Funny Girl(31)

With exquisite timing, Clive’s female fan brought up the subject of Sophie.

‘She’s supposed to be hopeless, though.’

‘I thought she was a newcomer.’

‘Oh, no. My daughter saw her in Clacton, in a summer show.’

Clive looked at Sophie and Sophie shook her head.

‘Thinks she’s it, apparently. My daughter waited half an hour for an autograph and she just walked right past her. Mind you, what my daughter was going to do with her autograph I don’t know.’

‘Might be worth keeping if this takes off,’ said one of the men.

‘Yes, but it won’t take off, will it?’ said the woman. ‘Not with her in it.’

‘Or him.’

‘She’ll be the problem.’

‘They both will.’

‘I don’t mind him.’

‘I don’t like either of them. Oh, well. What else are you going to do?’

‘I’ve been to one before,’ said the woman. ‘It’s nearer an hour, once they’ve got everyone settled and the warm-up man’s told his jokes.’

‘What was the warm-up chap like? Last time?’

‘Oh, you know. Not very good. Not as funny as he thinks he is.’

‘Oh, lumme,’ said the man. ‘I’ve half a mind to go home.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ said the woman. ‘It might not be as bad as all that.’

Sophie puffed out her cheeks.

‘Shall we go and stand in the corridor?’ she said.

‘It’s going to be great,’ said Clive.

‘We’ve all been living in a bubble,’ said Sophie.

‘What sort of bubble?’

‘A lovely squishy pink bubble.’

‘I wouldn’t knowingly live in a squishy pink bubble,’ said Clive.

‘Any colour you like, then. We all love the script. I do anyway. Tom Sloan loves Dennis. Dennis loves Tony and Bill. And now it’s all gone pop. Suddenly.’

‘That’s what bubbles do,’ said Clive. ‘That’s why you shouldn’t choose to live in them.’

‘People don’t come to these things because they want to cheer you along, do they?’ said Sophie. ‘They come because they’re bored. Or because they want to see the inside of a TV studio.’

‘Or because they applied for tickets months ago in the hope of getting something good,’ said Clive. ‘And they got us instead.’

‘We’re good.’

‘We think so. But they’ve never heard of us. So now they’re cheesed off. I went along to one once because the producer had turned me down for a job. I went because I was hoping it would be awful.’

‘And was it?’

‘Anything can be awful if you want it to be.’

‘Even good things?’

‘Especially good things, sometimes. They make people jealous.’

‘I don’t want it to go out in the world,’ said Sophie. ‘I want to stay like we were.’

‘It’s a TV programme,’ said Clive. ‘It belongs in the world.’

‘Oh, hell,’ said Sophie.

Dennis knocked on the door.

‘Everyone all right?’

Sophie made a face.

‘Oh, you’ll be fine,’ said Dennis.

‘How do you know?’ she said.

‘Because you’re not normal,’ he said. ‘Nothing matters to you as much as this. You’re not going to mess it up.’

And she didn’t. Clive had been in plenty of student productions in which the object of the exercise was to destroy one’s friends, classmates and contemporaries onstage, but he’d never experienced anything like this: the moment the red recording light came on, Sophie was at him, like a vicious dog that had been kept in a dark shed and then released into the light. All through the rehearsals she had been trying things out in an attempt to wring more out of the script than Tony and Bill had intended to provide: she made faces, held a line back for a couple of seconds longer than anyone was expecting, found intonations and emphases that could turn a simple ‘Thank you’ into something that made people laugh, or at least watch her. So he shouldn’t have been surprised by her energy or her relentlessness, but he was rocked back on his heels fighting her off: she was everywhere, in every gap, over and under every line, hers and his. Poor old Bert, Clive could see, was lost, which meant that some of her performance was too. Clive felt as though he’d gone three goals down in the first two minutes of a football match, and though he now suspected that even a draw was beyond him, he could at least make a better fist of things. He was always decent, in any part he was given, but nobody had ever pushed him to go further, and because he hadn’t been pushed, he coasted. Sophie wasn’t ever going to let him coast. Perhaps that was even a good thing, if you looked at it the right way. Now, though, he had to watch, listen, feel, during every single second of the performance, and respond to what she was actually doing, rather than what he’d presumed she was going to do. It was all rather exhausting.