Funny Girl(114)

Gloria smiled proudly, and sat down, but fifteen minutes later they hadn’t managed more than a couple of minutes of an unbroken conversation. It was a Tuesday afternoon, so it wasn’t as if there was a queue. But those who did come to say hello were in no hurry to leave. One woman took a great deal of pleasure and a lot of time explaining that her sister had been upstairs in Toys when Sophie was downstairs in Cosmetics; the next woman was adamant that Sophie had been in her daughter’s class at school, although Sophie didn’t recognize the name.

‘Cynthia Johnstone?’

‘She’s Cynthia Perkins now,’ said the woman. ‘But that probably won’t help.’

Sophie screwed up her face, as if to suggest that happy memories of Cynthia Johnstone were only seconds away from returning.

‘Well,’ said the woman. ‘It must be hard, when you’re having tea with the Prime Minister and all that.’

Sophie could still chant the register, Anderson to Young, from her class, and there was no Johnstone. It went from Harvey to Jones. Cynthia’s mother was quite wrong: it wasn’t hard to remember. Sophie hadn’t met many people before she moved to London. There were school friends and her colleagues in the shop and a couple of boyfriends and that was it. It was everyone she’d met since that confused her, an endless stream of faces looming in front of her, all of them saying that they’d met her before, at a party or a meeting or a recording.

‘Oh,’ said Gloria. ‘Cynthia Johnstone. Pretty girl. Good at needlework.’

A doubtful look crossed the woman’s face and then vanished when she realized she was being offered a way out.

‘That’s her,’ she said.

‘Of course it is,’ said Sophie. ‘Remember me to her, won’t you?’

‘I will,’ said the woman, but of course the whole point of the conversation was that Cynthia Johnstone had never forgotten her in the first place.

They finished their tea quickly and left, before anyone else could take Cynthia’s mother’s place.

‘Thank you,’ said Sophie on the way out. She’d put her headscarf back on.

‘She wasn’t going to leave until we’d given in,’ said Gloria. ‘But I suppose it’s not much to ask.’

If she hadn’t come home, Sophie wouldn’t have understood why anyone was entitled to ask for anything at all, but now she could see that whatever it was she’d achieved had to be shared.

They went for a walk down to the South Pier and past the baths, the scene of Sophie’s first triumph. It was sunny but very windy, and she remembered the gooseflesh on her arms that day.

‘I won Miss Blackpool,’ she said to her mother. ‘In 1964.’

‘You never did.’

‘I did. And I told them I didn’t want to do it.’

It sounded preposterous now, the story of a fantasist, and she was glad she’d done something since.

‘Why?’

‘Because I didn’t want to stay here for a year. I thought I’d get stuck.’

‘I’d have been so proud, if I’d seen that,’ said Gloria.

‘That’s what I’m saying. There was nothing to see. I didn’t even stand on the podium to get my tiara.’

‘That’s what I would have been proud of,’ said her mother. ‘I didn’t want you to stay here, looking after George. I wanted you out.’

The conversation, with its intimations of disappointment and imprisonment, reminded her of why she’d come home and why she’d chosen her mother of all people to talk to.

‘Mum, I’m going to have a baby.’

‘Oh, Sophie. You’re not even wed.’

She’d forgotten that bit. She’d forgotten it would mean anything to her mother anyway.

‘That’s not the important part.’

‘It will be to a lot of people. It will be to your father. Are you going to tell him today too?’

‘I’m not going to see him. I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘Am I allowed to know who the father is?’

‘You can probably guess. You saw it before I did.’

‘That nice Dennis?’

‘Yes,’ said Sophie, and she smiled in anticipation of her mother’s pleasure.

‘He’s not as nice as he looks, then.’

‘He’s wonderful,’ said Sophie.