Funny Girl(122)

‘What do you want me to say, Clive? What’s the actual point of this conversation? You seem to want me to tell you that ever since Barbara (and Jim) it’s all been a terrible disappointment. And I’m not going to do that. Has it all been a terrible disappointment for you? Is that it?’

A bottle of champagne appeared, just in time.

‘I can’t drink at lunchtime,’ said Sophie. ‘It makes me feel wretched.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Clive. ‘Don’t be so feeble.’

She shook her head at the waiter and put her hand over the glass. The waiter, infuriatingly, looked at Clive for further instructions.

‘Give her the tiniest taste,’ said Clive. ‘Just so that we can toast each other.’

The tiniest taste wouldn’t make her feel wretched, but if she took one now, it would make her feel irritated and resentful. She let the waiter pour a splash and then she drowned it in mineral water.

‘Oh, that’s a terrible thing to do,’ said Clive.

‘Cheers,’ said Sophie, and chinked his glass.

‘You never break that rule? For anyone?’

‘It’s about knowing your limitations. Which is what we were talking about.’

‘Were we?’

‘I’d just asked you if it had all been a terrible disappointment for you.’

‘Which bit? Work? Marriage? Life?’

‘Whichever you choose.’

‘I don’t know if they were a disappointment. I just messed them all up. That’s different, isn’t it?’

After Sophie had told Clive that she didn’t want to marry him, he had, inexplicably, gone back to Hampshire and proposed to his first fiancée, Cathy, and had made things even worse by marrying her. He’d stuck it out for about a year, just long enough for Cathy to get pregnant. He didn’t get married again for a while after that, but when he did, in the early 1980s, the outcome was similar: one year, one child, this time in California. He’d been with Carrie, his third wife, for the last decade, although Sophie wasn’t sure where she was, or why she hadn’t travelled with him.

‘I can see that the marriages might not have been ideal. Present wife excepted, of course.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to make any exceptions for her,’ said Clive. ‘Ghastly woman.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Sophie.

‘Oh, it’s not news,’ said Clive. ‘She’s always been ghastly.’

Sophie had some obvious questions about this assertion, but decided not to ask them. And then she changed her mind.

‘Why do you keep marrying ghastly women?’

‘I’ve only married two ghastlies,’ said Clive. ‘Cathy was all right. Boring and pointless, yes, but she wasn’t a horror.’

‘Why did you marry two ghastly women?’

‘I’m weak. We know that about me.’

‘But when people say they’re weak, they’re talking about drink or drugs or sex or things that give them pleasure. Marrying horrors doesn’t look like much fun from any angle.’

‘I suppose fun was involved, at some point.’

‘Let’s draw a veil over that.’

‘Probably for the best. Anyway. I mess my marriages up, and my relationships with my children are as a consequence poor, and I messed work up too.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘The same way as you, I suppose. We should have been famous, Sophie.’

We are famous, she wanted to say, and then couldn’t see any earthly reason why she shouldn’t.

‘We are famous.’

‘Oh, famous for soap operas and TV detective shows and so on. We should be more famous than that.’

‘Really? That’s what we deserve?’

He looked at her, and for a moment she thought he’d detected the sarcasm, but he ploughed on anyway.

‘Look at my contemporaries. McKellen, Gambon, Ben Kingsley … They’re doing all right. They probably don’t even think about being old, they’re getting so many scripts thrown at them. I know you took time out to have babies and so on, but still. We just sort of … dribbled out.’

Oh, but there was so much here she wanted to argue with him about; there was so much that made her want to grab him by his tie – yes, he was wearing a tie – and rock his head back and forth, and perhaps smash it on the table once or twice. What did they deserve? Certainly not what they’d got, she could see that much now, although it had taken her a while. They should be down on their knees every day, thanking God for what they’d been given in return for not very much. Sophie had been pretty, and she was able to make people laugh, and later, during middle age, she had been able to convince people – convince her employers anyway – that she was a middle-aged woman who had suffered bereavement, or who had taken over her imprisoned husband’s minicab firm. These, it seemed to her, were marginal talents. And yet she could have raised a family with them, if she’d needed to, bought more than one home, sent her children to private schools. She’d been given awards, and space in magazines, and love. And after, or nearly after, all that, she’d been given money to write a book about her life, this life that had already been charmed, over-feted, too well rewarded. And this book, Barbara (and Me), had sold so well that she’d been given even more money for it. And she hadn’t even written it herself! Her friend Diane had done it for her! She wanted to say all this to Clive, loudly and scornfully, but he hadn’t been asked to write a book, and he hadn’t been given awards, and as far as she knew nobody took photographs of him at home and put them in women’s magazines. He was disappointed about something else, she thought; he was disappointed that he’d never quite added up to as much as the results of his own calculations. The trouble was that he’d got his sums all wrong, but she didn’t want to be the one to tell him that.