Funny Girl(91)

‘I’d tell her to bugger off.’

‘There you are. You’ve done it all.’

‘But I missed it. Because I was too angry. I didn’t notice it was happening.’

‘Well, I suppose that was always likely to happen, in the circumstances.’

‘So now what?’

‘It all depends on whether you have any use for a clearly rather pathetic and very remorseful middle-aged lady who used to be your mother.’

‘I don’t, really.’

‘Do you want an apology? Because she seemed to me like a woman who wanted to offer one.’

‘Oh, bugger,’ Sophie said. ‘I do, I think.’ And then, ‘Thank you.’

Clive, Nancy and Bill turned up, tipsy and loud and stupid. Nancy immediately launched into a story about a friend of hers who had performed a sexual act on a former government minister in a box at the Royal Opera House. She seemed to have a suspiciously large number of friends who got up to that kind of thing, Dennis had noticed, and yet the stories always seemed to contain detail that friends would never have provided. Clive also seemed to have taken the view that they were all thinly disguised autobiography, and as a consequence he always listened with rapt, gleeful attention, like a small boy sat cross-legged in front of the family radiogram during Dick Barton.

‘Could you take me home?’ Sophie said to Dennis quietly, amidst the gasps of shock and the roars of laughter.

Not only was there a God, but He was fair and just and wise: Dennis’s dealings with Gloria had somehow earned him another fifteen-minute cab ride.

Sophie took her mother for coffee at the Ritz, in a taxi, simply because she could, and simply because she knew it would make her mother uncomfortable.

‘Will I still be able to get the 11.30 train?’ her mother asked when it became obvious to her that the Ritz wasn’t just around the corner, as Sophie had airily promised.

‘Do you have to?’

‘If I miss that one, I’d have to wait two hours for the next.’

‘I suppose it depends how much you miss it by, doesn’t it? If you get there at 1.25, you’ll only have to wait five minutes. You never know, there may be a lot to say.’

This was Gloria’s cue to stare out of the window silently until they got to the hotel. As they walked in, the doorman greeted Sophie by name, and told her to keep a careful eye on Jim, and Sophie laughed and said she would. She’d been to the Ritz before and something similar had happened; that was one of the reasons she wanted to take her mother there.

They sat down on one of the sofas in the big lounge and ordered coffee and biscuits.

‘Is this what it’s like, then?’ said Gloria. ‘The Ritz, and so on?’

‘If I want it to be.’ And then, because that sounded too haughty, ‘But most of the time I’m at work. Or at home. I work hard.’

‘Oh. This is a very comfy settee, isn’t it? But it’s hard to sit up straight in.’

Sophie waited and waited for something, some further flicker of interest in the last fifteen years of her daughter’s life, but Gloria seemed lost in the soft furnishings and the admittedly mystifying residents of the hotel.

‘Is that all you can say?’ said Sophie. ‘That the settee is comfy?’

She’d promised herself that she would try to stay calm, but it was impossible.

‘I don’t know what to say, to tell the truth,’ said Gloria.

‘So why did you come down?’

Her mother shrugged.

‘I had to.’

‘Have you been in Morecambe all this time?’

‘No, we moved around a bit. He got a job in Bolton when … when we moved. And then another one in Lancaster. And then we’d just moved to where I am now when he went.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘I don’t know. I think he might be back in Blackpool.’

‘Did you marry him?’

‘No. He was happy as we were. He could have his cake and eat it.’

Nobody walking past them in the Ritz would ever have described her mother as cake. She was bread and butter, Sophie could see that now. She’d always thought of her as cake, though. She’d grown up listening to her father talk about running off and fancy men, and so she’d dressed her up, put make-up and stockings on her, given her a cream and jam filling and slathered her in icing. But she was just a woman clutching a mackintosh and a shabby old-fashioned handbag that Sophie wanted to snatch from her and dump in the nearest bin.