He took Bill to a Pall Mall club that served steak and kidney pudding and treacle tart; he seemed permanently amused by the incongruity.
‘Half the members here are lawyers who spend their time trying to close me down,’ he said. ‘Except none of them know it’s me.’
Bill doubted whether that was true. He hadn’t known Braun for very long, but it was obvious that he had no talent for discretion, or even for talking at a volume level that could be described as conversational. He seemed to enjoy emphasizing the words likely to offend, so anecdotes involving, say, buggery and a young Catholic priest could be shared, albeit piecemeal, by the furthest corners of the dining room.
‘I think your novel is remarkable,’ he said after the claret had been poured and appreciated. ‘Where have you come from? Why don’t I know about you? What do you do all day?’
‘I’m a scriptwriter,’ said Bill.
‘How glamorous. Anything I would have heard of?’
‘Television, mostly. Have you seen Barbara (and Jim)?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Braun. ‘Why on earth would I have seen something called Barbara (and Jim)? And why do you ask?’
Bill was flustered. He thought that there was an obvious link between the two halves of his reply, but Braun hadn’t spotted it.
‘Well, that’s what I do.’
‘What?’
‘I write Barbara (and Jim).’
‘Presumably they only let you do the Jim bits,’ said Braun, and laughed at his own joke.
Bill managed a smile. He was, he realized, disconcerted by the recognition of his sexual preferences in a professional context. He’d spent so long hiding them in meetings about work that he wondered whether he preferred it that way.
‘And has it gone well for you?’
‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘It’s very popular.’
‘People watch it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lots of people?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘It’s gone off a bit recently.’
They were getting lots of nice notices for this series, but they were losing viewers every week. The British public were apparently unsure about the comic potential of marital discord and the BBC Audience Research department had spoken to several people who were very concerned about the welfare of baby Timmy.
‘I just want to know what popular means,’ said Braun.
‘Well. The highest we got was eighteen million. We’re down to about thirteen at the moment.’
Braun looked at him and laughed.
‘You know there are only fifty million people in the country, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So … You’re being serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dear God. Have you ever heard of Jean-François Durand?’
‘Yes. The Python’s Moustache.’
‘Read it?’
‘Bought it.’
‘Lovely reviews – “The best book to have been published anywhere in Europe this year,” the TLS said, an interview with the author in the Listener – 7,229 copies sold. Unless someone’s bought one this morning.’
‘Right.’
Bill knew that publishing was different. He had no idea that it was a virtually uninhabited country, like Australia.
‘We’ll do better with yours,’ said Braun. ‘It will be a succès de scandale. Do you want your own name on it?’
‘Yes.’
It was his book. He wanted to see his name on the cover.
‘Are you prepared for that? With the BBC, and your family and so on?’
‘I need to have a little chat with a few people.’
‘I’m hoping by the time the book is published we won’t be breaking the law every time we pick somebody up.’
There had been a debate about the new Sexual Offences Bill in Parliament, finally; there would be a change in the law, and homosexuals would no longer need to fear imprisonment. Roy Jenkins had said that ‘those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of shame all their lives’. Bill supposed he’d meant it kindly, but it hadn’t made anyone feel much better about themselves.
‘When will you publish?’
‘As soon as possible. Now is the time.’
Bill suddenly felt weak with relief. He had had enough of trying to guess the thoughts and feelings of eighteen million people he didn’t know. He wanted to talk to the few thousand that he did.
He had to have a little chat with one of his colleagues the very next morning: Sophie had come into rehearsals with a plan.
‘Are you doing anything tonight?’ she said to him during the first tea break.
‘Nothing in particular. What are you offering?’
‘Will you come out for dinner with me and Clive?’
‘Is he buying?’
‘I am.’
‘Lovely.’
‘I want you to meet a friend of mine.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Diane.’
Bill froze.
‘She’s a bit younger than you,’ said Sophie, and then, apparently off Bill’s look of panic, ‘but not that much younger. And she’s very pretty, and clever, and I can’t understand why she hasn’t got a boyfriend. Just like I can’t understand why you haven’t got a girlfriend.’
He had known Sophie for three years, and he had spent all of them hiding himself from her, while at the same time presuming that she had worked him out. He now saw that he’d been asking a lot of her.
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘Don’t tell me I’m too late,’ said Sophie.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You are a bit, yes.’
He took her outside for a walk and a smoke. She was shocked, then apologetic and self-flagellatory, and Bill became aware of how much he loved her.
‘Has it been hard, writing about a man and a woman and a baby, then?’ she said. ‘Are you sick of us?’
He just smiled. He felt at peace with the world.
20
It all fell apart very quickly in the end.
Tony and Bill discussed the possibility of Barbara and Jim separating one Tuesday evening, a couple of weeks before the end of the fourth series. They were in the pub after work, trying to come up with an idea for the last episode, something that would address the haemorrhaging of audience figures, and they were tired.
‘I haven’t got the energy to fight for this marriage,’ said Bill.
‘One last push,’ said Tony.
‘And then what?’
‘A holiday. The Anthony Newley script. Reds Under the Bed. Can’t wait.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then what? I dunno. We retire to Bexhill and we die.’
‘Before then?’
‘Another pint and a packet of potato crisps.’
‘I think they should knock it on the head,’ said Bill.
‘Who?’
‘Barbara and Jim. I don’t know how to dig them out of this. And I don’t even know if I want to.’
They had been delighted by the logic of the marriage guidance idea, and it had seemed even better when Nancy turned up, with her posh voice and her comic timing. She had helped the fourth series settle into a predictable, slightly lazy rhythm. The episodes always began in the Marriage Guidance Council office, grievances were aired, jokes were made, Marguerite gave Barbara and Jim homework – exercises to do, problems to solve. And by the end of the thirty minutes, a new, previously unanticipated problem had emerged, directly as a result of Marguerite’s suggestion. They had gone into marriage guidance with several bones of contention, all dug up from the soil of the original idea: he was from the South, she was from the North, he was Labour, she was a Tory, he was timid and thoughtful, she was quick-tempered and instinctive, he was Oxbridge, she had left school at fifteen. (Cynics might have pointed out that it was such an unlikely marriage that it could never have existed outside of a television scriptwriter’s imagination in the first place.) But such were the
demands of television that Tony and Bill had chewed all the marrow out of the old problems and had added a whole new set – sex, friends, parenting, in-laws, tastes. They now had a whole magnificent skeleton of contention, instead of the original bones, a skeleton as complicated and as intimidating as the diplodocus in the Natural History Museum.
‘Right,’ said Tony. ‘Christ.’
‘I’m not saying, you know, that’s that. Talk me out of it.’
‘Can you do that? Just … knock the series on the head? Without my say so?’
Just for a moment, Tony had a flash of something awful, lawyers and arguments about ownership.
‘No. Course not. If you want to keep it going, that’s up to you.’
‘But you’re out.’
‘I never said that either. I’m just … holding an idea up to the light and having a look at it.’
‘OK. So where do we go from here?’
‘I dunno,’ Bill said. He took a long pull on his pint. ‘I’m out.’
‘You just said you were having a look.’
‘I had a look. I didn’t like what I saw.’
‘When did you have a look?’
Tony knew he sounded panicky. He tried to breathe deeply without Bill noticing.
‘Just now.’
‘When you were drinking your beer?’
‘I’m not drunk. I knocked back a quarter of a pint, that’s all.’
‘I know. But … was that when it happened? When you made your mind up?’
‘I made my mind up weeks ago. But I didn’t want to march into work and say it with no preamble. I was looking for an opportunity.’
‘You want to pack in Barbara (and Jim)?’
‘Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?’
‘I’m just checking.’
‘I can’t see that they’ve got anywhere left to go,’ said Bill. ‘If you want to keep it open so that you can write the next series, I’ll help you. But I think she should ask him to leave.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Tony felt a little sick, as if he were breaking up with June.
‘You all right?’ said Bill.
‘Yes. Course. It’s not like they’re real people.’
They were real people. They were going to get a divorce. It was sad. Also, Tony needed them to be happy and together so that he could look after his own family. He had been foolish to agree to marriage guidance. It had put them in danger, made the unthinkable possible.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m going to carry on. If they’ll let me.’
‘They’ll let you,’ said Bill. ‘Dennis knows you don’t need me.’
‘You won’t think less of me?’ said Tony.
‘Why would I think less of you?’
‘Because I know I’m going to have to more or less pretend this series didn’t happen. They’ll start off next year all happy and shiny and repaired, and I’ll have to piss around with new bathrooms a lot.’
‘It’s hard to make a living in this game,’ said Bill. ‘You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.’
‘Thank you.’
Nancy came in after lunch the worse for wear and immediately the atmosphere, sleepy and good-natured but focused in the morning, changed. Sophie became irritable and Clive looked like a man who was walking as carefully as he could through a minefield but knew he was going to lose a leg anyway.
Barbara and Jim were receiving advice from Marguerite about the corrosive effects of jealousy.
‘They’re quite … square, aren’t they?’ said Nancy when Dennis had finished talking about the long marriage guidance scene.
‘Who?’ said Dennis.
Clive started to walk briskly towards the door.
‘Need some air,’ he said.
‘Ha ha,’ said Nancy as she watched him go. ‘So are you, I see.’
Clive ignored her. Sophie was mystified.
‘Why does that make him square?’
‘He’s squeamish,’ said Nancy. ‘Thank heavens women have more sense.’
‘I don’t understand, I’m afraid,’ said Sophie.
‘Jealousy,’ said Nancy. ‘I don’t get jealous.’
‘Good for you,’ said Sophie.
Tony stopped scribbling in the margins of the next scene and looked over at the girls. There was an atmosphere in the room, although he couldn’t have described it.
‘I think we perform different functions, don’t we?’
‘In the script?’ said Sophie.
‘In life,’ said Nancy.
‘I expect so,’ said Sophie.
She wasn’t interested, and her lack of interest only made Nancy more determined to attract her full attention.
‘You do the homely stuff, and you’re marvellous at it. And I do the exotic stuff. You’d have to ask Clive whether I’m marvellous at that.’
‘I’d stop there,’ said Bill pleasantly.
‘Stop where?’ said Sophie.
‘He doesn’t want me to talk about my sexual relationship with Clive,’ said Nancy. ‘He thinks it will pollute the working environment.’
‘I know it will,’ said Bill.
Sophie finally understood.
‘You’re saying you’ve been sleeping with my fiancé?’
‘ “My fiancé”,’ said Nancy. ‘Gosh. It’s 1959 and I’m in rep at Chichester.’
‘I won’t be working this afternoon,’ said Sophie.
‘Understood,’ said Dennis.
They all watched her leave.
‘And Nancy, I don’t think Barbara and Jim will be requiring marriage guidance any more.’
‘As from …?’
‘Well. Now, really.’
‘I’m contracted for another two episodes,’ said Nancy.
In the end, Dennis had to escort her from the premises.
‘Perhaps we should tell Dennis what we were talking about last night,’ said Tony when Dennis came back.
‘That?’
‘Yes. That.’
‘I didn’t think you wanted to talk about that,’ said Bill.
‘I don’t think we’ve got any choice,’ said Tony. ‘We’re supposed to be writing a comedy series, not The Perils of Pauline. There’s no rescuing them.’
And so, with appropriate solemnity and regret, Tony and Bill started to talk about divorce.
Sophie found Clive sitting on a bench up the road, smoking. She sat down next to him, took one of his cigarettes, listened to his apologies. He was distraught, of course: he was just the kind of idiot who could only understand what things meant by doing them first. He apologized, and vowed everything there was to vow, and called himself every name under the sun, and very soon Sophie found that her rage had evaporated. She gave him his ring back, but she didn’t hurl it at him.
‘I have to admit, I thought you’d be crosser than this,’ said Clive. ‘I thought there’d be violence.’
‘I don’t think I ever really believed you were serious,’ she said. ‘So somewhere in the back of my mind I thought there might be a day something like this one.’
‘Were you serious?’
‘I’d have gone through with it.’
‘Why?’
She almost laughed, and stopped herself. Why? It was a fair question. She had, in theory, agreed to spend the rest of her life with someone, and yet she couldn’t immediately remember what had made her think it was a good idea. She was hopeless at taking care of herself. She forgot to eat, for example, and suddenly found herself picking at stale bread or peeling a blackened banana. She wondered whether Clive fulfilled a similar function. He wasn’t stale or beginning to go mouldy. But there must have been something inside her, some dimly recognized need, making her reach for him. She was beginning to wonder whether she was lonely.
‘Can we carry on working together?’ said Clive.
‘I’m not going to let the chaps down,’ she said. ‘I can put up with you until the end of the series. So long as everybody agrees that we don’t need marriage guidance.’
‘That seems fair.’
‘Can I ask you something? What is the “exotic stuff”, and why is it so important?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nancy said that you needed her for the exotic stuff.’
‘Oh, hell.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing.’
Clive lit another cigarette, puffed on it furiously, played with the engagement ring.
‘All right, I know what it means. But why is it so important to you?’
‘It’s not. Now.’
‘Why was it?’
‘Because …’
She gave him as long as her patience allowed.
‘I thought we were all right,’ she said. ‘I mean, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said Clive quickly. ‘We were.’
‘More than all right. Good.’
‘Yes, good. Lovely.’
‘So I don’t understand.’
‘Do you remember what it used to be like?’
‘We haven’t been at it that long.’
‘No, I mean … here. In this country.’
‘Are we still talking about the same thing?’ said Sophie.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, no, I don’t remember. I didn’t do anything until I came down to London.’
‘I don’t mean you personally.’ Another cigarette, more furious puffing. ‘I mean … Well, here.’
‘In this country.’
‘Exactly!’ he said, relieved to be finally understood.
‘You just said that and I didn’t understand it then.’
‘Oh.’
‘Try again.’
‘Everything hidden away. Everybody scared. Nothing ever mentioned. A woman like Nancy …’
‘They existed, I believe,’ said Sophie darkly.
‘Exactly! But now … you just meet them! It’s amazing! And you can read about it, and you can go to the cinema and see it, and you can probably listen to recordings of it, I don’t know. And I didn’t want to miss out. When my children ask me what I was doing when everyone else was helping themselves to free love, I don’t want to say, you know …’