Funny Girl(28)

It was intended as an expression of pique, but Edith didn’t say anything, so Dennis went for a walk down to the river. On the way home, he stopped off at the Rose and Crown for a Scotch egg and a pint, and he watched a game of darts. If, during his engagement to Edith, someone had tried to explain how lonely marriage could be, he wouldn’t have believed it.

There were four mornings of rehearsals, Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. On Saturday they met the director of the programme, a pleasant, slightly dull man called Bert, who had done lots of episodes of Comedy Playhouse, and as a consequence didn’t seem to have any new ideas for this one. The uninspiring conversation with Bert was followed by a technical run-through which took up the rest of the day; Tony and Bill watched helplessly as Bert told the actors where to stand, and in the process seemed to sap precious life out of their script. Sunday was the day it all happened – more technical rehearsals and a performance in front of an audience in the evening.

They didn’t have a moment of doubt about Sophie, because she didn’t leave them room for one. She learned lines, she improved them, she got laughs out of pleases and thank-yous and pauses. She took direction, and she charmed Clive into believing, temporarily at least, that the work was worth doing.

And the script, formerly a sickly, derivative and occasionally embarrassing scrap of a thing, had become the piece of work that Tony and Bill were most proud of. Sophie had pushed them uphill, hard, until they had reached heights they had always hoped, but weren’t sure, they were capable of. In the first draft of the second stab, Jim was meeting a friend in the pub where Barbara worked – a friend who was cut out of proceedings as Jim and Barbara’s mutual attraction and sparky antagonism edged him aside. They’d asked Warren Graham from The Awkward Squad to come in and read Bob, and he’d made a solid fist of it, but it was clear that every second that Jim and Barbara weren’t talking to each other was an opportunity lost. So Bob was ditched, and Jim and Barbara meet because Jim has half an hour to kill. He intends to kill it with a pint and the evening papers; instead, he falls dramatically and dizzyingly in love.

The show was quicker than anything anyone involved could remember: Clive and Sophie burned through the lines. The final version of the script was forty pages, ten pages longer than the usual half-hour comedies, and when Bert the director first flicked through it, he told Bill and Tony to cut it down. They had to persuade him that it could work at this length, although he didn’t believe them until the cast proved it to him. It was fast, funny and real, and it said things about England that Tony and Bill had never heard on the BBC. And the relationship between the couple was something different too. They went from fighting to flirting and back again on the turn of a sixpence. Everyone came into work happy and excited and jabbering with contributions and improvements. If Sophie hadn’t been told that her father was dangerously ill after a heart attack, everything would have been going swimmingly.

She found out on the Saturday morning, just before the technical rehearsal; he’d been ill for two days, but Sophie didn’t have a phone, and her Sunday night trudge down to the phone box had become fortnightly in recent weeks, when she remembered at all, so Marie had written her a letter.

Sophie called her as soon as she read it.

‘Oh, Barbara, love, thank heavens.’

‘How is he?’

‘He’s very poorly.’

Sophie began to panic, and not all of the panic could be sourced to concern for her dad. Oh, please God, not today, she was thinking. Or tomorrow. Not today or tomorrow. Monday I’ll do anything I have to do.

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘He’s comfy at the moment but they’re worried he might have another one.’

‘Is he speaking?’

‘No, he’s been asleep for the last two days. I checked the trains, just because I had to do something. You can get one at midday and you’ll be in the hospital in time for evening visiting.’

‘Right.’

‘Have you got enough money for a ticket?’

She thought for a moment. If she didn’t have the fare, there wasn’t an awful lot that Marie could have done about it, not on a Saturday.

‘Yes,’ she said eventually.

‘Good,’ said Marie. ‘I’ll get Jack to pick you up from the station.’

Perhaps there would be another chance. Perhaps they would forgive her for leaving them in the lurch, twenty-four hours before the recording; and they couldn’t replace her, not now, so perhaps they’d reschedule. But perhaps not.