Therapy

too, I’ve heard.” Joe winked at the other two, and of course Humphrey backed him up.
    “He’s certainly got the tackle. I saw him in the showers the other day. It must be a ten-incher.”
    “How d’you measure up to that, Tubby?”
    “You’ll have to raise your game.”
    “You’ll get yourself arrested one day, Humphrey,” I said. “Ogling blokes in the showers.” The others hooted with laughter.
    This kind of joshing is standard between us four. No harm in it. Humphrey’s a bachelor, lives with his mother and doesn’t have a girlfriend, but nobody supposes for a moment that he’s gay. If we did, we wouldn’t wind him up about it. Likewise with the innuendo about Brett Sutton and Sally. It’s a stock joke that all the women in the club wet their knickers at the sight of him — he’s tall, dark, and handsome enough to wear his hair in a ponytail without looking like a ponce — but nobody believes any real hanky-panky goes on.
    For some reason I remembered this conversation as we were going to bed tonight, and relayed it to Sally. She sniffed and said, “Isn’t it a bit late in the day for you lot to be worrying about the size of your willies?”
    I said that for a really dedicated worrier it was never too late.
     
    One thing I’ve never worried about, though, is Sally’s fidelity. We’ve had our ups and downs, of course, in nearly thirty years of marriage, but we’ve always been faithful to each other. Not for lack of opportunity, I may say, at least on my side, the entertainment world being what it is, and I daresay on hers too, though I can’t believe that she’s exposed to the same occupational temptations. Her colleagues at the Poly, or rather University as I must learn to call it now, don’t look much of an erotic turn-on to me. But that’s not the point. We’ve always been faithful to each other. How can I be sure? I just am. Sally was a virgin when I met her, nice girls usually were in those days, and I wasn’t all that experienced myself. My sexual history was a very slim volume, consisting of isolated, opportunistic couplings with garrison slags in the Army, with drunken girls at drama-school parties, and with lonely landladies in seedy theatrical digs. I don’t think I had sex with any of them more than twice, and it was always fairly quick and in the missionary position. To enjoy sex you need comfort — clean sheets, firm mattresses, warm bedrooms — and continuity. Sally and I learned about making love together, more or less from scratch. If she were to go with anyone else, something new in her behaviour, some unfamiliar adjustment of her limbs, some variation in her caresses, would tell me, I’m certain. I always have trouble with adultery stories, especially those where one partner has been betraying the other for years. How could you not know? Of course, Sally doesn’t know about Amy. But then I’m not having an affair with Amy. What am I having with her? I don’t know.
     
    I met Amy six years ago when she was hired to help cast the first series of The People Next Door. Needless to say, she did a brilliant job. Some people in the business reckon that ninety per cent of the success of a sitcom is in the casting. As a writer I would question that, naturally, but it’s true that the best script in the world won’t work if the actors are all wrong. And the right ones are not always everybody’s obvious first choice. It was Amy’s idea, for instance, to cast Deborah Radcliffe as Priscilla, the middle-class mother — a classical actress who’d just been let go by the Royal Shakespeare, and had never done sitcom before in her life. Nobody except Amy would have thought of her for Priscilla, but she took to the part like a duck to water. Now she’s a household name and can earn five grand for a thirty-second commercial.
    It’s a funny business, casting. It’s a gift, like fortune-telling or water-divining, but you also need a trained memory. Amy has a mind like a Rolodex: when you ask her advice about casting a part she goes into a kind of trance, her eyes turn up to the ceiling, and you can almost hear the fllick-flick-flick inside her head as she spools through that mental card-index where the essence of every actor and actress she has ever seen is inscribed. When Amy goes to see a show, she’s not just watching the actors perform their given roles, she’s imagining them all the time in other roles, so that by the end of the evening she’s assimilated not