‘It’s Jim. Jim, to my mind, is not a virgin.’
‘I didn’t think he would be, to your mind.’
‘I can act, you know, insecurity and donnishness and shyness and the rest of it. But I can’t do anything about what I look like.’
‘I didn’t think you’d have the nerve to go through with it,’ said Bill. ‘But you have.’
‘I make no apologies for frankness.’
‘I’m not sure I quite understand what he’s being frank about,’ said Sophie.
‘Clive thinks he’s too good-looking to be a virgin,’ said Tony.
Sophie laughed. Clive looked pained.
‘It’s a serious point,’ said Clive. ‘I knew I’d be mocked for it, but that doesn’t make it less valid.’
‘You don’t have to wear specs and have acne to be a virgin,’ said Bill.
‘I understand, but … Don’t you think it shows on my face?’
Bill wrinkled his nose up in disgust.
‘What?’
‘Experience.’
Sophie looked at him, because he was inviting scrutiny, and decided that even though he had probably slept with loads of girls, there was an innocence that could be mistaken for sexual inexperience. He hadn’t lived much, as far as she could see. He’d spent too much time waiting around for something to happen to him.
‘And anyway,’ said Clive, ‘why can’t I … Why am I a virgin until the end of the script?’
‘What we’re implying,’ said Tony, ‘is that you’re, you know … hopeless.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Well. There are various forms of hopelessness, obviously. The one we were thinking of was impotence.’
Clive slumped into his chair. He couldn’t speak for several moments.
‘Where does it say that?’
‘It doesn’t.’
‘Oh, bloody hell. Where is it implied?’
‘Page nine. Did you not understand a word you were saying just now?’
‘I just read the lines. I don’t think about them.’
He scanned the page.
‘Oh, Christ. “Hydraulic failure?” What would happen if I marched straight round to see a solicitor the morning after the first episode has gone out?’
‘A solicitor?’
‘There’s got to be something legal here. Slander. Libel. Something.’
‘You’d be suing a fictional character who you’d agreed to play. I’d go to every day of the trial, if it came to court.’
‘I should never have agreed to those brackets,’ said Clive. ‘I’ll be saying that for the rest of my life.’
‘It might have been the brackets that made us think of it,’ said Tony. ‘They’re sort of a droopy punctuation mark, aren’t they?’
‘Well,’ said Clive, ‘mark my words: nobody’s going to believe it.’
He was wrong. They believed it and loved it and carried on loving it. There was one kind of life for them before the first episode of the new series and another kind of life afterwards, and the night the programme was transmitted marked the end of the life before. They would all remember the transmission at some point or another in the years to come, and they never failed to be surprised by the memory: their new lives had already been born, but they watched television with people who belonged to the old. Sophie went home to watch with her father and Auntie Marie; her father was appalled and confused and proud, and tried to anticipate jokes and plot developments, and always got it wrong, and then tried to make a case for the superiority of his own version, which meant that half the lines, and all the subtleties of timing and delivery, were lost. Dennis watched with Edith, who didn’t laugh once, and told him at the end that it was very good indeed, if that was the sort of thing one liked. Clive could not resist going home to Eastleigh, to watch with Cathy and his mother and his gratifyingly disbelieving father, who had recovered himself by the end of the episode. He enjoyed the brackets and the hydraulic failure more than Clive’s performance, he said, and told Cathy that she was well off out of it. Tony watched with June, who wept tears of pride at the end; they had both invited Bill, but he went home to Barnet to watch with his parents, who, he felt, with absolutely no evidence, seemed relieved by the unambiguous heterosexuality of the programme. After that night, they belonged to each other as much as they belonged to anyone else.
TELEVISION REVIEW:
BARBARA (AND JIM)