe to go that far when we’re parting. We don’t neck while we’re sitting on the sofa, nor have I ever attempted any squeezing or stroking below the neckline. I admit that I sometimes wonder what Amy would look like naked. The image that comes into my mind is a slightly overweight version of that famous nude by whatsisname, the Spanish bloke, old master, he did two paintings of the same woman reclining on a couch, one clothed, one naked, I must look it up. Amy is always so dressed, so thoroughly buttoned and zipped and sheathed in her layers of carefully coordinated clothing that it’s hard to imagine her ever being completely naked except in the bath, and even then I bet she covers herself with foam. Divesting Amy of her clothes would be a slow and exciting business, like unpacking an expensively and intricately wrapped parcel, rustling with layers of fragrant tissue paper, in the dark. (It would have to be in the dark – she told me one of her problems with Saul was his insistence on making love with the lights on.) Whereas Sally’s clothes are loose and casual, and so few and functional that she can strip in about ten seconds flat, which she frequently does after coming home from work, walking around upstairs stark naked while doing humdrum domestic tasks like changing the sheets or sorting the laundry.
This train of thought is proving rather arousing, but unprofitably so, since Sally is not here to slake my lust and Amy wouldn’t even if she were. Why do I only seem to get horny these days in London, where my girlfriend is contentedly chaste, and almost never at home in Rummidge, where I have a partner of tireless sexual appetite? I don’t know.
“You should try it, Tubby.” How does Jake know I haven’t tried it? It must show in my body language, somehow. Or my face, my eyes. Jake’s eyes light up like an infra-red security scanner every time a pretty girl comes within range.
I suppose the nearest I came to trying it in recent memory was with Louise, in L.A., three or four years ago, when I went out for a month to advise on the American version of The People Next Door. She was a “creative executive” in the American production company, a Vice-President in fact, which isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds to a British ear, but pretty good all the same for a woman in her early thirties. She was my minder and intermediary with the scriptwriting team. There were eight writers working on the pilot. Eight. They sat round a long table drinking coffee and Diet Coke, anxiously trying out gags on each other. As the company had bought the rights they could do anything they liked with my scripts, and they did, throwing out most of the original storylines and dialogue and retaining only the basic concept of incompatible neighbours. It seemed to me that I was being paid thousands of dollars for almost nothing, but I wasn’t complaining. At first I used to attend the script conferences and brainstorming sessions dutifully, but after a while I begin to think my presence was only an embarrassment and a distraction to these people, who seemed engaged in some desperately competitive contest from which I was happily excluded, and my participation became more and more a matter of stretching out on a lounger beside the pool of the Beverly Wilshire and reading the draft scripts which Louise Lightfoot brought to me in her smart, leather-trimmed canvas script satchel. She used to come back at the end of the day in her little Japanese sports coupé to collect my notes, and drink a cocktail, and more often than not we would eat together. She had recently split up with a partner and “wasn’t seeing anybody” and I, marooned in Beverly Hills, was very glad of her company. She took me to the “in” Hollywood restaurants and pointed out the important producers and agents. She took me to movie previews and premières. She took me to art galleries and little theatres and, on the grounds that it would help me understand American television, to more plebeian places of resort: drive-in Burger Kings and Donut Delites, ten-pin bowling alleys, and on one occasion a baseball game.
Louise was small but shapely in build. Straight bobbed brown hair which always shone and swung as if it had been freshly washed, which it invariably had been. Perfect teeth. Is there anybody in Hollywood who hasn’t got perfect teeth? But Louise needed them, because she laughed a lot. It was a resonant, full-bodied laugh, rather a surprise given her petite figure and general style of poised professional career woman; and when she laughed she threw back her head and shook it from side to side, making her hair fan out. I seemed to be able to produce this effect very easily. My wry little British digs at Hollywood manners and Californiaspeak tickled Louise. Naturally, for a scriptwriter there is nothing more gratifying than having an attractive and intelligent young woman helpless with laughter at your jokes.
One warm evening towards the end of my stay, we drove down to Venice to eat at one of the shoreside fish places they have there. We ate outside on the restaurant’s deck to watch the sun set on the Pacific in a vulgar blaze of Technicolor glory, and sat on in the gloaming over coffee and a second bottle of Napa Valley Chardonnay, with just a small oil-lamp flickering between us on the table. For once I wasn’t trying to make her laugh, but talking seriously about my writing career, and the thrill of making the breakthrough with The People Next Door. I paused to ask if I should order some more coffee and she smiled and said, “No, what I’d like to do now is take you back to my place and fuck your brains out.”
“Would you really?” I stalled, grateful for the semi-darkness as I struggled to arrange my thoughts.
“Yep, how does that grab you, Mr Passmore?” The “Mr Passmore” was a joke, of course – we had been on first-name terms since Day One. But that was how she always referred to me when speaking to other people in the company. I had heard her doing it on the phone. “Mr Passmore thinks it’s a mistake to make the Davises a Latino family, but he will defer to our judgement. Mr Passmore thinks the scene beginning page thirty-two of the twelfth draft is overly sentimental.” Louise said it was a mark of respect in the industry.
“It’s very sweet of you, Louise,” I said, “and don’t think that I wouldn’t like to go to bed with you, because I would. But, to coin a phrase, I love my wife.”
“She would never know,” said Louise. “How could it hurt her?”
“I’d feel so guilty it would probably show,” I said. “Or I’d blurt it out one day.” I sighed miserably. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, it’s no big deal, Tubby, I’m not in love with you or anything. Why don’t you get the check?”
Driving me back to my hotel she said suddenly, “Am I the only girl you’ve had these scruples about?” and I said I’d always had them, and she said, “Well, that makes me feel better.”
I didn’t sleep much that night, tossing and turning in my vast bed at the Beverly Wilshire, wondering whether to call Louise and ask if I could have second thoughts, but I didn’t; and although we saw each other again on several occasions it was never quite the same, she was gradually backing away instead of coming closer. She drove me to the airport at the end of my stay and kissed me on the cheek and said, “’Bye, Tubby, it’s been great.” I agreed enthusiastically, but I spent most of the flight home wondering what I’d missed.
Time to go to bed. I wonder what they’ll be showing on the Dream Channel tonight. Blue movies, I shouldn’t wonder.
Thursday morning, 18th Feb. The video entryphone in the flat is connected to a camera in the porch which gives you a choice of two sh
ots: a close-up of the face of the person ringing your bell, and a wide shot of the porch, with the street in the background. Sometimes in idle moments I press the button for the wide shot to have a look at the people passing or pausing on the pavement. It gives me ideas for characters – you see all types – and I suppose there’s a certain childish, voyeuristic pleasure in using the gadget. It’s like an inverted periscope. From my cosy cabin high above the ground I scan life on the scruffy surface: tourists frowning over their street-maps, young girls too vain to cover their skimpy going-out gear with topcoats clutching themselves against the cold, young bucks in leather jackets scuffling and nudging each other, infatuated couples stopping in mid-stride to kiss, bumped by impatient men with briefcases hurrying to catch a train at Charing Cross.
Last night, for no particular reason, I pressed the button as I was going to bed, and blow me if there wasn’t someone kipping down for the night in the porch. I suppose it’s surprising it hasn’t happened before, but it’s a very small square space not big enough for a grown man to lie down in without his feet sticking out onto the pavement. This bloke was sitting up inside his sleeping-bag, with his back against one wall and his feet against the other, and his head sunk on his chest. He looked young, with a pointed, foxy face and long, lank hair falling down over his eyes.
I felt quite shocked to see him there, then angry. What a nerve! He was taking up the whole porch. It would be impossible to go in or out without stepping over him. Not that I wanted to go in or out any more that night, but one of the other residents might turn up, and in any case it lowered the tone of the property to have him camped there. I thought about going downstairs and telling him to push off, but I was already in pyjamas and I didn’t fancy confronting him in dressing-gown and slippers or alternatively going to the trouble of dressing myself again. I thought of phoning the police and asking them to move him on, but there’s so much serious crime in this part of London that I doubted whether they would be bothered to respond, and anyway they would want to know if I had already requested him to move on myself. I stood there, staring at the fuzzy black and white image, wishing that sound as well as vision could be activated from inside the flat on the entryphone, so that I could bark, “Hey, you! Piss off!” through the loudspeaker, and watch his reaction on the video screen. I smiled at the thought, then felt a bit of a bastard for smiling.