Funny Girl(48)

‘Salut,’ said Edith, and chinked Sophie’s glass.

Sophie smiled. Vernon Whitfield wandered over to join them.

‘Do you know Vernon Whitfield?’ said Edith.

‘I’ve heard of you, of course,’ said Sophie.

Vernon Whitfield nodded, as if this was inevitable and also a bit boring.

‘Sophie’s the star of Dennis’s TV programme,’ said Edith.

‘Ah,’ said Vernon Whitfield.

He was the star, in his head, in this room; he was the one who delivered lectures on the Third. Sophie’s variety of stardom – seventeen million viewers now, and on the cover of the Radio Times (with Jim) – didn’t really register.

‘Everyone has a television now,’ he went on, with obvious disapproval.’

‘I don’t,’ said Edith.

‘Good for you,’ said Vernon Whitfield.

‘Isn’t that a television?’ said Sophie, nodding towards the corner of the living room.

‘It’s not mine,’ said Edith.

She snorted at the very suggestion that it might have been, so Vernon Whitfield snorted too. Was it really possible that these two were having an affair? Sophie could imagine them having a good snort together, but that was about all. She had no idea what Dennis was like in bed, and she didn’t want to think about it too deeply, but she could imagine his enthusiasm and kindness. And also, he looked nothing like a frog.

‘It’s funny that you’ve got a television and I haven’t,’ said Sophie. It was true. The Radio Rentals people still hadn’t delivered hers.

‘First, it’s not my television,’ said Edith. ‘And secondly, why is it funny?’

‘What’s funny,’ said Vernon Whitfield, ‘is that because Suzy has no television, she has managed to find the time to read the latest Margaret Drabble and we haven’t.’

This, it turned out, was even funnier than the idea that the television in Edith’s house belonged to her. It was obvious that Margaret Drabble was an author; obvious too that she was an author Sophie was not expected to have read. She wasn’t dim. But these people made her dim. They made her afraid, and the fear resulted in mental paralysis.

‘I haven’t read Margaret Drabble,’ said Sophie.

This was the sentence she’d been instructing herself not to say a couple of minutes before. It popped out anyway. Vernon and Edith got a fit of the giggles then.

‘The New Colleague’, formerly ‘The New Secretary’, was ready by the following lunchtime. Everyone, including Dennis, had pitched in, during a long, boozy, loud session in a pub on Hammersmith Grove, round the corner from Dennis’s house. Dennis had left his own party, and later that night, when he got home, he left his own marriage. He told Edith he knew about the affair, he didn’t love her any more, and he wanted her to leave. She was shocked, and embarrassed, and upset, but she left. He had been drunk when he made the speech, but in Dennis’s opinion it didn’t diminish its magnificence or his pride in it.

‘The New Colleague’ was conceived as an act of revenge – on Edith, for her crimes against Dennis and Sophie, and on the British middle classes, for their crimes (unspecified) against Tony and Bill. Jim invites Edwina, the eponymous addition to the staff at Number Ten, to dinner at the house; Edwina turns out to be a bluestocking socialist who is both amused and appalled by Barbara, tries to patronize her, and clearly regards her marriage to Jim as temporary. (There is a suggestion that she sees herself as filling the vacancy.) Over the course of the thirty minutes, Barbara runs rings around Edwina – to Jim’s initial discomfort and, later, great delight. Just about any position Edwina tries to adopt – on politics, or the arts, or religion – Barbara rips apart with her teeth. She doesn’t know as much as Edwina, of course, but Edwina is revealed to have a plodding intelligence and her blue stockings are full of unexamined assumptions, as well as long, bony legs. (Dennis cast the tallest, poshest girl he could find.) Edwina hands in her resignation the next day and goes off to work for the Conservatives – much to Tory-voting Barbara’s confusion and dismay. It was a show that polarized critics, but the critics who didn’t like it didn’t believe in Barbara’s speed of thought, which rather proved the point.

After Sophie had scraped the last of the make-up off her face, she was aware of the first sharp pangs of something that felt like homesickness. They’d already been told that the BBC wanted another series, but that was months away; and anyway, the last episode of the first series made her realize that one day there would be a last episode, and she didn’t know whether she’d be able to bear it. And it didn’t help, telling herself that when it was time for the last episode, she’d have had enough, because she couldn’t bear that either. She wanted to stay like this for ever. She changed her wish quickly: not like this, not exactly … she wanted it to be the Monday just gone, with a whole week of rehearsals to look forward to, and then a recording. That’s where she would like to stop. She was already afraid that she’d never be happier than now – then – and it was already over. She went to look for Clive, and she took him home and made him something to eat and he made love to her. But it wasn’t work.