by Nick Hornby
Diane was dressed in the latest gear, pretty, friendly, puppyishly keen to learn.
They met in the office, which Bill didn’t need any more, because he could write on his own at home. Through Diane’s eyes it must have looked as though Tony and Bill had constructed a thriving scriptwriting corporation: there was Hazel, and the sofas, and the desk, and the record player, and all the telephones … Bill had even bought an espresso machine, imported from Italy, exactly the same make as the one in Bar Italia in Soho. The office, Tony suddenly saw, was the product of highly successful adult labour.
Diane stared at it all, intimidated.
‘Do I have to pay for it?’ she said.
‘Not until you see your name on the credits every Thursday night,’ said Tony.
‘Is that what will happen?’ said Diane.
‘It better,’ said Tony. ‘Or I won’t be able to pay the rent on this place either.’
They spent the morning talking. Dennis wanted Just Barbara to get as far away from Barbara (and Jim) as it was possible to go; he wanted a cast of characters rather than a two-hander, he wanted Swinging London reflected in the locations and the stories, he wanted Barbara out of her flat and into the world, he wanted youth and fun and glamour. Tony knew nothing about any of that, whereas Diane knew everything about where girls shopped, ate, drank coffee, danced, met boys. If Tony had somehow persuaded Dennis to let him have a go on his own, he’d have been fired approximately halfway through the first page.
Tony knew more about other things, though. He knew a lot about budgets, structure and timing, so he was able to tell Diane that they couldn’t set a scene there, or there, or even there. He knew everything there was to know about Barbara, so he was able to tell Diane that she wouldn’t think this or say that. And he knew about babies, so he could point out that Barbara would be unable to do just about anything at all. In other words, he was perfectly equipped to prevent Just Barbara from being written. Bill, it turned out, was right. It was a hopeless idea.
‘Does she have to have a baby?’ said Diane.
‘She’s already had it, is the problem.’
‘No, I mean … can’t we just forget about it?’
‘The good people of Britain never forget anything. But …’
There was something here. He felt a familiar little prickle of excitement.
‘Go on. But …?’
‘But what if she’s not Barbara?’ said Tony.
‘If she’s not Barbara, we can’t call it Just Barbara, can we?’
‘No. We’d definitely have to change the name of the show. But what if she was Just somebody else? Just Sophie, say? No divorce, no Jim, no baby Timmy. Just a young girl making her way in the big city. And going out in the evenings.’
‘Can we do that?’
‘We’re writers,’ said Tony. ‘We can do anything we want.’
He had learned that much, at least.
22
The party for Bill’s book was in the upstairs bar of a Soho pub that, for various reasons, Tony had always been too afraid to enter. He went with June, and once they were there they huddled in a corner and watched everyone. The book, it seemed, was going to be a great success, or as much of a success as it was possible to be when half the bookshops in London wouldn’t stock it and most of the newspapers wouldn’t review it. The literary editor of the Daily Express, for example, had phoned Michael Braun to tell him that the Express would ignore not only this book, but all other books that Braun might publish in the future. But the New Statesman had called Bill ‘a towering, fiery, obscene talent’, and even the Spectator had said ‘the broad-minded reader would find much to admire’. Tony felt close to the novel and far away from it all at the same time; and he felt guilty too, for wasting Bill’s time with overflowing baths and the like. It was as if he’d made Arthur Miller write lines for pet-food advertisements.
‘How do you feel?’ said June.
‘I’m pleased for him,’ said Tony, as Bill received a kiss on the lips from a young man who appeared to be wearing eye make-up and who was definitely wearing a feather boa.
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Lots of people hate their friends doing well.’
‘Not me.’
‘Good for you,’ said June. ‘But you don’t mind all this?’
‘All what?’
June gestured at the men in the room.
‘I don’t suppose any of these chaps have a mother-in-law in Pinner babysitting for them.’
‘I don’t mind that.’
‘Really?’
‘No. None of it. Not the Pinner bit, or the mother-in-law bit, or the babysitting bit. And I’m sorry if I’ve ever given the impression that I do.’
‘I think perhaps I feel guilty.’
‘For what?’
‘I’m worried that life is passing you by.’
‘I’m a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it.’
‘Doesn’t that mean you at least have to be sitting somewhere interesting?’
‘This isn’t life.’
A bald woman wearing a kaftan came into the room, sought out Bill and kissed him on the lips. Tony didn’t know whether she proved or disproved the statement he’d just made.
Bill finally came over to see them, and they shook hands warmly. They’d met for lunch a few times, and Tony had told him about his troubles with Diane and the new series. Bill had been mildly sympathetic but uninterested; he’d gone to a better place. He had nearly finished a second novel, and he’d been commissioned to write a play for the Royal Court.
He kissed them both on the cheek. Tony tried to pretend that he was bohemian enough to carry it off without self-consciousness, but he was acutely aware of his jacket, his tie and his wife.
‘Thank you both for coming to this den of iniquity,’ Bill said.
‘The Pinner Mothers’ Union will be agog when I tell them,’ said June.
‘She’s not actually a member of the Pinner Mothers’ Union,’ Tony said, completely unnecessarily.
June and Bill both laughed, but at him, not with him.
‘You can’t have it all ways,’ said Bill, and then Michael Braun pulled him away to introduce him to someone else.
Tony’s eyes wandered around the room and then came to rest on a beautiful young coloured woman wearing a beautiful shimmering silver chemise and a dramatically tied headscarf. Why didn’t he know any young coloured women? Why didn’t he know people who tied their headscarves in a dramatic way? He didn’t care about Bill’s success, he thought. He liked it. It was great. And he didn’t worry about whether he was missing out on life. What Tony really wanted was to walk into a room somewhere and feel he was at home in it.
Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.
‘It’s not working,’ he said to June suddenly, on the way back to Pinner.
‘What?’ She looked alarmed, and he squeezed her hand.
‘Oh. Sorry. I meant work. Diane. All that. It’s hopeless. I’m writing with a kid who thinks that wearing the wrong heels to a discotheque is the stuff of life.’
‘I don’t see why it couldn’t be the stuff of a joke,’ June said.
‘A joke she wants to turn into thirty minutes of peak-viewing television.’
‘Well, stop her,’ said June. ‘You’re the senior writer in the partnership.’
‘I have stopped her,’ said Tony. ‘But I don’t know what to replace it with. I don’t know anything about young women or fashion magazines or boyfriends.’
‘So turn it into something else.’
‘What, a searing indictment of race relations in Britain?’ He was still thinking about the coloured girl at the party and feeling resentful. ‘How come Bill knows coloured girls?’
‘Wasn’t she beautiful!’
‘But how did he me
et her?’
‘I’ll tell you how,’ said June.
‘You actually know?’
‘I can guess.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘He was at a party, and this beautiful girl came in, and he went over and said, “Hello, I’m Bill.” ’
‘But how do you get invited to parties like that?’
‘Are you serious?’ said June.
‘Yes,’ said Tony.
‘You do know you were invited to a party exactly like that.’
‘Tonight, you mean?’
‘Yes. Tonight.’
He tried to think of a reason why tonight didn’t count, but there wasn’t one.
Dennis told Sophie, Tony and Diane that he wanted to do things differently this time. Comedy Playhouse was still on the BBC, still showing half-hour comedies that were all desperate to become grown-up series, but he explained that, in his view, they could afford to be more ambitious. Sophie was a known quantity, a much-loved TV star, and he didn’t want her grubbing around for a commission like the rest of them. He paid for twelve scripts, and when everyone was happy with them, he was going to dump them on Tom Sloan’s desk, the whole lot of them. And if Sloan didn’t want them, he’d have to go through them page by page and explain what was wrong with them. He was aware that there was a different version of the future, one in which Tom turned them all down without really reading them and Dennis apologized for wasting his time, but at least Dennis’s fantasy indicated the strength of his determination and enthusiasm.
He was aware that the path he had chosen was the longest and least direct available to him, but there was method in his procrastination. He had chosen that path because he could meander along it with Sophie. There would be endless excuses for coffee, lunch, maybe even dinner. The Comedy Playhouse route offered intensive contact time over the course of a week, and was therefore not without its attractions; but if there was no further interest, he would run the risk of Sophie embarking on a professional life that didn’t involve him, and he wasn’t sure he could bear that. Slow and steady, he told Tony and Diane, wins the race. He didn’t convey the same message to Sophie. He felt that he had enough self-promotional problems as it was, without introducing the notion of tortoises.
The weeks of waiting for Tony and Diane passed slowly. Dennis was producing two other comedy programmes for the BBC, neither of which was making him happy. Heirs and Graces was about an impoverished aristocratic couple who had lost their stately home and were now attempting to run a seaside boarding house. Dennis Price and Phyllis Calvert had already turned the script down, with great firmness and speed, and now Dennis was avoiding telephone calls from the writer, who thought that Laurence Olivier would be ideal for the role of Lord Alfred. He could hardly bear to think about Slings and Marrows, a Comedy Playhouse episode about the ruthless behind-the-scenes politics of a village fete. There were people at the BBC who thought that Slings and Marrows had enormous potential, but Dennis had already decided that if it went to series he would retire to Norfolk and grow prize-winning vegetables. Work was going nowhere, and he was worried that Sophie was beginning to look at other scripts, other producers, other potential husbands. And then, just as he was beginning to wonder whether he should plod off towards one of his mother’s stout bluestockings, there were three significant advances.
The first was an invitation to the theatre: Sophie had been given tickets to the first night of the musical Hair at the Shaftesbury and she needed someone to go with.
‘When is it?’ said Dennis.
It didn’t matter when it was, because even if he was busy, which he wasn’t, he would have cancelled. But as Sophie had telephoned him, she couldn’t see that he hadn’t even bothered looking for his empty diary.
‘Tonight,’ said Sophie.
‘Ah,’ said Dennis. ‘You’ve been let down.’
If tortoises could speak, they’d have sounded like him, he thought, mournful and elderly.
‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘I knew you’d say that.’
Dennis winced. His tortoise tendencies had been noted already.
‘I’ve just been offered them,’ said Sophie. ‘This second. You were the first person I called. They didn’t even know the show was opening until that business yesterday.’
‘What business?’
‘I thought if I said “that business”, you’d know, and I wouldn’t have to say any more. I don’t really know what business.’
Luckily Dennis remembered what the business was: the Theatres Act, passed the previous day. The people of Britain were now allowed to see nipples and pubic hair in a West End theatre, if that was what they wanted to do.
‘I knew you’d know,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s why I love you.’
This was the second significant advance, coming so swiftly after the first that there was nearly a collision. It was some time before Dennis could bring himself to speak again. He knew that it had not been intended as a serious declaration, and she had only said it because he had ploddingly retrieved a fragment of knowledge about government legislation from the dusty recesses of his fusty Cambridge brain. But if he had recorded the telephone call and edited the tape carefully, he could listen to Sophie Straw telling him that she loved him all day.
‘Ha ha!’ he said eventually, but the laughter seemed merely to confuse her, so he moved on. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ he said. The expression was as inappropriate as the laugh, seeing as there was nothing in the conversation to date that could be given either of those metaphorical values.
‘There’s nudity,’ said Sophie.
‘Yes,’ said Dennis.
‘Are we happy with nudity?’ said Sophie.
Had one of his scriptwriters tried to fob him off with something containing that line, he would have had the culprit escorted from the premises and shot. Now he could see that it wasn’t just a cheap gag. On the contrary, it was priceless, and contained considerable subtlety, charm and truth. A beautiful woman combining the prospect of happiness and nakedness in the same spoken sentence could achieve the power of the greatest lyric poetry.
‘I’m happy if you’re happy,’ said Dennis.
The audience for Hair was a surprisingly typical first-night crowd: lots of men in suits and their nervous-looking wives. Dennis was both disappointed and relieved. He would have enjoyed telling his mother that he’d spent the evening sitting amidst long-haired, bare-chested men and kohl-eyed, bare-breasted women, but many of the men looked as though they’d come straight from the City, and their wives straight off the 5.20 from Godalming. The men had a gleam in their eyes that might not have been there if they were about to sit through three hours of The Cherry Orchard, and there was a loud, and somewhat self-congratulatory, hum of anticipation before the curtain came up. But – and here was the relief – Dennis didn’t look out of place. He would go so far as to say that he looked rather young and bohemian compared to a lot of the people there – he’d decided, at the last moment and as a concession to the winds of change, to wear an open-necked shirt and a striped blazer. Sophie looked extraordinary in a canary-yellow minidress and white boots, and the photographers in the foyer surrounded her. She tried to involve Dennis in the pictures, a gesture he might have regarded as a significant advance had it not been for the immediate downwards drop of the cameras the moment he went to stand by her side.
They had aisle seats, dead centre, fifteen or so rows from the front, and within seconds of sitting down, Dennis found himself wishing that they were in the back row of the Royal Circle. Members of the cast were roaming the theatre, looking for accessible targets on whom to rain flowers and kisses. Sophie was not only accessible, but famous and attractive, so she was visited by several intimidatingly good-looking young men whose kisses were a rather more enthusiastic expression of the new age of peace, love and understanding than Dennis thought appropriate.
‘Steady on,’ he said to the third visitor, who apparently wanted to whet Sophie’s anticipation by inserting his tongue into
her mouth.
The young man skipped away, apparently amused by the antiquity of the admonition, but he was immediately replaced by a young woman who leaned across Sophie to push a sunflower into Dennis’s hair. Finally, though, the lights went down, the show began and, despite occasional forays into the audience from the stage, Dennis and Sophie managed to avoid further trouble by studying their feet.
And, to Dennis’s surprise, he loved the play. It was a mess, in parts, but it was also chaotic, funny and gloriously tuneful, and the energy of the young actors was electrifying. Dennis spent as much time looking at the audience as he did at the stage, and more or less everywhere he looked there was genuine delight. The one exception was a scowling face a dozen or so seats to his left: it was Vernon Whitfield, who would go home and bash out a humourless, hostile and laughably prissy review for the Listener. It failed to mention, inevitably, that everyone around him was having the time of their lives.
The nudity was confined to one scene immediately before the interval, and Dennis tried not to find it difficult, but failed. What kind of idiot would go and see Hair on a first date? He was a pipe-smoking, beer-drinking comedy producer on the cusp of middle age; why had he thought it would be a good idea to sit down next to the most beautiful woman he had ever met, a woman several years his junior, while she examined the naked bodies of young male actors and singers? The seconds seemed like hours, and he tried to pass the time by attempting to find actors whose penises were beyond any shadow of a doubt roughly the same size as his own; he found two, neither of them belonging to the leading characters. They had been hidden away, presumably to avoid audience scorn and disappointment. Sophie tried to make eye contact during the scene, as if she’d sensed his tension and wanted to defuse it, but Dennis kept his eyes firmly on the stage. Afterwards, she tried to tease him about his goggle-eyed appreciation of the female form; he made a face suggesting that she’d caught him bang to rights. Better that way, he thought, than the confession that, such was his nervousness and self-doubt, he’d forgotten to look at any of the breasts and bottoms on display.