by David Lodge
I got so carried away by that bit of description that I discovered I’d missed the 5.10 as well. Or rather I discovered I’d left myself only two minutes in which to catch it, and I couldn’t bear the thought of running down the ramp towards the same ticket-collector and having him shut the barrier in my face again, like some kind of dream repetition of the original trauma. So I may as well, while I wait for the 5.40, record why I was on such a short fuse in the first place.
I called in at Jake’s office on my way to Euston. It’s a small set of rooms over a tatty tee-shirt and souvenir shop in Carnaby Street. There was a new girl in the tiny reception office at the top of the stairs, tall and slim, in a very tight, very short black dress that barely covered her bum when she stood up. She introduced herself as Linda. After she’d shown me into Jake’s room and shut the door, he said, “I know what you’re thinking, and no, she isn’t the one. Not,” he added, with his cheeky chappie grin, “that I could swear she won’t be, one day. Did you get a look at those legs?” “I could hardly avoid it, could I?” I said. “Given the dimensions of your office and her skirt.” Jake laughed. “What’s the news from Heartland?” I said. He stopped laughing. “Tubby,” he said, leaning forward earnestly in his swivel chair, “you’re going to have to find some acceptable way of writing Priscilla out of the series. Acceptable to everyone, I mean. I know you can, if you set your mind to it.” “And if I can’t?” I said. Jake spread his hands. “Then they’ll get somebody else to do it.” I felt a small, premonitory spasm of anxiety. “They can’t do that without my agreement, can they?” “I’m afraid they can,” said Jake, swivelling his chair to pull open a drawer, and avoiding my eye in the process. “I looked up the original contract.” He took a file from the drawer and passed it to me across the desk. “Clause fourteen is the relevant one.”
The contract for the first series had been drawn up a long time ago, when I was just another scriptwriter, with no particular clout. Clause fourteen said that if they asked me to write further series based on the same characters, and I declined, they could employ other writers to do the job, paying me a token royalty for the original concept. I can’t recall giving this clause any special thought at the time, but I’m not surprised that I agreed to it. Getting the programme extended for another series was then my dearest ambition, and the idea that I might not want to write it myself would have seemed absurd. But the clause referred not just to a second series, but to “series”, in the indefinite plural. Effectively I had signed away my copyright in the story and characters. I reproached Jake for not having spotted the danger and re-negotiated the clause in subsequent contracts. He said he didn’t think Heartland would have played ball anyway. I don’t agree. I think we could have twisted their arm between the second and the third series, they were so keen. Even now I can’t believe that they would turn the whole show over to another writer, or writers. It’s my baby. It’s me. Nobody else could make it work as well.
Could they?
This is a dangerous train of thought, fraught with new possibilities for loss of self-esteem. Anyway, I’d better stop, or I’ll miss the 5.40 as well.
Friday 26th Feb., 8 p. m. Jake called this morning to say he’d received a note from Ollie Silvers, “just summarizing the main points of our conversation with Tubby last Sunday, to avoid any misunderstanding.” This brings clause fourteen into operation, and means that I have twelve weeks in which to make up my mind whether to write Priscilla out of the script myself, or let someone else do the deed.
Aromatherapy with Dudley this afternoon. Dudley Neil-Hutchinson, to give his name both barrels. He looks a bit like a hippie Lytton Strachey – tall, spindly, with a long woolly beard that you’d think was attached to his granny glasses. He wears jeans and deck shoes and ethnic print shirts and waistcoats from the Oxfam shop. He tucks his beard into the waistcoats so that it doesn’t tickle when he massages you. He practises at home in a modern three-bedroomed semi near the airport, triple-glazed to exclude the sound of aircraft taking off and landing. Sometimes, lying prone on the massage table, you feel a shadow pass over you and if you look up quickly enough you catch a glimpse of a huge plane swooping silently over the rooftops, so close you can pick out the white faces of passengers at the portholes. It’s quite alarming at first. Dudley does two mornings a week at the Wellbeing, but I prefer to go to his house for treatment because I don’t want Miss Wu to know I’m resorting to aromatherapy as well as acupuncture. She’s so sensitive, she might take it as a personal vote of no confidence in her skills. I can just imagine bumping into her as I came out of a session with Dudley, and the silent, hurt look of reproach in her dark brown eyes. Miss Wu doesn’t know about Alexandra, either. Alexandra knows about Miss Wu, but not about Dudley. I haven’t told her, not because she’d feel threatened, but because she might be disappointed in me. She respects acupuncture, but I don’t think she would have much time for aromatherapy.
It was June Mayfield who put me onto it. She works in Make-Up at Heartland, and sits in the wings during recordings of The People Next Door, ready to dart forward and titivate Debbie’s hair when required, or powder the actors’ noses if they get shiny under the lights. I was chatting to her in the canteen one day and she told me aromatherapy had changed her life, curing her of the migraines that had been the bane of her existence for years. She gave me Dudley’s card, and I thought I’d give it a try. I’d just given up yoga, on account of my Internal Derangement of the Knee, so I had a vacant slot in my therapy schedule. I used to go once a fortnight to Miss Flynn, a seventy-five-year-old lady with elastic joints who teaches Pranayama yoga. It’s not the sort where you stand on your head for hours or tie yourself in knots that have to be unravelled in Casualty. It’s mostly about breathing and relaxation, but it does entail attempting the lotus position or at least the half-lotus, which Miss Flynn didn’t think would be a good idea while I was having trouble with my knee, so I packed it in. To tell you the truth, I was never much good at yoga anyway. I could never manage the “slipped second” which is a vital part of it, when you’re supposed to empty your mind and not think of anything at all. Miss Flynn tried to teach me a mental routine according to which you empty your mind first of thoughts about work, then of thoughts about family and friends, then of thoughts about yourself. Well, I could never get past first base. As soon as I silently pronounced the word “work” to myself, thoughts about script revisions and casting problems and audience figures would start swarming in my head. I would develop worries about work that I never had before.
Aromatherapy is easier. You just lie there and let the therapist massage you with what are called essential oils. The theory behind it is quite simple – perhaps too simple. Dudley explained it to me at my first session. “If you hurt yourself, what’s your instinctive reaction? You rub the affected part, right?” I asked how you rub your mind. He said, “Ah, that’s where the essential oils come in.” Aromatherapists think that, through absorption into the skin, the oils enter the bloodstream and thus affect the brain. Also that the inhalation of the oils’ distinctive aromas has a stimulating or calming effect on the nervous system, depending on which ones you use. There are uppers and downers in aromatherapy, or “high notes” and “bass notes” as they call them. According to Dudley, it’s a very ancient form of medicine which was practised in China and Egypt yonks ago. But, like everything else, nowadays it’s computerized. When I go to see Dudley I tell him my symptoms, and he writes them into his personally devised aromatherapy programme, called PHEW (no, I made that up, the filename is ATP), presses a key, and the computer comes up with a list of suggested essential oils – juniper, jasmine, peppermint or whatever. Then Dudley lets me sniff them and makes up a cocktail of the ones I like best, using a vegetable “carrier oil” as a base.
I didn’t feel the same inhibition about discussing sexual matters with Dudley as I did last week with Miss Wu, so when he asked me how I’d been since the last treatment, I mentioned the non-ejaculation incident. He said that the a
bility to have sexual congress without ejaculating was highly prized by oriental mystics. I said they were welcome to it. He tapped away at his Apple Mac for a few moments and it came up with bergamot, ylang-ylang and rose otto. “Didn’t you give me rose for depression, last time?” I said, with a hint of suspicion in my voice. “It’s a very versatile oil,” said Dudley suavely. “It’s used against impotence and frigidity as well as depression. Also grief and the menopause.” I asked him if that included the male menopause, and he laughed without answering.
Saturday, 27th Feb. Well, it worked, up to a point. We made love last night and I came. I don’t think Sally did, but she wasn’t really in the mood, and seemed surprised when I suggested it. I can’t say the earth moved for me, either, but at least I had an ejaculation. So the old essential oil of rose did the trick, as far as impotence is concerned. But not as far as depression, grief and the male menopause are concerned. I woke at 3.05 with my brain churning like a cement-mixer, anxieties like sharp pebbles in a general grey sludge of Dread, and spent the next few hours in a shallow dozing state, dropping off and waking again with the fleeting sensation of having been in a dream without being able to remember what it was. My dreams are like silvery fish: I grab at their tails, but they wriggle from my grasp, and shimmy down into the dark depths. I wake gasping for breath, my heart pounding, like a diver surfacing. Eventually I dropped a sleeping tablet and lapsed into a dreamless coma from which I woke, in an empty bed, at nine-thirty, sullen and dry-mouthed.
Sally had left a note to say she’d gone to Sainsbury’s. I had some errands to do myself, so walked to the High Street. I was standing impatiently in line at the Post Office when I heard a woman’s voice say at my shoulder, “Are you desperate?” I swivelled round, thinking she was addressing me, but it was a mother talking to her little boy. “Can’t you wait till we get home?” she said. The little boy shook his head miserably and pressed his knees closer together.
Later. I was desperate enough to give old Kierkegaard another go, and had better luck this time. I dipped into Either/Or, because the title intrigued me. A socking great book, in two volumes, and very confusingly written, a dog’s breakfast of essays, stories, letters etc., written by two fictitious characters called A and B, and edited by a third called Victor Eremitus, all aliases for Kierkegaard I presume. What particularly caught my eye was a short piece in the first volume called “The Unhappiest Man”. As I read it, I felt like I did when I first saw the list of Kierkegaard’s book titles, that he was speaking directly to my condition.
According to K., the unhappy man is “always absent to himself, never present to himself.” My first reaction was: no, wrong, Søren old son – I never stop thinking about myself, that’s the trouble. But then I thought, thinking about yourself isn’t the same as being present to yourself. Sally is present to herself, because she takes herself for granted, she never doubts herself – or at least not for long. She coincides with herself. Whereas I’m like one of those cartoon characters in a cheap comic, the kind where the colour doesn’t quite fit the outline of the drawing: there’s a gap or overlap between the two, a kind of blur. That’s me: Desperate Dan with his blue chin sticking out but not quite coinciding with his jawline.
Kierkegaard explains that the unhappy man is never present to himself because he’s always living in the past or the future. He’s always either hoping or remembering. Either he thinks things were better in the past or he hopes they’ll be better in the future, but they’re always bad now. That’s ordinary common-or-garden unhappiness. But the unhappy man “in a stricter sense” isn’t even present to himself in his remembering or his hoping. Kierkegaard gives the example of a man who looks back wistfully to the joys of childhood which in fact he never himself experienced (perhaps he was thinking of his own case). Likewise the “unhappy hoper” is never present to himself in his hoping, for reasons which were obscure to me until I came to this passage: “Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment.”
I know exactly what he means by “gratifying disappointment”. I worry about making decisions because I’m trying to guard against things turning out badly. I hope they’ll turn out well, but if they do turn out well I hardly notice it because I’ve made myself miserable imagining how they could turn out badly; and if they turn out badly in some unforeseen way (like clause fourteen in the Heartland contract) that only confirms my underlying belief that the worst misfortunes are unexpected. If you’re an unhappy hoper you don’t really believe things will get better in the future (because if you did you wouldn’t be unhappy). Which means that when they don’t get better it proves you were right all along. That’s why your disappointment is gratifying. Neat, eh?
I also have a persistent feeling that things were better in the past – that I must have been happy once, otherwise I wouldn’t know I was unhappy now, and somewhere along the way I lost it, I blew it, I let it go, though I can only recall that “it” in fleeting fragments, like watching the 1966 World Cup Final. It’s possible, however, that I’m kidding myself, that really I was always miserable because I was always an unhappy hoper. Which paradoxically would make me an unhappy rememberer too.
How can you be both? Easy-peasy! That’s precisely the definition of the unhappiest man:
This is what it amounts to: on the one hand, he constantly hopes for something he should be remembering … On the other hand he constantly remembers something he should be hoping for … Consequently what he hopes for lies behind him and what he remembers lies before him … He is forever quite close to the goal and at the same moment at a distance from it; he now discovers that what it is that makes him unhappy, because now he has it, or because he is this way, is precisely what a few years ago would have made him happy if he had had it then, whereas then he was unhappy because he did not have it.
Oh yes, this guy has my number alright. The unhappiest man. Why then am I grinning all over my face as I read?
Sunday afternoon, 28th Feb. I didn’t go to the studio today. I thought I would show Heartland that I resent the way they’re treating me. Sally approved. I left a message on the office answerphone early this morning to say I wouldn’t be coming in. I didn’t give a reason, but Ollie and Hal will figure it out. It’s the first time I’ve missed a recording since last April, when I had a stomach bug. Needless to say, I’m punishing myself more than I’m punishing them. Hal will be too busy to brood on my absence, and Ollie is not the brooding type. Whereas I have nothing to do except brood. The day has passed with excruciating slowness. I keep looking at the clock and working out what stage of rehearsal they will have reached. It’s five past four now, and dark already. It’s bitterly cold outside, with a thin coating of snow. Blizzards expected in other parts of the country, the papers say. The posh Sundays are full of handwringing and breastbeating. The country seems to be going through some huge crisis of confidence, Internal Derangement of the National Psyche. The Gallup poll published last week showed eighty per cent of the electorate were dissatisfied with the Government’s performance. According to another poll, more than forty per cent of young people think that Britain will become a worse country to live in over the next decade. Which means, presumably, they think that either Labour won’t win the next election, or it won’t make any difference if they do. We’ve become a nation of unhappy hopers.
And unhappy rememberers: I wasn’t the only one, it seems, to feel that the death of Bobby Moore measured the extent of our decline. There are lots of nostalgic articles in the papers about him and the 1966 World Cup. Our losing the third Test in succession to India this week hasn’t helped national morale, either. India! When I was a boy a Test series against India was always a dead boring prospect because it was bound to be a walkover for England.
It’s half past five. Rehearsals will be over by now, and the cast will be tucking into their meal in the canteen before going off to Make-Up. Ron Deakin always has sausage, egg and chips.
He swears he never eats fry-ups at home, but says that sausage, egg and chips go with the character of Pop Davis. He’s quite superstitious about it – got into quite a panic one day, when they ran out of sausages in the kitchen. I wonder if he will be put off by my not being there as usual tonight. The actors like me to be around on recording day, they find it reassuring. I’m afraid I’m punishing them, as well as myself, by staying away.
The more I think about it, and I can think of nothing else, the worse I feel. I’m trying to resist deciding that I have made the wrong decision, but I can feel myself being drawn inexorably towards that conclusion as if by the gravitational force of a black hole. In short, I can feel myself getting into one of my “states”. The state, c’est moi, as Amy might say. How am I going to get through the rest of the evening? I stare at the key marked HELP on my keyboard. If only it could.
Monday morning, 1st March. At about 6.45 yesterday evening, just as Sally was laying the table for our evening meal, my nerve broke. I rushed out of the house, shouting an explanation to Sally without giving her time to tell me I was a fool, backed the Richmobile out of the garage, slithering and sliding all over the drive – I damn near dented the offside wing on the gatepost – and drove at imprudent speed into Rummidge, arriving at the studio just in time to take my seat for the recording.
It went brilliantly. A wonderful audience – sharp, appreciative, together. And the script wasn’t bad, either, though I says it myself. The story-line is that the Springfields decide to put their house up for sale in order to get away from the Davises, but without telling the Davises because they feel guilty about it, and the Davises keep unknowingly sabotaging the plan by turning up or doing something outrageous just when the Springfields are showing potential buyers round the house. The audience loved it. I expect a lot of them want to move house themselves and can’t because they have negative equity. Negative equity is when your mortgage is more than your house is worth. There’s a lot of it about. It’s a kind of internal derangement of the property market. Not funny, if you’ve got it, but it might make you see the funny side of Edward and Priscilla’s dilemma. Or, to put it another way, watching their farcical trials and tribulations might make you feel better about your negative equity, especially as the episode ends with the Springfields reconciled to staying where they are. I often feel that sitcom has that kind of therapeutic social effect.