by Nick Hornby
‘Was Talk of the Devil your idea?’
Dennis didn’t know whether he could stay in the room. Talk of the Devil was a comedy series about the Devil. He had gone to all the trouble of adopting human form so that he could work in the Vehicle Registration Department of a provincial town hall. It hadn’t gone down terribly well with either critics or audiences, and hadn’t been commissioned for a second series. Nobody talked about Talk of the Devil, not out loud.
‘Unfortunately it never quite found its feet,’ said Sloan. ‘I thought it had some very good things in it.’
‘It couldn’t have found its feet if you’d cut them off and stuffed them into its mouth,’ said Sophie. ‘You don’t want another one of those on your hands.’
Tom Sloan had gone from enchantment to irritation and mild outrage.
‘There are a lot of good actresses from the North who could play Barbara,’ said Sloan.
Sophie was amazed.
‘Really? Comic actresses?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like who?’
‘Marcia Bell, for example. She’s very good.’
‘I’ve never heard of her.’
‘That’s a coincidence, because we’ve never heard of you,’ said Sloan.
‘Marcia Bell, Dennis?’
They both turned to look at him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘she’s one way we could go, certainly.’
Sophie didn’t draw a finger across her throat, because she was on her best behaviour, but she managed to convey, with a little smile and her eyes, that Dennis was a dead man.
‘How funny is she, Dennis?’ said Sophie.
‘On a scale of one to ten?’ he said, and laughed.
‘Yes,’ said Sophie.
‘If you like,’ said Sloan.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘on a good day …’
‘What was her best day?’
Dennis stood up.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Thanks so much for finding the time to say hello.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t mind,’ said Sophie. ‘He knows I’m right.’
Dennis looked at Tom Sloan. It wasn’t entirely clear that either of these assertions was correct. Dennis sat down again.
‘The other thing is,’ said Sophie, ‘do you really want to lose us all to the other side?’
‘Who am I losing?’
‘Not Dennis,’ said Sophie. ‘He’ll stay here, won’t you, Dennis? He’s a BBC man from his head to the holes in his socks.’
Dennis smiled weakly. He presumed she wasn’t being complimentary.
‘But Bill, Tony and I … The trouble is, the money is so much better over there.’
‘They don’t even have a Comedy Playhouse,’ said Sloan. ‘You can’t take a thirty-minute programme to them and expect them to know what to do with it.’
The commercial channel was Sloan’s nemesis – he’d lost a lot of his star writers and performers over the last few years. Sophie had altered the power balance in the room simply by mentioning the other lot.
‘We wouldn’t be taking one programme to them,’ said Sophie. ‘We’d be taking a whole series.’
‘Have they got enough material for a series?’ Sloan said to Dennis.
‘Easily,’ said Sophie. ‘This morning we were talking about the second series.’
‘The second series?’
Sloan had the look of a man who had arrived on the railway platform just as the train was leaving the station. To Dennis’s amazement, he started chasing after it.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Before you do anything too hasty, why don’t we just see how the Playhouse goes?’
Sophie made a face suggesting that although this suggestion was not without its merits, it didn’t meet all her expectations. She was extraordinary, thought Dennis. They had come up here hoping to persuade Tom Sloan to give an entirely unknown and inexperienced actress a starring role in the BBC’s showcase comedy series. They had achieved this, against considerable odds, and now she was acting as though she’d been vaguely insulted.
She brightened, eventually. She was prepared, apparently, to give him a chance.
‘Oh, all right then,’ she said.
Dennis was too angry to speak to her on the way down. She didn’t care.
‘You’ll thank me one day,’ she said.
‘Why on earth will I ever thank you for the most excruciating fifteen minutes of my life?’
‘Because the rewards will be greater than the pain.’
‘There isn’t enough money in the world,’ said Dennis.
‘It’s not about money, is it?’ said Sophie.
‘Isn’t it? So what is it about?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘And neither do you. Oh, and I haven’t forgiven you yet either.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. You and bloody Marcia Bell.’
‘Are you always going to ask for this much?’
‘You’d better hope so,’ she said.
5
Dennis lived in a rented flat in Hammersmith with his wife, Edith, and a cat. That evening, neither Edith nor the cat showed the slightest interest in his return – the cat because she was asleep for most of it, and Edith because she was in the middle of an affair with a married man. Perhaps it wasn’t the middle; perhaps it was the very beginning, but it wasn’t anywhere near its end, Dennis could tell. Edith was elsewhere even when they were at home, visiting him only to convey disappointment and dissatisfaction.
The most excruciating time of his life had not been spent in Tom Sloan’s office, despite what he’d told Sophie. The most excruciating time of his life had been spent reading and then rereading a letter he’d found between the pages of a manuscript she’d brought home from work. He’d put it back where he’d found it and hadn’t said anything, and now he was just waiting, although he had no idea what he was waiting for. His anguish meant that he made a poor husband, silent and watchful and raw.
Edith was tall, dark, beautiful and clever, and when she agreed to marry him his friends made the kinds of jokes that friends were supposed to make in those circumstances, all of them various articulations of disbelief along the lines of ‘How did you hook her, you lucky so-and-so?’ They didn’t seem so funny now, and he didn’t seem so lucky. He shouldn’t have hooked her. She wasn’t the sort of catch one could take home and show off to people; she was the sort of catch that drags the angler off the end of the pier and pulls him out to sea before tearing him to pieces as he’s drowning. He shouldn’t have been fishing at all, not when he was so ill equipped.
Why had she married him? He still wasn’t sure. She must have thought that he was going places, but then he got the sense that he wasn’t travelling as fast or as far as she’d been expecting. This was unfair, because despite the constant barbs he had to endure about Other Dennis, he was doing all right for himself. Tom Sloan liked him, up until but possibly not including recent incidents; he had good relationships with writers and actors, and the programmes were good, mostly, with only the occasional misfire. (He had to take some of the blame, he knew, for Talk of the Devil.)
The problem was that Edith didn’t really have a funny bone in her entire body and couldn’t see that comedy was any sort of a job for a man with a university education. She’d presumed that he’d trudge through a couple of years with people like Bill and Tony, and then move on to somewhere smarter, to News and Current Affairs, or to one of the arts programmes. Dennis, however, loved his job, and wanted to work with funny writers and funny actors for the rest of his life.
Edith was an editor at Penguin Books and had met her lover at work. Vernon Whitfield was a poet and essayist, a frequent contributor to the Third Programme, older than her and quite insufferably serious-minded. His last radio talk had been entitled ‘Sartre, Stockhausen, and the Death of the Soul’. Even before Dennis had found the letter, he’d always turned the radio off when he heard the familiar drone. If he could have chosen any living person to represent everything he opposed, Whitfi
eld would probably have been the man.
And now Edith was sleeping with him, and Dennis didn’t know what to do about it. She would leave him in the end, he supposed, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to leave her, not unless he awoke from this miserable dream and realized that a wife who chose to sleep with another man was unlikely to make him very happy any time soon, and a wife who chose to so much as smile at Vernon Whitfield was in any case the least suitable life partner he could possibly have found. What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.
Edith didn’t want to stay at Penguin Books, of course. She hated being stuck in Harmondsworth, right out near London Airport, for a start, and anyway she wanted to move to Jonathan Cape or Chatto & Windus, proper publishers who happened to be based in proper parts of town. She wouldn’t ever confess to disapproving of the Penguin principle, the idea of selling books to people who had never previously bought them; she was a socialist, and an intellectual, and in theory she was heartily in favour of creating more people like her. But there was something about it that made her feel queasy, Dennis could tell, and she’d been appalled by the sex-starved herd buying copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in their millions. Dennis bought one himself, just to annoy her, and read it in bed, guffawing at all the silly dirty parts. That drove her mad, so he’d stopped. It wasn’t doing him much good anyway, in any direction.
What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but ‘love’ would have to do for now. He, like everybody else in the room, had been charmed by Sophie, by her laugh and her eyes and her sense of humour, and on the way home he’d tried to imagine what it might be like to take her out to dinner, take her to bed, marry her. But he’d failed. He was a Cambridge English graduate with a pipe and a beard, and he was doomed to be with someone like Edith.
Edith hadn’t done any shopping, so there wasn’t anything to eat.
‘Do you want to go out for something?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I have a lot to read. There are eggs, I think, if you’re hungry. And some bread.’
‘How was your day?’
‘Oh, bloody,’ she said.
‘Bloody’, he had learned, didn’t mean what it might have meant to a soldier or a surgeon. It usually meant that a telephone call with a politics professor had gone on longer than she had wanted it to.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Did you get out at all?’
She looked at him.
‘Did you try calling me? I had to go into town for a meeting.’
‘No, I didn’t call. But it was a lovely afternoon.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s all I meant.’
It wasn’t all he’d meant at all. But that was the sort of dangerous, poison-dart territory one could wander into, with just a casual observation about the weather.
‘How about you?’ She didn’t often ask, and he took the feigned interest as a sign of guilt.
‘Had a very tricky meeting,’ he said.
‘What does “tricky” mean?’
He imagined things, he knew he did, but he definitely heard a faint mocking superiority, a refusal to believe that anything connected with light entertainment could ever be onerous.
‘It means exactly the same as it does in your job, I should think. I mean, there wasn’t any blood, obviously. But there were very difficult moments involving very strong characters.’
She sighed heavily and picked up a manuscript. He’d misjudged his tone, again. He always did. How on earth could she love him? But she didn’t.
‘I’m going to have a bath,’ he said. ‘Do you want scrambled eggs, if I make them later?’
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘And I think she’s just gone in the bathroom.’
‘She’ was Mrs Posnanski, their Polish landlady, who lived on the top two floors of the house. Edith and Dennis had the whole of the ground floor, but the bathroom was on the half-landing. If Mrs Posnanski had only just gone in, it meant that she wouldn’t be out for hours.
‘Do you mind awfully if I turn the radio on?’
‘Then I’d have to read in the bedroom.’
‘I’ll go for a walk, then.’
It was intended as an expression of pique, but Edith didn’t say anything, so Dennis went for a walk down to the river. On the way home, he stopped off at the Rose and Crown for a Scotch egg and a pint, and he watched a game of darts. If, during his engagement to Edith, someone had tried to explain how lonely marriage could be, he wouldn’t have believed it.
There were four mornings of rehearsals, Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. On Saturday they met the director of the programme, a pleasant, slightly dull man called Bert, who had done lots of episodes of Comedy Playhouse, and as a consequence didn’t seem to have any new ideas for this one. The uninspiring conversation with Bert was followed by a technical run-through which took up the rest of the day; Tony and Bill watched helplessly as Bert told the actors where to stand, and in the process seemed to sap precious life out of their script. Sunday was the day it all happened – more technical rehearsals and a performance in front of an audience in the evening.
They didn’t have a moment of doubt about Sophie, because she didn’t leave them room for one. She learned lines, she improved them, she got laughs out of pleases and thank-yous and pauses. She took direction, and she charmed Clive into believing, temporarily at least, that the work was worth doing.
And the script, formerly a sickly, derivative and occasionally embarrassing scrap of a thing, had become the piece of work that Tony and Bill were most proud of. Sophie had pushed them uphill, hard, until they had reached heights they had always hoped, but weren’t sure, they were capable of. In the first draft of the second stab, Jim was meeting a friend in the pub where Barbara worked – a friend who was cut out of proceedings as Jim and Barbara’s mutual attraction and sparky antagonism edged him aside. They’d asked Warren Graham from The Awkward Squad to come in and read Bob, and he’d made a solid fist of it, but it was clear that every second that Jim and Barbara weren’t talking to each other was an opportunity lost. So Bob was ditched, and Jim and Barbara meet because Jim has half an hour to kill. He intends to kill it with a pint and the evening papers; instead, he falls dramatically and dizzyingly in love.
The show was quicker than anything anyone involved could remember: Clive and Sophie burned through the lines. The final version of the script was forty pages, ten pages longer than the usual half-hour comedies, and when Bert the director first flicked through it, he told Bill and Tony to cut it down. They had to persuade him that it could work at this length, although he didn’t believe them until the cast proved it to him. It was fast, funny and real, and it said things about England that Tony and Bill had never heard on the BBC. And the relationship between the couple was something different too. They went from fighting to flirting and back again on the turn of a sixpence. Everyone came into work happy and excited and jabbering with contributions and improvements. If Sophie hadn’t been told that her father was dangerously ill after a heart attack, everything would have been going swimmingly.
She found out on the Saturday morning, just before the technical rehearsal; he’d been ill for two days, but Sophie didn’t have a phone, and her Sunday night trudge down to the phone box had become fortnightly in recent weeks, when she remembered at all, so Marie had written her a letter.
Sophie called her as soon as she read it.
‘Oh, Barbara, love, thank heavens.’
‘How is he?’
‘He’s very poorly.’
Sophie began to panic, and not all of the panic could be sourced to concern for her dad. Oh, please God, not today, she was thinking. Or tomorrow. Not today or tomorrow. Monday I’ll do anything I have to do.
&nb
sp; ‘What do the doctors say?’
‘He’s comfy at the moment but they’re worried he might have another one.’
‘Is he speaking?’
‘No, he’s been asleep for the last two days. I checked the trains, just because I had to do something. You can get one at midday and you’ll be in the hospital in time for evening visiting.’
‘Right.’
‘Have you got enough money for a ticket?’
She thought for a moment. If she didn’t have the fare, there wasn’t an awful lot that Marie could have done about it, not on a Saturday.
‘Yes,’ she said eventually.
‘Good,’ said Marie. ‘I’ll get Jack to pick you up from the station.’
Perhaps there would be another chance. Perhaps they would forgive her for leaving them in the lurch, twenty-four hours before the recording; and they couldn’t replace her, not now, so perhaps they’d reschedule. But perhaps not.
‘I can’t come home, Marie.’
There was silence, broken only by the pips telling her to put in more money.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m still here,’ said Marie. ‘You can’t come home?’
‘No.’
The panic had gone.
‘Why not?’
‘I can come on Monday. I’ll tell you then.’
‘He might be dead by Monday.’
This wasn’t, in Sophie’s view, the clinching argument Marie seemed to think it should have been. She didn’t want her father to die. She would mourn him. She owed him … not everything, exactly, because there were lots of things she’d had to obtain for herself, but enough. If, however, the choice was between a brief goodbye and a new life, then it was no choice at all.
‘I’d be letting a lot of people down.’
‘Derry and Toms isn’t even open on Saturday afternoons, is it? You don’t have to be at work until Monday.’
‘It’s not that. I’m not working there any more.’
The pips were going again.
‘Auntie Marie, I haven’t got any more change. I’ll see you in the hospital on Monday.’