Funny Girl(93)

‘What would I know?’

‘Oh, there have been a couple of magazine articles and so on.’

There had been hundreds, or so it seemed to her. The agency sent her cuttings, and something came in the post every other day.

‘I haven’t seen any,’ said Gloria.

‘What do you see?’

‘I don’t get a paper. I watch the news.’

Her relationship with Clive had not been on the news.

‘Doesn’t anyone ever tear something out and give it to you?’

‘No,’ said Gloria. ‘Nobody knows you’re my daughter.’

Gloria’s secrecy, her willingness to forgo the pleasures of pride in order to atone for the sins of her past, could have been winning, if Sophie had been paying attention, but she was momentarily distracted by her mother’s ignorance. It had stung her. People like her mother should know that she was engaged to Clive. They were celebrities, and they were together, and their togetherness was a part of it all. Before she said goodbye, Sophie bought her mother a whole pile of magazines from the kiosk outside the station. There was bound to be something in one of them.

Later that week she called Diane, who came to the flat with a photographer, and the photographer snapped away while she made Clive pork medallions in Madeira sauce. After they’d finished the meal (more photos, toasting the camera with a glass of wine), they sat down on beanbags and pretended to examine her LPs (more photos, pretending to argue about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by pointing angry fingers at each other and smiling), while they talked to Diane about the future. Diane wrote two pieces, one for Crush and one for the Express. And yet when the articles appeared, Sophie was left wondering whether she’d missed the point of her conversation with her mother somehow.





19


Bill didn’t know what you were supposed to do with books you’d written yourself. He didn’t know any publishers. He didn’t know any literary agents. And he didn’t know whether you could just heave a four-hundred-page manuscript at friends and colleagues and ask them to lug it home and then provide a kind but honest – but above all kind – assessment of your worth as a novelist and therefore as a human being since this book was the closest he’d ever come to pure self-expression. There weren’t that many friends and colleagues he could ask. Diary of a Soho Boy wasn’t for the faint of heart, he could see that: he’d written the kind of book he wanted to read, and he’d told what he knew to be the truth about men like him. He hadn’t described what went where, but neither had he made it all so opaque that nobody would be able to tell what was going on. He didn’t even know whether it was publishable. The kind of love he had described was still illegal, so did that make the descriptions illegal too?

In the end he decided to tell Tony he’d finished, just to see what happened next.

‘Can I read it?’

‘What do you want to read it for?’

‘Because I want to read everything you write, you twerp.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I know that.’

‘What if you hate it?’

‘I wouldn’t tell you.’

‘So what’s the point of reading it?’

‘What’s the point of reading anything? I wouldn’t tell Graham Greene I didn’t like his last book either.’

‘But presumably you don’t write comedy scripts with Graham Greene.’

‘All the more reason not to tell you if I don’t like it.’

‘So you’re just going to tell me I’m a genius?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Can we start again, then?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Tony, will you read my book? And tell me what you think of it?’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Before, you asked me. Now I’m asking you. As a favour.’

‘I’m not Vernon Whitfield. I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with it. Not that there will be anything wrong with it.’

‘I don’t want Vernon Whitfield stuff. Just tell me it reads like a book. Whether there are boring bits. Whether I should put it in the bin or show it to someone else. Whether I’ll get arrested.’

‘I’m not a legal person either.’

‘All right, whether I’ll get fired from the BBC. Thrown out of pubs. That sort of thing.’