Therapy

beside it. When you press the bell-push, a female voice asks you if you have a first-class ticket, and if you say “Yes” the door springs open with a click and a buzz, and you’re in. There’s a nice-looking girl at the desk who smiles as you show your ticket and sign the Visitors’ Book, and offers you complimentary coffee or tea. It’s calm and hushed inside, air-conditioned, carpeted and comfortably furnished with armchairs and banquettes upholstered in soothing tones of blue and grey. There are newspapers, and telephones, and a photocopier. Down below, the hoi polloi waiting for trains must sit on their luggage, or on the floor (since there are no seats in the vast marbled concourse) or else patronize one of the fast-food outlets — Upper Crust, Casey Jones, The Hot Croissant, Pizza Hut, etc. — that cluster together in a junk-food theme park at one end of
     
    I got so carried away by that bit of description that I discovered I’d missed the 5.10 as well. Or rather I discovered I’d left myself only two minutes in which to catch it, and I couldn’t bear the thought of running down the ramp towards the same ticket-collector and having him shut the barrier in my face again, like some kind of dream repetition of the original trauma. So I may as well, while I wait for the 5.40, record why I was on such a short fuse in the first place.
     
    I called in at Jake’s office on my way to Euston. It’s a small set of rooms over a tatty tee-shirt and souvenir shop in Carnaby Street. There was a new girl in the tiny reception office at the top of the stairs, tall and slim, in a very tight, very short black dress that barely covered her bum when she stood up. She introduced herself as Linda. After she’d shown me into Jake’s room and shut the door, he said, “I know what you’re thinking, and no, she isn’t the one. Not,” he added, with his cheeky chappie grin, “that I could swear she won’t be, one day. Did you get a look at those legs?” “I could hardly avoid it, could I?” I said. “Given the dimensions of your office and her skirt.” Jake laughed. “What’s the news from Heartland?” I said. He stopped laughing. “Tubby,” he said, leaning forward earnestly in his swivel chair, “you’re going to have to find some acceptable way of writing Priscilla out of the series. Acceptable to everyone, I mean. I know you can, if you set your mind to it.” “And if I can’t?” I said. Jake spread his hands. “Then they’ll get somebody else to do it.” I felt a small, premonitory spasm of anxiety. “They can’t do that without my agreement, can they?” “I’m afraid they can,” said Jake, swivelling his chair to pull open a drawer, and avoiding my eye in the process. “I looked up the original contract.” He took a file from the drawer and passed it to me across the desk. “Clause fourteen is the relevant one.” The contract for the first series had been drawn up a long time ago, when I was just another scriptwriter, with no particular clout. Clause fourteen said that if they asked me to write further series based on the same characters, and I declined, they could employ other writers to do the job, paying me a token royalty for the original concept. I can’t recall giving this clause any special thought at the time, but I’m not surprised that I agreed to it. Getting the programme extended for another series was then my dearest ambition, and the idea that I might not want to write it myself would have seemed absurd. But the clause referred not just to a second series, but to “series”, in the indefinite plural. Effectively I had signed away my copyright in the story and characters. I reproached Jake for not having spotted the danger and re-negotiated the clause in subsequent contracts. He said he didn’t think Heartland would have played ball anyway. I don’t agree. I think we could have twisted their arm between the second and the third series, they were so keen. Even now I can’t believe that they would turn the whole show over to another writer, or writers. It’s my baby. It’s me. Nobody else could make it work as well.
    Could they?
    This is a dangerous train of thought, fraught with new possibilities for loss of self-esteem. Anyway, I’d better stop, or I’ll miss the 5.40 as well.
     
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    Friday 26th Feb., 8p. m. Jake called this morning to say he’d received a note from Ollie Silvers, “just summarizing the main points of