‘Shall we push on?’ said Dennis.
They read the script out loud, and it sang, beautifully, as it usually did once it had cleared its throat, and despite Alfred’s tuneless, tone-deaf bellow. Dulcie turned out to be surprisingly good. She was understated and intelligent, and Bill and Tony ended up writing her a little bit more.
And suddenly Barbara and Jim became the only people that mattered in the world, and the only marriage that counted, and everything else fell away. Clive became clever and kind and steady, Sophie swam in the confidence and security that come from being loved. Dennis enjoyed the company, Tony the simplicity and the straightforwardness of the attraction, Dulcie and Alfred the youth and the promise. It was such a joyful world that Tony worried for a moment whether he and Bill had gone soft, but these characters had real problems, and they spoke in real sentences, so it wasn’t that. It was the form itself, with its promise of next week, another episode, another series; it couldn’t help but offer hope, to its characters and to everyone who identified with them. Tony didn’t think he would ever want to write anything apart from half-hour comedies. They contained the key to health, wealth and happiness.
‘We should do an anniversary episode every year,’ said Dennis.
‘For the next fifty years,’ said Sophie.
Dulcie and Alfred smiled sadly.
‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘Sorry.’
‘Barbara and Jim probably wouldn’t have sat next to the same couple in the same restaurant every year anyway,’ said Clive.
After the recording, and after Dulcie and Alfred had been helped into their taxi, they sat in the BBC Club drinking wine and talking about getting old.
‘It was sort of pathetic, wasn’t it?’ said Clive.
‘What else are they going to do?’ said Sophie.
‘The crossword. Gardening. Jigsaw puzzles. Anything but acting.’
‘Yes,’ said Dennis. ‘All those waiting-to-die things. They should just accept that they’re filling in time with good grace.’
‘I’m going to be like her,’ said Sophie. ‘People are going to have to throw me out.’
‘They will,’ said Clive. ‘That’s what happens.’
11
The week before work began on the second series, Dennis was cornered in the canteen by Barry Bannister, the producer of Pipe Smoke. Dennis hated Pipe Smoke, even though he watched it every night. It was a programme in which men with beards and spectacles (but no pipes, which had recently been banned because the fug was making life difficult for the cameraman) talked with an annoying certainty about God and the H-bomb and theatre and classical music. Dennis had a beard and spectacles, and he smoked a pipe, but he hoped that he wasn’t as insufferable as Bannister’s terrible windbags. Pipe Smoke was the last programme in the schedule before the 11.20 close-down, and Dennis sometimes wondered whether its dullness was deliberate, an attempt by the BBC to persuade the workers of Britain that they needed more sleep than they were getting.
‘Do you know Vernon Whitfield?’ Bannister asked him.
Dennis hopped into the nearest available rabbit hole, which led down into a whole labyrinth of interconnected tunnels. These all brought him to rooms full of pain and humiliation: letters tucked inside books, chilly bedtimes, lies, tears and (towards the end) a long poem about loss that Edith had read out to him, naked, with no explanation for the poem or the nudity, while she wept. Time passed, and all he did was smile at Barry blankly. This sort of thing had been happening a lot since Edith had gone. Entire minutes could go by, in shops and pubs and work meetings, in which he seemed to lose track of himself. When he came back again, he frequently found that people had given up on him. Conversations had moved on, shopkeepers were serving somebody else. He was, he supposed, glad that his marriage was finally over, but he hadn’t managed to prepare himself for the shock of it, the sheer exhaustion.
‘Hello?’ said Barry Bannister. ‘Are you receiving me?’
‘Sorry,’ said Dennis. ‘Late night.’
‘Vernon Whitfield?’
‘Know of him, of course. Don’t know him.’
‘Well, he wants to come on Pipe Smoke and attack your programme when it comes back again.’
‘Why on earth would he want to do that?’
‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Bannister, and Dennis resisted the temptation to apprise him of all the relevant information. ‘He just thinks that the BBC should be aiming higher than fatuous comedies about uneducated young women. His words, not mine.’
‘And what do you want me to do about it?’
‘I wondered whether you’d come on and defend yourself.’
‘Why me? Why not Tony and Bill? Or one of the actors?’
‘Because … Well, you’re the producer and the director. And you’re more of a Pipe Smoke man, aren’t you? Cambridge, articulate, well spoken. I’m not saying we’re against people who aren’t …’