‘I haven’t read Margaret Drabble,’ said Sophie.
This was the sentence she’d been instructing herself not to say a couple of minutes before. It popped out anyway. Vernon and Edith got a fit of the giggles then.
‘The New Colleague’, formerly ‘The New Secretary’, was ready by the following lunchtime. Everyone, including Dennis, had pitched in, during a long, boozy, loud session in a pub on Hammersmith Grove, round the corner from Dennis’s house. Dennis had left his own party, and later that night, when he got home, he left his own marriage. He told Edith he knew about the affair, he didn’t love her any more, and he wanted her to leave. She was shocked, and embarrassed, and upset, but she left. He had been drunk when he made the speech, but in Dennis’s opinion it didn’t diminish its magnificence or his pride in it.
‘The New Colleague’ was conceived as an act of revenge – on Edith, for her crimes against Dennis and Sophie, and on the British middle classes, for their crimes (unspecified) against Tony and Bill. Jim invites Edwina, the eponymous addition to the staff at Number Ten, to dinner at the house; Edwina turns out to be a bluestocking socialist who is both amused and appalled by Barbara, tries to patronize her, and clearly regards her marriage to Jim as temporary. (There is a suggestion that she sees herself as filling the vacancy.) Over the course of the thirty minutes, Barbara runs rings around Edwina – to Jim’s initial discomfort and, later, great delight. Just about any position Edwina tries to adopt – on politics, or the arts, or religion – Barbara rips apart with her teeth. She doesn’t know as much as Edwina, of course, but Edwina is revealed to have a plodding intelligence and her blue stockings are full of unexamined assumptions, as well as long, bony legs. (Dennis cast the tallest, poshest girl he could find.) Edwina hands in her resignation the next day and goes off to work for the Conservatives – much to Tory-voting Barbara’s confusion and dismay. It was a show that polarized critics, but the critics who didn’t like it didn’t believe in Barbara’s speed of thought, which rather proved the point.
After Sophie had scraped the last of the make-up off her face, she was aware of the first sharp pangs of something that felt like homesickness. They’d already been told that the BBC wanted another series, but that was months away; and anyway, the last episode of the first series made her realize that one day there would be a last episode, and she didn’t know whether she’d be able to bear it. And it didn’t help, telling herself that when it was time for the last episode, she’d have had enough, because she couldn’t bear that either. She wanted to stay like this for ever. She changed her wish quickly: not like this, not exactly … she wanted it to be the Monday just gone, with a whole week of rehearsals to look forward to, and then a recording. That’s where she would like to stop. She was already afraid that she’d never be happier than now – then – and it was already over. She went to look for Clive, and she took him home and made him something to eat and he made love to her. But it wasn’t work.
THE SECOND SERIES
10
If Sophie had asked Brian to custom-design a miserable few months intended to make her grateful for Barbara (and Jim) and all who sailed in her, he couldn’t have done a better job. People from Hollywood wanted her to be in movies, he said, and when she didn’t believe him, he sent her a script called Chemin de Fer. She read it, and didn’t really understand it, and called him on her phone. She never got tired of picking up her phone and dialling a number and not putting a coin in a slot.
‘First of all,’ she said, ‘what does Chemin de Fer mean?’
‘It’s the same thing as baccarat.’
‘You’re going to have to say something else it’s the same thing as.’
‘Shimmy.’
‘No. Try again.’
‘It’s a card game they play in casinos.’
‘Nobody knows about casinos.’
‘Of course they do, sweetheart. They’re even legal now. You’re being naive.’
‘I’ve never been in a casino.’
‘Of course you haven’t.’
‘I’ll bet Tony and Bill have never been in casinos.’
‘Why do we care what Tony and Bill have never done? They’re BBC writers. They’ve never done anything.’
Tony and Bill would never have written Chemin de Fer. They cared too much about things being real, and about how one scene led to the next. This script was like a dish made from things you’d found in your larder and had to use up before they went off: a Welsh mountain, a casino, a blonde with a big bust.
‘They could have gone to a casino. They’re on good money,’ said Sophie.
‘They’re not on commercial television money.’
‘I mean, compared to everyone else in Britain. People who work in shops and live in the North.’