He knew how the conversation would go; he knew that they’d be intrigued, stimulated, encouraging. He was more interested in the chat he’d have with Bill over lunch one day, in which he’d just happen to mention that he knew coloured girls, was working with one, even. Perhaps he could be proud of this job after all.
Sophie met the odd TV company for coffee and the occasional theatre producer for lunch, but she spent a lot of time shopping, and lying in bed with Dennis in the evenings, watching TV and talking about Everyone Loves Sophie. They wanted to work together as a couple, they loved the new idea that Tony and Diane had talked about, they couldn’t wait until the new show was given the go-ahead. They never spoke about it, but they both wanted 1965 back. The peak that they had reached then was only a short distance away, just up there, and how hard could it possibly be to climb those few feet? The difficult part, surely, had been scrambling up the slope underneath them, miles and miles of it.
Sophie put off going to see the doctor because she didn’t want to know what he would tell her. It was as simple as that. She hid everything from Dennis, and managed to delay the retching by staying in bed with her eyes closed. This seemed to work until Dennis had left the house. Once she was vertical, the nausea would overcome her and she’d spend the next hour jumping out of a hot bath to kneel beside the toilet.
And then, finally, she knew she could ignore it no longer. She was not, of course, surprised by the news the doctor eventually gave her, after forty-eight hours in which she hardly spoke to Dennis at all. She tried to quell the feeling of dread, because she knew that there were millions of women who prayed for exactly this terrible thing to happen.
‘What if Sophie Simmonds were pregnant?’ she said when Dennis got home that evening.
He laughed.
‘That would be very funny,’ he said, and for a moment she thought he meant that there were comic possibilities in the idea, that the show could accommodate such a calamity.
‘We create a completely new show because we don’t like her being a mother and she gets pregnant anyway.’
She burst into tears then.
‘She is pregnant,’ said Sophie eventually, and Dennis was just about to argue with her when he understood.
She could see that he was excited by the news but was trying to look sombre and anxious, for her benefit, and this broke her heart in a different way.
‘You shouldn’t have to be sad,’ she said. ‘It’s a good thing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I love you, I’ve loved you since the moment I met you, and I want to have a child with you. And I know it’s bad timing, but I can make you happy. We can make you happy. The baby and I. I know it.’
She hugged him.
‘And we can still do the show,’ he said. ‘Just … not yet, that’s all.’
There was nothing to think about, but she thought about it anyway, and when she couldn’t think about it any longer, she got on a train to talk to her mother.
Gloria took the day off work and they met in Blackpool, in the restaurant of R. H. O. Hills. It was much harder to get to Morecambe on the train, and when Gloria suggested the meeting place, Sophie felt a little thrill of something that she couldn’t quite describe. R. H. O. Hills suddenly seemed like the only place in the world where she could understand the length of the journey she had taken. It was the other end, after all. It was only when she sat down and breathed in the familiar department-store smell of pipe smoke, perfume, leather and tea that she wondered whether she was thinking about how far she’d come because she knew she’d stopped. Gloria hadn’t arrived, so she ordered the afternoon tea – sandwiches and anything you wanted from the cake trolley – and looked around, trying to see if there was anyone she recognized. She’d worn a headscarf to cover up her blonde hair, but after a little while she decided that she’d like it if somebody recognized her, so she took the scarf off. The couple on the next table stared, and by the time her mother arrived she was signing autographs.
Gloria smiled proudly, and sat down, but fifteen minutes later they hadn’t managed more than a couple of minutes of an unbroken conversation. It was a Tuesday afternoon, so it wasn’t as if there was a queue. But those who did come to say hello were in no hurry to leave. One woman took a great deal of pleasure and a lot of time explaining that her sister had been upstairs in Toys when Sophie was downstairs in Cosmetics; the next woman was adamant that Sophie had been in her daughter’s class at school, although Sophie didn’t recognize the name.
‘Cynthia Johnstone?’
‘She’s Cynthia Perkins now,’ said the woman. ‘But that probably won’t help.’
Sophie screwed up her face, as if to suggest that happy memories of Cynthia Johnstone were only seconds away from returning.