Therapy

by David Lodge

  Being the sort of writer I am, I couldn’t just summarize other people’s views of me, I had to let them speak their thoughts in their own voices. And what they said wasn’t very flattering. “You’ve been very hard on yourself,” Alexandra said, when she finally saw what I’d written. It took me some weeks – I got a bit carried away – and I only sent the stuff to her last week, quite a bulky package. I went up to Rummidge yesterday for her verdict. “They’re very funny, very acute,” she said, leafing through the sheaves of A4 with a reminiscent smile playing over her pale, unpainted lips, “but you’ve been very hard on yourself.” I shrugged and said I had tried to see myself truthfully from other people’s points of view. “But you must have made up a lot of these things.” Not all that much, I said.

  I had to use my imagination a bit, of course. I never saw Brett Sutton’s statement to the police, for instance, but I had to make one myself, and they gave me a copy to take home, so I knew what the format was like, and it wasn’t hard to guess what Brett Sutton’s version of events would have been. And although Amy was always very secretive about her sessions with Karl Kiss, I knew she would have been giving him daily bulletins about developments in our relationship following Sally’s bombshell, and I’ve had plenty of opportunity to study the way she thinks and talks. Most of the things she says to Karl in the monologue she said to me at one time or another, like remembering her mother slicing carrots in the kitchen while telling her the facts of life, or dreaming of the cartoon in Public Interest with me as Vulcan and Saul as Mars. The bit about her sewage-disposal problems in the Playa de las Americas hotel was an extrapolation from listening to her endlessly cranking the handle of the toilet when she was in the bathroom. The ending is a little too neat, perhaps, but I couldn’t resist it. Amy did return to England in a bouncy, self-assertive mood, saying that she was going to give Karl his “congé”, but the last I heard she was back in analysis again. I don’t see much of Amy, actually, these days. We tried meeting again for a meal once or twice, but we couldn’t seem to get back onto the old friendly footing. Embarrassing memories of Tenerife kept getting in the way.

  Whether Louise actually described our reunion to Stella in such detail, I have no idea, but whatever she told her would have been on the phone. Louise may have given up smoking and drinking and drugs (apart from Prozac), but she’s completely addicted to the telephone. She had her dinky Japanese portable beside her plate at the Venice restaurant all through our meal, and kept interrupting my heartbroken confidences to take and make calls about her movie. Ollie wasn’t difficult. I must have been trapped with him in a bar a hundred times. I did take a few liberties with Samantha. She mentioned – I can’t remember the context now – that she had a friend who was suffering from impacted wisdom teeth, but the hospital visit was all my invention. I just liked the idea of this helpless, speechless captive auditor unable to stem the flow of Samantha’s loud recapitulation of our would-be dirty weekend in Copenhagen. She’s a smart babe, Samantha, but sensitivity is not her strong point.

  The hardest one to write was Sally’s. I didn’t show it to Alexandra because she might have thought I was taking a liberty, writing her into it. I know she invited Sally to come and see her, because she asked if I had any objection (I said no). And I believe Sally agreed, but Alexandra never told me what she said, so I assumed it was discouraging. It was almost physically painful, reliving the bust-up through Sally’s eyes. That’s why the monologue changes halfway from being one side of a conversation with Alexandra to being a stream of reminiscence about our courtship. But that was painful too, reliving those days of hope and promise and laughter. The most chilling thing that Sally said to me in the course of that long hellish weekend of argument and pleading and recrimination before she walked out, the moment when I knew, really knew, in my heart, that I’d lost her, was when she said: “You don’t make me laugh any more.”

  Thursday 27th May, 10 a.m. It took me all day to write yesterday’s entry. I worked without a break, except for five minutes when I nipped out to Pret A Manger for a prawn and avocado sandwich, which I ate at the table as I went on writing. There was a lot to catch up on.

  I finished at about seven, feeling tired, hungry and thirsty. My knee was giving me gyp too: sitting in one position for long periods is bad for it. (What is “gyp”, I wonder? Dictionary says “probably a contraction of gee up”, which doesn’t sound very probable to me. More likely something to do with Egypt, as in “gyppy tummy”, a bit of army slang from the days of the Empire.) I went out to stretch my legs and refuel. It was a fine warm evening. The young swarmed round Leicester Square tube station as they always do at that time of day, whatever the season. They bubble up from the subway like some irrepressible underground spring, spill out on to the pavement, and stand around outside the Hippodrome in their flimsy casual clothes looking eager and expectant. What are they hoping for? I don’t think most of them could tell you if you asked them. Some adventure, some encounter, some miraculous transformation of their ordinary lives. A few, of course, are waiting for a date. I see their faces light up as they spot their boyfriend or girlfriend approaching. They embrace, oblivious to the fat baldy in the leather jacket sauntering past with his hands in his pockets, and move off, arms round each other’s waists, to some restaurant or cinema or bar throbbing with amplified rock music. I used to meet Sally on this corner when we were courting. Now I buy a Standard to read over my Chinese meal in Lisle Street.

  The trouble with eating alone, well one of the troubles anyway, is that you tend to order too much and eat too fast. When I came back from the restaurant, bloated and belching, it was only 8.30, and still light. But Grahame was already settling himself down for the night on the porch. I invited him in to watch the second half of the European Cup Final between AC Milan and Marseille. Marseille won 1–0. A good game, though it’s hard to work up much passion about a match with no British club involved. I remember when Manchester United won the European Cup with George Best in the side. Delirious. I asked Grahame if he remembered, but of course he wasn’t even born then.

  Grahame is lucky to still be occupying the porch. Herr Bohl, the Swiss businessman who owns flat number 5 and resides there occasionally, took exception to his presence and proposed to call the police and have him ejected. I appealed to Bohl to let him stay on the grounds that he keeps the porch beautifully clean and deters passers-by from tossing their rubbish into it and drunks from using it as a nocturnal urinal, which they used to do frequently and copiously. This cunning appeal to the Swiss obsession with hygiene paid off. Herr Bohl had to admit that the porch smelled considerably sweeter since Grahame’s occupancy, and withdrew his threat to call the police.

  It helped my case that Grahame himself always looks clean and doesn’t smell at all. This puzzled me for a long time until one day I ventured to ask him how he managed it. He smiled slyly and told me he would let me into a secret. The next day he led me to a place on Trafalgar Square, just a door in the wall with an electronic lock on it that I must have passed scores of times without noticing it. Grahame tapped out a sequence of numbers on the keypad and the lock buzzed and opened. Inside was an underground labyrinth of rooms providing food, games, showers and a launderette. It’s a kind of refuge for homeless young people. There are even dressing-gowns provided so that if you’ve only got one set of clothes you can sit and wait while they’re being washed and dried. It reminded me a bit of the Pullman Lounge at Euston Station. I sent a donation to the charity that runs it the other day. Knowing it’s there makes me feel slightly less guilty about knowing that Grahame is sleeping in the porch. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate …

  Actually, there’s no reason why I should feel guilty at all. Grahame has chosen to live on the street. Out of a pretty lousy set of options, admittedly, but it’s probably the best life he’s ever had – certainly the most independent. “I am the master of my fate,” he said to me solemnly one day. It was one of these phrases he had seen somewhere and memori
zed, without knowing who said it. I looked it up in my dictionary of quotations. It comes from a poem by W. E. Henley:

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  I wish I was.

  11.15. Jake just rang. I listened to him leave a message on the answerphone without picking up the receiver or returning his call. He was trying to lure me to lunch at Groucho’s. He’s getting jittery because we’re approaching the deadline after which Heartland can exercise their right to employ another writer. Well, let them. I’m much more interested in Søren and Regine than in Priscilla and Edward these days, but I know Ollie Silvers has no intention of making a programme about Kierkegaard, however much work I do on The People Next Door, so why should I bother?

  Grahame was quite impressed when he found out I was a TV scriptwriter, but when I mentioned the name of the show he said, “Oh, that,” in a distinctly sniffy tone. I thought this was a bit cheeky, especially as he was swigging my tea and stuffing himself with carrot cake from Pret A Manger at the time. “It’s all right, I suppose,” he said, “if you like that sort of thing.” I pressed him to explain why he obviously didn’t like it himself. “Well, it ain’t real, is it?” he said. “I mean, every week there’s some great row in one of the houses, but it’s always sorted out by the end of the programme, and everybody’s sweet as pie again. Nothing ever changes. Nobody ever gets really hurt. Nobody hits anybody. None of the kids ever run away.” “Alice ran away once,” I pointed out. “Yeah, for about ten minutes,” he said. He meant ten minutes of screen time, but I didn’t quibble. I took his point.

  2.15 p.m. I went out for a pub lunch and when I came back there was a message from Samantha on the answerphone: she’s had an idea for solving the Debbie–Priscilla problem that she wants to discuss with me. She said she would be back at her desk by three, which seems to imply a rather leisurely lunch, but gave me time to leave a message on her answerphone, asking her to put the idea on paper and mail it to me. I only communicate by answerphone or letter nowadays. This allows me to control the agenda of all discussions and avoid the dreaded question, “How are you?” Sometimes if I’m feeling particularly lonely I call my bank’s Phoneline service and check the balances in my various accounts with the girl whose recorded voice guides you through the digitally coded procedure. She sounds rather nice, and she doesn’t ask how you are. Though if you make a mistake she says, “I’m sorry, there appears to be a problem.” Too true, darling, I tell her.

  “Only when I write do I feel well. Then I forget all of life’s vexations, all its sufferings, then I am wrapped in thought and am happy.” – Kierkegaard’s journal, 1847. While I was writing the monologues I was – not happy exactly, but occupied, absorbed, interested. It was like working on a script. I had a task to perform, and I got some satisfaction in performing it. Now that I’ve finished the task, and brought my journal more or less up to date, I feel restless, nervous, ill-at-ease, unable to settle to anything. I have no aim or objective, apart from making it as difficult as possible for Sally to get her hands on my money, and my heart isn’t really in that any more. I’ve got to go up to Rummidge to see my lawyer tomorrow. I could instruct him to throw in the towel, settle the divorce as quickly as possible and give Sally what she wants. But would that make me feel any better? No. It’s another either/or situation. It doesn’t matter what I do, I’m bound to regret it. If you divorce you’ll regret it, if you don’t divorce you’ll regret it. Divorce or don’t divorce, you’ll regret both.

  Perhaps I still hope that Sally and I will get together again, that I can have my old life back, that everything will be as it used to be. Perhaps, in spite of all my tantrums and tears and plots for revenge – or because of them – I haven’t truly despaired of our marriage. B says to A: “In order truly to despair one must really want to, but when one truly wills despair one is truly beyond it; when one has truly chosen despair one has truly chosen what despair chooses, namely oneself in one’s eternal validity.” I suppose you could say I chose myself when I declined Alexandra’s offer to put me on Prozac, but it didn’t feel like an act of existential self-affirmation at the time. More like a captured criminal holding out his wrists for the handcuffs.

  5.30. I suddenly thought that as I’m going up to Rummidge tomorrow, I might as well try to fit some therapy in. I made a couple of phone calls. Roland was fully booked, but Dudley was able to give me an appointment in the afternoon. I didn’t try Miss Wu. I haven’t seen her since that Friday when Sally dropped her bombshell. I haven’t felt like it. Nothing to do with Miss Wu. Association of ideas: acupuncture and my life falling apart.

  9.30. I ate at an Indian restaurant this evening and came home at about nine, spicing the metropolitan pollution with explosive, aromatic farts. Grahame said a man had rung my doorbell. From his description I guessed it was Jake. “Friend of yours, is he?” Grahame enquired. “Sort of,” I said. “He asked me if I’d seen you lately. Didn’t give a very flattering description.” Naturally I asked what it was. “Fattish, bald, round-shouldered.” The last epithet shook me a bit. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly round-shouldered. It must be the effect of depression. How you feel is how you look. I don’t think it was only his childhood accident that made Kierkegaard’s spine curve. “What did you tell him?” I asked. “I didn’t tell him nothing,” said Grahame. “Good,” I said. “You did well.”

  Friday 28th May. 7.45 p.m. Just returned from Rummidge. I drove, simply to give the Richmobile a run: I keep it in a lock-up garage near King’s Cross, and hardly ever use it these days. Not that there was much pleasure to be had on the M1 today. It had broken out in a rash of cones, like scarlet fever, and contraflow between Junctions 9 and 11 was causing a five-mile tailback. Apparently a car towing a caravan had contraflowed into a lorry. So I was late for my appointment with Dennis Shorthouse. He specializes in divorce and family litigation for my solicitors, Dobson McKitterick. I never had any dealings with him until the bust-up with Sally. He’s tall, grey-haired, with a spare frame and a lined, beaky face, and rarely moves from behind his large, eerily tidy desk. Just as some doctors keep themselves preternaturally clean and neat as if to ward off infection, so Shorthouse seems to use his desk as some kind of cordon sanitaire to keep his clients’ misery at a safe distance. It has an in-tray and an out-tray, both always empty, a spotless blotter and a digital clock, subtly angled towards the client’s chair like a taxi-meter, so you can see how much his advice is costing you.

  He’d had a letter from Sally’s solicitors, threatening to sue for divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. “As you know, adultery and unreasonable behaviour are the only grounds for an immediate divorce,” he said. I asked him what constituted unreasonable behaviour. “A very good question,” he said, joining his fingertips and leaning forward across the desk. He launched into a long disquisition, but I’m afraid my mind wandered and I suddenly became aware that he had fallen silent and was looking expectantly at me. “I’m sorry, would you just repeat that, please?” I said. His smile became a trifle forced. “Repeat how much?” he said. “Just the last bit,” I said, not having a clue how long he had been speaking. “I asked you, what kind of unreasonable behaviour Mrs Passmore was likely to complain of, if she were under oath.” I thought for a moment. “Would my not listening when she was talking to me count?” I said. “It might,” he said. “It would depend on the judge.” I got the impression that if Shorthouse were judging me himself, I wouldn’t stand much chance. “Have you ever physically assaulted your wife?” he said. “Good God, no,” I said. “What about drunkenness, verbal abuse, jealous rages, false accusations, that sort of thing?” “Only since she walked out on me,” I said. “I didn’t hear you say that,” he said. He paused for a moment before summing up: “I don’t think Mrs Passmore will risk lodging an unreasonable behaviour petition. She won’t qualify for legal aid, and i
f she were to lose the costs could be considerable. Also she would be back to square one as regards the divorce. She’s threatening this to bring pressure on you to co-operate. I don’t think you need worry.” Shorthouse smirked, obviously pleased with his analysis. “You mean she won’t get a divorce?” I said. “Oh, she’ll get it eventually, of course, on grounds of irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. It’s a question of how long you want to make her wait.” “And how much I want to pay you to delay things?” I said. “Quite so,” he said, glancing at the clock. I told him to carry on delaying.

  Then I went to see Dudley. Drawing up outside his house I thought wistfully of all the previous occasions on which I had visited him with nothing more serious to complain of than a general, ill-defined malaise. A wide-bodied jet thundered overhead as I rang the doorbell, making me cringe and cover my ears. Dudley told me it was a new scheduled service to New York. “Be useful to you, won’t it, in your line of work?” he remarked, “You won’t have to go from Heathrow any more.” Dudley has a rather exaggerated notion of the glamour of a TV scriptwriter’s life. I told him I was living in London now, anyway, and the reason. “I don’t suppose you have an essential oil for marital breakdown, do you?” I said. “I can give you something for stress,” he offered. I asked him if he could do anything about my knee, which had been playing up badly on the M1. He tapped away on his computer and said he would try lavender, which was allegedly good for aches and pains and stress. He took a little phial out of his big, brass-bound case of essential oils, and invited me to smell it.