by Nick Hornby
‘I’ll say no if you want me to.’
‘Why on earth would I want you to say no?’
‘Because you’d miss me too much.’
‘I’ll come to Wales and see you.’
‘Will you?’
‘Of course.’
‘And can I ask you a favour?’
‘Anything.’
‘Will you feed Brando?’
She had been sent a Siamese cat by a proud Blackpool pet shop. It had been delivered to the BBC in a van and the van driver wouldn’t take it back again.
‘That would be lovely. I’ll feel connected to you when you’re gone.’
He didn’t come to Wales. (He didn’t feed the cat either. When she got back, Brando had gone.)
John Osborne, it turned out, was not available for the rewrite of Chemin de Fer. (Sophie suggested Tony and Bill, but the American producers weren’t interested.) A man who’d written something for a Dean Martin film did it instead. He put in three jokes for her character, two of which were removed before the shoot and one of which didn’t survive the edit. She hated the director.
She liked the leading man, a French pop singer named Johnny Solo, presumably by his manager rather than by Monsieur and Madame Solo. He was charming and extraordinarily handsome, and after he’d chased her around the hotel they were staying in, she could no longer remember why she was running away, so she stopped. It wasn’t as if she had a boyfriend, as far as she could tell. Johnny was a terrible actor, though, and in any case he couldn’t speak English. Most days Sophie had to ask the cameras to stop rolling, because she could only listen to the French pop star’s American accent with a straight face for very short periods of time. They had a bad script, an awful director and a terrible leading man; it was all so hopeless that she didn’t even have to consider her own performance, luckily.
Clive didn’t call her until a few days before they were supposed to start rehearsing again.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she said.
‘Where have I been? Nowhere. You, meanwhile, have been lounging around in your underwear in Wales, while Johnny Foreigner ogles.’
‘You could have ogled, if you’d come to Wales.’
‘Who goes all the way to Wales for an ogle? Especially a second-hand ogle.’
She didn’t want to have a conversation about second-hand ogling, and she certainly didn’t want a conversation about Johnny Foreigner.
‘What did you do instead, then?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he said airily. ‘Thinking. Reading. Taking stock.’
She wished he’d chosen any three other activities – space exploration, say, and needlework and coal mining. He wasn’t a thinker or a reader or a stock-taker.
‘Seeing girls?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘ “For God’s sake” is different from “No”.’
She couldn’t seem to stop herself. And what right did she have to say anything, when she’d stopped running from Johnny Foreigner? If Clive had come to Wales, though, she wouldn’t have stopped running. She’d have run and run.
‘I was actually phoning to ask you out to dinner,’ he said eventually. There was to be no further discussion about the precise meaning of the expression ‘For God’s sake’, apparently.
She shrugged down the phone, but he couldn’t see her, so in the end she had to say yes.
They had another argument in the Trattoo, a nasty one. He accused her of being bourgeois, whatever that was – it seemed to involve engagement rings and babies and all sorts of things she wasn’t interested in. He got so heated about them that for a moment she thought he might actually be proposing, in an angry, cack-handed fashion. She asked him about other girls, and he was cagey, and she said she didn’t mind; he asked her about Johnny Foreigner, and she was cagey, and he didn’t speak to her all the way home. He didn’t stay the night.
Tony booked a table in the Positano Room at the Trattoria Terrazza for his wedding anniversary, mostly because Bill told him to.
‘The place in Romilly Street? I’ll never get in there. Isn’t that where they all go? Michael Caine and Jean Shrimpton and everyone?’
‘ “We”. Not “they”,’ said Bill.
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘You and me and Michael Caine and Jean Shrimpton.’
‘Oh, get out of it,’ said Tony.
‘People know who we are.’
‘People in the contracts department of the BBC. And a couple of reviewers. Let’s not get above ourselves. We’re writers.’
‘That’ll be enough to get you a table.’
‘I’m not going to call them and tell them I’m a famous television writer and they have to let me in.’
‘Get Hazel to do it.’
Hazel was their new secretary. The phone in the office had been ringing a lot since Barbara, mostly with offers of work, and they’d employed Hazel to answer it. This occupied perhaps half an hour of her working day, and they didn’t know what to do with her the rest of the time. And they couldn’t work with her in the one-room office, so for the moment they’d gone back to the coffee bar.
‘How is that going to help?’
‘She’ll tell them you’re a famous television writer and they have to let you in.’
‘But then I’ll get there and I’ll just be me and it will be embarrassing.’
‘What night do you want to go?’ said Bill.
‘Our anniversary’s next Tuesday. I was going to take her out Saturday.’
‘Oh.’
‘What?’
‘You’re not Saturday night famous. Take her out on Tuesday night and you’ll be all right.’
There were famous people in the Positano Room, even on a Tuesday night. As Tony and June were waiting to be seated, Terence Stamp looked straight at them, and Tony momentarily lost his nerve.
‘Shall we go somewhere else?’
Mick Jagger in the Positano Room
June looked at him, baffled.
‘Why?’
‘Terence Stamp just looked at me.’
‘Where is he supposed to look?’
‘You can see what he’s thinking. He’s thinking, Who let them in? They’re not beautiful or famous.’
‘Thanks.’
But she laughed. Tony never had to worry about her sulking, or looking for offence and then taking it. It was a miracle that they had stayed married for one hundred weeks, given everything, and June’s view was that they had enough trouble, without looking for it. She seemed determined to find the unintended insults and the accidental ironies funny, whenever she could.
An impressively Italian waiter in a stripy matelot T-shirt that showed off his beautiful dark skin took them to a table on the edge of the room. Their nearest neighbours were two debby girls who were apparently too pretty to talk to each other, or even to eat. Their meals were untouched, and they were both smoking long, thin cigarettes. June was trying not to stare at their long, thin legs and their short skirts.
‘We’re supposed to order the osso buco,’ said Tony as they looked at their menus.
‘Who said?’
‘Bill.’
‘Who did he come here with?’
‘I don’t know.’
Why hadn’t he asked? He might have learned something about Bill’s life outside the office and the rehearsal hall and the studio.
‘Is he happy, do you think?’
June knew as much about Bill’s private life as Tony did.
‘He seems happy, yes.’
‘Why don’t you ever ask him about things like that?’
‘Men don’t.’
‘What do you ask him about, then?’
Tony thought. He couldn’t really remember asking Bill about anything that wasn’t related to the script they were working on. Bill asked him about June all the time, but Tony didn’t ask him anything in return. He was afraid of what Bill might tell him.
‘Oh, you know. Whether he’s got a girlfriend, and things like that.’
June made a face.
‘What?’
‘I’m not that naive. Of course he hasn’t got a girlfriend.’
‘You knew that?’
‘Yes. I mean, not straight away. He’s not a queen. Neither of you is.’
‘I’m not one at all.’
‘You’re a married man, you mean?’
The waiter with the beautiful dark skin came, and they ordered melon and the osso buco, as instructed. Tony asked him for a wine recommendation too. He wanted to ask him about his aftershave, but decided that this was an enquiry that June would misinterpret.
‘There’s something we have in common,’ said June when he’d gone.
‘What?’
‘Him.’
‘The waiter? Really?’
‘Not half. But I think I’d be making the same mistake again.’
‘It isn’t … It wouldn’t be the same mistake. Well, it might be. I’d have to know more about him.’
‘Oh, that old story.’
She laughed. Tony was becoming excruciated.
‘I don’t know what I am.’
June looked at him.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I thought I did. And then I met you, and now I don’t.’
‘Gosh. So … Right. OK. Golly. I had no idea.’
‘You thought I was just …’
‘Not at first. Obviously. But then … Well, yes. To cut a long story short.’
There was an awkward pause.
‘Can I ask you questions?’
‘Oh, Gawd.’
He got a laugh, but he couldn’t deflect her.
‘Do … Well, did you ever do anything about the other thing?’
‘No,’ he said too quickly. And then, because he wanted to give due weight to the Aldershot incident, ‘Not really.’
‘What does “Not really” mean?’
‘I went looking once. During National Service. It all ended badly, and nothing happened.’
‘Oh. And … is that how you want to spend the rest of your life?’
He had tried very hard not to think about the rest of his life. He saw flashes of it sometimes, and these flashes made him uncomfortable, because he saw the possibility for pain and drama, and he didn’t want that.
‘I don’t know. I hope … What I hope is that nothing keeps happening. On that side. And something starts happening on this side.’
‘Thank you,’ June said.
‘For what?’
‘For even saying that much. It helps.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘You’re so patient, and kind, and loving, and I don’t know why.’
‘I love you,’ she said with a shrug and a little smile – not a sad smile, exactly, but a smile conveying complications.
‘I love you too.’
They had said the things you were supposed to say at an anniversary dinner, but they hadn’t said them glibly. They chinked glasses.
‘It’s funny, sex,’ she said. ‘It’s a little thing like a glass of water is a little thing. Or something that falls off a car and only costs a couple of bob to replace. It’s only a little thing, but nothing works without it.’
The nice-smelling dark-skinned waiter in the white T-shirt arrived with their melon.
‘What do we use?’ said Tony. ‘A spoon?’
‘I think so.’
‘I’ve never had this before,’ said Tony. ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’
‘Why is it so terrible?’
‘I dunno. Seems like I haven’t done anything I should have.’
‘I haven’t had it either.’
‘Well, there’s a reason for that.’
June laughed.
‘This is like the eating scene in Tom Jones,’ she said. ‘Do you remember? With Albert Finney and Susannah York?’
‘It wasn’t Susannah York in the eating scene. It was Joyce thingy.’
‘Joyce Redman,’ said June.
‘Joyce Redman,’ said Tony.
A nice life wasn’t so far away, if they could somehow get hold of the little thing that makes the engine work. He could remember that it was Joyce someone, not Susannah York, and she could remember Joyce’s second name, and in forty years’ time they would make a great couple.
‘When’s Barbara and Jim’s anniversary?’ said June.
And that was another thing: the series was always somewhere near the front of her mind. How could he not love that?
‘I’ve got no idea.’
‘Maybe you should pick a date.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘And they haven’t talked about starting a family yet either.’
‘Christ.’ He laughed. ‘We hadn’t even thought about that. I could kiss you.’
‘Men normally say that to people they don’t want to kiss,’ she said. ‘The old secretary, when she does something clever. The cleaner, when she finds a pair of spectacles.’ She laughed, but he could have kicked himself.
‘All right, then, I will kiss you,’ he said.
And when they got home they had another drink, and, after a lot of encouragement and some laughter and a little imagination, they managed something. It probably wasn’t quite enough to prevent other conversations in the future, unless Tony had somehow stumbled upon some alchemical admixture of alcohol, ardour, dissociation and competence that he could bottle, but it wasn’t nothing. After June had gone to sleep, he realized that they had never talked about starting a family either. It had never occurred to him that he’d be able to.
One afternoon in July, Dennis phoned Tony and Bill up at the office to tell them to watch that night’s Comedy Playhouse.
‘What is it?’ said Bill.
‘It’s called Till Death Us Do Part.’
‘Bugger,’ said Bill.
‘What?’
‘It’s a clever title. Why didn’t we think of it?’
‘The programme is really rather good,’ said Dennis. ‘I went to the recording. It’s one of Other Dennis’s. He invited me. He’s very proud of it.’
‘Will it depress us?’ said Bill. ‘Because I don’t want to watch anything that’s depressing.’
‘It’s very funny,’ said Dennis.
‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about,’ said Bill. ‘Very funny is depressing.’
‘Our show is very funny,’ said Dennis. ‘This one’s funny in a different way.’
‘A better way or a worse way?’ said Bill.
‘Different,’ said Dennis firmly. ‘Anyway. They may not even make a series out of it. Sloan hates it, apparently.’
‘Why?’
‘Too subversive.’
Bill knew beyond any doubt that Till Death Us Do Part was going to be very depressing indeed.
Tony and Bill watched the show together, at Tony’s house. June cooked sausages and mash and they all sat down with trays on their laps. The Ramseys, the family at the centre of the programme, were working-class East Enders; docker Alf was a Conservative, as foul-mouthed as the BBC would allow, prejudiced (blacks, Jews, anyone who wasn’t white and British, as Alf saw it), a Churchill-lover, a fervent monarchist. Nobody had ever seen anything like him on television. When Alf’s Scouse son-in-law first appeared, Bill howled in outrage.
‘They’ve nicked our idea!’
‘Because he’s from the North?’ said Tony.
‘They seem to be very different people, him and Barbara,’ said June.
‘And they come from a different place,’ said Tony.
‘It’s the same thing!’ said Bill. ‘We thought of that!’
‘Yes,’ said Tony. ‘We’re brilliant. We had the brainwave of a character who came from somewhere else.’
‘You didn’t, actually,’ said June. ‘Sophie did. She came up with it by actually coming from somewhere else.’
‘Can we all shut up?’ said Bill. ‘I want to listen.’
Till Death Us Do Part was brilliant, savage, fre
sh, real, and unlike anything they had ever seen. Tony and June enjoyed it a lot, but by the closing credits Bill was sunk in a gloom so deep that he could hardly talk.
‘We’re finished,’ he said eventually.
‘Why are we finished?’
‘They’re ahead of the game. We were something when we started. We’re nothing now.’
June laughed.
‘It’s not even a series yet. It might never be a series. You’re miles ahead of them. And people adore Barbara (and Jim).’
‘Oh, people,’ said Bill. ‘I’m not talking about people.’
‘Who are we talking about, then?’ said Tony. ‘Critics?’
‘While there are still people, you’re not finished,’ said June. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’
‘Why didn’t we set ours in an ordinary working-class home? We lived in ordinary working-class homes.’
‘Yeah, and they were horrible,’ said Tony. ‘I wouldn’t want to look at them once a week, let alone write about them every day.’
‘And the whole point of Barbara (and Jim) is that they come from different classes,’ said June. ‘That was the joke.’
‘Why did she end up in his, though?’ said Bill. ‘Why couldn’t he have gone to live in hers?’
‘Because why would he?’ said Tony. ‘Why would she, more to the point? Why would anyone, if they had the choice? People want to get out of those places, Bill. They’re all being knocked down.’
‘And hers was in Blackpool,’ said June. ‘I don’t know how someone who works at Number Ten goes up and down to Blackpool every day.’
‘Yeah, well, we shouldn’t have had him working at Number Ten, should we?’
‘So you’re saying we wrote the wrong programme altogether,’ said Tony.
‘Yes.’
‘The series that just about everyone in Britain watches every week …’
‘The show that made a star out of Sophie …’ said June.
‘The series that pays you a decent wage because it’s done so well for us … No bloody good?’
‘Tom Sloan hates Till Death Us Do Part, according to Dennis,’ Bill said. ‘Why doesn’t he hate anything we write?’