He thanked everyone for coming, and they got a standing ovation, and afterwards there was a long queue of people who wanted autographs on their DVD collections, and old eight by tens, and the first-day-cover series of Great British Sitcoms that the Post Office had issued at what young people called the turn of the century. (When Sophie had first heard that, she wanted to weep at her own confusion. That’s when you know you’re old, when you start to get your turns of the century muddled up.) She thought she’d be exhausted, but the more she signed, the younger she felt.
The young man with the stubble waited at the back of the line. Sophie – he’d focused on her – hadn’t been able to get rid of him, so in the end they’d asked him into the green room for a drink. Sophie wasn’t even sure that she’d wanted to get rid of him. Sometimes people asked her to do something, appear on a documentary about the 1960s or read a short story on Radio 4 about a grandmother forcing herself not to interfere in her daughter’s parenting mistakes. (She had read three of those.) But Max, the young man with the stubble, was talking about a starring role in a play.
‘I’m not going to tell you it’ll take the West End by storm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’
‘It works like that for some people,’ said Tony.
‘Young people,’ said Bill.
‘What can I tell you?’ said Max, his arms spread in defeat. ‘You ain’t young people. But you never know. If we got the story right, and it made people laugh, I can see you doing well in the regional theatres. Places like Bexhill and Eastbourne, anywhere, you know …’
‘Anywhere people go to die,’ said Clive.
He was awake now. He’d flown from California for the tribute, so he could be forgiven his erratic participation in the evening. It did mean, however, that his long journey had been a complete waste of time. He’d slept through the episodes, woken briefly when the lights came up and nodded off again during the Q&A.
‘That’s exactly not what I’m thinking of,’ said Max passionately. ‘I’ve got a title. From This Day Forward. From the marriage vows. Old people want to be offered hope. Don’t you think? It’s not all doom and gloom.’
‘It really is,’ said Bill.
‘Well, your job is to find something that isn’t,’ said Max.
‘You’d love that,’ said June, who had been in the audience with Roger and his wife.
‘It’s not really a job, though, is it?’ said Tony. ‘A job is when someone pays you to do something.’
‘Oh, I’ll get the money to pay you for a script,’ said Max. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to write for free.’
‘I’m in,’ said Bill.
Tony looked at him.
‘What?’ Bill said. ‘I’m fucking skint.’
The last time they had all been in the same room was after Dennis’s funeral, but it had hardly been a reunion, not with everyone else there. Sophie and Dennis had been together for a long time after Barbara (and Jim), and the wake had been full of children, and grandchildren, and friends, and godchildren, and colleagues from all the shows that had come after. The programme she always thought of as their show took up only a tiny little corner of their sitting room. There had been a moment when she’d looked over and seen Clive, Tony and Bill talking and laughing, and she had longed for everyone else, even her children, to leave, just for thirty minutes, so that she could talk about Dennis to the people who’d watched her fall in love with him. But she knew that nobody else would have understood, and she wasn’t sure she could explain the impulse even to herself, so the night had ended, as it should have, with Georgia and Christian and a Balthazar of champagne that Dennis had been saving for a special occasion. Either he had left it too long or he knew what he was doing, depending on how you looked at it.
If she were to bet on whose funeral they’d be attending next, then her money would have to go on Bill, but the odds wouldn’t be very good: he looked awful. The long, yellowy-white beard was regrettable, and the walking stick that only just enabled mobility put years on him, but beards and sticks weren’t going to kill him; the drinking and the smoking would do that. Except, of course, that they hadn’t, and he was older than Sophie, and if he dropped dead tomorrow, nobody would talk about a life cut tragically short by his addictions. He’d lived his life. They all had. Any years remaining to them were a gift, if that was the right word. Oh, of course it was the right word. She wished she and her friends could stop speaking like that. She was almost certain that they made those bitter jokes just to disguise their pathetic, doomed hunger to live longer.
‘How much are you going to pay us?’ Bill said.
‘You really want to talk about that now?’ said Max. ‘In front of everyone?’
‘He’s going to pay you a tenner, Bill,’ said Clive. ‘Now what?’
‘Oh, it’ll be more than a tenner,’ said Max, at a volume and with a conviction that suggested fifteen would be closer to the mark.
‘I think Clive’s point was that it’s a buyer’s market,’ said Tony. ‘It doesn’t matter what you pay us. We haven’t got any other work.’
‘Tony, you don’t want to think about shutting up, do you?’ said Bill. ‘You’re costing us money.’
‘I’ll just have a chat to your agent about all that, shall I?’ said Max.
‘You do that,’ said Bill. ‘We’ll lend you a Ouija board.’
‘Ah,’ said Max.