‘Oh, lumme,’ said the man. ‘I’ve half a mind to go home.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ said the woman. ‘It might not be as bad as all that.’
Sophie puffed out her cheeks.
‘Shall we go and stand in the corridor?’ she said.
‘It’s going to be great,’ said Clive.
‘We’ve all been living in a bubble,’ said Sophie.
‘What sort of bubble?’
‘A lovely squishy pink bubble.’
‘I wouldn’t knowingly live in a squishy pink bubble,’ said Clive.
‘Any colour you like, then. We all love the script. I do anyway. Tom Sloan loves Dennis. Dennis loves Tony and Bill. And now it’s all gone pop. Suddenly.’
‘That’s what bubbles do,’ said Clive. ‘That’s why you shouldn’t choose to live in them.’
‘People don’t come to these things because they want to cheer you along, do they?’ said Sophie. ‘They come because they’re bored. Or because they want to see the inside of a TV studio.’
‘Or because they applied for tickets months ago in the hope of getting something good,’ said Clive. ‘And they got us instead.’
‘We’re good.’
‘We think so. But they’ve never heard of us. So now they’re cheesed off. I went along to one once because the producer had turned me down for a job. I went because I was hoping it would be awful.’
‘And was it?’
‘Anything can be awful if you want it to be.’
‘Even good things?’
‘Especially good things, sometimes. They make people jealous.’
‘I don’t want it to go out in the world,’ said Sophie. ‘I want to stay like we were.’
‘It’s a TV programme,’ said Clive. ‘It belongs in the world.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Sophie.
Dennis knocked on the door.
‘Everyone all right?’
Sophie made a face.
‘Oh, you’ll be fine,’ said Dennis.
‘How do you know?’ she said.
‘Because you’re not normal,’ he said. ‘Nothing matters to you as much as this. You’re not going to mess it up.’
And she didn’t. Clive had been in plenty of student productions in which the object of the exercise was to destroy one’s friends, classmates and contemporaries onstage, but he’d never experienced anything like this: the moment the red recording light came on, Sophie was at him, like a vicious dog that had been kept in a dark shed and then released into the light. All through the rehearsals she had been trying things out in an attempt to wring more out of the script than Tony and Bill had intended to provide: she made faces, held a line back for a couple of seconds longer than anyone was expecting, found intonations and emphases that could turn a simple ‘Thank you’ into something that made people laugh, or at least watch her. So he shouldn’t have been surprised by her energy or her relentlessness, but he was rocked back on his heels fighting her off: she was everywhere, in every gap, over and under every line, hers and his. Poor old Bert, Clive could see, was lost, which meant that some of her performance was too. Clive felt as though he’d gone three goals down in the first two minutes of a football match, and though he now suspected that even a draw was beyond him, he could at least make a better fist of things. He was always decent, in any part he was given, but nobody had ever pushed him to go further, and because he hadn’t been pushed, he coasted. Sophie wasn’t ever going to let him coast. Perhaps that was even a good thing, if you looked at it the right way. Now, though, he had to watch, listen, feel, during every single second of the performance, and respond to what she was actually doing, rather than what he’d presumed she was going to do. It was all rather exhausting.
At the end, the man with the APPLAUSE board didn’t even have to lift it above his head. Clive ushered her forward so that she could take a bow, and the audience cheered, and he applauded too. He hadn’t been left with a lot of choice.
Sophie was beside her father’s hospital bed by lunchtime on Monday afternoon. He hadn’t died, and he hadn’t had any more heart attacks, and he was awake and talking. There was an argument to say that this was the worst of all possible outcomes, because now he could sit there, looking wounded. Marie was on the other side of the bed. She wasn’t wounded. She was just sour and disappointed. Sophie gave her dad the grapes she’d bought in London, and a bottle of Lucozade, and a Commando War Stories book called At Dawn You Die.
‘You must be made of money,’ he said, by way of thanks.
‘Or made of guilt,’ said Marie.
Sophie took a deep breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Yes, but what are you sorry for?’ said Marie.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come.’
‘Not good enough,’ said Marie. ‘We talked about this. We decided you had to be sorry you didn’t come. Not sorry you couldn’t come.’
She understood the difference. They wanted her to admit she’d made a mistake.
‘I couldn’t come,’ she said. ‘I wish I had been able to.’
‘So why couldn’t you?’ said her father. ‘What was so important?’