‘Who’s stopping you?’
‘It’s a funny place, LA. The thing is, it …’
‘You’re not going to tell me about the weather, are you? Or how it doesn’t have a centre?’
‘I thought you might be interested,’ he said, a little huffily.
‘It was interesting the first time someone I knew came back from California, in 1968 or so. But it hasn’t been interesting since then.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘And that’s not why you want to come back anyway. Nobody wants to come back from a place where the sun shines all day. They say they do. But somehow it doesn’t happen.’
‘So why do I want to come back, then?’
‘I have no idea. Has Carrie actually left you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s a good way of telling: is she living in your house?’
‘No.’
‘Right.’
‘But she quite often disappears off on jobs and things.’
‘Has she disappeared off on a job? Have you called her agent?’
‘Yes. He says not. It was quite an embarrassing conversation actually.’
‘I think we should work on the basis that she’s left you, then.’
‘I was beginning to come to the same conclusion. Anyway. I don’t want to be old and unemployed and friendless there.’
‘You’d rather all that happened here.’
He looked at her, hurt, and she had to make a face to show she was joking. She was sure he would have laughed, in the old days, and she couldn’t decide whether it was age or Hollywood that had sanded down his sharpness. She blamed Hollywood.
‘Do you have enough friends?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if that sounds pitiful. But I have to say, you’d be central in the … in the construction of a new life.’
‘I’d be a plank,’ she said.
‘Are you offering or clarifying?’
‘I was clarifying.’
‘Oh.’
‘I suppose we’d better see how we get on during rehearsals,’ said Sophie. ‘But all being well, I’m sure I can turn clarification into a firm offer.’
‘I’m trying to think of an off-colour joke that would work.’
‘Because of “firm offer”?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I think you might be better off going down the clarification route.’
‘Something to do with butter?’
‘If you must.’
‘There used to be loads of them, didn’t there, during the Last Tango in Paris era?’
‘You’re right. It was the golden age of smutty butter jokes,’ said Sophie.
‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’
It was absurd that they were getting old, thought Sophie – absurd and wrong. Old people had black-and-white memories of wars, music halls, wretched diseases, candlelight. Her memories were in colour, and they involved loud music and discos, Biba and Habitat, Marlon Brando and butter. She and Dennis had gone to see a nude musical on their first date, and they’d been married for over forty years, and he had died – not of old age, quite, but of a disease that kills the elderly more than anyone else. She picked up her glass and drank down the champagne-flavoured mineral water.
‘Could I have a glass of champagne, please?’
She was going to get drunk, just to see whether it was as bad as she remembered.
26
Tony and Bill wrote the script in three weeks. It came in at ninety minutes, the equivalent of three episodes. Max had told them that older people didn’t want to sit in a theatre for hours, which suited them, because they didn’t want to sit in the Polish café for months. Max had even provided them with the two tent poles over which he wanted them to drape the play: a pair of weddings. Barbara and Jim – both single again after bereavement – start talking at their son’s wedding, and in the process rekindle something; in the second act, they are preparing to remarry.
‘They can’t both have lost their spouses, can they?’ said Tony on the second day, when they had talked about everything else they could think of, and could no longer postpone work. ‘Nobody dies now. Not before they’re eighty.’
There was a subtext to the observation, but Tony didn’t want to brush the soil off it and expose it to scrutiny. The truth was, however, that if Bill could live as long as he had, with all his years of drinking and unsafe sex and drug abuse, then humans were indeed a lot more durable than they ever had been. (‘Abuse?’ Bill had repeated scornfully a couple of decades ago, when Tony had expressed concern. ‘How am I abusing them? That’s what they were made for.’)
‘Dennis died,’ said Bill. ‘He wasn’t eighty.’
‘He was unlucky,’ said Tony.
Dennis was killed by an infection he’d picked up in the hospital, after a routine hip operation.
‘One divorce and one bereavement?’
‘Go on, then,’ said Tony, as if he’d been offered another cake.
‘Which one’s which?’
‘We can’t make Sophie play a widow, can we? Not when she is one.’
‘You can’t make an actor play a character she knows something about?’
‘But won’t it upset her?’
‘Heaven forbid we get a performance out of her.’
‘And Jim’s divorced,’ said Tony.
‘I suppose so,’ said Bill. ‘But that does mean he’s got two broken marriages behind him. He never seemed like the type, to me.’
‘What about if he never remarried?’ said Tony.
‘And he’s been pining for her all this time?’
‘Why the sarcasm?’
‘Do people really pine for that long?’
‘You can regret mistakes, can’t you?’
‘For nearly fifty years?’
‘Course you can. I’m not saying he’s been sat in a dark room sobbing for all that time. Just that he wishes things hadn’t turned out the way they did.’
‘Yeah, well. It’s too late now.’
‘Why is it too late?’ said Tony.
‘Come off it.’
‘Come off what?’
‘It. It’s over.’
‘Why is it over?’
‘There’s nothing left of her. Or there’s too much left of her, depending on which way you look at it. She’s not Barbara any more, is she?’
‘Are you being deliberately provocative?’
‘She was gorgeous.’
‘And that was all there was to her?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll write the fucking play with you. They can get back together, I don’t care. But really. Between you and me.’
‘Bloody hell, Bill. You of all people.’
‘What?’
‘You sit in that flat surrounded by empty bottles of Johnnie Walker or whatever, on your own, day after day, miserable as sin, and you can’t see the value of companionship?’
Bill sighed and, as he did so, deflated.
‘Of course I can,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t want to think about it. I want what you’ve always had.’
Jim stayed unmarried.
The big breakthrough came on the next day.
‘Hang on,’ said Bill. ‘How old is the baby now?’
‘Barbara’s baby? Timmy? He’s not really a baby any more. He’s nearly fifty. He was born at the beginning of the third series – 1966, was that? Or ’67?’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bill. ‘People who were born in ’66 are nearly fifty? I know the show’s fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I’d have guessed that Tim was twenty-five or thirty.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Tony. ‘Roger’s more or less the same age.’
‘Tim,’ said Bill. ‘Roger. What were we all thinking of, with those names?’
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘They’re all right now. But did you and June really look at yours and go, you know, “Coochy-coo, baby Roger”?’
‘I suppose we must have done.’
Bill sho
ok his head in wonder.
‘Anyway. What’s baby Timmy doing getting married for the first time at fifty? Who is he, Cary Grant or someone? He’s got to have been married before,’ said Bill.
‘What about if he’s been living with whatever-her-name-is all this time?’
‘They’re not going to have that sort of wedding, are they? Marquees and bridesmaids and a vicar? It’s got to be a second marriage, hasn’t it?’ said Bill. ‘Have you been invited to many second marriages?’
‘I don’t know that I have. People tend to slope off, don’t they? What about you?’
‘I’ve been to three first marriages in the last six weeks,’ said Bill.
‘Nieces and nephews and all that?’
‘No,’ said Bill. ‘Don’t you read the papers?’
‘Who do you know who’s famous?’
‘Gay people,’ said Bill. ‘Gay people are famous. Or they were, when they legalized gay marriage. When was it – March? April?’
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Tony. ‘That’s fantastic.’
‘I suppose,’ said Bill. ‘It’s only a bit of paper and a knees-up.’
‘The play,’ said Tony. ‘It’s a gay wedding.’
And they both experienced a familiar prickle of excitement, a feeling from so long ago that it took them a little while to identify it.
The rehearsals were in a Soho club called the Soho Club in Berwick Street, just above the market. They had an hour to talk about the script before meeting the director; the other three cast members – Max couldn’t run to more than five – would come in later in the week.
None of them had ever heard of the Soho Club, of course, and they didn’t see anyone else over the age of forty all day. A terrifyingly beautiful Slavic girl wearing black lipstick and a tiny skirt signed them in and showed them all up the stairs to a room tucked away at the end of a corridor. Table, chairs, scripts, fruit, mineral water. Bill didn’t like it.
‘We don’t belong here,’ he said. ‘And those stairs are no good for me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Max. ‘I’m a founder member and I get the room for free.’
‘Who were all those people downstairs?’ said Clive. ‘And why haven’t they got anywhere to go at ten o’clock in the morning?’
‘They all work in the media,’ said Max. ‘Producers, writers, directors …’
‘Actual producers and writers and directors?’
‘It’s tough out there,’ said Max. ‘So if you mean, you know, Are they being paid? … They’re trying. You have to take a punt, don’t you?’
It was a different world they lived in now, Sophie caught herself thinking, and then she told herself off. Of course it was a different world. Don’t be so banal. Obviously, 1980 was different from 1930, 1965 was different from 1915, and so on. Oh, but dear God … To a twenty-two-year-old now, 1965 was like 1915 had been to her when she was starting out. It wasn’t like that, though, was it? She saw pictures of the Beatles and Twiggy everywhere. Nobody had wanted to think about 1915 in the 1960s, had they? And then she remembered the Lord Kitchener posters that used to be everywhere. It was all so confusing.
‘When were you born, Max?’
He may have been talking about something else to Bill and Clive, but she was lost now.
‘In 1975.’
‘Thank you.’
It was a different world because, when they had started out, television and pop music and cinema had had to fight like mad for the tiniest modicum of respect. She had watched Dennis on that Pipe Smoke programme arguing with Vernon Ditchfield, or whatever his name was, about television comedy, but now she was beginning to wonder whether Ditchfield might have had a point: entertainment had taken over the world, and she wasn’t sure that the world was a better place for it. Sometimes it seemed as though all anyone wanted to do was write television programmes, or sing, or appear in movies. Nobody wanted to make a paintbrush, or design engines, or even find a cure for cancer.
She emerged from her septuagenarian reverie to find Clive tapping his script with a biro. To her surprise and delight, she recognized the expression on his face, even though she hadn’t seen it for a long time. He was about to say something he knew was going to annoy everybody. There was a particular twinkle in the eyes, an unmistakable lift in the eyebrows, a special jut of the chin.
‘I don’t think Tim is gay,’ he said.
She was right. This was fantastically annoying.
‘You know Tim, do you?’ said Tony.
‘I am his father,’ said Clive.
‘You haven’t seen him since 1967,’ said Bill. ‘You walked out on him. You don’t get a say in his sexuality.’
‘I just don’t think fans of the show would believe it,’ said Clive. ‘He was such a sturdy little chap.’
There were howls of outrage from all round the table.
‘I think he’s winding you up,’ said Max.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Sophie.
‘Once a berk, always a berk,’ said Bill.
‘Do you think it reflects badly on you?’ said Tony. ‘Is that it?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Clive.
‘Of course that’s it,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s what it always is.’
‘Let’s just stick to the facts,’ said Clive. ‘There’s no need to get personal.’
‘What on earth are the facts?’ said Sophie.
‘The facts are,’ said Clive, ‘that I have two children, and neither of them …’
This time, the howls of outrage stopped him from even finishing his sentence.
‘Why are you like this?’ said Bill. ‘You must have worked with lots of gay people in Hollywood. You may even have gay friends.’
‘Of course I have,’ said Clive. ‘I love gay people. I love you, Bill. And I don’t even feel the need to qualify that.’
‘How would you qualify it?’ said Tony.
‘I’m not going to. I don’t feel the need.’
‘But if you had to.’
‘Well, lots of men would say, “I love you, but not in that way”, wouldn’t they? Not me, though.’
‘You just said it anyway,’ said Bill.
‘I was made to,’ said Clive, aggrieved.
‘You knew we were going to winkle it out of you. That’s why you said you didn’t feel the need to qualify it. You wanted to qualify it,’ said Tony.
‘There’s a serious point here, though,’ said Max.
‘What’s that?’
‘Do older people understand gays? Do they want to see a play about a gay marriage?’
‘We’re older people,’ said Sophie. ‘Ask us.’
‘Would you want to see a play about a gay marriage?’ said Max.
‘Yes,’ said Sophie firmly.
‘Not really,’ said Clive.
‘Why on earth not?’ said Tony.
‘I’d be worried that it was going to be too politically correct,’ said Clive.
‘You’ve read it,’ said Bill. ‘Is it too politically correct?’
‘It’s not politically incorrect, is it?’ said Clive.
‘How would that work?’ said Tony. ‘You want lots of 1970s jokes about limp wrists and bending over?’
‘Not lots,’ said Clive. ‘One or two. Just for realism’s sake.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Bill.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Sophie, appalled by Bill’s capitulation.
‘No, I think he’s right,’ said Bill. ‘Jim’s old-school Labour, isn’t he? He’d be a dinosaur now. Slightly homophobic, a bit slow-witted, talks about coloured people, out of his depth in the modern world.’
‘You’re right,’ said Tony. ‘We can play around with that.’
Clive looked panic-stricken.
‘That’s not how I think of Jim at all.’
‘No?’
‘No. I see him as very intelligent, well read, up to date with all the latest, you know, anti-sexism and racism news …’
‘That’s not very politi
cally incorrect.’
‘I didn’t think Jim would be the politically incorrect one.’
‘You thought it would be Barbara?’ said Sophie.
‘Makes sense to me,’ said Clive. ‘They were always opposites.’
‘Let’s get this straight,’ said Bill. ‘Because you don’t like political correctness, you want some homophobic jokes in the play. But because you always want to be liked, you don’t want to be the one who makes them.’
Clive opened his mouth to say something, and closed it again.
‘Tough,’ said Sophie. ‘And Max, we’re not old people. Not like that. Remember we’re the same age as Bob Dylan and Dustin Hoffman.’
‘So you’d all run to buy tickets to see a play about gay marriage?’ said Max.
‘Yes,’ said Sophie firmly. ‘All of us.’
‘It’s not about gay marriage, for Christ’s sake,’ said Bill. ‘Have any of you even read it? It’s about a man and a woman making peace with their past, and trying to work out whether they have a future together.’
And Clive looked at her, and put his hand on Sophie’s knee, and left it there. She thought about moving it, and then decided that she liked it where it was: she had been craving this kind of touch, and had been wondering, over the last year or two, whether she would ever feel it again. She knew what Max meant when he said that people of their age wanted to think about the future, like everybody else, but what they most wanted was to live in the present, rather than the past. She didn’t have to worry about what kind of partner Clive would make, or whether their relationship could work, or even whether she was going to sleep with him. That stuff was for the young, and they were welcome to it.
After lunch, they met the director, a sunny, friendly young woman called Becky. As an introductory exercise, she got them all to talk about something or someone important to them, and when it came to her turn, she talked about her wife. Everyone looked at Clive, but he just beamed encouragingly.
There were two previews in Eastbourne before the first night, but the distinction seemed arbitrary: if there were to be no critics and no parties, what was the difference between a preview and what the posters along the seafront called a ‘World Premiere’?
‘Ticket prices,’ said Max.
‘That’s it?’ said Sophie.
‘Pretty much,’ said Max.
They were drinking tea in the lounge of the Cavendish Hotel, and, rather pleasingly, Sophie had already been recognized. She wouldn’t go so far as to say she’d been mobbed. There were a disconcerting number of Scandinavian and German families staying in the hotel and hers was not the kind of fame that had travelled very far. But two or three retired couples – one or two, anyway – had looked over, and then put their heads together, and dropped their voices to a whisper.