Funny Girl(50)

Clive didn’t call her until a few days before they were supposed to start rehearsing again.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she said.

‘Where have I been? Nowhere. You, meanwhile, have been lounging around in your underwear in Wales, while Johnny Foreigner ogles.’

‘You could have ogled, if you’d come to Wales.’

‘Who goes all the way to Wales for an ogle? Especially a second-hand ogle.’

She didn’t want to have a conversation about second-hand ogling, and she certainly didn’t want a conversation about Johnny Foreigner.

‘What did you do instead, then?’

‘Oh, you know,’ he said airily. ‘Thinking. Reading. Taking stock.’

She wished he’d chosen any three other activities – space exploration, say, and needlework and coal mining. He wasn’t a thinker or a reader or a stock-taker.

‘Seeing girls?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘ “For God’s sake” is different from “No”.’

She couldn’t seem to stop herself. And what right did she have to say anything, when she’d stopped running from Johnny Foreigner? If Clive had come to Wales, though, she wouldn’t have stopped running. She’d have run and run.

‘I was actually phoning to ask you out to dinner,’ he said eventually. There was to be no further discussion about the precise meaning of the expression ‘For God’s sake’, apparently.

She shrugged down the phone, but he couldn’t see her, so in the end she had to say yes.

They had another argument in the Trattoo, a nasty one. He accused her of being bourgeois, whatever that was – it seemed to involve engagement rings and babies and all sorts of things she wasn’t interested in. He got so heated about them that for a moment she thought he might actually be proposing, in an angry, cack-handed fashion. She asked him about other girls, and he was cagey, and she said she didn’t mind; he asked her about Johnny Foreigner, and she was cagey, and he didn’t speak to her all the way home. He didn’t stay the night.

Tony booked a table in the Positano Room at the Trattoria Terrazza for his wedding anniversary, mostly because Bill told him to.

‘The place in Romilly Street? I’ll never get in there. Isn’t that where they all go? Michael Caine and Jean Shrimpton and everyone?’

‘ “We”. Not “they”,’ said Bill.

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘You and me and Michael Caine and Jean Shrimpton.’

‘Oh, get out of it,’ said Tony.

‘People know who we are.’

‘People in the contracts department of the BBC. And a couple of reviewers. Let’s not get above ourselves. We’re writers.’

‘That’ll be enough to get you a table.’

‘I’m not going to call them and tell them I’m a famous television writer and they have to let me in.’

‘Get Hazel to do it.’

Hazel was their new secretary. The phone in the office had been ringing a lot since Barbara, mostly with offers of work, and they’d employed Hazel to answer it. This occupied perhaps half an hour of her working day, and they didn’t know what to do with her the rest of the time. And they couldn’t work with her in the one-room office, so for the moment they’d gone back to the coffee bar.

‘How is that going to help?’

‘She’ll tell them you’re a famous television writer and they have to let you in.’

‘But then I’ll get there and I’ll just be me and it will be embarrassing.’

‘What night do you want to go?’ said Bill.

‘Our anniversary’s next Tuesday. I was going to take her out Saturday.’

‘Oh.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not Saturday night famous. Take her out on Tuesday night and you’ll be all right.’

There were famous people in the Positano Room, even on a Tuesday night. As Tony and June were waiting to be seated, Terence Stamp looked straight at them, and Tony momentarily lost his nerve.

‘Shall we go somewhere else?’

Mick Jagger in the Positano Room



June looked at him, baffled.

‘Why?’

‘Terence Stamp just looked at me.’

‘Where is he supposed to look?’