Funny Girl(102)

‘Well,’ said Bill. ‘The first one is, it’s a terrible idea.’

‘Oh,’ said Dennis. ‘We were rather pleased with it. What’s wrong with it?’

‘Doesn’t go anywhere.’

‘It can go anywhere you want it to go.’

‘It’s got no legs. Or wheels. You won’t get it out of the garage.’

‘Why not?’

‘There’s the bloody baby, for a start. Every bloody episode you’ve got to explain where it is.’

‘Perhaps he could be with Jim. He said he was going to help out.’

‘He meant take it for a walk sometimes, not invite it to stay for the weekend. And is she going to work? Or is she knocking round the house all day? And how many boyfriends can a divorced mother of one have in a television comedy before someone calls the police on her? No. It’s not for me.’

‘Just no?’

‘Just no,’ said Bill, and that appeared to be that.

‘Thanks, mate,’ said Tony when they got outside. He was angry.

‘Do you really want to write a series called Just Barbara?’ said Bill.

‘I just want to write,’ said Tony. ‘I’m a writer. It’s my living.’

‘ “Just Barbara”,’ said Bill, in a whiny, simpering voice.

‘Well, anything sounds stupid if you say it like that. “Hancock’s Half Hour”. “Look Back in Anger”. “The Gospel According to St Matthew”. It’s just a character. One woman.’

‘One woman who can’t do this and can’t do that because we’ve visited every corner of her personality fifteen times over the last few years. Is that what you want to spend your life doing?’ said Bill. ‘Really? You don’t want to do something fresh and different and interesting?’

‘Yes, but …’

‘There aren’t any buts,’ said Bill. ‘That’s the whole point of being a writer, isn’t it? If I wanted buts, I’d go and work in a f*cking but factory.’

‘Bully for you. In my life there are f*cking buts everywhere.’

‘You’re living the wrong life, then.’

‘Oh, I’ll just change it, shall I?’

It was the wrong response. He didn’t want to change his life. His buts were June and baby Roger, and he was happy with both of them.

‘This is all because of that bleeding book, isn’t it?’ said Tony.

It still hadn’t been published, but it had already changed Bill’s life. Braun and Braun had asked him for another one, and the literary editors were asking for reviews and columns and anything they could think of to get him into their pages.

‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘Of course it is. It turns out I can do something else. I don’t have to write for grannies in bloody Melton Mowbray.’

‘You’ve become one of that lot,’ said Tony.

‘Which “lot”?’

‘One of the Vernon Whitfields of this world. You think you have to write a book to be clever.’

‘Oh,’ said Bill. ‘Now he finds the fire in his belly. Where was all your revolutionary fervour when you came up with “The New Bathroom”?’

They had reached the tube station.

‘Do you want a drink?’ said Bill.

‘June’s going out,’ said Tony. ‘I’ve got to look after the baby. And when I wake up tomorrow I’ve got to work out a way of supporting both of them.’

Bill fished around in his pocket for some change and seemed to be trying to remember something.

‘ “… the writers are to be commended for addressing the problem head-on, and suggesting solutions that many couples will, regrettably, need to consider at some point in the future”,’ he said eventually.

‘That rings a bell,’ said Tony. ‘Oh, it’s the Times review. We’re the writers.’

‘Yes. Ironic, isn’t it?’

‘Why?’

‘There we are, commendably suggesting ways that couples can separate without fighting. And here we are fighting.’

‘Oh, Christ on a bike,’ said Tony.

Tony’s peculiar romantic history meant that he had never broken up with a girl or a boy. He had never given anyone the push, and he’d never received it either. But he imagined it felt exactly like this: the sudden lurch in the stomach, the acute awareness of time and place and temperature, the terrible realization that this was it, there were to be no second chances or mind-changing or persuasion.