Therapy

all the deposit accounts are in his name only, so I’m having to meet all my expenses out of my monthly salary, including lawyers’ fees. I’m really having a struggle to make ends meet.
    No, I don’t hate him, in spite of the way he’s behaved. I feel sorry for him. But there’s nothing I can do for him any more. He must work out his own salvation. I have to study my own needs. I’m not a hardhearted woman. Tubby pretends that I am, but I’m not. It hasn’t been easy for me, all this stuff with lawyers and so on. But having screwed myself up to take this step, I’ve got to see it through. This is my last chance to forge an independent life for myself. I’m just young enough to do it, I think. A few years younger than Tubby, yes.
    It was such a long time ago. We were two different people, really. I was doing teaching practice in a Junior School in Leeds and he turned up there one day with a theatre group that toured schools. Five young people, would-be actors who couldn’t get Equity cards, had formed a company on a shoestring and were going around the country in an old Dormobile, towing a trailer full of props. They did stripped-down versions of Shakespeare for secondary schools and dramatized fairytales for juniors. They weren’t very good, to be honest, but they made up in enthusiasm for what they lacked in technique. After they’d done their show in the school hall and the kids had gone home, we invited them into the staff-room for tea and biscuits. I thought they were terribly bohemian and adventurous. My own life had been so respectable and sheltered in comparison. I did English at Royal Holloway, a women’s college of London University marooned in the Surrey stockbroker belt. My parents insisted on my going to a singlesex college if I wasn’t going to live at home, and I failed my Oxbridge entrance exams, so it was Royal Holloway or Leeds University. I was determined to get away from home, but I came back to do my PGCE in Leeds, to save money. I chose junior-school teaching — not many graduates did — because I didn’t fancy trying to control the roughs and toughs in the state comprehensives that were replacing the kind of grammar school I had gone to myself. In those days I wore pastel twin-sets and pleated skirts to mid-calf and sensible shoes and hardly any make-up. These young actors wore scruffy dark sweaters with holes in them, and had long greasy hair and smoked a lot. There were three boys and two girls and they all slept together in the Dormobile most of the time, Tubby told me, to save money. One night he parked it on top of a hill and didn’t put the handbrake on properly, and it slowly trundled down the hill until it ran up against a police station. He told the story in such a droll way, he made me laugh aloud. That’s what first attracted me to him, I think — the way he could make me laugh spontaneously, joyously. Laughing at home tended to be politely restrained or — amongst us children — mocking and sarcastic. With Tubby, I laughed before I realized I was laughing. If I were to try and put into a nutshell what has been wrong with our marriage for the last few years — why I didn’t get anything out of it, any happiness, any glad-to-be-alive feeling — I’d say it was because he didn’t make me laugh any more. Ironic, really, isn’t it, when you think that every week he makes millions of people laugh at his television show. Not me, I’m afraid. I find it totally unfunny.
    Anyway, that first day, he rather cheekily asked for my phone number and I rather recklessly gave it to him. I met him several times while he and his friends were in the Leeds area, in the evenings in pubs. Pubs! I had hardly ever been in a pub before I met Tubby. I didn’t invite him home. I knew my parents wouldn’t approve of him, though they would never admit why — because he was unkempt and under-educated and had a Cockney accent. I suppose you know he left school at sixteen? Well he did, with just a couple of O-Levels. He went to grammar school after the Eleven-Plus but never fitted in, was always bottom of the class. I don’t know — a combination of temperament, bad teaching and lack of support at home, I suppose. His parents were working-class — very decent, but not very educationconscious. Anyway, Tubby left school as soon as he could, and went to work as an office-boy for a theatrical impresario, that’s how he got interested in the stage. After National Service he went to