Funny Girl(55)

She left a pause, but Clive decided not to fill it.

‘… and people say that they’ll tell Barbara? Why would they do that?’

‘And what does it matter what they say?’ said Tony.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Clive. ‘And it’s embarrassing for my, my colleagues.’

‘These fellas, just standing there drinking their pints.’

‘I wonder,’ said Bill, scratching his chin thoughtfully, ‘whether it gets even more confusing because you’ve been having sex with the actress who plays Barbara?’

‘They don’t know that.’

‘They probably will by now,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s all anyone seems to talk about these days, my sex life.’

‘Confusing for you, I meant,’ said Bill. ‘You probably wouldn’t mind them saying that they’ll tell Barbara if you didn’t care whether Barbara knew.’

‘There’s nothing for Barbara to know,’ said Clive.

‘There’s nothing you want to tell her, anyway.’

‘All I’m saying is that it’s a right palaver, being on a successful TV show,’ said Clive. ‘And I don’t want to make it worse. What if I wanted to leave?’

‘Are you talking as Jim or Clive?’

‘Clive, you idiot.’

‘If you left, we would no longer have a show entitled Barbara (and Jim),’ said Bill.

‘That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

‘It would just be called Barbara,’ said Sophie. She never tired of that joke.

‘But that’s what worries me,’ said Clive. ‘If I walked out on Barbara and the kids, I wouldn’t be able to go out anywhere. I’d be attacked in the street.’

‘What about you, Sophie?’ said Dennis. ‘Why don’t you want kids?’

‘I do,’ said Sophie. ‘I just don’t want them with him.’

‘You should have thought of that before you married him,’ said Clive.

Dennis suddenly understood that Bill’s joke didn’t work any more: Barbara and Jim were not fictional characters. Their popularity, the public’s investment in them, made them real, and they needed care and guidance. He was prepared to do it, because he had nobody at home to worry about. He hoped the others felt the same way.

The majority of the episodes had been two-handers, and writers, cast and critics seemed to prefer them that way. ‘The Anniversary’ was mostly set in a smart restaurant, however, and Tony and Bill had written parts for another, elderly couple at a nearby table, who end up bellowing out their marital grievances and disappointments, much to the consternation of Barbara and Jim – Jim is eventually obliged to separate the pair when the wife starts raining blows upon the husband’s head.

When Dennis arrived for work on Wednesday morning, the two actors he’d booked were sitting outside the rehearsal room looking perplexed. The man was wearing a bow tie and the woman was wearing a hat that she might have borrowed from Mary Pickford. They both looked desperate, and they’d both lied about their age – Dennis had specifically asked casting for a couple in their sixties, the man just retired, the well-preserved woman active in the Women’s Institute, that sort of thing. These two, however, looked like they’d been let out of an old people’s home for the day. If the violence went ahead as scripted, there would be deaths.

‘Barbara (and Jim)?’ said the man hopefully.

He had a loud, posh voice. If bow ties could talk, Dennis thought, that was exactly what they’d sound like.

‘That’s us,’ said Dennis. ‘Me anyway. I don’t know where everyone else has got to.’

They walked into the rehearsal room and Dennis put the kettle on while Dulcie and Alfred fussed around with coats and hats and scripts. Their clothes and even their names smelled of mothballs and Edwardian defeat.

‘We loved it,’ said Dulcie.

‘We read our scenes aloud to each other in bed last night,’ said Alfred.

Dennis was momentarily startled.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You’re married?’

The question clearly disappointed them.

‘People forget,’ said Dulcie to Alfred sadly.

‘This young man might not even have known in the first place,’ said Alfred. ‘It’s been nearly fifty years.’

‘How old are you, dear?’ said Dulcie.