Funny Girl(118)

That was another thing she was suddenly self-conscious of this evening: her accent. There was no trace of Barbara from Blackpool. She sounded like a theatrical grande dame, she thought. Fifty years of Barbara (and Jim) meant fifty years of London. She had only lived in the North for a third of her life, after all that.

Clive was not awake, so she turned back to the audience.

‘Do people really want to watch old people moaning on?’

There was laughter, and some shouts of ‘Yes!’ and ‘We do!’, and applause.

‘You don’t have to moan on,’ said the young man with the stubble.

‘You’re quite right,’ said Sophie. ‘I should remember that. In life, I mean.’

‘There’s quite a market for things starring old people,’ said the young man. ‘There was that film about the old folks’ home for opera singers, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel … The grey pound is really worth something.’

‘Well,’ said Sophie, ‘nobody’s asked us, as far as I know.’

‘Sorry,’ said Clive. ‘Did you ask me something?’

Sophie raised her eyebrows despairingly, and got a laugh.

‘I’m asking you now,’ said the young man with the stubble. ‘I’m a producer, and I have investors who …’

‘Ah,’ said the BFI compère, ‘I now see that this is more of a sales pitch than a question. Perhaps you could have a word with Sophie privately afterwards?’

He thanked everyone for coming, and they got a standing ovation, and afterwards there was a long queue of people who wanted autographs on their DVD collections, and old eight by tens, and the first-day-cover series of Great British Sitcoms that the Post Office had issued at what young people called the turn of the century. (When Sophie had first heard that, she wanted to weep at her own confusion. That’s when you know you’re old, when you start to get your turns of the century muddled up.) She thought she’d be exhausted, but the more she signed, the younger she felt.

The young man with the stubble waited at the back of the line. Sophie – he’d focused on her – hadn’t been able to get rid of him, so in the end they’d asked him into the green room for a drink. Sophie wasn’t even sure that she’d wanted to get rid of him. Sometimes people asked her to do something, appear on a documentary about the 1960s or read a short story on Radio 4 about a grandmother forcing herself not to interfere in her daughter’s parenting mistakes. (She had read three of those.) But Max, the young man with the stubble, was talking about a starring role in a play.

‘I’m not going to tell you it’ll take the West End by storm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘It works like that for some people,’ said Tony.

‘Young people,’ said Bill.

‘What can I tell you?’ said Max, his arms spread in defeat. ‘You ain’t young people. But you never know. If we got the story right, and it made people laugh, I can see you doing well in the regional theatres. Places like Bexhill and Eastbourne, anywhere, you know …’

‘Anywhere people go to die,’ said Clive.

He was awake now. He’d flown from California for the tribute, so he could be forgiven his erratic participation in the evening. It did mean, however, that his long journey had been a complete waste of time. He’d slept through the episodes, woken briefly when the lights came up and nodded off again during the Q&A.

‘That’s exactly not what I’m thinking of,’ said Max passionately. ‘I’ve got a title. From This Day Forward. From the marriage vows. Old people want to be offered hope. Don’t you think? It’s not all doom and gloom.’

‘It really is,’ said Bill.

‘Well, your job is to find something that isn’t,’ said Max.

‘You’d love that,’ said June, who had been in the audience with Roger and his wife.

‘It’s not really a job, though, is it?’ said Tony. ‘A job is when someone pays you to do something.’

‘Oh, I’ll get the money to pay you for a script,’ said Max. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to write for free.’

‘I’m in,’ said Bill.

Tony looked at him.

‘What?’ Bill said. ‘I’m f*cking skint.’

The last time they had all been in the same room was after Dennis’s funeral, but it had hardly been a reunion, not with everyone else there. Sophie and Dennis had been together for a long time after Barbara (and Jim), and the wake had been full of children, and grandchildren, and friends, and godchildren, and colleagues from all the shows that had come after. The programme she always thought of as their show took up only a tiny little corner of their sitting room. There had been a moment when she’d looked over and seen Clive, Tony and Bill talking and laughing, and she had longed for everyone else, even her children, to leave, just for thirty minutes, so that she could talk about Dennis to the people who’d watched her fall in love with him. But she knew that nobody else would have understood, and she wasn’t sure she could explain the impulse even to herself, so the night had ended, as it should have, with Georgia and Christian and a Balthazar of champagne that Dennis had been saving for a special occasion. Either he had left it too long or he knew what he was doing, depending on how you looked at it.