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all monies unpaid to
Jeremy Planter and chase them. I went to the Planter file and took out his last
seven contracts, photocopied them, putting the photocopies in my bag, and with light-hearted
apologies said my ‘hasta lasagnes’ and left the office.
    The
evening was a total bastard. I was twenty minutes late getting back from the
West End, so Liz and I passed each other at the front door. She was going to the
gym, or to see her best friend Heather, or both. For the first time, I wondered
whether all this was true. She was in a frazzled state; Grace had obviously
been winding her up all day. She doesn’t go to day nursery on Wednesday, the
original idea being that I’d be able to get back early on Wednesdays, but that
turned out not to be possible on a regular basis. Liz left without a word to
me. It must be tough for women who have to stay in all day with the baby, brain
turning to gelatine.
    Grace
tried her not-eating-anything gambit again, but I soon put paid to that by
ignoring her and taking exaggerated enjoyment out of eating my own egg — the
old Tom and Jerry trick, works every time. No doubt Grace would get wise to it
sooner or later, but for the meantime it meant we’d get through another night
without ‘I’m hungry’ at a quarter past ten. I was able to watch two of the nine
videos I had to look at over the weekend after Grace had her bath. Although I
get Tilda to do most of my viewing nowadays, there are always some which I have
to watch. Not watch them properly, of course, like I used to, but fast-search
to the scenes which my clients are in. It’s no good having a client on telly
and having to explain to them the following week that you didn’t even see their
work. But there are ways of lightening the load: just taking a couple of notes
about salient points and mentioning them with emphasis can give a client the
feeling that you have been avidly following every nuance of their perf. Theatre
is more wearing on the vertebrae, of course, you have to be seen to have
actually been there, and leaving in the interval is risky — the scenery may
fall down in the second half and you wouldn’t know. ‘I thought you paced your
performance brilliantly in the second act, m’dear’ would soon be sussed if your
client had had a fainting fit in the final scene, or been too pissed to finish
the show. Not that we have any real piss-artists at Muffin and Ketts, I can’t
be doing with them.
    Once
Grace was asleep I cracked open a bottle of something and got out the week’s
script pile. Again, a skim-through would suffice. Size and type of part, then
check to the end to see which characters die, and if there are any major plot
reveals one should know about. Drinking alone is not something I used to do,
but in the evenings, with Liz out and Grace asleep, it was becoming, dare I say
it, a bit of a routine. Liz wouldn’t be back until two or three in the morning
now, so I’d turn in at twelve and leave the hall light on for her. I
contemplated ringing her friend Heather to see if she had really gone there,
but couldn’t bring myself to do it.
    I’ve
discovered with Liz that equality between the sexes is a difficult thing to
achieve, let alone maintain. There are 168 hours in a week. That’s how many there
are in total. Not a particularly magical number, but the actual one. If we say
that eight hours every day are spent sleeping, that leaves 112 waking hours.
Then take away three hours a day for preparing, eating and clearing away food,
and you have got ninety-one hours a week left each. It’s already looking
stressful and tight. Other deductions common to us all were harder to make.
Like home administration and repairs, tidying up, working to get the money in,
and ablutions, of course. I found myself making allowances for her when it came
to ablutions. Women are allowed to spend longer on washing. Evidently they have
less naturally oily skin and so need to put on creams and things, and, of
course, they are