‘I’m weak. We know that about me.’
‘But when people say they’re weak, they’re talking about drink or drugs or sex or things that give them pleasure. Marrying horrors doesn’t look like much fun from any angle.’
‘I suppose fun was involved, at some point.’
‘Let’s draw a veil over that.’
‘Probably for the best. Anyway. I mess my marriages up, and my relationships with my children are as a consequence poor, and I messed work up too.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘The same way as you, I suppose. We should have been famous, Sophie.’
We are famous, she wanted to say, and then couldn’t see any earthly reason why she shouldn’t.
‘We are famous.’
‘Oh, famous for soap operas and TV detective shows and so on. We should be more famous than that.’
‘Really? That’s what we deserve?’
He looked at her, and for a moment she thought he’d detected the sarcasm, but he ploughed on anyway.
‘Look at my contemporaries. McKellen, Gambon, Ben Kingsley … They’re doing all right. They probably don’t even think about being old, they’re getting so many scripts thrown at them. I know you took time out to have babies and so on, but still. We just sort of … dribbled out.’
Oh, but there was so much here she wanted to argue with him about; there was so much that made her want to grab him by his tie – yes, he was wearing a tie – and rock his head back and forth, and perhaps smash it on the table once or twice. What did they deserve? Certainly not what they’d got, she could see that much now, although it had taken her a while. They should be down on their knees every day, thanking God for what they’d been given in return for not very much. Sophie had been pretty, and she was able to make people laugh, and later, during middle age, she had been able to convince people – convince her employers anyway – that she was a middle-aged woman who had suffered bereavement, or who had taken over her imprisoned husband’s minicab firm. These, it seemed to her, were marginal talents. And yet she could have raised a family with them, if she’d needed to, bought more than one home, sent her children to private schools. She’d been given awards, and space in magazines, and love. And after, or nearly after, all that, she’d been given money to write a book about her life, this life that had already been charmed, over-feted, too well rewarded. And this book, Barbara (and Me), had sold so well that she’d been given even more money for it. And she hadn’t even written it herself! Her friend Diane had done it for her! She wanted to say all this to Clive, loudly and scornfully, but he hadn’t been asked to write a book, and he hadn’t been given awards, and as far as she knew nobody took photographs of him at home and put them in women’s magazines. He was disappointed about something else, she thought; he was disappointed that he’d never quite added up to as much as the results of his own calculations. The trouble was that he’d got his sums all wrong, but she didn’t want to be the one to tell him that.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to be given this chance to get back on track.’
‘Which chance?’
She must have missed something.
‘The play.’
‘Oh, Clive. Nobody will notice the play.’
He looked at her, apparently trying to work out if this was some kind of cruel joke at his expense.
‘So why is this Max person bothering?’
‘He thinks he can make money out of old people in Eastbourne and he wants to give us some of it.’
‘That’s it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you need the money, then?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘I’ll be all right, I suppose, if there isn’t any more. So why do you want to do it?’
‘I like working. And I like working with people I know even more.’
‘That’s the thing,’ said Clive. ‘There’s nobody I like in America.’
‘Out of two hundred million people?’
‘Nobody I like who wants to work with me anyway.’
‘Ah.’
She couldn’t help thinking that he’d just told her he hated all food, before going on to explain that he was referring to a half-eaten sandwich in the fridge.
‘The thing is, I want to come home.’
‘Who’s stopping you?’
‘It’s a funny place, LA. The thing is, it …’
‘You’re not going to tell me about the weather, are you? Or how it doesn’t have a centre?’
‘I thought you might be interested,’ he said, a little huffily.
‘It was interesting the first time someone I knew came back from California, in 1968 or so. But it hasn’t been interesting since then.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘And that’s not why you want to come back anyway. Nobody wants to come back from a place where the sun shines all day. They say they do. But somehow it doesn’t happen.’
‘So why do I want to come back, then?’
‘I have no idea. Has Carrie actually left you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s a good way of telling: is she living in your house?’
‘No.’