Funny Girl(9)

He was waiting for her at a table for four at the side of the stage. His other guests hadn’t arrived. He ordered her a Dubonnet and lemonade without asking her, and they talked about work, and London, and nightclubs, and then he looked up and smiled.

‘Sidney!’

But Sidney, a small, bald man with a moustache, didn’t seem pleased to see Valentine, and then Valentine’s face became too complicated for Barbara to read. There was the smile, then the smile vanished, and then there was a quick, shocked widening of the eyes. And then a smile returned, but it contained no warmth or pleasure.

‘Audrey!’ said Valentine.

Audrey was a large woman in an extremely purple and inappropriately long dress. She was, Barbara guessed, Sidney’s wife. And as Barbara watched, she began to see that there had been some kind of misunderstanding. Sidney had thought that it was a night out with one kind of lady (‘the ladies’, ‘our good lady wives’, that sort of thing), but Valentine had invited Barbara on the assumption that it was another sort of night out altogether, one involving ladies but not the ladies. Presumably they had enjoyed both kinds of evening in the past, hence the confusion. The lives of married men with money were so complicated and so deceitful, the codes they spoke in so ambiguous, that Barbara wondered why this sort of thing didn’t happen all the time. Perhaps it did. Perhaps the Talk of the Town was full of tables at which women of wildly different ages were sitting, all glowering at each other.

‘Valentine and I have a tiny bit of business to discuss at the bar,’ said Sidney. ‘Please excuse us for five minutes.’

Valentine stood up, nodded at the women and followed Sidney, who was stomping away angrily. It was a misunderstanding with consequences, obviously. Sidney’s good lady wife would realize who Barbara was and what she represented; she would presumably work out that there had been other, similar evenings to which she hadn’t been invited. If Valentine had been quicker on the uptake he could have introduced Barbara as his cousin, or his secretary, or his parole officer, but he’d allowed himself to be dragged away by Sidney for an ear-bashing, and left the two women to come to their own conclusions.

Audrey sat down heavily opposite Barbara and looked at her.

‘He’s married, you know,’ she said eventually.

Barbara very much doubted that she’d still be around to hear Matt Monro sing, so she thought she may as well have as much fun as she could. She looked at Audrey and laughed, immediately and scornfully.

‘To who?’ she said. ‘I’ll kill her.’ And she laughed again, just to show how unconcerned she was by Audrey’s news.

‘He’s married,’ said Audrey insistently. ‘To Joan. I’ve met her. He’s been married a long time. Kids and everything. They’re not even kids any more. The lad is sixteen and his daughter’s at nursing college.’

‘Well,’ said Barbara, ‘he can’t be doing a very good job of bringing them up. He hasn’t spent a night away from home for two years.’

‘Home?’ said Audrey. ‘You live together?’

‘Oh, it’s not as bad as it looks,’ said Barbara. ‘We’re supposed to be getting married next June. Although obviously if what you’re saying is true, he’s got some sorting out to do first.’ And she laughed for a third time, and shook her head at the preposterousness of it all. Valentine! Married! With kiddies!

‘Have you met these “children”?’

‘Well,’ said Audrey, ‘no.’ A tiny worm of doubt had crept in, Barbara noted with satisfaction. ‘But I’ve talked to Joan about them. Sidney and I have two teenagers of our own.’

‘Ah,’ said Barbara. ‘Talking. We can all talk. I could pop fifteen children out, talking to you now. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop …’

Fifteen children meant way too many pops, she now realized. She’d seem insane if she kept going, so she stopped.

‘Five anyway,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Talking’s not the same as seeing, is it?’

‘Are you saying that Joan made them up?’

‘To be honest, I think this Joan might be made up.’

‘How can she be made up? I met her!’

‘Yes, but you know what they’re like. Sometimes they want an evening out without us, if you know what I mean. It’s harmless enough. Well, I think so.’

‘You’re saying that Joan was some sort of …’