by Nick Hornby
Unfortunately, her willingness to see him again after the bad-breath kiss was misinterpreted and he asked her to marry him. He took her to Sheekey’s, because it was the closest place they had to a Site of Romantic and Historical Significance; he made the ring appear in a glass of champagne while the staff applauded. When she didn’t say anything immediately they found jobs to do in one of the other rooms. It was the wrestling, she realized, that had persuaded him to buy a ring. He must have thought that she was fending him off because she was an old-fashioned girl, but it wasn’t that at all. It was simply because she didn’t want to go to bed with him.
‘This has all gone wrong, hasn’t it?’ said Maurice when their table was no longer surrounded by onlookers.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was a very good trick. And it was romantic, with all the waiters watching.’
‘I can hear a “but” coming …’
‘We don’t really know each other,’ she said.
‘I think you know me,’ he said. ‘But then, I have been on TV longer than you. And also, you’re an actress.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘When you’re on TV, you’re not you. You’re playing a part. But when I’m on TV, I’m me. I’m Maurice.’
This part was true, unfortunately. The private Maurice was very similar to the Maurice that the public knew. He never seemed to go anywhere without make-up, for a start, and that toothy, insincere smile flashed on and off, randomly, like a faulty car headlight.
‘I’m sure there’s a lot more to you than that,’ said Sophie.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There really isn’t. What you see is what you get with me. And I’m not ashamed of that. You could be married to me for a thousand years, and I’d still be the person you see on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.’
Sophie was tempted to thank him for the evenings out by advising him that he should never say that again, to any woman, unless he wanted his date to kill herself for some reason.
‘I’m sure,’ said Sophie.
‘So what you’re saying,’ said Maurice, ‘is … I should just give it time. And we should keep going out. And we must kiss and cuddle a lot.’
That was one of the things wrong with him: he used expressions like ‘kiss and cuddle’. It was the sort of thing her grandparents said. There was probably an old music-hall song called ‘We Must Kiss and Cuddle a Lot’; there would never be a Rolling Stones song with the same title. Or a Yardbirds song, she imagined, although she still didn’t know what the Yardbirds sounded like. And also, what kind of a job was comic magician? She didn’t think she could bear to be married to a comic magician, even if his breath was sweeter than Parma violets and his kisses were like atom bombs. Comic magicians belonged on seaside piers. Comic magicians were what she had come to London to escape, not to find, and certainly not to marry.
‘I don’t think I am saying that really,’ she said eventually.
‘Oh.’
‘I think what I’m saying is that giving it time won’t make any difference.’
‘Why not?’
He was looking at her earnestly. He really wanted to understand.
‘I don’t think I’m right for you.’
‘You are. Definitely. I know that.’
‘Ah. Well. I think it must be the other way around, then.’
‘I’m still not following you.’
She didn’t think she’d ever shown enough gratitude for the quick wits of the people she worked with, and if the evening ever ended, which it showed no signs of doing, she would rectify that. She would buy them all flowers or whisky and write a card thanking them for being so clever. There were a thousand reasons why she would never have this conversation with Dennis. He would never have made an engagement ring appear in her champagne glass, of course, but once he’d realized that she was never going to put it on, he wouldn’t have asked her why not. She didn’t want to be a dim comedy magician’s wife, and she didn’t have to be, but she also saw that it wouldn’t amaze people if that was the choice she made.
She explained, as clearly as she could, and broke Maurice’s heart, and then she went home on her own.
13
When Bill had become used to the idea, and was no longer quite so dismissive of the first and depressed by the second, he liked to joke that Tony was responsible for two pregnancies in the same month. Tony didn’t spoil the joke by pointing out that the paternity of the other child was in doubt: Tom Sloan was a suspect, and Dennis, too. And Bill himself could hardly be considered blameless. But yes, fatherhood. There was suddenly a lot more of it in Tony’s life than he could ever have predicted.
He and Bill had moved into a bigger office now, one which could accommodate Hazel while allowing them to work in the room at the back. When June came to see him to tell him the news, she didn’t walk straight through, as she usually did when she dropped in; she stood by Hazel’s desk and waited while Hazel came through to tell him she was there. He knew what it was about as soon as he saw her.
He took her outside on to the street, away from curious eyes, and hugged her tightly.
‘Can you believe it? You’ve knocked me up,’ she said, and Tony laughed at the implication of violence, or at least vigour, in the phrase. He hadn’t knocked her up. There had been a lot of patience, coaxing, maybe-tomorrows, never-minds and I-think-sos. Just recently, there were signs that it was getting better, or at least less complicated.
‘We’ll have to move,’ said Tony. ‘A house with a garden.’
‘Hold your horses,’ said June. ‘We’ll be all right for a bit.’
They lived in a flat in Camden Town, and June loved the shops, the cinemas and the market.
‘Somewhere leafy and quiet. Pinner or somewhere.’
‘Really? Oh, dear. Anyway, there are other things to worry about before that.’
‘What have we got to worry about?’
‘Childbirth, for a start. I’m terrified.’
‘Sorry. Yes.’
‘And whether I’ll be a good mum.’
‘You’ll be a wonderful mum.’
‘You’ll be a wonderful dad.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Tony. ‘And here’s me worrying about gardens.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘I feel great.’
And he carried on feeling great, until he told Bill.
Perhaps it was healthy, and great things would come of it, but he and Bill were in the process of becoming two different people. At the end of a working day Tony ached, in the way that he’d ached after all those stupid training exercises he’d endured during his National Service. Up until now it was as if they shared a brain, or at least had created a new one that hovered between them, and they filled it with stuff, lines and stories and characters, like two taps might fill a bath. Sometimes one was working better than the other, and sometimes the bath needed more hot than cold, but the process of adjustment was self-evident, obvious. They just talked and then wrote.
During this series, however, the shared brain was becoming harder to find. Now they were two men yoked together by talent and circumstance, trying to speak with a single voice, and suddenly every single line and every narrative choice had to be debated, attacked, defended; both Tony and Bill won small triumphs and endured small defeats. Maybe this was how every writing partnership worked, but they’d never had to do it like this before, and it was hard.
Tony tried to think of how to break his news to Bill in a way that somehow wouldn’t invite sarcasm and scorn. Bill liked June, and they seemed to enjoy each other’s company when they met. Maybe it was Tony’s paranoia, but he couldn’t help thinking Bill looked on the marriage as bogus, an indication of cowardice and a desire to conform. Tony and Bill used to be two different shades of chalk. Now Tony was turning into a variety of cheese. It wasn’t a strong cheese, admittedly – he was probably closer in flavour to a cheese spread than to a seeping blue French thing riddled with maggots. But he was a mild married man, and even before June got pregn
ant the two of them had stayed in, night after night, watching television, listening to the radio, talking about what they’d seen and heard, analysing scripts. Once or twice a week, they went to the pictures, and dissected the films they saw on the way home. Tony could listen to June talking about scripts all night. She couldn’t write them – she’d tried, although she would never show Tony or anyone else the results – but she always knew where they’d gone wrong, what they were lacking, where they’d turned right when they should have turned left, why scenes were lifeless when they should have fizzed and crackled. He was beginning to wonder whether June’s facility, and their shared interest, might serve them better in the long run than a passionate sexual relationship that would eventually die on them.
Bill, however, went to clubs and bars that nobody else knew about, and drank a lot, and met wild, dangerous people who constantly ran the risk of imprisonment for their sexual preferences but who didn’t seem to care. And he was starting to look at a world beyond light entertainment, a world that Tony didn’t really understand. He went to the theatre – he had discovered Harold Pinter and N. F. Simpson and Joe Orton – and he knew Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and the people at Private Eye. He’d submitted a couple of clever, angry sketches to Ned Sherrin’s new satirical show, Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life – he’d even written something called ‘The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Homosexual Virgin’, satirizing the time it was taking to do anything about the recommendations in the Wolfenden Report. It had been turned down, but he was proud of it, and Tony got the impression that he was writing something longer which allowed him to visit the places that Barbara (and Jim) could never go. Tony admired all of it, and he wished he could be more like him, but he knew he wasn’t, and probably wouldn’t ever be.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ said Bill when Tony told him.
His swearing was more ostentatious these days too. He’d tried to avoid bad language when they’d started out, because he didn’t want people to think that he was some uneducated oik from Barnet. Now half the actors and writers he knew wanted to sound like uneducated oiks from Barnet, so he effed and blinded with the best of them.
‘How did that happen?’
Tony smiled sheepishly. ‘The normal way. More or less.’
‘Mr Normal,’ said Bill. ‘Mr fucking Average.’
‘That’s me,’ said Tony.
‘You are, though, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know, Bill. I’m a TV writer who left school at fifteen and once got arrested in an Aldershot toilet. And I’ve just found out I’m about to become a father after making love to my wife a dozen times over the entire duration of our marriage with a success rate of less than 50 per cent. Is that average?’
‘Probably better than average, that last bit.’
Tony laughed, and remembered his mother’s savage digs at his father’s expense.
‘But you’re ironing all the kinks out,’ said Bill. ‘You want to be respectable.’
‘It just happened. I haven’t tried to do any of it. And it suits me.’
‘Yeah, well. I suppose it’s good one of us is like that.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it? Write about Mr and Mrs Average?’
‘Yeah, she looks like Sabrina and he works for Harold Wilson.’
‘Well, we’re writing for Mr and Mrs Average anyway.’
‘First of all, I don’t believe anyone’s average. And second … what if we were? What’s wrong with that? We wrote about whatever we wanted, and we ended up with eighteen million people watching us. That’s the thing about television comedy, isn’t it? It makes us all a part of something. That’s what I love about it. You laugh at the same thing as your boss and your mum and your next-door neighbour and the television critic of The Times and the Queen for all I know. It’s brilliant.’
Bill sighed. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Congratulations.’
It was just bad luck that Dennis was called to Tom Sloan’s office the following day, and Sloan told him about ITV’s plans to launch a new quiz show on the same evening as the last episode of the second series.
‘The same time?’
‘No, they’re not that mad. But they think Up Your Alley is weak.’
Unfortunately Up Your Alley, a drama series about life in the workhouse of a Yorkshire mill town during the Depression, was weak, in the sense that nobody wanted to watch it.
‘How can I help?’ said Dennis, although he didn’t know whether he meant that. The offer would almost certainly lead to trouble.
‘What have you got planned for the last episode? We need something that everyone will want to see. And then we’re hoping they can’t be bothered to get up and switch over afterwards.’
‘Oh, it’s rather good,’ said Dennis. ‘You remember that in the first episode Barbara mentioned that she’d come down to London to be a singer? Well, she goes for an audition at …’
‘No singing.’
‘You wouldn’t hear her sing, even though Sophie’s actually got a very good voice. It’s about Barbara wanting to do something and be someone in her own right, rather than …’
‘Let me stop you there. We don’t want politics in the last show of the series.’
‘Is it politics, really? To find an ambition for a bored young woman?’
‘Sounds political to me.’
‘We could look at that, certainly,’ said Dennis.
Dennis had encouraged Tony and Bill to find something for Barbara to do, and they had responded imaginatively, and now he feared that he was going to have to tell them to find something else.
‘Why isn’t she pregnant yet? Is there a reason? Can’t they have children?’
Dennis didn’t want to have to explain that Clive and Sophie were reluctant to commit themselves to a fictional family.
‘They haven’t been married for that long, and Jim …’
‘So no reason. Right. Get her in the familly way. That’ll bring them in.’
‘Right-o,’ said Dennis.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ said Bill when Dennis told him.
Tony laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ said Bill.
‘You say that every time you hear someone’s going to have a baby,’ said Tony.
‘Why does he do that?’ said Dennis.
‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.’
‘It’s the logic of bloody couples,’ said Bill. ‘Doesn’t matter who they are: a man and a woman meet, get married, set up house, have kids. It’s like … food. It might all look different on the plate, but there’s only one way it can go down and it all comes out the other end looking and smelling the same. And who wants to write about that?’
Dennis looked at Tony, perplexed, and Tony shrugged.
‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ said Tony.
‘Can she have a miscarriage before the next series?’ said Bill. ‘Or an abortion? Are abortions funny?’
‘Ask a woman who’s died of septicaemia after having knitting needles stuck into her,’ said Dennis.
‘She wouldn’t hear me,’ said Bill.
‘You are a bastard sometimes, though,’ said Dennis. ‘Why can’t the poor woman get pregnant?’
‘She can,’ said Bill. ‘But am I right in thinking that she would then have a baby to look after? And if so, what the bloody hell are we supposed to do with it for sixteen episodes?’
‘Babies can be funny,’ said Dennis.
‘Tell us your best baby joke.’
It was a rhetorical question, of course, but Dennis made the mistake of taking it seriously, in an attempt to allay Bill’s fears.
‘All right. When my niece was three months old …’
‘Oh, Lord, spare us,’ said Bill.
‘You don’t even want to listen,’ said Dennis.
‘A baby,’ said Bill, ‘will scupper everything.’
‘Thanks,’ said Tony. ‘I’m going to be a father, Dennis.’
‘Tha
t’s wonderful news,’ said Dennis.
‘Try telling him that.’
‘I don’t care what other people do in their spare time,’ said Bill. ‘But …’
‘That’s not true,’ said Tony.
‘Let’s stick to Jim and Barbara,’ said Dennis. ‘What can we do to make it more palatable to you?’
‘How long does she have to be pregnant for?’ said Bill. And then, when Tony and Dennis were about to provide different versions of the same joke, ‘Yes, yes, very funny. How long in screen time?’
‘Off the top of my head?’ said Dennis.
‘Is there an actual formula you can check later?’ said Bill. ‘Official TV Pregnancy Durations?’
‘First episode of the next series to warm us up, and she can pop it out in the second.’
‘Christ on a bike,’ said Bill.
‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ said Tony. ‘There are things to say.’
‘Give me a for example.’
‘The christening. Jim’s an atheist, I’d imagine. So he objects. We can have a whole episode poking some fun at some soppy Church of England vicar.’
‘We might need to talk that one through first,’ said Dennis. ‘Tom’s a Presbyterian.’
Bill gave him a look of such contempt that Dennis decided he’d rather face Tom Sloan’s Presbyterian wrath.
‘Point taken, Bill, but Tony’s right. Just because they’re going to become a family doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you’ve been doing. You just have to be ingenious about it.’
‘And some weeks not mention the little sod at all.’
‘If it makes you feel better.’
‘It does.’