Funny Girl(26)

‘Easily,’ said Sophie. ‘This morning we were talking about the second series.’

‘The second series?’

Sloan had the look of a man who had arrived on the railway platform just as the train was leaving the station. To Dennis’s amazement, he started chasing after it.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Before you do anything too hasty, why don’t we just see how the Playhouse goes?’

Sophie made a face suggesting that although this suggestion was not without its merits, it didn’t meet all her expectations. She was extraordinary, thought Dennis. They had come up here hoping to persuade Tom Sloan to give an entirely unknown and inexperienced actress a starring role in the BBC’s showcase comedy series. They had achieved this, against considerable odds, and now she was acting as though she’d been vaguely insulted.

She brightened, eventually. She was prepared, apparently, to give him a chance.

‘Oh, all right then,’ she said.

Dennis was too angry to speak to her on the way down. She didn’t care.

‘You’ll thank me one day,’ she said.

‘Why on earth will I ever thank you for the most excruciating fifteen minutes of my life?’

‘Because the rewards will be greater than the pain.’

‘There isn’t enough money in the world,’ said Dennis.

‘It’s not about money, is it?’ said Sophie.

‘Isn’t it? So what is it about?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘And neither do you. Oh, and I haven’t forgiven you yet either.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. You and bloody Marcia Bell.’

‘Are you always going to ask for this much?’

‘You’d better hope so,’ she said.





5


Dennis lived in a rented flat in Hammersmith with his wife, Edith, and a cat. That evening, neither Edith nor the cat showed the slightest interest in his return – the cat because she was asleep for most of it, and Edith because she was in the middle of an affair with a married man. Perhaps it wasn’t the middle; perhaps it was the very beginning, but it wasn’t anywhere near its end, Dennis could tell. Edith was elsewhere even when they were at home, visiting him only to convey disappointment and dissatisfaction.

The most excruciating time of his life had not been spent in Tom Sloan’s office, despite what he’d told Sophie. The most excruciating time of his life had been spent reading and then rereading a letter he’d found between the pages of a manuscript she’d brought home from work. He’d put it back where he’d found it and hadn’t said anything, and now he was just waiting, although he had no idea what he was waiting for. His anguish meant that he made a poor husband, silent and watchful and raw.

Edith was tall, dark, beautiful and clever, and when she agreed to marry him his friends made the kinds of jokes that friends were supposed to make in those circumstances, all of them various articulations of disbelief along the lines of ‘How did you hook her, you lucky so-and-so?’ They didn’t seem so funny now, and he didn’t seem so lucky. He shouldn’t have hooked her. She wasn’t the sort of catch one could take home and show off to people; she was the sort of catch that drags the angler off the end of the pier and pulls him out to sea before tearing him to pieces as he’s drowning. He shouldn’t have been fishing at all, not when he was so ill equipped.

Why had she married him? He still wasn’t sure. She must have thought that he was going places, but then he got the sense that he wasn’t travelling as fast or as far as she’d been expecting. This was unfair, because despite the constant barbs he had to endure about Other Dennis, he was doing all right for himself. Tom Sloan liked him, up until but possibly not including recent incidents; he had good relationships with writers and actors, and the programmes were good, mostly, with only the occasional misfire. (He had to take some of the blame, he knew, for Talk of the Devil.)

The problem was that Edith didn’t really have a funny bone in her entire body and couldn’t see that comedy was any sort of a job for a man with a university education. She’d presumed that he’d trudge through a couple of years with people like Bill and Tony, and then move on to somewhere smarter, to News and Current Affairs, or to one of the arts programmes. Dennis, however, loved his job, and wanted to work with funny writers and funny actors for the rest of his life.

Edith was an editor at Penguin Books and had met her lover at work. Vernon Whitfield was a poet and essayist, a frequent contributor to the Third Programme, older than her and quite insufferably serious-minded. His last radio talk had been entitled ‘Sartre, Stockhausen, and the Death of the Soul’. Even before Dennis had found the letter, he’d always turned the radio off when he heard the familiar drone. If he could have chosen any living person to represent everything he opposed, Whitfield would probably have been the man.