Therapy

by David Lodge

  Oh, I’m afraid I can’t take this Kierkegaard thing seriously. I told you, Tubby’s not an intellectual. It’s just a fad, something to impress other people with. Perhaps me. Perhaps himself. A device to dignify his petty little depressions as existentialist Angst. No, I’ve not read any myself, but I know roughly what he’s about. My father used to quote him occasionally in his sermons. Not any more, but of course we had to when we were children, every Sunday, morning and evening. I think that’s why I find Tubby’s obsession with Kierkegaard rather absurd. Tubby had a totally secular upbringing, knows absolutely nothing about religion, whereas I’ve been all through it and out the other side. It was painful, I can tell you. For years I concealed it from my father, that I no longer believed. I think it broke his heart when I finally came clean. Perhaps I waited too long to tell him what I really felt, as I did with Tubby about our marriage.

  Well, I could say that it was none of your business, couldn’t I? But no, there isn’t anyone else. I suppose Tubby’s been unloading his paranoid fantasies on you. You know about his ridiculous suspicion of my tennis coach? Poor man, I haven’t been able to look him in the eye since, let alone have any lessons. I really don’t know why Tubby went berserk with jealousy. Well, yes I do, it was because he just couldn’t accept that the problem in our marriage was himself. It had to be somebody else’s fault, mine, or some phantom lover of mine. It would have been so much better for all concerned if he could have faced facts calmly. All I wanted was an amicable separation and a reasonable financial settlement. It was all his fault that it’s escalated into a battle, with lawyers and injunctions and separate lives in the house and so on. He could still avoid a lot of unnecessary pain and expense by simply agreeing to the divorce, and making a fair settlement. No, he’s not. He’s at his London flat, I suppose. I don’t know, I haven’t seen him in the last few weeks. The bills keep coming in for the house, for gas and electricity and so on, and I forward them to him but he doesn’t pay them, so I’ve had to pay some myself to avoid having the services turned off, which isn’t fair. He very meanly drew out most of the money in our joint bank account the day after I left the house, and all the deposit accounts are in his name only, so I’m having to meet all my expenses out of my monthly salary, including lawyers’ fees. I’m really having a struggle to make ends meet.

  No, I don’t hate him, in spite of the way he’s behaved. I feel sorry for him. But there’s nothing I can do for him any more. He must work out his own salvation. I have to study my own needs. I’m not a hard-hearted woman. Tubby pretends that I am, but I’m not. It hasn’t been easy for me, all this stuff with lawyers and so on. But having screwed myself up to take this step, I’ve got to see it through. This is my last chance to forge an independent life for myself. I’m just young enough to do it, I think. A few years younger than Tubby, yes.

  It was such a long time ago. We were two different people, really. I was doing teaching practice in a Junior School in Leeds and he turned up there one day with a theatre group that toured schools. Five young people, would-be actors who couldn’t get Equity cards, had formed a company on a shoestring and were going around the country in an old Dormobile, towing a trailer full of props. They did stripped-down versions of Shakespeare for secondary schools and dramatized fairy-tales for juniors. They weren’t very good, to be honest, but they made up in enthusiasm for what they lacked in technique. After they’d done their show in the school hall and the kids had gone home, we invited them into the staff-room for tea and biscuits. I thought they were terribly bohemian and adventurous. My own life had been so respectable and sheltered in comparison. I did English at Royal Holloway, a women’s college of London University marooned in the Surrey stockbroker belt. My parents insisted on my going to a single-sex college if I wasn’t going to live at home, and I failed my Oxbridge entrance exams, so it was Royal Holloway or Leeds University. I was determined to get away from home, but I came back to do my PGCE in Leeds, to save money. I chose junior-school teaching – not many graduates did – because I didn’t fancy trying to control the roughs and toughs in the state comprehensives that were replacing the kind of grammar school I had gone to myself. In those days I wore pastel twin-sets and pleated skirts to mid-calf and sensible shoes and hardly any make-up. These young actors wore scruffy dark sweaters with holes in them, and had long greasy hair and smoked a lot. There were three boys and two girls and they all slept together in the Dormobile most of the time, Tubby told me, to save money. One day he parked it on top of a hill and didn’t put the handbrake on properly, and it slowly trundled down the hill until it ran up against a police station. He told the story in such a droll way, he made me laugh aloud. That’s what first attracted me to him, I think – the way he could make me laugh spontaneously, joyously. Laughing at home tended to be politely restrained or – amongst us children – mocking and sarcastic. With Tubby, I laughed before I realized I was laughing. If I were to try and put into a nutshell what has been wrong with our marriage for the last few years – why I didn’t get anything out of it, any happiness, any glad-to-be-alive feeling – I’d say it was because he didn’t make me laugh any more. Ironic, really, isn’t it, when you think that every week he makes millions of people laugh at his television show. Not me, I’m afraid. I find it totally unfunny.

  Anyway, that first day, he rather cheekily asked for my phone number and I rather recklessly gave it to him. I met him several times while he and his friends were in the Leeds area, in the evenings in pubs. Pubs! I had hardly ever been in a pub before I met Tubby. I didn’t invite him home. I knew my parents wouldn’t approve of him, though they would never admit why – because he was unkempt and under-educated and had a Cockney accent. I suppose you know he left school at sixteen? Well he did, with just a couple of O-Levels. He went to grammar school after the Eleven-Plus but never fitted in, was always bottom of the class. I don’t know – a combination of temperament, bad teaching and lack of support at home, I suppose. His parents were working-class – very decent, but not very education-conscious. Anyway, Tubby left school as soon as he could, and went to work as an office-boy for a theatrical impresario, that’s how he got interested in the stage. After National Service he went to drama school and tried to make it as an actor. That was when I met him. He played all the comic parts in the Dormobile troupe’s repertory, and wrote the scripts for their fairy-tale adaptations. He discovered in due course that he was better at writing than acting. We kept in touch after the troupe left Yorkshire. That summer I went up to Edinburgh, where they were doing a show in the Festival – the Fringe, of course – and distributed fliers and programmes, without telling my parents what I was up to. Then, much against their wishes, I applied for my first teaching job in London, knowing Tubby was based there. The Dormobile company had gone bust, and he was scraping a living as a temporary office worker, writing jokes for stand-up comedians in his spare time. We started to go steady. Eventually I had to bring him home one weekend to meet the family. I knew it would be sticky, and it was.

  My father had a living in an inner suburb of Leeds which had been going down in the world for decades. The church was huge, neo-gothic, blackened redbrick. I can’t remember it ever being full. It had been built on the top of a hill by the wealthy manufacturers and merchants who originally lived in the big stone villas that surrounded it, overlooking their factories and warehouses and the streets of terraced workers’ cottages at the bottom of the hill. There were still a few professional middle-class owner-occupiers when my father took over the parish, but most of the big houses were converted into flats or occupied by extended Asian families in the nineteen-fifties. My father was an earnest, well-meaning man, who read the Guardian when it was still called the Manchester Guardian, and did his best to make the Church responsive to the needs of the inner city, but the inner city never seemed to be very interested apart from weddings and christenings and funerals. My mother supported him loyally, scrimping and saving to bring up her children in a respectable middle-class style on
my father’s inadequate stipend. There were four of us, two boys and two girls. I was the second oldest. We all went to local single-sex grammar schools, but we grew up in a kind of cultural bubble, insulated from the lives of our peers. We had no television, partly because Father disapproved of it, but also because we couldn’t afford it. Going to the cinema was such a rare treat that the intensity of the experience used to upset me, and I rather dreaded the prospect as a child. We had a gramophone, but only classical records. We all learned to play musical instruments, though none of us had any real talent, and sometimes the whole family would sit down together and stumble through a piece of chamber music, making a noise that started the neighbourhood dogs howling. We were teetotal – again, as much from economy as principle. And we were very argumentative. The main family recreation was scoring points off each other in conversation, especially at meals.

  Tubby was completely flummoxed by this. He wasn’t used to family meals in any case. He very rarely sat down at the same table with his mother and father and brother, except for Sunday lunch and other high days and holidays. When he lived at home, he and his father and his brother would eat separately, at different times from each other, and from Mrs Passmore. When they came in in the evening, from work or school, she would ask them what they wanted, and then she would cook it and wait on them at table, as if she was running a café, while they ate with a newspaper or a book propped up against the salt cellar. I couldn’t believe it when I first visited his home.

  He found our domestic life equally bizarre, “as archaic as the Forsyte Saga,” he said to me once: sitting down en famille two or three times a day, with grace before and after meals, cloth napkins which you had to replace in your own special napkin-ring at the end of each meal so as to save laundry, and proper cutlery, however worn and tarnished, soup spoons for soup and fish knives and forks for fish, and so on. Our food was pretty horrible, and there was never enough of it when it was nice, but it was served with due ceremony and decorum. Poor Tubby was completely adrift that first weekend. He started eating before everyone else was served, he used his dessert spoon for his soup and his soup spoon for dessert and committed all kinds of other faux pas that had my younger brother and sister sniggering up their sleeves. But what really stunned him was the cut-and-thrust of mealtime conversation. It wasn’t that there was any real debate. Father thought he was encouraging us to think for ourselves, but in fact there were very strict limits to what it was permissible to say. You couldn’t have argued against the existence of God, for instance, or the truth of Christianity or the indissolubility of marriage. We children very soon cottoned on to these constraints, and domestic conversation became more of a point-scoring game, the aim being to discredit one of your siblings in the eyes of the rest of the family. If you misused a word, for instance, or made some error of fact, the others would be down on you at once like a ton of bricks. Tubby couldn’t cope with this at all. Of course, he used it much later in The People Next Door. The Springfields and the Davises are based essentially on my family and his, mutatis mutandis. The Springfields are totally secular, but that mixture of highmindedness and disputatiousness, their unacknowledged snobbery and prejudice, all go back to Tubby’s first impression of my family, while the Davises are a more rumbustious, somewhat sentimentalized version of his own, with bits of his Uncle Bert and Aunt Molly added. I suppose that’s why I never cared for the programme. It stirs too many painful memories. Our wedding was particularly gruesome, with the two sets of totally incompatible relatives grinding and grating against each other.

  Why did I marry him? I thought I was in love with him. Well, perhaps I was. What is love, except thinking you’re in it? I was longing to rebel against my parents without knowing how to do it. Marrying Tubby was a way of asserting my independence. And we were both desperate for sex – I mean just the normal appetites of youth – but I wasn’t rebellious enough to think of having it outside marriage. And then Tubby did have an undeniable charm in those days. He had faith in himself, in his gift, and he made me share that faith. But most of all, he was fun to be with. He made me laugh.

  TUESDAY, 25TH MAY. The plane trees outside my window are in leaf: rather listless, anaemic leaf, with no visible blossom, not like the creamy phallic candles of the chestnuts outside my study in Hollywell. There aren’t any squirrels scampering about in these branches, either, but that’s hardly surprising. I should be grateful – I am grateful – that trees grow here at all, considering the pollution in central London. There’s a narrow, featureless short cut between Brewer Street and Regent Street called Air Street that always makes me smile when I clock the nameplate. I smile rather than laugh because it’s invariably choked with traffic pumping carcinogenic exhaust fumes into the atmosphere, and you wouldn’t want to open your mouth if you could help it. Air Street. I don’t know how it got the name, but you could make a fortune selling bottled air round here.

  Now that I’m living permanently in the flat I find it claustrophobic. I miss the clean-smelling air of Hollywell, I miss the squirrels playing tag in the garden, I miss the daytime hush of those suburban streets where the loudest noise at this time of year is the burr of a distant lawnmower, or the pock pock of a game of tennis. But I couldn’t stand the strain of sharing the house with Sally any longer. Passing her in stony-faced silence on the stairs or in the hall; exchanging curt accusing little notes (“If you must leave the laundry to soak, please remove it before it is my turn to use the utility room.” “As I bought the last bottle of Rinse-Aid for the dishwasher perhaps you would like to replace it next time”); hiding when she opened the front door to a neighbour or tradesman so that we wouldn’t be obliged to speak to each other in front of them; picking up the phone to make a call and dropping it like a hot brick because Sally was already using it, and then being tempted to press the monitor button and listen in … Whoever dreamed up that “separate lives” lark had a sadistic streak – or a warped sense of humour. When I described it to Jake he said, “You know, there’s a great idea for a sitcom there.” I haven’t spoken to him since.

  It feels strange, writing this journal again. There’s quite a gap in it. After Sally dropped her bombshell that evening (what exactly is, or was, a bombshell, incidentally? And how do you drop one without blowing yourself up? Is it a grenade, or a mortar shell, or was it a primitive kind of aerial bomb that they lobbed out of the open cockpits of the old biplanes? The dictionary isn’t much help) – after Sally burst into my study that Friday evening, and announced that she wanted a separation, I was too upset to be able to write anything, even a journal, for weeks. I was beside myself with jealousy and rage and self-pity. (Now there’s a good cliché for you, “beside myself”: as if you’re so full of negative feelings that you shake your mind loose from your body, severing the connections between them, and the one is unable to voice the pain of the other.) All I could think of was how to get even with Sally: by being obstructive over money; by trying to track down and expose the lover I was sure she must have; and by having an affair with somebody myself. Why did I think that this last would bother her, I wonder? In any case, even if I’d succeeded I wouldn’t have been able to let Sally know, because then she could have sued for a quick divorce on the grounds of adultery. If I try and untwist the tangled and frazzled wires of my motivation at that time, I would have to say that I was trying to make up for lost philandering.

  What was most painful about Sally’s UDI was of course her rejection of me as a person, and the implied judgement that our thirty years together, or a good many of them, had been worthless, meaningless, as far as she was concerned. After she walked out of the house I sat on the floor of the living-room with all our family photograph albums, which I hadn’t looked at for years, spread out around me, and turned the pages with tears streaming down my cheeks. The unbearable poignancy of those snaps! Sally and the children grinning into the lens from deckchairs, pushchairs, swings, sandcastles, paddling pools, swimming pools, bicycle saddles, pony saddles, the decks of cr
oss-Channel ferries and the patios of French gîtes. The kids gradually getting taller and stronger from year to year, Sally getting a little thinner in the face and greyer in the hair, but always looking healthy and happy. Yes, happy. Surely the camera couldn’t lie? I snivelled and wiped away my tears and blew my nose, peering intently at the brightly coloured Kodak prints to see if I could discern in Sally’s face any sign of the disaffection to come. But her eyes were too small, I couldn’t see into the eyes, which is the only place where a person can’t disguise what they’re thinking. Perhaps it had all been an illusion, our “happy marriage”, a smile for the camera.

  Once you begin to doubt your marriage, you begin to doubt your grasp of reality. I thought I knew Sally – suddenly I found I didn’t. So perhaps I didn’t know myself. Perhaps I didn’t know anything. This was such a vertiginous conclusion that I sheered away from it, and took refuge in anger. I demonized Sally. The breakup of our marriage was all her fault. Whatever truth there might be in her complaints about my self-centredness, moodiness, abstractedness, etc. etc. (and admittedly my inattention to the news about Jane’s pregnancy was an embarrassing lapse) they didn’t amount to grounds for leaving me. There had to be another reason, viz., another man. There were plenty of examples of adultery in our circle of acquaintance to support the hypothesis. And our lifestyle since the children left home would have made it very easy for Sally to maintain another relationship, with me being in London for two days a week, and her professional life a closed book as far as I was concerned. What particularly angered me was that I hadn’t taken advantage of the situation myself. “Anger” isn’t quite the word, though. Chagrin, or as Amy would say, chagrin, is better – it has the teeth-grinding, bottled-up, you’ll-be-sorry-for-this quality of resentment that had me in its grip. I was chagrined at the thought of all the women I might so easily have had in the course of my professional life, especially in recent years, if I hadn’t resolved to be faithful to Sally: actresses and production assistants and publicity girls and secretaries – all susceptible to the mana of a successful writer. Freud said, so Amy told me once, that all writers are driven by three ambitions: fame, money and the love of women (or men, I presume, as the case might be, though I don’t think Freud took much account of women writers, or gay ones). I admit to pursuing the first two ambitions, but scrupulously abstained from the third on principle. And what was my reward? To be put out to grass when I had served my turn, when my sexual powers were on the wane.