by Nick Hornby
‘In a way that doesn’t involve you providing a synopsis of every single episode?’ said Bill. ‘Because we had a lot of that tonight.’
‘There were sixty-four made, right?’ said Max.
‘And twelve have survived,’ said June.
‘Well, I’ve got twenty-two,’ said Max.
He had their full attention.
‘How?’
‘Oh, you don’t want to know. But they’ve cost me a few quid.’
Bill hit him with his stick, hard. He’d clearly intended to crack him over the head, but Max thrust his arm up just in time and took the blow on his elbow.
‘What the FUCK?’ said Max.
June, it turned out, had done a first-aid course in preparation for a holiday with the grandchildren, and for a moment she was concerned that a bone had been broken. But after Max had walked around the room for a couple of minutes, stretching his arm and swearing, June decided that a hospital visit would not be required.
‘What did you do that for?’ said Max.
‘That’s our money,’ said Bill. ‘Ten episodes are two whole DVDs.’
‘Nobody’s buying DVDs any more.’
‘Repeat fees,’ said Bill. ‘Downloads. All that malarkey. You owe us thousands of pounds.’
‘We’ll do all that when we put the stage show on,’ said Max. ‘If I decide I do want to work with a fucking lunatic.’
‘Excuse my friend,’ said Tony. ‘He’s been down on his luck.’
‘Thousands of pounds,’ said Bill again.
‘You’d only have pissed it up the wall,’ said Clive.
‘My prerogative,’ said Bill.
Something had just happened, Sophie thought. It didn’t really matter what it was, or that at its root was a pitiable desperation; tomorrow morning she would be able to call Georgia and tell her that Bill had walloped a young man with his walking stick, and Georgia would laugh, and express disbelief. Usually she had to listen to stories – about Georgia’s work, or her useless ex-husband, or the children. If she ever had anything to offer in return, it was something from the library, an illustrative anecdote about Christian in Majorca in 1975, or Chatterton Avenue in 1987, and Georgia had usually heard it many times before. (Georgia would never pretend that the story was fresh. She wasn’t that sort of daughter.) Sophie never had anything new. Already, Max’s play was worth more than the money she could earn from it. She wanted to do it more than she had wanted anything for years, apart from all the obvious, impossible things.
25
Tony and Bill met in a Polish café around the corner from Bill’s little house in Kentish Town. Bill couldn’t travel very far, and he clearly didn’t want Tony coming to his home. The cleaning lady was sick and hadn’t been for a couple of weeks, Bill told him. If it had been any other friend, Tony would have told him that he was being daft and that they could put up with a bit of mess, but it had been many, many years since Bill was in a position to pay a cleaning lady. Tony imagined cobwebs, booze bottles, mounds of old newspapers, takeaway cartons.
They ordered coffees, and in an awkward moment’s silence, Tony got his laptop out of his briefcase and put it on the table.
‘Really?’ said Bill.
‘I haven’t used a typewriter for years.’
‘I wasn’t asking you to bring a fucking great Corona with you. Pen! Paper! The coffee bar is longhand, isn’t it?’
‘It was. All those years ago. Does that mean it still is?’ said Tony.
‘Nothing still is,’ said Bill. ‘It’s all gone.’
‘Bloody hell, Bill.’
‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’
‘We’ve got to stop thinking like that, if we want to come up with anything anyone wants to go and see. Max is right.’
‘How can he be right about anything?’
‘He wanted to employ us.’
‘And you take that as a good sign?’
‘Let’s not bother, then,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll go home and watch Millionaire Matchmaker and have my lunch.’
For a long time, Bill and Tony had met up every other month or so, but it had been harder over the last decade. Tony would try to steer a steady path between the perils that always threatened to capsize their fragile, leaky little boat: he didn’t talk about work (because Bill didn’t have any), or June (because Bill’s life-partner, a younger man called Christopher, turned out to be no such thing and left him), or more or less anything that indicated happiness and fulfilment. Tony didn’t mind long, brooding conversations about the state of the BBC and the dismal savagery of modern comedy; he too was confused by it. But in the end the discourse became so repetitive that when Bill stopped calling Tony didn’t chase him.
It wasn’t the pursuit of art that had impoverished Bill; he just didn’t work hard enough, and when he did write, he wrote the wrong things. Diary of a Soho Boy had done well, but he’d taken too long to write his second book, and his second book, when it finally appeared, was almost identical to its predecessor. He’d survived on his royalties, for a while, and the film option he sold, and the money he’d been given to write the screenplay, but he’d never finished it, as far as Tony knew, and it had saddened him to see it mentioned in the BAFTA programme as a work in progress. There was nothing going on there, and nobody was ever going to make a film of it. Diary of a Soho Boy was old hat now. It was still in print, but only students of gay history wanted to read it these days. Twenty-first-century homosexuals in Britain had their own literature, different lives, new problems. Fear of imprisonment wasn’t one of them. It had gone the way of polio and rickets.
Christopher had paid for everything in the last fifteen years of their relationship. Tony hadn’t known him well, but he knew him to be a kind man, and he’d almost certainly tired of the relationship, and Bill’s hopeless dependency, long before he actually left. Tony had ‘loaned’ Bill money in the past, and he could see that if they were going to have another stab at working together, he wouldn’t be able to avoid another request.
The coffee arrived, and Bill picked up his cup with two hands and trembling fingers.
‘Be nice to put a drop of something in here,’ said Bill.
Tony ignored him.
‘Just to get us going.’
Tony put the laptop back in his briefcase and found a notebook and a ballpoint pen.
‘We don’t drink,’ said Tony. ‘Not during the day.’
Clive and Sophie met in an Italian restaurant in Kensington Church Street, a few doors down from where the Tratt used to be. It had been Clive’s suggestion, and the sentimentality made Sophie feel a little queasy; one of the many difficulties of ageing, she found, was that people wanted to rekindle friendships the cheap and easy way, by pressing buttons – old jobs, old friends, old restaurants – without doing any of the work. But Clive didn’t know London very well any more and she couldn’t think of anywhere better.
‘May I begin by telling you how beautiful you’re looking?’ he said. ‘I won’t say that you don’t look a day older, but you have aged in a most charming way.’
‘It wouldn’t kill you to say I don’t look a day older,’ said Sophie. ‘You last saw me at Dennis’s funeral three years ago. And I was a wreck.’
‘I was thinking about the other night. The BAFTA thing.’
‘I’ve only aged four days since then.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’ve now lost track of the compliment,’ said Sophie.
‘You look well.’
‘Oh. Is that what it boils down to?’ She pouted to indicate disappointment, and Clive laughed.
‘Did you enjoy seeing the shows again?’
‘It was complicated. You?’
‘You know, I don’t really want to spend the whole lunch talking about the past,’ said Clive.
‘What an annoying thing to say.’
‘Why?’
‘Because nobody was asking you to. Because you just asked me about the other night, so out of politeness I
asked you the same question. Because we wouldn’t even be sitting here if it wasn’t for the past, and for people wanting to talk about the past.’
‘If it’s any consolation to you, I regret everything,’ said Clive. ‘And I always have.’
‘When you say you regret everything …’
‘Related to Barbara (and Jim), and my part in its downfall.’
‘I’m going to shove a breadstick up your nose in a minute,’ said Sophie.
‘What have I done now?’
‘Why on earth would your regret be a consolation to me?’ said Sophie.
‘I just thought you’d like to know.’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t give you any satisfaction?’
‘No.’
‘You weren’t annoyed with me?’
‘No.’
‘Now I know you’re not telling the truth. You were extremely annoyed with me at the time.’
‘I thought we were talking about the show. That’s what I was talking about anyway. I wasn’t annoyed with you about that. I was cross about you sleeping with that deranged woman when you were supposed to be engaged to me.’
She could see why she had found him attractive, even now. He had aged well too. If men of his age still wore moustaches, he could have looked like John Mills, or David Niven, or one of the other twinkly old actors she used to see on the chat shows when the children were young, and she and Dennis watched television every night. (Later, she looked David Niven up on Wikipedia and found that he’d been younger than Clive when he died, and nearly ten years younger than both of them when he used to sit on Michael Parkinson’s sofa at the beginning of the 1970s, telling all those stories about Sam Goldwyn. The discovery made her feel shaky and breathless.)
‘But that was why it all went wrong.’
She was about to correct him on tiny, detailed points of chronology – to remind him about Bill and Tony and their decision to separate, and about the plotting in the series – and then she realized that she didn’t want that kind of argument at all.
‘Nothing went wrong,’ she said.
She could tell that he didn’t believe her.
‘Nothing went wrong,’ she said again. ‘I married Dennis. He was the best husband I could possibly have hoped for. We had two wonderful children.’
‘You’re right,’ said Clive. ‘That’s the most important thing.’
‘No, it isn’t, and I haven’t finished,’ said Sophie. ‘Nothing went wrong professionally either. I’ve enjoyed every second of my career, and I’ve worked whenever I wanted to.’
Clive put up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
‘All right. Everything’s been marvellous.’
‘I never thought any of those things would happen to me.’
‘Yes, you did,’ said Clive gently. ‘You knew it would happen to you. You were the most confident young woman I’d ever met. You knew you were going to be a television star.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Sophie. ‘Was I one of those?’
‘I’m afraid you were, rather.’
‘Yes, well. You live and you learn.’
‘But everything’s been marvellous.’
‘What do you want me to say, Clive? What’s the actual point of this conversation? You seem to want me to tell you that ever since Barbara (and Jim) it’s all been a terrible disappointment. And I’m not going to do that. Has it all been a terrible disappointment for you? Is that it?’
A bottle of champagne appeared, just in time.
‘I can’t drink at lunchtime,’ said Sophie. ‘It makes me feel wretched.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Clive. ‘Don’t be so feeble.’
She shook her head at the waiter and put her hand over the glass. The waiter, infuriatingly, looked at Clive for further instructions.
‘Give her the tiniest taste,’ said Clive. ‘Just so that we can toast each other.’
The tiniest taste wouldn’t make her feel wretched, but if she took one now, it would make her feel irritated and resentful. She let the waiter pour a splash and then she drowned it in mineral water.
‘Oh, that’s a terrible thing to do,’ said Clive.
‘Cheers,’ said Sophie, and chinked his glass.
‘You never break that rule? For anyone?’
‘It’s about knowing your limitations. Which is what we were talking about.’
‘Were we?’
‘I’d just asked you if it had all been a terrible disappointment for you.’
‘Which bit? Work? Marriage? Life?’
‘Whichever you choose.’
‘I don’t know if they were a disappointment. I just messed them all up. That’s different, isn’t it?’
After Sophie had told Clive that she didn’t want to marry him, he had, inexplicably, gone back to Hampshire and proposed to his first fiancée, Cathy, and had made things even worse by marrying her. He’d stuck it out for about a year, just long enough for Cathy to get pregnant. He didn’t get married again for a while after that, but when he did, in the early 1980s, the outcome was similar: one year, one child, this time in California. He’d been with Carrie, his third wife, for the last decade, although Sophie wasn’t sure where she was, or why she hadn’t travelled with him.
‘I can see that the marriages might not have been ideal. Present wife excepted, of course.’
‘Oh, you don’t need to make any exceptions for her,’ said Clive. ‘Ghastly woman.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Sophie.
‘Oh, it’s not news,’ said Clive. ‘She’s always been ghastly.’
Sophie had some obvious questions about this assertion, but decided not to ask them. And then she changed her mind.
‘Why do you keep marrying ghastly women?’
‘I’ve only married two ghastlies,’ said Clive. ‘Cathy was all right. Boring and pointless, yes, but she wasn’t a horror.’
‘Why did you marry two ghastly women?’
‘I’m weak. We know that about me.’
‘But when people say they’re weak, they’re talking about drink or drugs or sex or things that give them pleasure. Marrying horrors doesn’t look like much fun from any angle.’
‘I suppose fun was involved, at some point.’
‘Let’s draw a veil over that.’
‘Probably for the best. Anyway. I mess my marriages up, and my relationships with my children are as a consequence poor, and I messed work up too.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘The same way as you, I suppose. We should have been famous, Sophie.’
We are famous, she wanted to say, and then couldn’t see any earthly reason why she shouldn’t.
‘We are famous.’
‘Oh, famous for soap operas and TV detective shows and so on. We should be more famous than that.’
‘Really? That’s what we deserve?’
He looked at her, and for a moment she thought he’d detected the sarcasm, but he ploughed on anyway.
‘Look at my contemporaries. McKellen, Gambon, Ben Kingsley … They’re doing all right. They probably don’t even think about being old, they’re getting so many scripts thrown at them. I know you took time out to have babies and so on, but still. We just sort of … dribbled out.’
Oh, but there was so much here she wanted to argue with him about; there was so much that made her want to grab him by his tie – yes, he was wearing a tie – and rock his head back and forth, and perhaps smash it on the table once or twice. What did they deserve? Certainly not what they’d got, she could see that much now, although it had taken her a while. They should be down on their knees every day, thanking God for what they’d been given in return for not very much. Sophie had been pretty, and she was able to make people laugh, and later, during middle age, she had been able to convince people – convince her employers anyway – that she was a middle-aged woman who had suffered bereavement, or who had taken over her imprisoned husband’s minicab firm. These, it seemed to her, were marginal talen
ts. And yet she could have raised a family with them, if she’d needed to, bought more than one home, sent her children to private schools. She’d been given awards, and space in magazines, and love. And after, or nearly after, all that, she’d been given money to write a book about her life, this life that had already been charmed, over-feted, too well rewarded. And this book, Barbara (and Me), had sold so well that she’d been given even more money for it. And she hadn’t even written it herself! Her friend Diane had done it for her! She wanted to say all this to Clive, loudly and scornfully, but he hadn’t been asked to write a book, and he hadn’t been given awards, and as far as she knew nobody took photographs of him at home and put them in women’s magazines. He was disappointed about something else, she thought; he was disappointed that he’d never quite added up to as much as the results of his own calculations. The trouble was that he’d got his sums all wrong, but she didn’t want to be the one to tell him that.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to be given this chance to get back on track.’
‘Which chance?’
She must have missed something.
‘The play.’
‘Oh, Clive. Nobody will notice the play.’
He looked at her, apparently trying to work out if this was some kind of cruel joke at his expense.
‘So why is this Max person bothering?’
‘He thinks he can make money out of old people in Eastbourne and he wants to give us some of it.’
‘That’s it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you need the money, then?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘I’ll be all right, I suppose, if there isn’t any more. So why do you want to do it?’
‘I like working. And I like working with people I know even more.’
‘That’s the thing,’ said Clive. ‘There’s nobody I like in America.’
‘Out of two hundred million people?’
‘Nobody I like who wants to work with me anyway.’
‘Ah.’
She couldn’t help thinking that he’d just told her he hated all food, before going on to explain that he was referring to a half-eaten sandwich in the fridge.
‘The thing is, I want to come home.’