by David Lodge
HETTY, DARLING, HOW are you? Omigod, I don’t need to ask, do I? Poor you. Your jaw is swollen out like a pumpkin. I expect you’re surprised to see me, but I phoned and your flatmate told me you were here, and as I was passing I thought I’d pop in even though it’s not a proper visiting hour. I don’t think they really mind, do they? Can’t you talk at all? Oh dear, what a shame. I was looking forward to a nice chat. Well, you’ll just have to nod and shake your head and use your eyes, darling, like a good television actress. I bought you some grapes, where shall I put them – on here? They’ve been washed, so you can help yourself. No? Can’t eat anything? What a curse wisdom teeth are. Badly impacted was it? Two of them? No wonder you look so poorly. Mmm … these are rather delicious. No pips. You’re sure that if I peeled one for you, you wouldn’t …? No? Oh well, all right. Does it hurt terribly? I suppose they pumped you full of painkillers. You must demand more as soon as they wear off. Hospitals are terribly mean about that, they think pain is improving. Well, I’m going to have to make all the conversational running, aren’t I? Fortunately I’ve got lots to talk about. The fact is I just had the most bizarre weekend and I’m dying to tell somebody all about it who isn’t connected with work. I’ve got a new job at Heartland, you see, a proper job. Script editor. I started last week. Basically it means you read the writer’s first drafts and make comments and suggestions and generally act as a buffer between him and the producer or director. It’s the first stepping-stone to writing or producing oneself. You know I’ve been chaperoning that little brat Mark Harrington in The People Next Door? Well now I’m working with the writer, Tubby Passmore. Well, you may pull a face, Hetty, but thirteen million people can’t be wrong, not in television they can’t. Tubby asked for me himself. I got to know him through the chaperoning – we would meet at rehearsals, in the canteen and so on. He was always perfectly pleasant, but rather shy. I had him down as a herbivore. I always say there are two kinds of men, the herbivores and the carnivores. It’s something about the way they look at you. Because I’ve got these tits I get a lot of looks. I know you used to say at school that you’d kill for them, Hetty, but frankly I’d give anything for a figure like yours. No, honestly. Clothes hang so much better on a flat-chested figure. Not that you’re completely flat, darling, but you know what I mean. Anyway, some men just run their eyes appreciatively over you as if you were a statue or something, those are the herbivores, they just want to browse, and others look at you as if they would like to tear your clothes off and sink their teeth into you, those are the carnivores. Jake Endicott is a carnivore. He’s my agent. Tubby’s agent too, as it happens. And Ollie Silvers, the producer of The People Next Door – he’s another carnivore. When I talked to Tubby one day about my writing ambitions, he suggested I asked Ollie to give me some scripts to read and report on, you know, unsolicited ones, the slush-pile. So I went to see him wearing my cream linen suit without a blouse and all through the interview I could see he was trying to look down my front to see what I was wearing under the jacket, if anything. I walked out of his office with a pile of scripts. I can see you disapprove, Hetty, but I’m completely postfeminist about this, I’m afraid. I think it’s a great mistake for women to make all this fuss about sexual harassment. It’s like unilateral disarmament. In a man’s world we’ve got to use all the wiles and weapons we’ve got. I don’t think you should shake your head as hard as that, darling, your stitches might come undone. It may be different in the Civil Service, for all I know. Anyway, as I say, I thought Tubby was a confirmed herbivore. If we were sitting at the same table in the canteen or the bar, he would chat to me in a fatherly sort of way, but he never made a pass or anything approaching one. He’s old enough to be my father, actually. On the corpulent side, as the name implies. Balding. A big egg-shaped head. He always reminds me of the pictures of Humpty Dumpty in a copy of Alice in Wonderland I had as a child. I cultivated him purely out of self-interest, I don’t mind admitting. Goodness I must stop eating your grapes. Just one more then.
Well, as I was saying, Tubby always seemed completely immune to my feminine charms, in fact I was slightly piqued by his lack of interest, but then his attitude suddenly changed. It was after his marriage broke up – oh, I forgot to mention, his wife left him a month or two ago. There were lots of rumours – that she’d come out as a lesbian or gone to live in an ashram or that she found him in bed with her tennis coach. All wildly off the mark, as I found out later. We didn’t see much of him for some weeks. But then he turned up at rehearsals one day, in London, a grotty place in Pimlico that Heartland use, and immediately made a set at me. Without any warning. I remember seeing him push through the swing doors and stand at the threshold looking round the room until he spotted me, and then he came straight over and plonked himself down beside me, hardly bothering to say hallo to Hal Lipkin, that’s the director, or any of the cast. Deborah Radcliffe smiled at him but he walked straight past her without a glance, which didn’t please her very much. I could see her looking daggers at us out of the corner of my eye. Tubby looked wrecked. Bloodshot eyes. Unshaven. Crumpled clothes. It turned out that he’d just flown in from L.A., and come straight to the rehearsal rooms from Heathrow. I said that it showed great devotion to duty and he stared at me as if he didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I said, “I mean, attending rehearsals when you must be exhausted.” He said, “Oh, bugger the rehearsals,” and in the next breath asked me out to dinner that very evening. Well, I was supposed to be going to see a film with James, but I didn’t let that stop me. I mean if a famous, well, famous in television terms, writer asks a nobody like me out to dinner, you go. If you don’t want to stay a nobody all your life, you go. That’s the way it works, darling, believe me. Incidentally, James thinks I spent this last weekend visiting my grandmother in Torquay, just remember that if you should happen to see him, won’t you?
So Tubby took me to this little Italian restaurant in Soho, Gabrielli’s. I’d never been there before, but he was obviously a regular. They received him with open arms as if he was a long-lost son – all except the owner’s wife, who was giving me the evil eye for some reason. Tubby was basking in all the attention until the woman came over to put some breadsticks on the table and said, looking at me, “Is this your daughter, then, Signor Passmore?” and Tubby went very red and said, no I wasn’t, and then this woman said, “And ’ow is Signora Amy?” and Tubby went even redder and said he didn’t know, he hadn’t seen her for a while, and this interfering old bitch gave a smug sort of smile and disappeared into the kitchen. Tubby looked like Humpty Dumpty after he’d fallen off the wall. He muttered that he sometimes ate there with Amy Porteus, the casting director for The People Next Door. I’ve met her a couple of times. She’s a dumpy little brunette, in her forties I should say, always slightly overdressed and reeking of perfume. I said in a bantering tone that he obviously wasn’t in the habit of bringing young women there anyway, and he said dourly no, he wasn’t, and asked if I would like a drink. I had a Campari and soda and he had just a mineral water. I told him about my idea for a soap, and he nodded his head and said it sounded interesting, but he didn’t really seem to be attending. What darling, what don’t you understand? Mime it. Oh! Not a soup, darling, a soap, you know like Eastenders, only what I have in mind is more like Westenders. I asked him if he’d been to L.A. on business, and he said, “Partly,” but he didn’t explain what the other part was. They served us quite a decent meal and we had a bottle of Chianti that was supposed to be very special but he drank hardly any of it, he said because of his jet-lag, he was afraid he might fall asleep. Over the dessert he steered the conversation rather clumsily towards sex. “You’ve no idea,” he said, “how repressed we were about sex when I was young. Nice girls simply didn’t. So nice boys couldn’t, most of the time. The country was full of twenty-five-year-old virgins, many of them male. I suppose you find that difficult to credit. I suppose you wouldn’t think twice about having sex with someone you liked, would you?” So I said –
what? Oh, right, I’ll speak more quietly. These beds are rather close together, aren’t they? What’s she in for? Mime it. Appendix? No. Hysterectomy? Really? Well mimed, darling. You know, there’s the makings of a rather good parlour game here.
So I said it would depend on whether I really liked the person, and he looked at me soulfully and said, “Do you really like me, Samantha?” Well, I was a bit taken aback at the speed with which we’d reached this point. It was like being taken for a ride in one of those GTi’s that look like sedate family saloons and do nought to sixty in about three seconds flat. So I laughed my tinkle-of-tiny-bells laugh and said it sounded like a leading question. He looked very despondent and said, “So you don’t, then?” I said on the contrary I liked him very much but I thought he was exhausted and jet-lagged and didn’t quite know what he was doing or saying and I didn’t want to take advantage of him. Well he pondered that for a moment, frowning to himself, and I thought, you’ve blown it, Samantha, but to my relief his Humpty-Dumpty face broke into a smile, and he said, “You’re absolutely right. What about some dessert? They do a rather good tiramisu here.” He poured himself a full glass of wine, knocked it back as if making up for lost time, and ordered another bottle. He talked about football for the rest of the meal, which I can’t say is my favourite conversational topic, but fortunately we’d nearly finished. He put me in a cab outside the restaurant, gave the driver a tenner for the fare, and kissed me on the cheek like an uncle. Ah, here comes the tea-trolley. Can you drink from a cup? Oh good. I was going to say that if you couldn’t, I’d drink it for you. Shall I take your biscuits, then? Pity to waste them. Mmm, custard creams, my favourite. What a shame you can’t have any.
So where was I? Oh yes, well a few days later I got a message to go and see Ollie Silvers at Heartland’s London office. I spent a whole morning agonizing over what to wear, and what to leave off, but in the event it turned out to be quite unnecessary because he offered me the job straightaway. Hal Lipkin was with him. They sat at each end of a long sofa, and took turns to shoot remarks at me. “You may have noticed that Mr Passmore’s been acting rather strangely lately,” Ollie said. “His marriage is on the rocks,” Hal said. “He’s taken it very hard,” said Ollie. “We’re concerned about him,” said Hal. “We’re also concerned about the show,” said Ollie. “We’d like to do another series,” said Hal. “But a snag has cropped up,” said Ollie. I can’t tell you what the snag is, darling, because they swore me to secrecy. I know you don’t mix with media journalists, but nevertheless. I shouldn’t even have told you there is a problem. It’s all terribly hush-hush. Basically they want Tubby to rewrite the last scripts of the present series to open the way for a new development of the story in the next series. Putting a new sit in the sitcom, you might say. “But Tubby doesn’t seem to be able to concentrate his mind on the problem,” said Hal. “So we think he needs a script editor,” said Ollie. “A kind of minder-cum-dramaturge,” said Hal. “Somebody to keep his nose to the grindstone and his arse to the typing chair,” said Ollie. “We put it to Tubby,” said Hal. “And he asked for you,” said Ollie. They hadn’t given me a chance to say a word all this time – I was just looking from one to the other like a spectator at Wimbledon. But now they paused as if inviting a response. I said I was flattered. “You should be,” Ollie said. “We would have preferred somebody with more experience,” said Hal. “But those reports you wrote for me were very sharp,” said Ollie. “And you must know the show inside-out by now, watching rehearsals all this time,” said Hal. I said, “Yes. I expect that’s why Mr Passmore suggested me for the job.” Ollie gave me a carnivorous leer and said, “Yes, I expect it is.” He didn’t know, of course, that Tubby had taken me out to dinner and propositioned me just a few days before.
Naturally I assumed that this new development was a rather more subtle second attempt at seduction on Tubby’s part. So I wasn’t surprised when almost the first thing he did when I started work was invite me to go away with him for a weekend. I called him from my new office, or rather from my new desk in the office I share with two other girls. We’re all script editors – for some reason script editors nearly always are women. Like midwives. I said, “Hallo, this is Samantha, I suppose you know I’m your new script editor,” and he said, “Yes, I’m very pleased you took the job.” I didn’t let on that I knew he’d asked for me. I said, “When shall we meet?” and he said, “Come to Copenhagen with me next weekend.” I said, “What for?” and he said, “I’ve got to do some research.” I said, “What has Copenhagen got to do with The People Next Door?” and he said, “Nothing. I’m writing a film about Kierkegaard, didn’t Ollie tell you?” I said that no, Ollie hadn’t made that entirely clear, but I was of course happy to help him in any way I could. He said he would book flights and hotel rooms and get back to me about the details. I noticed the plural “rooms” with approval. I mean, I understood what I was letting myself in for, but a girl has her pride. You needn’t look at me like that, Hetty.
As soon as he was off the phone, I called Ollie and told him Tubby seemed to think I had been assigned to help him develop a film about Kierkegaard, not The People Next Door. You do know who Kierkegaard is, don’t you darling, or rather was? Of course you do, you did PPE at Oxford. Sorry. I have to admit he was just a name to me before the weekend, but now I know more about him than I really want to. Not the most obvious subject for a TV film, you must agree. By the way, in case you think I’ve got his name wrong, that’s the way they pronounce it in Danish, Kierkegawd, as in “Oh my Gawd,” which is what Ollie said when I told him Tubby wanted to take me to Copenhagen and why. I heard him sighing and muttering to himself, and the click of a lighter as he lit a cigar, and then he said, “Look, Samantha my love, go along with it, humour him, do the Kierkegaard bit, go through the motions, but just keep reminding him at every opportunity about The People Next Door, OK?” I said, OK.
Have you ever been to Copenhagen? Neither had I till this weekend. It’s very nice, but just a little dull. Very clean, very quiet – hardly any traffic at all compared to London. Apparently they had the very first pedestrianized shopping precinct in Europe. It seems to sum the Danes up, somehow. They’re terribly green and energy-conscious. We stayed at a luxury hotel but the heat was turned down to a point that was almost uncomfortable, and in the room there was a little card asking you to help conserve the earth’s resources by cutting down on unnecessary laundry. The card is red on one side and green on the other, and if you leave it green side up they only change your sheets every third day, and they don’t change the towels at all unless you leave them on the bathroom floor. Which is all very sensible and responsible but just a teeny bit of a downer. I mean, I’m as green as the next woman at home, for instance I always buy my shampoo in biodegradable bottles, but one of the pleasures of staying in a luxury hotel is sleeping in crisp new sheets every night and using a fresh towel every time you take a shower. I’m afraid I left my card red side up all through the weekend and avoided the chambermaid’s eye if I met her in the corridor.
We flew from Heathrow on Friday evening – Club Class, nothing but the best my dear, a hot meal with real knives and forks and as much booze as you could down in the two hours. I drank rather a lot of champagne and probably talked too much in consequence, at least the woman in the row in front kept turning round to glare at me, but Tubby seemed quite amused. By the time we got to the hotel, though, I was beginning to feel rather tired and I asked if he’d mind if I went straight to bed. He looked a bit disappointed, but then said gallantly, no, not at all, it was a good idea, he’d do the same and then we’d be fresh for the morning. So we parted very decorously in the corridor outside my room, under the eyes of the porter. I fell into bed and passed out.
The next day was bright and sunny, ideal for exploring Copenhagen on foot. Tubby had never been there before either. He wanted to get the feel of the place, and also look for possible locations. There’s no shortage of well-preserved eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centur
y buildings, but the problem is modern traffic signs and street furniture. And there’s a picturesque dock called Nyhavn, with genuine old ships moored in it, but the genuine old buildings overlooking it have been converted into trendy restaurants and a tourist hotel. “We’ll probably end up shooting the film somewhere else entirely,” Tubby said, “somewhere on the Baltic or the Black Sea.” We had a smorgasbord lunch at a place on the Nyhavn and then went to the City Museum where they have a Kierkegaard room.
Tubby was very excited about this in anticipation, but it turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, at least I thought so. A smallish room for a museum, about thirty feet by fifteen, with a few sticks of furniture and half a dozen glass cases displaying bits and pieces connected with Kierkegaard – his pipes, his magnifying glass, some pictures and old books. You wouldn’t have given them a second glance in an antique shop, but Tubby pored over them as if they were sacred relics. He was especially interested in a portrait of Kierkegaard’s fiancée, Regine. He was engaged to her for about a year and then broke it off, but regretted it ever after according to Tubby. The portrait was a small oil painting of a young woman in a low-cut green dress with a dark green shawl round her shoulders. He stared at the picture for about five minutes without blinking. “She looks like you,” he said eventually. “Do you think so?” I said. She had dark brown eyes and hair to match, so I suppose he meant she had big tits. Actually, to be fair, there was something about the mouth and chin that was not unlike me. She also looked as if she was quite fun – there was a suspicion of a smile on her lips and a twinkle in her eye. Which was more than you could say for Kierkegaard, to judge from the drawing of him that was in the same case: a skinny, crooked, long-nosed old fogey in a stovepipe hat and carrying a furled umbrella like a gun under his arm. Tubby said it was a caricature done for a newspaper when Kierkegaard was in his forties, and pointed out another drawing done by a friend when he was a young man where he looked quite handsome, but somehow you didn’t believe in it as much as in the caricature. The crooked back was because he suffered from curvature of the spine. He used to prefer to write standing up at a high desk, which was one of the pieces of furniture in the room. Tubby stood at it himself for a moment, making some notes in a reporter’s notebook he’d brought with him, and a little German girl who had come into the room with her parents stared at him as he was writing and said to her father, “Ist das Herr Kierkegaard?” I laughed, because anyone who looked less like Kierkegaard would be hard to imagine. Tubby heard me laugh and looked round. “What is it?” he asked. When I explained, he blushed with pleasure. He’s absolutely obsessed with Kierkegaard, especially his relationship with this girl Regine. There was another piece of furniture in the room, at the opposite end to the desk, a sort of cupboard about five feet high. Tubby found out from the museum brochure that Kierkegaard had it made especially to keep his mementos of Regine in. Apparently she pleaded with him not to break off their engagement, and said she would be glad to be allowed to spend the rest of her life with him even if she had to live in a little cupboard, the silly cow. “That’s why it hasn’t got any shelves inside,” Tubby said. “So she would just fit inside.” I swear his eyes filled with tears as he read it out of the brochure.