Funny Girl(124)

‘Could I have a glass of champagne, please?’

She was going to get drunk, just to see whether it was as bad as she remembered.





26


Tony and Bill wrote the script in three weeks. It came in at ninety minutes, the equivalent of three episodes. Max had told them that older people didn’t want to sit in a theatre for hours, which suited them, because they didn’t want to sit in the Polish café for months. Max had even provided them with the two tent poles over which he wanted them to drape the play: a pair of weddings. Barbara and Jim – both single again after bereavement – start talking at their son’s wedding, and in the process rekindle something; in the second act, they are preparing to remarry.

‘They can’t both have lost their spouses, can they?’ said Tony on the second day, when they had talked about everything else they could think of, and could no longer postpone work. ‘Nobody dies now. Not before they’re eighty.’

There was a subtext to the observation, but Tony didn’t want to brush the soil off it and expose it to scrutiny. The truth was, however, that if Bill could live as long as he had, with all his years of drinking and unsafe sex and drug abuse, then humans were indeed a lot more durable than they ever had been. (‘Abuse?’ Bill had repeated scornfully a couple of decades ago, when Tony had expressed concern. ‘How am I abusing them? That’s what they were made for.’)

‘Dennis died,’ said Bill. ‘He wasn’t eighty.’

‘He was unlucky,’ said Tony.

Dennis was killed by an infection he’d picked up in the hospital, after a routine hip operation.

‘One divorce and one bereavement?’

‘Go on, then,’ said Tony, as if he’d been offered another cake.

‘Which one’s which?’

‘We can’t make Sophie play a widow, can we? Not when she is one.’

‘You can’t make an actor play a character she knows something about?’

‘But won’t it upset her?’

‘Heaven forbid we get a performance out of her.’

‘And Jim’s divorced,’ said Tony.

‘I suppose so,’ said Bill. ‘But that does mean he’s got two broken marriages behind him. He never seemed like the type, to me.’

‘What about if he never remarried?’ said Tony.

‘And he’s been pining for her all this time?’

‘Why the sarcasm?’

‘Do people really pine for that long?’

‘You can regret mistakes, can’t you?’

‘For nearly fifty years?’

‘Course you can. I’m not saying he’s been sat in a dark room sobbing for all that time. Just that he wishes things hadn’t turned out the way they did.’

‘Yeah, well. It’s too late now.’

‘Why is it too late?’ said Tony.

‘Come off it.’

‘Come off what?’

‘It. It’s over.’

‘Why is it over?’

‘There’s nothing left of her. Or there’s too much left of her, depending on which way you look at it. She’s not Barbara any more, is she?’

‘Are you being deliberately provocative?’

‘She was gorgeous.’

‘And that was all there was to her?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll write the f*cking play with you. They can get back together, I don’t care. But really. Between you and me.’

‘Bloody hell, Bill. You of all people.’

‘What?’

‘You sit in that flat surrounded by empty bottles of Johnnie Walker or whatever, on your own, day after day, miserable as sin, and you can’t see the value of companionship?’

Bill sighed and, as he did so, deflated.

‘Of course I can,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t want to think about it. I want what you’ve always had.’

Jim stayed unmarried.

The big breakthrough came on the next day.

‘Hang on,’ said Bill. ‘How old is the baby now?’

‘Barbara’s baby? Timmy? He’s not really a baby any more. He’s nearly fifty. He was born at the beginning of the third series – 1966, was that? Or ’67?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bill. ‘People who were born in ’66 are nearly fifty? I know the show’s fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I’d have guessed that Tim was twenty-five or thirty.’