Funny Girl(56)

‘I’m twenty-nine.’

‘There you are, then,’ she said to Alfred.

‘Ask your mother,’ said Alfred.

‘I will,’ said Dennis. He could see that it wouldn’t be wise to ask for help with the exact form of the question.

‘Will the writers be in?’ said Dulcie. ‘Because we do have a few suggestions.’

‘Good,’ said Dennis. ‘I’m sure they’d love to hear them.’

It would serve them right for being late.

It was an hour before Bill and Tony arrived with a new version of the script, an hour that reminded Dennis of a wet summer that he’d once had to spend with his grandparents in Norfolk during the war.

‘Who have we got here, then?’ said Tony.

‘It’s Dulcie and Alfred,’ said Dulcie with a big smile.

‘You come as a pair, do you?’

Dulcie’s smile vanished.

‘Well, yes,’ said Alfred. He left it for as long as he could, but it became clear that elucidation was required. ‘We’re married.’

‘Good for you,’ said Bill.

Dulcie gave her husband’s hand a consoling squeeze.

‘Never mind.’

‘Television people,’ said Alfred darkly.

Tony gave Dennis a mystified look, but Dennis could think of no wordless way of explaining that Dulcie and Alfred may have been famous around the time of the Great War, and that their union had possibly been a cause for national celebration.

‘We’ve got a few notes for you,’ said Alfred to Tony and Bill. ‘Nothing major.’

‘Just think of them as observations,’ said Dulcie.

‘Do you mind if we don’t think of them at all?’ said Bill pleasantly.

Dulcie gasped and clapped her hand to her mouth.

Sophie and Clive were last in.

‘We’re not unprofessional,’ said Sophie to Dulcie and Alfred. ‘We knew the script was going to be late.’

‘We’re great admirers of yours,’ said Alfred.

He stared at Sophie hopefully and smiled. She thanked him and smiled back. She was clearly supposed to say something else, but she couldn’t think what, and this failure to reciprocate, to tell Alfred and Dulcie how much they had meant to her over the years, caused another collapse in morale, another bout of hand-squeezing.

‘We’re still working, that’s the thing,’ said Dulcie.

‘And we’re still together,’ said Alfred.

‘So we see,’ said Clive. ‘Lovely.’

Clive looked at the others, to work out whether they wanted to hang themselves too. The longevity of both the relationship and the career felt like a terrible lesson to them all.

‘Shall we push on?’ said Dennis.

They read the script out loud, and it sang, beautifully, as it usually did once it had cleared its throat, and despite Alfred’s tuneless, tone-deaf bellow. Dulcie turned out to be surprisingly good. She was understated and intelligent, and Bill and Tony ended up writing her a little bit more.

And suddenly Barbara and Jim became the only people that mattered in the world, and the only marriage that counted, and everything else fell away. Clive became clever and kind and steady, Sophie swam in the confidence and security that come from being loved. Dennis enjoyed the company, Tony the simplicity and the straightforwardness of the attraction, Dulcie and Alfred the youth and the promise. It was such a joyful world that Tony worried for a moment whether he and Bill had gone soft, but these characters had real problems, and they spoke in real sentences, so it wasn’t that. It was the form itself, with its promise of next week, another episode, another series; it couldn’t help but offer hope, to its characters and to everyone who identified with them. Tony didn’t think he would ever want to write anything apart from half-hour comedies. They contained the key to health, wealth and happiness.

‘We should do an anniversary episode every year,’ said Dennis.

‘For the next fifty years,’ said Sophie.

Dulcie and Alfred smiled sadly.

‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘Sorry.’

‘Barbara and Jim probably wouldn’t have sat next to the same couple in the same restaurant every year anyway,’ said Clive.

After the recording, and after Dulcie and Alfred had been helped into their taxi, they sat in the BBC Club drinking wine and talking about getting old.

‘It was sort of pathetic, wasn’t it?’ said Clive.