Funny Girl(94)

‘Gotcha.’

‘And …’

‘I’ll just read it,’ said Tony.

‘How long will it take you, do you think?’

‘How long is a piece of string?’

‘Do you mean how long is my book?’

‘I suppose I do, yes.’

‘Four hundred pages. Double-spaced.’

‘And how boring is it?’

‘Fuck off.’

Tony read it twice in the next three days, while telling Bill that he hadn’t had time to start it yet. He read it so quickly the first time that he could think of nothing to say, except that he had taken himself off to the bedroom after the baby had gone to sleep, and was still there when June switched the TV off and came in to get undressed.

‘What’s it like?’ she said.

‘It’s … Well. Blimey. I dunno.’

‘If I may state the obvious, you’re finding it impossible to put down.’

‘Yeah, but he’s my best friend.’

‘I’ve read lots of scripts by best friends. I’ve put a lot of them down. And scripts are short.’

‘OK, then. It’s good. But blimey.’

‘What’s the blimey bit?’

‘It’s … Well. Bloody hell.’

‘Whatever job you decide to do when you get older, make sure it doesn’t involve the English language.’

‘It’s … I haven’t read anything like it before.’

‘Is it well written?’

‘I dunno. It’s just … him.’

‘So he has a voice.’

‘Well, if that’s a voice, everyone’s got one.’

‘No, not everyone’s got one. Most people can’t get it out on to the page. I had a go once and I sounded like an A-level literature student being strangled while writing an essay about Jane Austen. So he’s more than halfway there. I want to know about the blimeys and the bloody hells.’

‘The, you know. All that. It’s pretty steamy stuff. D’you know what? I don’t think I do go both ways.’

‘So it’s a handbook as well.’

‘I don’t know about the hand bit. It didn’t do much for me.’

June rolled her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ said Tony. ‘It isn’t half going to cause a fuss, though, if he can find someone to publish it.’

‘It’s that … honest?’

‘It’s not like Lady Chatterley, or Fanny Hill. But it’s still blokes kissing blokes.’

‘So what are you going to tell him?’

‘I’m going to tell him what I told him I was going to tell him: it’s a work of genius.’



‘Fuck off,’ said Bill.

‘I mean it.’

‘A work of genius like who? Dickens? Tolstoy?’

‘It’s different from them.’

‘Have you ever read Tolstoy?’

‘No, but I’m guessing he didn’t go in for the homosexual passion bit. I don’t know, Bill. I don’t read a lot of books. All I can say is that it wasn’t boring in the least, you have a voice, and I can’t imagine there’s anything else out there like it.’

They talked about characters for a little bit – it was, Bill said, supposed to be a picaresque novel, although he had to explain the word, and it was stuffed full of memorable, hilarious rogues, Soho chancers, down on their luck artists, the kind of people you could find in the Colony Room, according to Bill. And they talked about a section in the middle, a long description of the narrator’s childhood, that Tony thought was the only place where he’d started to feel as though he were reading a book.

‘It is a bloody book.’

‘It never felt like that. I never felt I was reading. And that bit was, you know. “Oh. Here I am, ploughing through an Important Novel of Today.” ’

‘I hate that bit,’ said Bill eventually. ‘It took me f*cking for ever, and it didn’t come naturally. I just didn’t want to cut it because of all the work.’

‘What are you going to do with it now?’

‘I’m going to give it to Hazel.’

Hazel was now their agent as well as their secretary. Every year, when Dennis phoned to make an offer for a new series, Tony and Bill made Hazel talk to him about money, because she could be bolshie on the subject and Dennis was scared of her, so they’d started to give her 10 per cent instead of a salary. She was gentle with Dennis, which Bill and Tony wanted her to be. But she was ferocious with anyone they didn’t know, the ITV producers who had commissioned Reds Under the Bed, and the film producer who wanted them to write the Anthony Newley script. Bill and Tony couldn’t bear to be in the same room when she talked to them.