Therapy

L. A., and come straight to the rehearsal rooms from Heathrow. I said that it showed great devotion to duty and he stared at me as if he didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I said, “I mean, attending rehearsals when you must be exhausted.” He said, “Oh, bugger the rehearsals,” and in the next breath asked me out to dinner that very evening. Well, I was supposed to be going to see a film with James, but I didn’t let that stop me. I mean if a famous, well, famous in television terms, writer asks a nobody like me out to dinner, you go. If you don’t want to stay a nobody all your life, you go. That’s the way it works, darling, believe me. Incidentally, James thinks I spent this last weekend visiting my grandmother in Torquay, just remember that if you should happen to see him, won’t you?
    So Tubby took me to this little Italian restaurant in Soho, Gabrielli’s. I’d never been there before, but he was obviously a regular. They received him with open arms as if he was a long-lost son — all except the owner’s wife, who was giving me the evil eye for some reason. Tubby was basking in all the attention until the woman came over to put some breadsticks on the table and said, looking at me, “Is this your daughter, then, Signor Passmore?” and Tubby went very red and said, no I wasn’t, and then this woman said, “And ’ow is Signora Amy?” and Tubby went even redder and said he didn’t know, he hadn’t seen her for a while, and this interfering old bitch gave a smug sort of smile and disappeared into the kitchen. Tubby looked like Humpty Dumpty after he’d fallen off the wall. He muttered that he sometimes ate there with Amy Porteus, the casting director for The People Next Door. I’ve met her a couple of times. She’s a dumpy little brunette, in her forties I should say, always slightly overdressed and reeking of perfume. I said in a bantering tone that he obviously wasn’t in the habit of bringing young women there anyway, and he said dourly no, he wasn’t, and asked if I would like a drink. I had a Campari and soda and he had just a mineral water. I told him about my idea for a soap, and he nodded his head and said it sounded interesting, but he didn’t really seem to be attending. What darling, what don’t you understand? Mime it. Oh! Not a soup, darling, a soap, you know like Eastenders, only what I have in mind is more like Westenders. I asked him if he’d been to L.A. on business, and he said, “Partly,” but he didn’t explain what the other part was. They served us quite a decent meal and we had a bottle of Chianti that was supposed to be very special but he drank hardly any of it, he said because of his jet-lag, he was afraid he might fall asleep. Over the dessert he steered the conversation rather clumsily towards sex. “You’ve no idea,” he said, “how repressed we were about sex when I was young. Nice girls simply didn’t. So nice boys couldn’t, most of the time. The country was full of twenty-five-year-old virgins, many of them male. I suppose you find that difficult to credit. I suppose you wouldn’t think twice about having sex with someone you liked, would you?” So I said — what? Oh, right, I’ll speak more quietly. These beds are rather close together, aren’t they? What’s she in for? Mime it. Appendix? No. Hysterectomy? Really? Well mimed, darling. You know, there’s the makings of a rather good parlour game here.
    So I said it would depend on whether I really liked the person, and he looked at me soulfully and said, “Do you really like me, Samantha?” Well, I was a bit taken aback at the speed with which we’d reached this point. It was like being taken for a ride in one of those GTi’s that look like sedate family saloons and do nought to sixty in about three seconds flat. So I laughed my tinkle-of-tiny-bells laugh and said it sounded like a leading question. He looked very despondent and said, “So you don’t, then?” I said on the contrary I liked him very much but I thought he was exhausted and jet-lagged and didn’t quite know what he was doing or saying and I didn’t want to take advantage of him. Well he pondered that for a moment, frowning to himself, and I thought, you’ve blown it, Samantha, but to my relief his Humpty-Dumpty face broke into a smile, and he said, “You’re absolutely right. What about some dessert? They do a rather good tiramisu here.” He poured himself a full glass of wine, knocked it back as