Therapy

our conversation with Tubby last Sunday, to avoid any misunderstanding .” This brings clause fourteen into operation, and means that I have twelve weeks in which to make up my mind whether to write Priscilla out of the script myself, or let someone else do the deed.
     
    Aromatherapy with Dudley this afternoon. Dudley Neil-Hutchinson, to give his name both barrels. He looks a bit like a hippie Lytton Strachey — tall, spindly, with a long woolly beard that you’d think was attached to his granny glasses. He wears jeans and deck shoes and ethnic print shirts and waistcoats from the Oxfam shop. He tucks his beard into the waistcoats so that it doesn’t tickle when he massages you. He practises at home in a modern three-bedroomed semi near the airport, triple-glazed to exclude the sound of aircraft taking off and landing. Sometimes, lying prone on the massage table, you feel a shadow pass over you and if you look up quickly enough you catch a glimpse of a huge plane swooping silently over the rooftops, so close you can pick out the white faces of passengers at the portholes. It’s quite alarming at first. Dudley does two mornings a week at the Wellbeing, but I prefer to go to his house for treatment because I don’t want Miss Wu to know I’m resorting to aromatherapy as well as acupuncture. She’s so sensitive, she might take it as a personal vote of no confidence in her skills. I can just imagine bumping into her as I came out of a session with Dudley, and the silent, hurt look of reproach in her dark brown eyes. Miss Wu doesn’t know about Alexandra, either. Alexandra knows about Miss Wu, but not about Dudley. I haven’t told her, not because she’d feel threatened, but because she might be disappointed in me. She respects acupuncture, but I don’t think she would have much time for aromatherapy.
    It was June Mayfield who put me onto it. She works in Make-Up at Heartland, and sits in the wings during recordings of The People Next Door, ready to dart forward and titivate Debbie’s hair when required, or powder the actors’ noses if they get shiny under the lights. I was chatting to her in the canteen one day and she told me aromatherapy had changed her life, curing her of the migraines that had been the bane of her existence for years. She gave me Dudley’s card, and I thought I’d give it a try. I’d just given up yoga, on account of my Internal Derangement of the Knee, so I had a vacant slot in my therapy schedule. I used to go once a fortnight to Miss Flynn, a seventy-five-year-old lady with elastic joints who teaches Pranayama yoga. It’s not the sort where you stand on your head for hours or tie yourself in knots that have to be unravelled in Casualty. It’s mostly about breathing and relaxation, but it does entail attempting the lotus position or at least the half-lotus, which Miss Flynn didn’t think would be a good idea while I was having trouble with my knee, so I packed it in. To tell you the truth, I was never much good at yoga anyway. I could never manage the “slipped second” which is a vital part of it, when you’re supposed to empty your mind and not think of anything at all. Miss Flynn tried to teach me a mental routine according to which you empty your mind first of thoughts about work, then of thoughts about family and friends, then of thoughts about yourself. Well, I could never get past first base. As soon as I silently pronounced the word “work” to myself, thoughts about script revisions and casting problems and audience figures would start swarming in my head. I would develop worries about work that I never had before.
    Aromatherapy is easier. You just lie there and let the therapist massage you with what are called essential oils. The theory behind it is quite simple — perhaps too simple. Dudley explained it to me at my first session. “If you hurt yourself, what’s your instinctive reaction? You rub the affected part, right?” I asked how you rub your mind. He said, “Ah, that’s where the essential oils come in.” Aromatherapists think that, through absorption into the skin, the oils enter the bloodstream and thus affect the brain. Also that the inhalation of the oils’ distinctive aromas has a stimulating or calming effect on the nervous system, depending on which ones you use. There are uppers and downers in aromatherapy, or “high notes” and “bass notes” as they call them. According to Dudley, it’s a very ancient form of medicine which was