Therapy

in bed for the night at a nearby hotel, just as I was leaving. She gave me a nice smile, so I smiled back, pleased that she evidently didn’t bear me a grudge from last week’s conversation. “Oh, are you going already?” she said. “Breaking up the party?” “Got to,” I said. “How’s the script-writing going?” “I’m going to discuss my idea with an agent,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment with Jake Endicott next week. He’s your agent, isn’t he? I mentioned that I knew you, I hope you don’t mind.” “No, of course not,” I said, thinking to myself, Cheeky bitch! “Be careful what you wear,” I said. She looked anxious. “Why? Has he got a thing about clothes?” “He’s got a thing about good-looking young women,” I said. “I’d advise a nice, long, baggy bin-liner.” She laughed. Well, she can’t say I didn’t warn her. Jake will go ape when he sees those knockers. She has a pretty face, too, round and freckled, with a hint of a double chin that’s like a trailer for the opulent curves straining at her blouse-front. She took my advice about asking Ollie if she could read some scripts and apparently he’s given her a bundle to report on. A young woman to watch, in more ways than one.
     
    I drove home slowly and deliberately on the icy, deserted roads. Sally was already asleep when I got in. Something about her posture in the bed, flat on her back, and the set of her mouth, told me that she had gone to bed displeased with me — whether for breaking my resolution to stay away from the recording, or for fastforwarding out of the house just as she was serving up supper, or for driving in dangerous conditions, or for all these things, I couldn’t tell. I found out this morning it was something else. Apparently, after I told her I wouldn’t be going to the studio as usual yesterday, she’d invited a couple of neighbours round for a drink in the evening. She swears she told me, so I suppose she must have done, though I haven’t the faintest memory of it. Worrying. She had to phone the Websters again and cancel. Embarrassing, undoubtedly. They’re Tory-voting zombies, but they ask us every year to their Christmas Eve drinks party, and we never ask them back. (On the rare occasions when we give a party I pore over the guest list for hours, agonizing over the choice of names, trying to arrive at a perfectly balanced crowd of scintillating and mutually compatible conversationalists. The Websters are not even considered for such gatherings, though excluding them doesn’t of course prevent me from being in a state of anxiety bordering on hysteria as the party approaches, or from anaesthetizing myself with drink as soon as possible after it starts.) So yesterday evening would have been an opportunity to level up the scores a bit. Sally says now we’ll have to ask them to dinner to make up. I hope that’s just a threat. Anyway, I’m in the doghouse. All the euphoria of last night has evaporated. My knee is playing up this morning, and I’ve definitely pulled a muscle in my back.
     
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    Monday afternoon. Just back from physiotherapy. I told Roland about the back muscle, but not that I pulled it fighting with a bantamweight Pakistani ticket-puncher. He assumed it was another tennis injury. In fact I haven’t played this past week, partly because of the weather and partly because I haven’t felt like getting together with my usual partners after what Rupert had told me about Joe and Jean. Roland gave me an old-fashioned back massage as well as Ultrasound on the knee. It’s what physiotherapy was all about when he trained — he’s good at it and he enjoys it. His hands are his eyes, he feels his way into the deepest core of your aches and pains, and gently but firmly eases away the inflammation. Dudley isn’t a patch on him.
    Roland’s wife had read him something out of the paper over breakfast this morning, about new extracts from the Diana Squidgey tapes being published in Australia. I said I found it hard to believe these conversations were overheard accidentally. Roland didn’t. It came out that he spends a lot of time at night listening to police messages on the VHF waveband of his Sony portable. “I listen for hours, sometimes,” he said. “In bed, with the earphones on. There was a drug bust in Angleside last night. Quite exciting it was.” So Roland suffers from insomnia too. It must be particularly horrible if you’re