Therapy

by David Lodge

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Lodge

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Part Two

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three

  Chapter Eight

  Part Four

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marriage, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence ‘Tubby’ Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst.

  As Tubby’s life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks – via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood – on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment.

  About the Author

  David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks …, Author, Author, Deaf Sentence and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

  ALSO BY DAVID LODGE

  Fiction

  The Picturegoers

  The British Museum is Falling

  Down

  Ginger, You’re Barmy

  Out of the Shelter

  Changing Places

  How Far Can You Go?

  Small World

  Nice Work

  Paradise News

  Home Truths

  Thinks …

  Author, Author

  Deaf Sentence

  A Man of Parts

  Criticism

  Language of Fiction

  The Novelist at the Crossroads

  The Modes of Modern Writing

  Working with Structuralism

  After Bakhtin

  Essays

  Write On

  The Art of Fiction

  The Practice of Writing

  Consciousness and the Novel

  The Year of Henry James

  Drama

  The Writing Game

  Home Truths

  Many people have kindly helped me with the research for and composition of this novel, by answering my questions and/or by reading and commenting on the text. I am especially indebted to Marie Andrews, Bernard and Anne Bergonzi, Izak Winkel Holm, Michael Paul and Martin Shardlow.

  The locations of events in this novel are the usual mixture of the real and the imaginary, but the characters and their actions are entirely fictitious, with the possible exception of the writer-presenter of a television documentary briefly mentioned in Part Four.

  D.L.

  To Dad, with love

  DAVID LODGE

  Therapy

  Therapy. The treatment of physical, mental or social disorders or disease.

  – Collins English Dictionary

  “You know what, Søren? There’s nothing the matter with you but your silly habit of holding yourself round-shouldered. Just straighten your back and stand up and your sickness will be over.”

  – Christian Lund, uncle of Søren Kierkegaard.

  “Writing is a form of therapy.”

  – Graham Greene

  RIGHT, HERE GOES.

  Monday morning, 15th Feb., 1993. A mild February day has brought the squirrels out of hibernation. The leafless trees in the garden make a kind of adventure playground for them. I watched two playing tag in the chestnuts just outside my study window: spiralling up a trunk, dodging and feinting among the branches, then scampering along a bough and leaping to the next tree, then zooming down the side of its trunk headfirst, freezing halfway, claws sticking like Velcro to the corrugated bark, then streaking across the grass, one trying to shake off the other by jinking and swerving and turning on a sixpence till he reached the bole of a Canadian poplar and they both rocketed up its side into the thin elastic branches and balanced there, swaying gently and blinking contentedly at each other. Pure play – no question. They were just larking about, exercising their agility for the sheer fun of it. If there’s such a thing as reincarnation, I wouldn’t mind coming back as a squirrel. They must have knee-joints like tempered steel.

  The first time I felt the pain was about a year ago. I was leaving the London flat, hurrying to catch the 18.10 from Euston, scuttling backwards and forwards between the four rooms, stuffing scripts and dirty socks into my briefcase, shutting windows, switching off lights, re-setting the central-heating timer, emptying milk cartons down the sink, sloshing Sanilav round the toilet bowl – in short, going through the Before You Leave The Flat hit-list that Sally had written out and stuck on the fridge door with magnetic yellow Smileys, when I felt it: a sharp, piercing pain, like a red-hot needle thrust into the inside of the right knee and then withdrawn, leaving a quickly fading afterburn. I uttered a sharp, surprised cry and keeled over on to the bed (I was in the bedroom at the time). “Christ!” I said, aloud, although I was alone. “What the fuck was that?”

  Gingerly I got to my feet. (Should that be “gingerlyly”? No, I’ve just looked it up, adjective and adverb both have the same form.) Gingerly I got to my feet and tested my weight on the knee, took a few paces forward (funny word actually, nothing to do with ginger, I always thought it meant the way you taste ground ginger, very carefully, dipping a moistened finger into it, and then trying it on the tip of your tongue, but no, it’s thought to come from Old French genson, dainty, or gent, of noble birth, neither of which applies to me). I took a few paces forward without any ill-effects, shrugged, and put it down to some freakish twitch of a nerve, like the sudden excruciating crick you can get in your neck sometimes, twisting round to get something from the back seat of a car. I left the flat, caught my train, and thought no more about it.

  About a week later, when I was working in my study, I crossed my legs underneath the desk, and I felt it again, the sudden stab of pain on the inside of the right knee, which made me gasp, sucking in a lungful of air and then expelling it with a resounding “Fuuuuckinell!” From then onwards, I began to get the pain with increasing frequency, though there was nothing predictable about it. It rarely happened when I might have expected it, like when I was playing golf or tennis, but it could happen just after a game, in the club-house bar, or while driving home, or when I was sitting perfectly still in my study, or lying in bed. It would make me cry out in the middle of the night, so that Sally thought I was having a nightmare. In fact nightmares are about the only thing I don’t have, in that line. I have depression, anxiety, panic attacks, night sweats, insomnia, but not nightmares. I never did dream much. Which simply means, I understand, that I don’t remember my dreams, because we dream all the time we’re asleep, so they say. It’s as if there’s an unwatched telly flickering all night long inside my head. The Dream Channel. I wish I could make a video recording of it. Maybe I would get a clue then to what’s the matter with me. I don’t mean my knee. I mean my head. My mind. My soul.

  I felt it was a bit hard that I should get a mysterious pain in the knee on top of all my other problems. Admittedly, there are worse things that can happen to you, physically. For instance: cancer, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, emphysema, Alzheimer’s and AIDS. Not to mention the things you can be born with, like muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, haemophilia and epilepsy. Not to mention war, pestilence and famine. Funny how
knowing that doesn’t make the pain in your knee any easier to bear.

  Perhaps it’s what they call “compassion fatigue”, the idea that we get so much human suffering thrust in our faces every day from the media that we’ve become sort of numbed, we’ve used up all our reserves of pity, anger, outrage, and can only think of the pain in our own knee. I haven’t got to that stage yet, not quite, but I know what they mean. I get a lot of charity appeals through the mail. I think they pass names and addresses to each other: you only have to make a donation to one organization and, before you know where you are, the envelopes are falling through the letterbox faster than you can pick them up. OXFAM, CAFOD, UNICEF, Save the Children, Royal Institute for the Blind, Red Cross, Imperial Cancer, Muscular Dystrophy, Shelter, etc. etc., all containing form letters and leaflets printed on recycled paper with smudgy b/w pictures of starving black babies with limbs like twigs and heads like old men, or young kids in wheelchairs, or stunned-looking refugees, or amputees on crutches. How is one supposed to stem this tide of human misery? Well, I’ll tell you what I do. I subscribe a thousand pounds a year to an organization that gives you a special cheque book to make donations to the charities of your choice. They also recover the tax you’ve paid on the money, which bumps it up to £1400 in my case. So every year I dispense fourteen hundred quid in little parcels: £50 for the starving babies of Somalia, £30 for the rape victims in Bosnia, £45 towards a water pump in Bangladesh, £25 to a drug-abuse rehabilitation unit in Basildon, £30 for AIDS research, and so on, until the account is empty. It’s rather like trying to mop up the oceans of the world with a box of Kleenex, but it keeps compassion fatigue at bay.

  Of course, I could afford to give much more. I could afford ten thousand a year from my present income, without too much pain. I could give it all away, for that matter, it still wouldn’t be more than a box of Kleenex. So I keep most of it and spend it on, among other things, private medical treatment for my knee.

  I went to my GP first. He recommended physiotherapy. After a while, the physiotherapist recommended that I see a consultant. The consultant recommended an arthroscopy. That’s a new kind of hi-tech microsurgery, all done by television and fibre-optics. The surgeon pumps water into your leg to create a kind of studio in there, and then sticks three needle-thin instruments into it. One has a camera on the end, another is a cutting tool and the third is a pump for sucking out the debris. They’re so fine you can hardly tell the difference between them with the naked eye and the surgeon doesn’t even have to put a stitch in the perforations afterwards. He sees what’s wrong with your knee-joint by wiggling it about and watching it on a TV monitor, and then cuts away the torn cartilage or tissue or rough bit of bone or whatever it is that’s causing the trouble. I’d heard that some patients have just a local anaesthetic and watch the whole operation on the monitor as it’s being done, but I didn’t fancy that, and said so. Nizar smiled reassuringly. (That’s the name of my orthopaedic consultant, Mr Nizar. I call him Knees ’R Us. Not to his face, of course. He’s from the Near East, Lebanon or Syria or one of those places, and well out of it from what I hear.) He said I would have a general anaesthetic, but he would give me a videotape of the op to take home. He wasn’t joking, either. I knew people had their weddings and christenings and holidays videotaped nowadays instead of photographed, but I didn’t know it had got as far as operations. I suppose you could make up a little compilation and invite your friends round to view it over wine and cheese. “That’s my appendectomy, had it done in 1984, or was it’85 … neat, eh? … And this is my open heart surgery, oops, a little bit of camera-jog there … Dorothy’s womb-scrape is coming up next …” [Memo: idea for The People Next Door in this?] I said to Nizar, “You could probably run a little video-rental business on the side for folk who haven’t had any operations of their own.” He laughed. He was very confident about the arthroscopy. He claimed that there was a ninety-five per cent success rate. I suppose somebody’s got to be in the unlucky five per cent.

  I had the operation done at Rummidge General. Being a private patient I would normally have gone into the Abbey, the BUPA hospital near the cricket ground, but they had a bit of a bottleneck there at the time – they were refurbishing one of their operating theatres or something – and Nizar said he could fit me in quicker if I came into the General, where he works one day a week for the NHS. He promised I would have a room to myself, and as the op entailed staying in for only one night, I agreed. I wanted to get it over and done with as soon as possible.

  As soon as I arrived at the General by taxi, at nine o’clock one winter morning, I began to wish I’d waited for a bed at the Abbey. The General is a huge, gloomy Victorian pile, blackened redbrick on the outside, slimy green and cream paint on the inside. The main reception area was already full of rows of people slumped in moulded plastic chairs, with that air of abandoned hope I always associate with NHS hospitals. One man had blood seeping through a bandage wrapped round his head. A baby was screaming its head off.

  Nizar had given me a scrap of graph paper with his name scrawled on it, and the date and time of my appointment – a ludicrously inadequate document for admission to a hospital, I thought, but the receptionist seemed to recognize it, and directed me to a ward on the third floor. I took the lift and was told off by a sharp-faced nursing sister who stepped in at the first floor and pointed out that it was for the use of hospital staff only. “Where are you going?” she demanded. “Ward 3J,” I said. “I’m having a minor operation. Mr Nizar.” “Oh,” she said with a slight sneer, “You’re one of his private patients, are you?” I got the impression she disapproved of private patients being treated in NHS hospitals. “I’m only in for one night,” I said, in mitigation. She gave a brief, barking laugh, which unsettled me. It turned out that she was in charge of Ward 3J. I wonder sometimes if she didn’t deliberately engineer the harrowing ordeal of the next hour and a half.

  There was a row of black plastic chairs up against the wall outside the ward where I sat for about twenty minutes before a thin, drawn-looking young Asian woman, in a house-doctor’s white coat, came and wrote down my particulars. She asked me if I had any allergies and tied a dogtag with my name on it to my wrist. Then she led me to a small, two-bed room. There was a man in striped pyjamas lying on one of the beds, with his face to the wall. I was about to protest that I had been promised a private room, when he turned over to look at us and I saw that he was black, probably Caribbean. Not wishing to appear racist, I swallowed my complaint. The house-doctor ordered me to take off all my clothes and to put on one of those hospital nightgowns that open down the back, which was lying folded on top of the vacant bed. She told me to remove any false teeth, glass eyes, artificial limbs or other such accessories I might be secreting on my person, and then left me. I undressed and put on the gown, watched enviously by the Caribbean. He told me he had been admitted three days ago, for a hernia operation, and nobody had come near him since. He seemed to have dropped into some kind of black hole in the system.

  I sat on the edge of the bed in my gown, feeling the draught up my legs. The Caribbean turned his face to the wall again and seemed to fall into a light sleep, groaning and whimpering to himself occasionally. The young Asian house-doctor came back into the room and checked the name on my dogtag against her notes as if she had never met me before. She asked me again if I had any allergies. I was rapidly losing faith in this hospital. “That man says he has been here three days and nobody has taken any notice of him,” I said. “Well, at least he’s had some sleep,” said the house-doctor, “which is more than I’ve had for the last thirty-six hours.” She left the room again. Time passed very slowly. A low winter sun shone through the dusty window. I watched the shadow of the window-frame inch its way across the linotiled floor. Then a nurse and a porter pushing a stretcher on wheels came to fetch me to the operating theatre. The porter was a young local man with a poker-player’s pallid, impassive face, and the nurse a buxom Irish girl whose starched uniform seemed a
size too small for her, giving her a slightly tarty look. The porter tossed me the usual local greeting – “A’right?” – and told me to hop on to the stretcher. I said, “I could walk, you know, in a dressing-gown. I’m not in any actual pain.” In fact I hadn’t felt a single twinge in the knee for over a week, which is pretty typical of all such ailments: as soon as you decide to have treatment, the symptoms disappear. “No, you’ve got to be wheeled,” he said. “Regulations.” Carefully holding the flaps of my gown together like an Edwardian lady adjusting her bustle, I mounted the stretcher and lay down. The nurse asked me if I was nervous. “Should I be?” I asked. She giggled but made no comment. The porter checked the name on my dogtag. “Passmore, yes. Right leg amputation, ennit?” “No!” I exclaimed, sitting up in alarm. “Just a minor knee operation.” “He’s only having you on,” said the nurse. “Stop it, Tom.” “Just pulling your leg,” said Tom, deadpan. They covered me with a blanket and tucked it in, pinning my arms to my sides. “Stops you getting knocked as we go through the swing doors,” Tom explained. The Caribbean woke up and raised himself on one elbow to watch me go. “So long,” I said. I never saw him again.

  You feel curiously helpless when you’re lying on your back on a stretcher without a pillow under your head. You can’t tell where you are or where you’re going. All you can see is ceilings, and the ceilings of the General Hospital weren’t a pretty sight: cracked plaster, flaking emulsion, cobwebs in corners and dead flies in the lighting fixtures. We seemed to be travelling through miles and miles of corridors. “Got to take the scenic route today,” Tom remarked from behind my head. “Theatre lift’s broke, ennit? Have to take you down to the basement by the utilities lift and then across to the other wing, then up the other lift and back over again.” The utilities lift was industrial-size: cavernous, dimly lit and smelling faintly of boiled cabbage and laundry. As I was pushed over the threshold the wheels caught on something and I found myself staring up into the space between the lift and the shaft at the black greasy cables and grooved wheels of the ancient-looking machinery. It was like being in one of those arty-farty movies where everything is shot from unnatural angles.