‘Right.’
‘But she quite often disappears off on jobs and things.’
‘Has she disappeared off on a job? Have you called her agent?’
‘Yes. He says not. It was quite an embarrassing conversation actually.’
‘I think we should work on the basis that she’s left you, then.’
‘I was beginning to come to the same conclusion. Anyway. I don’t want to be old and unemployed and friendless there.’
‘You’d rather all that happened here.’
He looked at her, hurt, and she had to make a face to show she was joking. She was sure he would have laughed, in the old days, and she couldn’t decide whether it was age or Hollywood that had sanded down his sharpness. She blamed Hollywood.
‘Do you have enough friends?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if that sounds pitiful. But I have to say, you’d be central in the … in the construction of a new life.’
‘I’d be a plank,’ she said.
‘Are you offering or clarifying?’
‘I was clarifying.’
‘Oh.’
‘I suppose we’d better see how we get on during rehearsals,’ said Sophie. ‘But all being well, I’m sure I can turn clarification into a firm offer.’
‘I’m trying to think of an off-colour joke that would work.’
‘Because of “firm offer”?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I think you might be better off going down the clarification route.’
‘Something to do with butter?’
‘If you must.’
‘There used to be loads of them, didn’t there, during the Last Tango in Paris era?’
‘You’re right. It was the golden age of smutty butter jokes,’ said Sophie.
‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’
It was absurd that they were getting old, thought Sophie – absurd and wrong. Old people had black-and-white memories of wars, music halls, wretched diseases, candlelight. Her memories were in colour, and they involved loud music and discos, Biba and Habitat, Marlon Brando and butter. She and Dennis had gone to see a nude musical on their first date, and they’d been married for over forty years, and he had died – not of old age, quite, but of a disease that kills the elderly more than anyone else. She picked up her glass and drank down the champagne-flavoured mineral water.
‘Could I have a glass of champagne, please?’
She was going to get drunk, just to see whether it was as bad as she remembered.
26
Tony and Bill wrote the script in three weeks. It came in at ninety minutes, the equivalent of three episodes. Max had told them that older people didn’t want to sit in a theatre for hours, which suited them, because they didn’t want to sit in the Polish café for months. Max had even provided them with the two tent poles over which he wanted them to drape the play: a pair of weddings. Barbara and Jim – both single again after bereavement – start talking at their son’s wedding, and in the process rekindle something; in the second act, they are preparing to remarry.
‘They can’t both have lost their spouses, can they?’ said Tony on the second day, when they had talked about everything else they could think of, and could no longer postpone work. ‘Nobody dies now. Not before they’re eighty.’
There was a subtext to the observation, but Tony didn’t want to brush the soil off it and expose it to scrutiny. The truth was, however, that if Bill could live as long as he had, with all his years of drinking and unsafe sex and drug abuse, then humans were indeed a lot more durable than they ever had been. (‘Abuse?’ Bill had repeated scornfully a couple of decades ago, when Tony had expressed concern. ‘How am I abusing them? That’s what they were made for.’)
‘Dennis died,’ said Bill. ‘He wasn’t eighty.’
‘He was unlucky,’ said Tony.
Dennis was killed by an infection he’d picked up in the hospital, after a routine hip operation.
‘One divorce and one bereavement?’
‘Go on, then,’ said Tony, as if he’d been offered another cake.
‘Which one’s which?’
‘We can’t make Sophie play a widow, can we? Not when she is one.’
‘You can’t make an actor play a character she knows something about?’
‘But won’t it upset her?’
‘Heaven forbid we get a performance out of her.’
‘And Jim’s divorced,’ said Tony.
‘I suppose so,’ said Bill. ‘But that does mean he’s got two broken marriages behind him. He never seemed like the type, to me.’
‘What about if he never remarried?’ said Tony.
‘And he’s been pining for her all this time?’
‘Why the sarcasm?’
‘Do people really pine for that long?’
‘You can regret mistakes, can’t you?’
‘For nearly fifty years?’
‘Course you can. I’m not saying he’s been sat in a dark room sobbing for all that time. Just that he wishes things hadn’t turned out the way they did.’
‘Yeah, well. It’s too late now.’
‘Why is it too late?’ said Tony.
‘Come off it.’
‘Come off what?’
‘It. It’s over.’