Funny Girl(123)

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to be given this chance to get back on track.’

‘Which chance?’

She must have missed something.

‘The play.’

‘Oh, Clive. Nobody will notice the play.’

He looked at her, apparently trying to work out if this was some kind of cruel joke at his expense.

‘So why is this Max person bothering?’

‘He thinks he can make money out of old people in Eastbourne and he wants to give us some of it.’

‘That’s it?’

‘I think so.’

‘Do you need the money, then?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘I’ll be all right, I suppose, if there isn’t any more. So why do you want to do it?’

‘I like working. And I like working with people I know even more.’

‘That’s the thing,’ said Clive. ‘There’s nobody I like in America.’

‘Out of two hundred million people?’

‘Nobody I like who wants to work with me anyway.’

‘Ah.’

She couldn’t help thinking that he’d just told her he hated all food, before going on to explain that he was referring to a half-eaten sandwich in the fridge.

‘The thing is, I want to come home.’

‘Who’s stopping you?’

‘It’s a funny place, LA. The thing is, it …’

‘You’re not going to tell me about the weather, are you? Or how it doesn’t have a centre?’

‘I thought you might be interested,’ he said, a little huffily.

‘It was interesting the first time someone I knew came back from California, in 1968 or so. But it hasn’t been interesting since then.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘And that’s not why you want to come back anyway. Nobody wants to come back from a place where the sun shines all day. They say they do. But somehow it doesn’t happen.’

‘So why do I want to come back, then?’

‘I have no idea. Has Carrie actually left you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There’s a good way of telling: is she living in your house?’

‘No.’

‘Right.’

‘But she quite often disappears off on jobs and things.’

‘Has she disappeared off on a job? Have you called her agent?’

‘Yes. He says not. It was quite an embarrassing conversation actually.’

‘I think we should work on the basis that she’s left you, then.’

‘I was beginning to come to the same conclusion. Anyway. I don’t want to be old and unemployed and friendless there.’

‘You’d rather all that happened here.’

He looked at her, hurt, and she had to make a face to show she was joking. She was sure he would have laughed, in the old days, and she couldn’t decide whether it was age or Hollywood that had sanded down his sharpness. She blamed Hollywood.

‘Do you have enough friends?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if that sounds pitiful. But I have to say, you’d be central in the … in the construction of a new life.’

‘I’d be a plank,’ she said.

‘Are you offering or clarifying?’

‘I was clarifying.’

‘Oh.’

‘I suppose we’d better see how we get on during rehearsals,’ said Sophie. ‘But all being well, I’m sure I can turn clarification into a firm offer.’

‘I’m trying to think of an off-colour joke that would work.’

‘Because of “firm offer”?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I think you might be better off going down the clarification route.’

‘Something to do with butter?’

‘If you must.’

‘There used to be loads of them, didn’t there, during the Last Tango in Paris era?’

‘You’re right. It was the golden age of smutty butter jokes,’ said Sophie.

‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’

It was absurd that they were getting old, thought Sophie – absurd and wrong. Old people had black-and-white memories of wars, music halls, wretched diseases, candlelight. Her memories were in colour, and they involved loud music and discos, Biba and Habitat, Marlon Brando and butter. She and Dennis had gone to see a nude musical on their first date, and they’d been married for over forty years, and he had died – not of old age, quite, but of a disease that kills the elderly more than anyone else. She picked up her glass and drank down the champagne-flavoured mineral water.