‘You can’t steal busts and faces either, is the truth of it,’ said Sophie.
‘No, but at least they’re actual things. A nice waist is sort of the absence of something, isn’t it?’
‘Anyway,’ said Sophie, who felt they were drifting away from the subject at hand, ‘I know how lucky I’ve been.’
‘But you don’t want to share the luck.’
‘We’re flatmates, Marjorie. I don’t know how much I owe you.’
‘A lot, I think.’
‘I can tell.’
‘I took you in when you had nowhere to go.’
‘You were looking for someone to share the rent.’
‘There’s always two ways of looking at everything.’
There was nothing to be done about good fortune, if that’s what she’d been given. Sophie could see that as long as it lasted, people would want some of it.
‘You’ll get someone else in,’ she said. ‘It’s a nice flat.’
‘It’s not.’
‘It’s handy for work.’
‘So this is it, then?’ said Marjorie. ‘You’re just … off?’
‘I think so,’ said Sophie. ‘I’ll pay rent for another month, though.’
‘Ooh, the last of the big spenders.’
She couldn’t get her stuff out quick enough.
Her home in Blackpool had dark furniture and wallpaper and paintings of horses on the wall. The dark furniture had been inherited from her grandparents, and couldn’t have been worth anything; the paintings of horses had been bought from Woolworths. But every home she went in was the same, even if the people she was visiting had a bit of money – the same fustiness, the same feeling that the good things in this country, the things that people valued, had all happened a long time ago, way before she was born. Before she’d moved to London, she’d loved looking at magazine photos of famous people at home, young people, fashion designers and singers and film stars, and she was dazzled by the white walls and the bright colours. Was it really only young people who wanted to paint over the misery of the last quarter of a century? The first thing she did when she moved in was strip off the brown wallpaper, and then she paid a man to paint the place white. As soon as she had the money and the time, she’d find things to hang on the walls. She didn’t care what these things were, as long as they were yellow and red and green and there were no sailing ships or castles and there was nothing with four legs anywhere.
She bought herself two Le Corbusier-style chairs and Afghan rugs and a bed and two beanbags and even some pasta jars, though she hadn’t ever bought or cooked pasta, from Habitat in the Fulham Road. The first people to visit were Brian and his wife; they came for drinks and then took her out to supper. The first person to stay the night was Clive.
The day after the first episode, with its ruinous insinuations, had aired, Clive took the view that he needed to mount a desperate public relations campaign that would entail sleeping with as many girls as possible, the less discreet the better. By the time he got to Bev, a lovely little thing he’d picked up at a party to launch a new cabaret club in Glasshouse Street, the naked female form was beginning to appear a little odd to him, and he didn’t enjoy the occasion as much as he might have done. He didn’t think Bev had noticed. He was, after all, a good actor, and, unlike Jim, he was never afflicted by any bizarre psychological and/or physiological problems. He was almost uncannily reliable, but as he rarely slept with the same girl for more than a couple of weeks, he didn’t receive as many admiring comments as he thought he deserved. It was, he supposed, a good argument for marriage, perhaps the best he’d come across. If he were to sleep with the same woman all the time, then that woman would know just how extraordinarily dependable and responsive he was.
‘Can I say I cured you?’ said Bev afterwards.
‘Cured me?’ he said, as if he didn’t know what she was going to say next.
‘In the first episode of Barbara (and Jim) …’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. I see what you mean. I’d forgotten all about that.’
There had been two episodes since, neither of which, thankfully, made any reference to his marital inadequacies; he had urged Bill and Tony to include references to his subsequent marital adequacies, just to help the audience develop a fuller picture of the marriage, but they hadn’t shown any interest in his notes so far.
‘The thing is, I was cured by the end of the episode,’ said Clive. ‘Don’t you remember? The chimes of Big Ben and all that?’
‘I didn’t really understand that bit,’ said Bev. ‘I thought it was New Year’s Eve, suddenly.’
‘No,’ said Clive. ‘The bongs represented satisfactory sexual congress.’
‘Lost on me,’ said Bev. ‘But I do love the programme. I never go out on Thursdays now.’
Bev was not alone. They had started off with ten million viewers, and so far they had added another million a week.
‘What’s she like?’ said Bev.
‘Sophie? Yes, she’s very nice.’