Therapy

off to tell Suzie, his production assistant, to amend the script. I left before Ollie arrived. Now I wonder why I didn’t put up more of a fight.
     
    The senior conductor has just announced that we are approaching Rugby. “Rugby will be the next station stop.” BR has taken to using this cumbersome phrase, “station stop” lately, presumably to distinguish scheduled stops at stations from unscheduled ones in the middle of fields, concerned perhaps that passengers disoriented by the fumes of bacon and tomato rolls and overheated brake linings in carriages with defective air-conditioning might otherwise stumble out on to the track by mistake and get killed.
     
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    Thursday evening. I got home at about 7.30. The train was only twelve minutes late in the end, and I found my car, unscathed by thieves or vandals, waiting for me where I had left it, like a faithful pet. I roused it with the remote button on my keyring as I approached and it blinked its indicator lights at me and cheeped three times, as the doorlocks clicked open. These remote-control gadgets give me an inexhaustible childish pleasure. Our garage door is operated by one, and it amuses me to start it opening as I turn the corner at the end of the road so that I can drive straight in without pausing. As the door yawned open this evening I saw that Sally’s car wasn’t parked inside, and when I let myself into the house I found a note in the kitchen to say that she’d gone down to the Club for a swim and sauna. I felt unreasonably disappointed, because I was all primed to tell her about the crisis over Debbie Radcliffe and the argument about the cut in this week’s episode. Not that she would be dying to hear about either topic. Au contraire.
    In my experience there are two kinds of writers’ wives. One kind is a combination of nanny, secretary and fan-club president. She reads the writer’s work in progress and always praises it; she watches his programmes at transmission and laughs at every joke; she winces at a bad review and rejoices at a good one as feelingly as he does; she keeps an anxious eye on his mood and workrate, brings him cups of tea and coffee at regular intervals, tiptoeing in and out of his study without disturbing his concentration; she answers the telephone and replies to letters, protecting him from tiresome and unprofitable invitations, requests and propositions; she keeps a note of his appointments and reminds him of them in good time, drives him to the station or airport and meets him again when he returns, and gives cocktail parties and dinner parties for his professional friends and patrons. The other kind is like Sally, who does none of these things, and has a career of her own which she considers just as important as her spouse’s, if not more so.
    Actually, Sally is the only writer’s wife of this kind that I’ve met, though I suppose there must be others.
    So it wasn’t that I was hoping for sympathetic advice and knowledgeable counsel when I got home, just i n opportunity to get some oppressive thoughts off my chest. Driving from the station, I felt a growing conviction that I had made a mistake in giving in so easily to cutting the reference to abortion in this week’s script, and began to torment myself by wondering whether or not to reopen discussion of the matter by phoning Ollie and Hal at their respective homes — knowing that I would be in a very weak position, having agreed to the cut this morning, and that I would create bad feeling all round by trying to revoke that decision, without actually achieving anything in the end anyway because it was probably too late to change the script again. Probably, but not necessarily. The actors rehearsed the cut version this afternoon, but could if required restore the missing lines at tomorrow’s rehearsal.
    I paced restlessly around the empty house, picked up the telephone a couple of times, and put it down again without dialling. I made myself a ham sandwich, but the meat was too cold from the fridge to have any flavour, and drank a can of beer that filled my stomach with gas. I turned on the telly at random and found myself watching a rival sitcom on BBC1 which seemed much wittier and sharper than The People Next Door, and switched it off again after ten minutes. I went into my study and sat down at the computer.
    I feel self-esteem leaking out of me like water torn an old bucket. I despise myself both for my weakness in