‘And what about the … well, the practical side?’
‘Is this going to help us come up with an idea?’
‘No. I’m just interested.’
‘Too bad.’
‘You’ll have to be helpful somehow, though. I don’t know what it’s like to sleep with someone night after night. Or argue with them about what side to watch. Or what it’s like to have a mother-in-law.’
‘We always agree about the television. We have exactly the same tastes.’
‘Do you think he knows I’m queer?’ said Bill. ‘And he’s playing an elaborate practical joke on me?’
‘How would he know?’
Bill was extremely careful. He always made sure that he knew the Test score, and that he dressed badly, and sometimes he made careful reference to girls. But then, he was afraid, like a lot of men in his position. He was always one mistake away from prison.
They decided, like God, that if they got the man right, the woman could somehow be made out of him. And the man in Wedded Bliss? wasn’t too bad, they thought. He was sort of odd, and oddly lovable, prone to fits of surreal rage provoked by everything in England that drove Tony and Bill insane – a sort of sitcom Jimmy Porter from Look Back in Anger. But Sophie was right about Cicely, the woman. She turned out to be hopeless, a cartoon sketch. This was unsurprising, seeing as they had borrowed her wholesale from a cartoon, the Gambols comic strip that appeared in the Express. The character of Cicely was as close to Gaye Gambol as they could get in script form. She didn’t look anything like her, though: Cicely, they imagined, was going to be sweet-looking, rather than curvy, probably because all the actresses that Dennis had suggested seemed very BBC, and BBC actresses all had big eyes, sweet natures and flat chests. They certainly weren’t sexy. But they extracted all of Gaye’s feminine idiocies from her and sprinkled them liberally over the script. Cicely lusted after mink coats, burned dinners, overspent her housekeeping allowance and made complicated, childlike excuses for doing so, missed appointments, failed to understand the simplest mechanical instrument. It wasn’t as though Tony and Bill ever believed that Gaye Gambol was real, or true, and nor did they believe that there were any housewives (or women, or people) like her. But they knew she was popular. If they didn’t have the nerve to produce somebody original and fresh, then at least they wanted a safe bet.
At which point Sophie walked in. She had Gaye Gambol’s wasp waist, large bust, blonde hair and big, fluttery eyelashes, and Tony and Bill burst out laughing.
Sophie and Clive ended up performing the script from beginning to end, mostly because Tony and Bill wanted to keep Sophie in the room. They loved her. She delivered her lines with an ease and a sense of timing that had been beyond the reach of every other actress they’d seen that week, and she even got a few laughs out of the script, much to Clive’s chagrin, although some of the laughs were derived from her decision to read Cicely in her Jean Metcalfe voice. Sophie smiled politely at a couple of his lines, but that was the most she could manage.
‘That’s not fair,’ said Clive.
‘What isn’t?’ said Bill.
‘You might at least have pretended to laugh. I have been reading the bloody thing all bloody day.’
‘The thing is,’ said Bill, ‘you hate comedy.’
‘He does,’ Tony said to Sophie. ‘He’s always moaning about it. He wants to do Shakesper-hear and Lawrence of Arabia.’
‘Just because it’s not my favourite thing doesn’t mean I don’t want laughs,’ said Clive. ‘I hate the dentist, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want fillings.’
‘Nobody wants fillings,’ Tony said.
‘No, but … if they need them.’
‘So laughs are like fillings to you?’ said Bill. ‘Painful and unpleasant, but necessary? What a bundle of joy you are.’
‘You’re good at comedy, though,’ said Sophie. ‘You’re very funny as Captain Smythe.’
‘He hates Captain Smythe,’ said Tony.
‘Well, forgive me if I’d rather play Hamlet than some twittish upper-class ass.’
‘Sophie, what would you like to do?’ said Tony.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘What character would you like to play?’
‘Well,’ said Sophie uncertainly, ‘Cicely, really.’
‘No,’ said Tony. ‘Cicely’s dead. Gone. Chucked out of the window.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Clive.
‘What?’ said Bill.
‘You’re offering to write something for her?’
‘We’re just chewing the fat.’
‘You are. You’re offering to write something for her. Bloody hell. You’ve never asked me what I want to do. You just say, “Here’s an upper-class twit with a silly voice. Make him funny.” ’
‘Because you’ve made it very clear that you’re destined for better things,’ said Bill.
‘Well, I wouldn’t mind having my own series.’
‘Oh, that would dull some of the pain, would it?’
‘Yes. It would, rather.’