Funny Girl(120)

25


Tony and Bill met in a Polish café around the corner from Bill’s little house in Kentish Town. Bill couldn’t travel very far, and he clearly didn’t want Tony coming to his home. The cleaning lady was sick and hadn’t been for a couple of weeks, Bill told him. If it had been any other friend, Tony would have told him that he was being daft and that they could put up with a bit of mess, but it had been many, many years since Bill was in a position to pay a cleaning lady. Tony imagined cobwebs, booze bottles, mounds of old newspapers, takeaway cartons.

They ordered coffees, and in an awkward moment’s silence, Tony got his laptop out of his briefcase and put it on the table.

‘Really?’ said Bill.

‘I haven’t used a typewriter for years.’

‘I wasn’t asking you to bring a f*cking great Corona with you. Pen! Paper! The coffee bar is longhand, isn’t it?’

‘It was. All those years ago. Does that mean it still is?’ said Tony.

‘Nothing still is,’ said Bill. ‘It’s all gone.’

‘Bloody hell, Bill.’

‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’

‘We’ve got to stop thinking like that, if we want to come up with anything anyone wants to go and see. Max is right.’

‘How can he be right about anything?’

‘He wanted to employ us.’

‘And you take that as a good sign?’

‘Let’s not bother, then,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll go home and watch Millionaire Matchmaker and have my lunch.’

For a long time, Bill and Tony had met up every other month or so, but it had been harder over the last decade. Tony would try to steer a steady path between the perils that always threatened to capsize their fragile, leaky little boat: he didn’t talk about work (because Bill didn’t have any), or June (because Bill’s life-partner, a younger man called Christopher, turned out to be no such thing and left him), or more or less anything that indicated happiness and fulfilment. Tony didn’t mind long, brooding conversations about the state of the BBC and the dismal savagery of modern comedy; he too was confused by it. But in the end the discourse became so repetitive that when Bill stopped calling Tony didn’t chase him.

It wasn’t the pursuit of art that had impoverished Bill; he just didn’t work hard enough, and when he did write, he wrote the wrong things. Diary of a Soho Boy had done well, but he’d taken too long to write his second book, and his second book, when it finally appeared, was almost identical to its predecessor. He’d survived on his royalties, for a while, and the film option he sold, and the money he’d been given to write the screenplay, but he’d never finished it, as far as Tony knew, and it had saddened him to see it mentioned in the BAFTA programme as a work in progress. There was nothing going on there, and nobody was ever going to make a film of it. Diary of a Soho Boy was old hat now. It was still in print, but only students of gay history wanted to read it these days. Twenty-first-century homosexuals in Britain had their own literature, different lives, new problems. Fear of imprisonment wasn’t one of them. It had gone the way of polio and rickets.

Christopher had paid for everything in the last fifteen years of their relationship. Tony hadn’t known him well, but he knew him to be a kind man, and he’d almost certainly tired of the relationship, and Bill’s hopeless dependency, long before he actually left. Tony had ‘loaned’ Bill money in the past, and he could see that if they were going to have another stab at working together, he wouldn’t be able to avoid another request.

The coffee arrived, and Bill picked up his cup with two hands and trembling fingers.

‘Be nice to put a drop of something in here,’ said Bill.

Tony ignored him.

‘Just to get us going.’

Tony put the laptop back in his briefcase and found a notebook and a ballpoint pen.

‘We don’t drink,’ said Tony. ‘Not during the day.’

Clive and Sophie met in an Italian restaurant in Kensington Church Street, a few doors down from where the Tratt used to be. It had been Clive’s suggestion, and the sentimentality made Sophie feel a little queasy; one of the many difficulties of ageing, she found, was that people wanted to rekindle friendships the cheap and easy way, by pressing buttons – old jobs, old friends, old restaurants – without doing any of the work. But Clive didn’t know London very well any more and she couldn’t think of anywhere better.