Therapy

only their performance on the night, but also their potential for quite other performances. You might go with Amy to see Macbeth at the RSC and say to her on the way home, “Wasn’t Deborah Radcliffe a great Lady Macbeth?” and she’d say, “Mmm, I’d love to see her do Judith Bliss in Hay Fever.” I wonder sometimes whether this habit of mind doesn’t prevent her from enjoying what’s going on in front of her. Perhaps that’s what we have in common — neither of us being able to live in the present, always hankering after some phantom of perfection elsewhere.
    I put this to her once. “Balls, darling,” she said. “With the greatest respect, complete cojones. You forget that every now and again I pull it off. I achieve the perfect fit between actor and role. Then I enjoy the show and nothing but the show. I live for those moments. So do you, for that matter. I mean when everything in an episode goes exactly right. You sit in front of the telly holding your breath thinking, they can’t possibly keep this up, it’s going to dip in a moment, but they do, and it doesn’t — that’s what it’s all about, n’est ce pas ?”
    “I can’t remember when I thought an episode was that good,” I said.
    “What about the fumigation one?”
    “Yes, the fumigation one was good.”
    “It was bloody brilliant.”
    That’s what I like about Amy — she’s always pumping up my self-esteem. Sally’s style is more bracing: stop moping and get on with your life. In fact in every way they’re antithetical. Sally is a blonde, blue-eyed English rose, tall, supple, athletic. Amy is the Mediterranean type (her father was a Greek Cypriot): dark, short and buxom, with a head of frizzy black curls and eyes like raisins. She smokes, wears a lot of make-up, and never walks anywhere, let alone runs, if she can possibly avoid it. We had to run for a train once at Euston: I shot ahead and held the door open for her as she came waddling down the ramp on her high heels like a panicked duck, all her necklaces and earrings and scarves and bags and other female paraphernalia atremble, and I burst out laughing. I just couldn’t help myself. Amy asked me what was so funny as she scrambled breathlessly aboard, and when I told her she refused to speak to me for the rest of the journey. (Incidentally, I just looked up “paraphernalia” in the dictionary because I wasn’t sure I’d spelled it right, and discovered it comes from the Latin paraphema, meaning “a woman’s personal property apart from her dowry.” Interesting.)
    It was one of our very few tiffs. We get on very well together as a rule, exchanging industry gossip, trading personal moans and reassurances, comparing therapies. Amy is divorced, with custody of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Zelda, who is just discovering boys and giving Amy a hard time about clothes, staying out late, going to dubious discos, etc. etc. Amy is terrified that Zelda’s going to get into sex and drugs any minute now, and distrusts her ex-husband, Saul, a theatre manager who has the kid to stay one weekend every month and who, Amy says, has no morals, or, to quote her exactly, “wouldn’t recognize a moral if it bit him on the nose.” Nevertheless she feels riven with guilt about the break-up of the marriage, fearing that Zelda will go off the rails for lack of a father-figure in the home. Amy started analysis primarily to discover what went wrong between herself and Saul. In a sense she knew that already: it was sex. Saul wanted to do things that she didn’t want to do, so eventually he found someone else to do them with. But she’s still trying to work out whether this was his fault or hers, and doesn’t seem to be any nearer a conclusion. Analysis has a way of unravelling the self: the longer you pull on the thread, the more flaws you find.
    I see Amy nearly every week, when I go to London. Sometimes we go to a show, but more often than not we just spend a quiet evening together, at the flat, and/or have a bite to eat at one of the local restaurants. There’s never been any question of sex in our relationship, because Amy doesn’t really want it and I don’t really need it. I get plenty of sex at home. Sally seems full of erotic appetite these days — I think it must be the hormone replacement therapy she’s having for the menopause. Sometimes, to stimulate my own sluggish libido, I suggest something Saul wanted to do with Amy, and Sally hasn’t turned me down yet. When