by David Lodge
I looked again at the words packed inside the head. I’m not bereaved (or not very recently – Mum died four years ago, and Dad seven), I’m not unemployed, I have plenty of money, I’m not separated or divorced, and I could pay off my mortgage tomorrow if I wanted to, but my accountant advised me against because of the tax relief. The only way I qualify for a nervous breakdown is under Health, though I suspect MIND was thinking of something more life-threatening than Internal Derangement of the Knee.
I skimmed through the rest of the letter: “Suicide … psychosis … halfway house … helpline …” After the final appeal for money, there was a PS: “You can let the air out of the balloon now. And as you do so, please think about how quickly the pressure of someone’s problems can be released with the time, care, and special understanding your gift will give today.” I let the balloon go and it rocketed round the room like a madly farting bluebottle for a few seconds before hitting a window pane and collapsing to the floor. I got out my charity chequebook and sent MIND £ 36 to provide somebody with a specially trained mental health nurse for a morning.
I could do with one myself today.
Last night, after Sally came in, we talked in the kitchen as she made herself a cup of hot chocolate, and I had a scotch. Or rather I talked, and she listened, rather abstractedly. She was feeling languorously euphoric from her sauna and seemed to have more than usual difficulty in focusing on my professional problems. When I announced that the lines about abortion had been cut from this week’s script, she said, “Oh, good,” and although she saw from my expression that this was the wrong response, she typically proceeded to defend it, saying that The People Next Door was too light-hearted a show to accommodate such a heavy subject – exactly Ollie’s argument. Then, when I told her that the future of the show was threatened by Debbie’s intention of leaving at the end of the present series, Sally said, “Well, that will suit you, won’t it? You can do something new with another producer prepared to take more risks than Ollie.” Which was quite logical, but not particularly helpful, since I don’t have an idea for a new show, and am unlikely to get one in my present state.
Sally ran her finger round the inside of her cup and licked it. “When are you going to bed?” she said, which is her usual way of suggesting that we have sex, so we did, and I couldn’t come. I had an erection, but no climax. Perhaps it was the scotch, on top of the beer, I don’t know, but it was worrying, like working a pump handle and getting nothing out of the spout. Sally came – at least I think she did. I saw a programme on television the other night in which a lot of women were sitting round talking about sex and every one of them had faked orgasm on occasion, either to reassure their partners or to bring an unsatisfactory experience to a conclusion. Perhaps Sally does too. I don’t know. She went off to sleep happily enough. I heard her breathing settle into a deep, slow rhythm before I dropped off myself. I woke again at 2.35 with the collar of my pyjama jacket damp with sweat. I felt a great sense of foreboding, as if there was something unpleasant I had forgotten and had to remember. Then I remembered: now I had Internal Derangement of the Gonads on top of all my other problems. I contemplated a life without sex, without tennis, without a TV show. I felt myself spiralling down into the dark. I always think of despair as a downward spiral movement – like an aeroplane that loses a wing and falls through the air like a leaf, twisting and turning as the pilot struggles helplessly with the controls, the engine note rising to a high-pitched scream, the altimeter needle spinning round and round the dial towards zero.
Reading through that last entry reminded me of Amy’s odd question, “How’s your Angst?” and I looked the word up. I was slightly surprised to find it in my English dictionary: “1. An acute but unspecific sense of anxiety or remorse. 2. (In Existentialist philosophy) the dread caused by man’s awareness that his future is not determined, but must be freely chosen.” I didn’t fully understand the second definition – philosophy is one of the bigger blank spots in my education. But I felt a little shiver of recognition at the word “dread”. It sounds more like what I suffer than “anxiety”. Anxiety sounds trivial, somehow. You can feel anxious about catching a train, or missing the post. I suppose that’s why we’ve borrowed the German word. Angst has a sombre resonance to it, and you make a kind of grimace of pain as you pronounce it. But “Dread” is good. Dread is what I feel when I wake in the small hours in a cold sweat. Acute but unspecific Dread. Of course I soon think of specific things to attach it to. Impotence, for instance.
It has to happen sometime, of course, to every man. Fifty-eight seems a bit premature, but I suppose it’s not impossible. Sooner or later, anyway, there has to be a last time. The trouble is, you’ll only know when you discover that you can’t do it any more. It’s not like your last cigarette before you quit smoking, or your last game of football before you hang up your boots. You can’t make a special occasion of your last fuck because you won’t know it is your last one while you’re having it; and by the time you find out you probably won’t be able to remember what it was like.
I just looked up Existentialism in a paperback dictionary of modern thought. “A body of philosophical doctrine that dramatically emphasizes the contrast between human existence and the kind of existence possessed by natural objects. Men, endowed with will and consciousness, find themselves in an alien world of objects which have neither.” That didn’t seem much of a discovery to me. I thought I knew that already. “Existentialism was inaugurated by Kierkegaard in a violent reaction against the all-encompassing absolute Idealism of Hegel.” Oh, it was, was it? I looked up Kierkegaard. “Kierkegaard, Søren. Danish philosopher, 1813–55. See under EXISTENTIALISM.”
I looked up Kierkegaard in another book, a biographical dictionary. He was the son of a self-made merchant and inherited a considerable fortune from his father. He spent it all on studying philosophy and religion. He was engaged to a girl called Regine but broke it off because he decided he wasn’t suited to marriage. He trained to be a minister but never took orders and at the end of his life wrote some controversial essays attacking conventional Christianity. Apart from a couple of spells in Berlin, he never left Copenhagen. His life sounded as dull as it was short. But the article listed some of his books at the end. I can’t describe how I felt as I read the titles. If the hairs on the back of my neck were shorter, they would have lifted. Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Dread – they didn’t sound like titles of philosophy books, they seemed to name my condition like arrows thudding into a target. Even the ones I couldn’t understand, or guess at the contents of, like Either/Or and Repetition, seemed pregnant with hidden meaning designed especially for me. And, what do you know, Kierkegaard wrote a Journal. I must get hold of it, and some of the other books.
Friday evening. Acupuncture at the Wellbeing Clinic this afternoon. Miss Wu began, as she always does, by taking my pulse, holding my wrist between her cool damp fingers as delicately as if it were the stem of a fragile and precious flower, and asked me how I was. I was tempted to tell her about my ejaculation problem last night, but chickened out. Miss Wu, who was born in Hong Kong but brought up in Rummidge, is very shy and demure. She always leaves the room while I strip to my underpants and climb on to the high padded couch and cover myself with a cellular blanket; and she always knocks on the door to check that I’m ready before she comes back in. I thought she might be embarrassed if I mentioned my seminal no-show, and to tell you the truth I didn’t fancy the idea of needles being stuck in my scrotum. Not that she normally puts the needles where you might expect, but you never know. So I just mentioned my usual symptoms and she put the needles in my hands and feet, as she usually does. They look a bit like the pins with coloured plastic heads that are used on wall-maps and notice-boards. You feel a kind of tingling jolt when she hits the right spot, sometimes it can be as powerful as a low-voltage electric shock. There’s definitely something to this acupuncture business, though whether it does you any lasting good, I don’t know. I
went to Miss Wu originally for my Internal Derangement of the Knee, but she told me frankly that she didn’t think she could do much about it except to assist the healing process by improving my general physical and mental health, so I settled for that. I feel better afterwards for the rest of the day, and maybe the next morning, but after that the effect seems to wear off. There’s a slightly penitential aspect to it – the needles do hurt a little, and you’re not allowed to drink alcohol on the day of the treatment, which is probably why I feel better for it – but I find Miss Wu’s infinitely gentle manner comforting. She always apologizes if a particularly strong reaction to the needle makes me jump; and when (very rarely) she can’t find the spot, and has to have several tries, she gets quite distressed. When she accidentally drew blood one day, I thought she would die of shame.
While the treatment is going on we chat, usually about my family. She takes a keen interest in the lives of Adam and Jane. Her questions, and my occasional difficulty in answering them, make me guiltily aware how little thought I give to my children these days, but they have their own lives now, independent and self-sufficient, and they know that if they are in serious need of money they only have to ask. Adam works for a computer software company in Cambridge, and his wife Rachel teaches Art History part-time at the University of Suffolk. They have a young baby so they’re completely taken up with the complex logistics of their domestic and professional lives. Jane, who did a degree in archaeology, was lucky enough to get a job at the museum in Dorchester, and lives in Swanage with her boyfriend Gus, a stonemason. They lead a quiet, unambitious, vegetarian life in that dull little resort and seem happy enough in a New Age sort of way. We see them all together these days only at Christmas, when we have them to stay in Hollywell. A tiny shadow of a frown passed across Miss Wu’s face when she realized from my remarks that Jane and Gus are not married – I guess that this would not be acceptable in her community. Well, I hope Jane will get married one day, preferably not to Gus, though she could probably do worse. Today I boldly asked Miss Wu if she expected to marry herself and she smiled and blushed and lowered her eyes, and said, “Marriage is a very serious responsibility.” She took my pulse again and pronounced that it was much improved and wrote down something in her book. Then she left the room for me to get dressed.
I left her cheque in a plain brown envelope on the little table where she keeps her needles and other stuff. The first time she treated me I made the mistake of taking out my wallet and crassly thrusting banknotes into her hand. She was very embarrassed, and so was I when I perceived my faux pas. Paying therapists is always a bit tricky. Alexandra prefers to do it all by mail. Amy told me that on the last Friday of every month when she goes into Karl Kiss’s consulting room there’s a little envelope on the couch with her bill in it. She picks it up and silently secretes it in her handbag. It is never referred to by either of them. It’s not surprising, really, this reticence. Healing shouldn’t be a financial transaction – Jesus didn’t charge for miracles. But therapists have to live. Miss Wu only charges fifteen quid for a one-hour session. I wrote her out a cheque for twenty, once, but this only caused more embarrassment because she ran after me in the car park and said I’d made a mistake.
When I was dressed she came back into the room and we made an appointment for two weeks’ time. Next Friday I have aromatherapy. Miss Wu doesn’t know that, though.
I’m game for almost any kind of therapy except chemotherapy. I mean tranquillizers, antidepressants, that sort of stuff. I tried it once. It was quite a long time ago, 1979. My first very own sitcom was in development with Estuary – Role Over, the one about a house-husband with a newly liberated, careerist wife. I was working on the pilot when Jake called me with an offer from BBC Light Entertainment to join the script-writing team for a new comedy series. It was a typical twist in the life of a freelance writer: after struggling for years to get my work produced, suddenly I was in demand from two different channels at once, I decided that I couldn’t do both jobs in tandem. (Jake thought I could, but then all he had to do was draw up two contracts and hold out two hands for his commission.) So I turned down the Beeb, since Role Over was obviously the more important project. Instead of just telephoning Jake, I wrote him a long letter setting out my reasons in minutely argued detail, more for my own sake than for his (I doubt if he even bothered to read it through to the end). But the pilot was a disaster, so bad that Estuary wouldn’t even expose it to the light of cathode tube, and it looked as if the series would never happen. Naturally I began to regret my decision about the BBC offer. Indeed “regret” is a ridiculously inadequate description of my state of mind. I was convinced that I had totally destroyed my career, committed professional suicide, passed up the best opportunity of my life etc. etc. I suppose, looking back, it was my first really bad attack of Internal Derangement. I couldn’t think about anything else but my fateful decision. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t read, couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t converse with anybody on anything for more than a few minutes before my thought process, like the stylus arm of a haunted record deck, returned inexorably to the groove of futile brooding on The Decision. I developed Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and went about drained of energy by the peristaltic commotion in my gut, fell exhausted into bed at ten-thirty and woke two hours later soaked in sweat, to spend the rest of the night mentally rewriting my letter to Jake demonstrating with impeccable logic why I could perfectly well work for the BBC and Estuary at the same time, and constructing other scenarios which turned back the clock and allowed me to escape in fantasy the consequences of my decision: my letter to Jake was lost, or returned to me unopened because wrongly addressed, or the BBC came back pleading with me to have second thoughts, and so on. After a week of this, Sally made me go and see my GP, a taciturn Scot called Patterson, not the one I have now. I told him about my restless bowels and sleeplessness, and guardedly admitted to being under stress (I wasn’t yet prepared to open the door on the raving madhouse of my mind to another person). Patterson listened, grunted, and wrote me out a prescription for Valium.
I was a Valium virgin – I suppose that was why the effect of the drug was so powerful. I couldn’t believe it, the extraordinary peace and relaxation that enveloped me like a warm blanket within minutes. My fears and anxieties shrank and receded and disappeared, like gibbering ghosts in the light of day. That night I slept like a baby, for ten hours. The next morning I felt torpid and mildly depressed in an unfocused sort of way. I dimly sensed bad thoughts mustering below the horizon of consciousness, getting ready to return, but another little pale green tablet zapped that threat, and cocooned me in tranquillity again. I was all right – not exactly in scintillating form either creatively or socially, but perfectly all right – as long as I was taking the pills. But when I finished the course, my obsession returned like a rabid Rottweiler freed from the leash. I was in an infinitely worse state than I had been before.
The addictive nature of Valium wasn’t fully appreciated in those days, and of course I hadn’t been taking it long enough to become addicted anyway, but I went through a kind of cold turkey as I struggled against the temptation to go back to Patterson and ask for another prescription. I knew that if I did so, I would become totally dependent. Not just that, but I was sure that I would never be able to write as long as I was on Valium. Of course I couldn’t write while I was off it, either, at the time, but I had a kind of intuition that eventually the nightmare would pass of its own accord. And of course it did, ten seconds after Jake called me to say Estuary were going to recast and do another pilot. It got an encouraging response, and they commissioned a whole series, which was a modest success, my first, while the BBC show bombed. A year later I could hardly remember why I had ever doubted the wisdom of my original decision. But I remembered the withdrawal symptoms after the last Valium and vowed never to expose myself to that again.
Two spasms in the knee while I was writing this, one sharp enough to make me cry out.
Sa
turday evening, 20th Feb. I heard a surprising and rather disturbing story from Rupert at the Club today. Sally and I went there after an early lunch to play tennis, outdoors. It was a lovely winter’s day, dry and sunny, the air crisp but still. Sally played doubles with three other women, I with my crippled cronies. It takes us blokes a long time to get into our kit, we have to put on so many bandages, splints, supports, trusses and prostheses first – it’s like mediaeval knights getting into their armour before a battle. So Sally and her pals were well into their first set as we walked, or rather limped, past their court on our way to ours. Rupert’s wife Betty was partnering Sally, and just at that moment she played a particularly good backhand volley to win a point, and we all applauded. “Betty’s been having some coaching too, has she, Rupert?” Joe remarked, with a grin. “Yes,” said Rupert, rather abruptly. “Well, our Mr Sutton certainly does something for the ladies,” said Joe. “I don’t know what exactly, but …” “Oh, knock it off, Joe,” said Rupert irritably, striding on ahead. Joe pulled a face and waggled his eyebrows at Humphrey and me, but said nothing more until we reached the court and picked partners.
I played with Humphrey, and we beat the other two in five sets, 6–2, 5–7, 6–4, 3–6, 7–5. It was a keenly contested match, even if to an observer it might have looked from the speed of our movements as if we were playing underwater. My backhand was working well for once, and I played a couple of cracking returns of service, low over the net, that took Rupert quite by surprise. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a sweetly hit backhand, it seems so effortless. I actually won the match with a mistimed volley off the frame of my racquet, which was more characteristic of our normal play. However, it was all very enjoyable. Joe wanted to switch partners and play the best of three sets, but my knee had tightened up ominously, and Rupert said his painkillers were beginning to wear off (he always takes a couple of tablets before a game), so we left the other two to play singles and went for a drink after we’d showered. We carried our pints to a nice quiet corner of the Club bar. In spite of the occasional twinge of pain in my knee, I felt good, glowing from the exercise, almost like the old days, and relished the cool bitter, but Rupert frowned into his jar as if there was something nasty at the bottom of it. “I wish Joe wouldn’t keep on about Brett Sutton,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. It’s worse than embarrassing, it’s unpleasant. It’s like watching somebody picking at a scab.” I asked him what he meant. He said, lowering his voice, “Didn’t you know about Jean?” “Jean who?” I said stupidly. “Oh, you weren’t there, were you,” Rupert said. “Joe’s Jean. She had it off with young Ritchie at the New Year’s Eve do.”