Funny Girl(43)

Last night’s episode revealed, startlingly, that the marriage between Barbara and Jim had not yet been consummated – a sorry state of affairs that had clearly been remedied by the end of the programme, when we were presented with the ecstatic and amusingly metaphorical bongs of Big Ben. Indeed, the revelation may be too startling for some, and one suspects that, as we speak, the Director-General of the BBC will be looking with some dismay at thousands of green-inked letters asking him to resign. He should on no account do so. The very existence of Barbara (and Jim) indicates the birth of a modern Britain, one prepared to acknowledge that its citizens are as sex-obsessed as our neighbours across the Channel, and that those who have not received the benefit of a public school or university education are just as likely to make clever, amusing observations as those who have – maybe more so, if poor old Jim is any guide. This marriage can, over time, come to contain everything we have only just begun to think about in Britain; perhaps we would have done so sooner, had not the war and the long years of austerity intervened. Barbara (and Jim) could not be better, funnier or more congenial guides to a decade that seems, finally, to be shaking off the dead hand of its predecessor.

The Times, 11 December 1964





9


The interview galvanized her, and anyway she hated the idea that she might get caught out in a lie, so she found a flat in the neighbourhood she’d already described – to Diane and the readers of Crush – as home: in Kensington Church Street, just up the hill from Derry and Toms. Sophie could walk out of the front door and be buying cosmetics at her old counter within ten minutes, if she wanted to. And it was only a little bit further on to Biba in Abingdon Road. She walked there on the first morning she woke up in her own bed and bought herself a brown pinstripe dress.

Marjorie seemed to be under the impression that they would be moving together.

‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s only got one bedroom.’

‘This place has only got one bedroom.’

‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘But I didn’t think either of us liked it that way.’

‘I don’t,’ said Marjorie. ‘I wish you were moving into a place with two bedrooms.’

Sophie hadn’t really thought of Marjorie as a dependant, someone she’d be carting around until Marjorie got married, or got promoted, or got her own television series.

‘We never talked about staying together,’ said Sophie.

‘I didn’t think we needed to,’ said Marjorie. ‘I thought it was just one of those things.’

‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s not.’

That degree of firmness felt uncomfortable, and Marjorie could tell.

‘You are lucky,’ said Marjorie.

‘I know.’

‘I don’t think you do.’

‘I do.’

‘It’s all looks,’ said Marjorie. ‘Honestly, I’d cut your face and bust off and put them on me if I thought it would make any difference. I don’t know what I’d do about your waist. You can’t steal waists, more’s the pity.’

Oh dear, thought Sophie. Not this again. She couldn’t share a flat with Marjorie any longer, not with all the sharp implements around.

‘You can’t steal busts and faces either, is the truth of it,’ said Sophie.

‘No, but at least they’re actual things. A nice waist is sort of the absence of something, isn’t it?’

‘Anyway,’ said Sophie, who felt they were drifting away from the subject at hand, ‘I know how lucky I’ve been.’

‘But you don’t want to share the luck.’

‘We’re flatmates, Marjorie. I don’t know how much I owe you.’

‘A lot, I think.’

‘I can tell.’

‘I took you in when you had nowhere to go.’

‘You were looking for someone to share the rent.’

‘There’s always two ways of looking at everything.’

There was nothing to be done about good fortune, if that’s what she’d been given. Sophie could see that as long as it lasted, people would want some of it.

‘You’ll get someone else in,’ she said. ‘It’s a nice flat.’

‘It’s not.’

‘It’s handy for work.’