‘Have I?’
‘Can you imagine how many girls have come in here saying that? Nothing to do with me, by the way. Any of them.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Sophie. ‘You’re a happily married man.’
‘Ask Patsy, if you don’t believe me.’
‘I believe you. Anyway, what do you say to them, when they come in here and tell you they’re up the spout?’
‘I recommend a very nice doctor in Harley Street. He’s not cheap, but he’s safe and he’s very discreet.’
‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘No. I’m not going to do that.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m not a medical man, but I don’t think there’s any other alternative.’
‘Apart from the obvious.’
Brian looked puzzled.
‘It’s not obvious to me,’ he said.
‘Some people, when they’re pregnant, they have a baby,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘People. Everybody.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. But I’m presuming we’re not in that category.’
‘I think we might be.’
He put the pictures he was holding down and gave her his full attention.
‘Start again,’ he said. ‘I’m lost.’
‘I’m going to have a baby.’
Telling Brian she was going to have a baby was different, she could now see, from telling him that she was pregnant. The latter was a kind of temporary affliction; the former went some way towards helping him imagine a future in which Sophie was the mother of a small human being.
‘What about the series?’
He wasn’t interested in the father or her marital state, she noted. Together, Brian and her mother would form a whole, rounded person.
‘They’ll wait,’ she said.
‘Do you think?’ said Brian, apparently amused.
‘It’s called Everyone Loves Sophie. I’m Sophie.’
He picked a photograph out of the middle of the pile.
‘What about if they called it Everyone Loves Freda? She’s Freda.’
‘Freda’s a terrible name.’
‘We’ll change it. Everyone Loves Suzy. How does that sound?’
It sounded both frightening and plausible, and for a moment she found herself thinking, Well, he’s won the argument. But then she realized the argument wasn’t real. She wasn’t going to go and see a discreet doctor in Harley Street. She understood that she could: the option was real, even if the argument wasn’t. The doctor could take the baby away, make it vanish, just as Barbara’s baby had vanished. And Tony and Diane need know nothing about it, and she could appear as childless, carefree, girl-about-town Sophie in a series called Everyone Loves Sophie. But how much fun would it be to play the part of a childless, carefree girl-about-town immediately after an abortion? How would she feel, having an abortion so that she could become a carefree, childless fictional character? How much delight would Dennis, the father of the aborted child, take in producing the show? How funny would he find carefree Sophie’s predicaments and pickles?
To her mother, it must have looked as though she could do anything she wanted to do. She could move from one end of the country to another, change her name, live on her own, sleep with whoever she wanted to without marrying them, drink tea at the Ritz, make babies disappear overnight, probably bringing them back again, if she felt like it. And it was true, she could. But it seemed to her that to take advantage of all of these opportunities, she had to turn something off inside her. She had to pretend that nothing mattered, as long as she got the life she thought she wanted. For some reason, she started thinking about how Everyone Loves Sophie or Everyone Loves Suzy would end, six months or five years into the future: Sophie or Suzy would meet someone, and want to have a baby with him, and Tony and Diane would run out of things to say. That was how half the stories in the world ended. She wasn’t sure it was the best ending, but it was the only one people seemed to be able to think of for girls like her. And Sophie had met someone, in real life, and she was pregnant by him, and he made her happy. You couldn’t keep asking to have the pages crumpled up and thrown in the bin, especially if they made sense.
‘Well,’ said Brian, after he’d finally understood. ‘I’ll still be here when you’re ready to come back.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sophie.
Brian couldn’t interest Dennis in Freda, or Suzy, or any of the girls who had sent him photographs, but one evening he saw Caviar and Chips, an ITV show about a working-class family that wins the football pools, and he had a bright idea: he approached the girl who played the family’s teenage daughter, a pretty young actress called Jackie Chamberlain, and told her that he had a series for her. Then he talked to ITV, and then he talked to Tony and Diane, and a few months later Everyone Loves Jackie, a series about a young, carefree, single girl with a cat and boyfriend troubles, was given a Thursday night slot. It didn’t last long, but then, that was the trouble with young people, Brian found: they would insist on getting older.