Therapy

the most bizarre weekend and I’m dying to tell somebody all about it who isn’t connected with work. I’ve got a new job at Heartland, you see, a proper job. Script editor. I started last week. Basically it means you read the writer’s first drafts and make comments and suggestions and generally act as a buffer between him and the producer or director. It’s the first stepping-stone to writing or producing oneself. You know I’ve been chaperoning that little brat Mark Harrington in The People Next Door ? Well now I’m working with the writer, Tubby Passmore. Well, you may pull a face, Hetty, but thirteen million people can’t be wrong, not in television they can’t. Tubby asked for me himself. I got to know him through the chaperoning — we would meet at rehearsals, in the canteen and so on. He was always perfectly pleasant, but rather shy. I had him down as a herbivore. I always say there are two kinds of men, the herbivores and the carnivores. It’s something about the way they look at you. Because I’ve got these tits I get a lot of looks. I know you used to say at school that you’d kill for them, Hetty, but frankly I’d give anything for a figure like yours. No, honestly. Clothes hang so much better on a flat-chested figure. Not that you’re completely flat, darling, but you know what I mean. Anyway, some men just run their eyes appreciatively over you as if you were a statue or something, those are the herbivores, they just want to browse, and others look at you as if they would like to tear your clothes off and sink their teeth into you, those are the carnivores. Jake Endicott is a carnivore. He’s my agent. Tubby’s agent too, as it happens. And Ollie Silvers, the producer of The People Next Door — he’s another carnivore. When I talked to Tubby one day about my writing ambitions, he suggested I asked Ollie to give me some scripts to read and report on, you know, unsolicited ones, the slush-pile. So I went to see him wearing my cream linen suit without a blouse and all through the interview I could see he was trying to look down my front to see what I was wearing under the jacket, if anything. I walked out of his office with a pile of scripts. I can see you disapprove, Hetty, but I’m completely postfeminist about this, I’m afraid. I think it’s a great mistake for women to make all this fuss about sexual harassment. It’s like unilateral disarmament. In a man’s world we’ve got to use all the wiles and weapons we’ve got. I don’t think you should shake your head as hard as that, darling, your stitches might come undone. It may be different in the Civil Service, for all I know. Anyway, as I say, I thought Tubby was a confirmed herbivore. If we were sitting at the same table in the canteen or the bar, he would chat to me in a fatherly sort of way, but he never made a pass or anything approaching one. He’s old enough to be my father, actually. On the corpulent side, as the name implies. Balding. A big egg-shaped head. He always reminds me of the pictures of Humpty Dumpty in a copy of Alice in Wonderland I had as a child. I cultivated him purely out of selfinterest, I don’t mind admitting. Goodness I must stop eating your grapes. Just one more then.
    Well, as I was saying, Tubby always seemed completely immune to my feminine charms, in fact I was slightly piqued by his lack of interest, but then his attitude suddenly changed. It was after his marriage broke up — oh, I forgot to mention, his wife left him a month or two ago. There were lots of rumours — that she’d come out as a lesbian or gone to live in an ashram or that she found him in bed with her tennis coach. All wildly off the mark, as I found out later. We didn’t see much of him for some weeks. But then he turned up at rehearsals one day, in London, a grotty place in Pimlico that Heartland use, and immediately made a set at me. Without any warning. I remember seeing him push through the swing doors and stand at the threshold looking round the room until he spotted me, and then he came straight over and plonked himself down beside me, hardly bothering to say hallo to Hal Lipkin, that’s the director, or any of the cast. Deborah Radcliffe smiled at him but he walked straight past her without a glance, which didn’t please her very much. I could see her looking daggers at us out of the corner of my eye. Tubby looked wrecked. Bloodshot eyes. Unshaven. Crumpled clothes. It turned out that he’d just flown in from