by John Challis
I really hoped that was all it was. I wantedto be mollified and allowed myself to be. We were, it was true, all very close after our hectic tour and living in and out of each other’s lives in shared digs.
Besides, at one point I’d suspected Richard, and Sabina couldn’t be having an affair with both of them... so perhaps it was neither, and we really were just a close, happy band of strolling players.
The following weekend, on Saturday morning, Sabina had gone off to keep an appointment for remedial work on some part of her anatomy, while I wandered down to the local hardware store to buy a bit of kit to do a chore she had requested. It was the kind of crisp, bright January day on which I love to get out into the open, and after I’d got what I wanted, I had an overpowering urge to get in the car and drive
the short distance up through Sheen Gate into to the wonderful open spaces of Richmond Park. I knew there was a car park on the right just inside and planned to leave the car there and get out for a good long stride across the rolling sunlit grassland.
Almost as soon as I drove into the car park, I saw a small Honda whose registration number, without even reading it properly, was familiar and I felt suddenly nervous. Focussing, I saw that it was
Sabina’s car, when she should have been at a body-repair shop in Putney. Before even registering it, I was aware that there were two people in the car and they weren’t doing the crossword together. They were busily engaged in what looked like more than a friendly embrace.
Almost numb with dread at what I was about to discover, I drove slowly in front of the car and as I did, the man looked up from what he was doing and saw me. It was Roy Marsden.
Looking pretty horrified himself, he gave an automatic response by putting on a rictus smile and giving me a cheery little wave. Beside him, Sabina’s face appeared.
I drove on, almost frozen with shock at the enormity of what I’d just seen.
Oh, Christ! I thought. What the hell do I do?We’ve got a show tonight!
Another wave of nausea hit me as I drove out the other end of the car-park and headed for home.
After some deep breathing, I tried to adopt an attitude of steely determination that would let me handle this vicious blow to my emotions – and my pride, of course – with some dignity. Then my guts kicked in againand I felt violently sick. As if in a trance, not hearing any outside sounds, I drove back down Sheen Lane. I parked the car and let myself into the house I’d enjoyed buying and doing up, like birds with a nest, with the woman I’d just seen wrapped in the arms of another man – and not just any other man but the leading man in the show in which I’d been immersed with Sabina for the past twelve weeks.
In an attempt to find some kind of replacement therapy, I blundered about, making coffee, tidying up, fiddling with plants in the garden, while I tried to face up to the sheer indignity that this affair must have been going on under my nose, with everyone else, my friends and colleagues all seeing it and the fact that my wife must have had such little regard for our marriage that she couldn’t be bothered to resist the idea – couldn’t even wait until the run of our show was over before rushing off to cheat on me.
I was jerked from the storm of resentment and angry thoughts whirling round my head by the sound of a key in the door. Sabina walked through into the kitchen where I was waiting. She looked calm, but apprehensive. ‘We should talk,’ she said.
‘Too bloody right!’ I snapped, immediately letting go of my dignity, and cursing my lack of resolve.
Sabina stayed calm. ‘I think it’s best if I leave home for a bit, to get some space to sort myself out.’ Familiar words, I recognized – clichés from a hundred marital dramas.
‘I... you...what?’ I burbled unhelpfully.
‘Look, I’m going to stay with Natalie for a while and see how things go.’
Natalie Forbes was a friend from the TV series Full House, in which she and Sabina had worked together. I had nothing against Natalie; she was attractive, frothy, not one of the great thinkers, but good fun. She’d been through a few dramas herself, and there was a tale that Ralph Bates’ wife, Virginia had once turned up on her doorstep and landed a good right hander on her pretty blonde head – though I never heard why.
I guessed that Sabina wanted to be somewhere where it would be easier to keep up contact with Roy.
‘Will you be seeing more of... him?’
‘I expect so, now and again. We hardly know each other yet.’
‘I shouldn’t think there’s much more to know,’ I snapped back, foolishly. ‘I mean, what the hell are you doing?’
‘Please don’t get angry,’ she said, with a note of alarm in her voice. ‘After all, we’ve all got a show to do.’
‘Show? A show? Who cares about the fucking show! Our bloody marriage is more bloody important than any show.’ I was gobsmacked, wounded, and very indignant that she didn’t seem to appreciate the scale of her disloyalty.
Bizarrely, my mind suddenly reverted to a similar scenario, when I’d first met Sabina, and she’d delivered the news to her previous boyfriend, Michael Cameron (who had referred to me as ‘John Callous’). She had told me with a distinct frisson how he got so angry he’d smashed one of her favourite ceramic figures. Perhaps what was happening now was simply part of a cycle of need in her life.
That evening, we made our way separate ways to the Mermaid and, still quite overwrought, I had to deal with changing in the same dressing room as the man I’d found wrapped around my wife in Richmond Park that morning.
He was patently nervous too and if Richard Heffer hadn’t known before what had been going on, he certainly did now. He did his best to keep the peace between two men he knew as good friends and colleagues. It wasn’t easy. Snarled words and observations kept escaping from me.
‘Nice sort of a shit you’ve turned out to be,’ I muttered in low, vicious tones as I got to my feet. Roy took a quick step back, thinking I was going to thump him. I didn’t, though. I’ve never thumped anyone; I’d be too concerned about hurting my own knuckles. But I did pick up his make-up box, with a view to hurling at across the room, though some innate professional instinct stopped me in time. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do; I was massively confused by what had happened, and frustrated that I didn’t know how to react. Besides, with my own self-esteem so wounded, I wanted simultaneously to lash out and steal off to lick those wounds.
Roy, drawing on his great reserves of ersatz dignity, tried to look understanding and fair. ‘Now, look, we can talk about this in a civilized way, like reasonable men,’ he suggested tentatively.
‘Civilized?’ I bellowed. ‘What’s civilized about sneaking of with the wife of a so-called friend and colleague?’
When I was changed and made up, I went along to Sabina’s dressing room and asked her again what the hell she thought she was doing with an arty-farty, bogus poseur like Marsden. Sabina reacted like a starchy hospital matron dealing with a recalcitrant patient. She gave me a couple of pills to calm me down, whether they were Valium or the pills she took to settle her own unreliable innards I didn’t know but the tension backstage was electric by now.
The whole company seemed to know about the showdown that morning and someone from the management came down with a message from Peter Woodward, who ran the company with Kate O’Mara. If I wanted to take a couple of shows off, they said, that would be fine.
But for years I’d lived with the maxim that the show was the thing, the show must always go on, and so, feeling a little saner after the pills had kicked in, I went on.
When it came to it, my performance was somewhat marred in my scenes with Sabina, when I kept bursting into tears, whether of rage, humiliation or frustration, I couldn’t say; perhaps all three.
Even though all the other players were sympathetic, with much back-patting, I hated the fact that everyone knew about Sabina and Roy and had clearly known for some time. Perhaps I’d known too but had been in denial over it. It seemed to me whatever it was that had made me
drive up to the car park in Richmond Park, it had been for a purpose – for me to be confronted by the truth and deal with it.
After the show, driving with Sabina on the way back to Observatory Road, I had a strange turn in my inner ear which put seemed to destroy my sense of balance, so that I couldn’t drive. I had to get out on the Embankment and walk up and down, with my head on one side. A wet wind drove up the Thames, while Sabina sat in the car looking sour and sceptical.
We spent a painful night, in the same house but without contact.
In the morning Sabina was still adamant that she was going and packed her clothes into a clutch of suitcases, while I stood by, foolishly haranguing her – knowing as I did it that it was the worst thing to do.
‘I suppose you’ll soon be shacked up with Roy, then.’
‘I told you,’ she snapped. ‘We hardly know each other!’
That made it worse. I was livid now, though I managed to avoid doing anything stupid or shameful as I watched her drive away with a carload of clothes to Natalie Forbes’ house in Shepherd’s Bush.
As her car turned into the main thoroughfare at the bottom of our road, my battered self-esteem encouraged me to wonder in a paranoid way if I was witnessing an example of Life imitating Art, of a woman seduced, like the character Sabina had played in Stoppard’s The Real Thing, by the attraction of perceived artistic superiority and a kind of intellectual superciliousness that supported it. But then, I reflected more rationally, I could hardly put Roy Marsden in the same camp as Tom Stoppard.
On my own, after the car had disappeared and I’d walked back into the empty silence of the house, I knew it was well and truly over. The bleakness in her cold, grey-green eyes had told me clearly that she’d come to a decision to close a chapter in her life; she wasn’t going to be talked out of it; there’d be no coming back. We would never sleep together again.
I played an old Stones album, which did nothing to help my mood, but at least it calmed me as I tried to identify my own contribution to the collapse of my third marriage. I was old enough by then to see that whatever else one person does to cause a split, it’s nearly always with some impetus from the other’s behaviour.
I was flirtatious, I knew, but this was an inherent part of my character – a simple enjoyment of female company – which meant nothing serious, and I hadn’t been unfaithful to her once during the time we were married. Sabina was flirtatious, too, although evidently it sometimes meant something to her.
I certainly drank too much but that is an endemic hazard for members of our profession, of both sexes. I was pretty cavalier about my finances but all the bills got paid in the end, even if it did sometimes take a large man coming round to discuss my ‘’elff’ to make me cough up. I suppose I’d always been aware that our bouncy, joshing relationship had been bolstered to some extent by our natural tendency to play the most convenient role. Without using it as an excuse, either for Sabina or me, this can often be a problem, especially for people with healthy egos and low self-esteem (which is not such a contradiction as you might think in the thespian world). In the end, marriages to people outside the profession tend to have a better survival rate. In our busy, almost glamorous lives, we hadn’t stopped to encourage one another to look too hard at the fundamental incompatibilities that lurked beneath the surface of our relationship.
In the meantime, we had another two weeks of The Relapse to run.
Luckily, during that time I was already working on the early episodes of Only Fools, Series 6, which helped to distract me from the horrors of appearing on stage every night with my estranged wife and her lover.
I had to grit my teeth sometimes to stop myself from lashing out at Roy when he tried to explain, without much apology, how it had happened. At the same time, he tried to bring me back on side by telling me how much he admired my comedic skills and how lucky I was to possess them. I hated working with him now but what was especially galling was that while Roy had been deploying his oily charm before I realized he was lusting after my responsive wife, I’d got him a nice one-off guest appearance in Only Fools, which was due to be shot on the first weekend of February, three weeks after The Relapse closed. I was not looking forward to it, and although I could probably and not unreasonably have had the booking scratched, I chose not to show that kind of weakness.
Soon after Sabina had moved out, various people turned up at Observatory Road, apparently to commiserate. Sabina’s old friend, Louisa Rix, whom I’d always liked, came round for a chat. She told me she was very sorry such a lovely relationship had had to end.
‘But you know, darling,’ she said shaking her head earnestly. ‘You’ll have to prepare yourself – she may not be coming back.’
I felt I already knew that, but I didn’t want to hear it from anyone else.
‘And,’ she went on, with a disapproving tilt of her chin, ‘I hear you kicked her car.’
It was the first I’d heard of it, though I suppose I might have given it a token boot up the exhaust as it sped away down the road en route for Shepherd’s Bush.
Louisa’s husband, Jonny Coy, met me in the pub later. He was genuinely upset and flabbergasted over what had happened. He’d seen Sabina the evening before. ‘I asked her what the hell she was doing,’ he said. ‘I told her that you and she had had such a wonderful relationship – so warm and witty, and real – it was absurd to walk out on it!’
I guess it had been all those things, as far as they went, but always at a superficial level, it seemed now. Or how could she have been so brazen as to pull off a stunt like she had, with one of my colleagues, right under my nose?
To Jonny, she’d tried to justify her actions as being a lot more than mere infatuation with the biggest stag in what was, after all, a temporary herd.
‘Besides,’ she’d said. ‘John never paid the bills on time.’
That was true enough, I told Jonny.
‘But it’s not grounds for separation!’ he asserted strongly. ‘And she also said she wanted babies.’
‘That hurts,’ I protested. ‘I accept that she may be finding the biological clock ticking a lot louder now but before we got together seriously, I was completely up-front about my infertility. She said that was OK, she could live with it.’
Privately, despite my own sense of loss and battered pride, I’d come to recognize that, in the end, the urge to procreate was just as strong in a modern, sophisticated western woman as it was in any tribal virgin in the Amazon jungle, and I had to respect that. By the last week of The Relapse at the Mermaid, after I’d somehow managed to sleep-walk through the previous three weeks, I was near the end of my tether. But I was given some let-up from my gloom one evening by finding a character from the past in my dressing room. In fact, I was astonished and, in an unexpected way, rather relieved when, out of the blue, my idle, unreliable and not entirely honest former partner in the St Margaret’s Garden Centre poked his head around the door.
Michael Slater looked fit well, tanned and chirpy. I told him so as I shook his hand and greeted his wife Alison who was with him. Always a bad keeper-in-touch, I’d seen very little of either of them since I’d stayed with them in their Earl’s Court flat after I’d split up with Debbie, my second wife, six years before.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ I asked, genuinely pleased to see him, although I didn’t really know why. I told him about what had happened between me and Sabina (whom they knew a little) and invited them to come round to Observatory Road soon.
At last The Relapse finished at the Mermaid. It had been enough of a success there to have yielded a worthwhile profit, which we all shared equally (after Roy Marsden’s extra salary had been deducted). I said goodbye to Sabina, not expecting or even wanting to see her again. I knew I would see Roy in a couple of weeks when we’d be working on the Only Fools episode in which I’d got him his part.
Sabina came round to the house a few more times, mainly to discuss what we were going to do with it. The last time she came, she announ
ced that she and Roy were both having counselling and suggested I should be.
I pointed out that counselling didn’t appear to be helping her much, which may have been unfair; she might have been in an even more unsatisfactory state without it. Bizarrely, shortly after that, Louisa Rix left Jonny Coy and it turned out that she was having counselling too.
A few days after Sabina’s visit, I came down to answer an early morning knock on the front door. Outside, shifting from foot to foot, was a grave-faced man in grey shoes and a beige anorak, who announced that he was from one of the nastier tabloids.
‘Would you care to make a comment on what’s been going on?’ he asked in a weasely, nasal voice. ‘Sorry to hear the news, by the way. We know who’s involved.’
‘No,’ I said, already closing the door.
How the hell had they found out? I wondered.
I watched the paper for the next couple of days, but nothing appeared about me, or Roy or Sabina, so I guessed they didn’t, in fact, have a clue who was involved.
Sabina got in touch to congratulate me in my great ‘show of strength’ in dealing with the tabloid, and went on to say that Roy had left his wife and two children and was now tormented by self-recrimination.
Sabina sounded unimpressed by this show of vacillation and weakness and seemed to be hinting at the possibility of a reconciliation between us.
I asked her bluntly if she had slept with Roy.
‘Since you ask a direct question, the answer is yes,’ she told me.
Frankly this was no surprise but the clear articulation of it drew a line in the sand for me.
Within this obviously strained relationship, Sabina and I had to decide between us what to do with8 Observatory Road. The house was something for which we’d worked hard and it meant a lot to both of us.
We’d planned it as a stepping-stone towards our future together. Now it had to be disposed of, like an obsolete Betamax player, irrelevant and surplus to requirements.
We agreed that for the time being the most sensible thing to do was to rent out the house while we decided how to proceed from there. In a rather bizarre coincidence, one of the first people who arrived to look at it came with a hefty blast from my complicated past.
