‘Please, I do want to get this right,’ said Dennis pleasantly.
‘… was that you people would show someone taking a shit if you thought some hyena would laugh at it.’
Dennis had only wanted Whitfield to make a twerp of himself. He hadn’t intended to goad him into the first use of a four-letter word on British television. Now that it had happened, however, Dennis could hardly pretend that it hadn’t. He was duty-bound to stop talking and look towards Robert Mitchell for guidance.
‘Well,’ said Robert Mitchell, ‘I do apologize to our viewers for, for the industrial language that was inadvertently used during what became a very heated discussion. Let’s end tonight a couple of minutes early, and we can all put the kettle on and calm down.’
(Robert Mitchell was also forced to apologize a couple of nights later. The Trades Unions Congress had written to the BBC to point out that it was an Oxbridge intellectual who was responsible for the only four-letter word ever heard on television, not a representative of the British working class.)
‘I’m so sorry,’ whispered Whitfield.
‘Goodnight,’ said Robert Mitchell.
Three weeks later, another critic used an even worse word on another programme and Vernon Whitfield’s crime was forgotten, but he never appeared on television again. Later, Dennis regretted the inarguably lowbrow tactics he had used. Now he would never know whether he could have won a fair fight.
12
Sophie had finally run out of excuses, so her father and her Auntie Marie came to London for the first time to see her, and her flat, and a recording of the show. They stripped away some of the fun and pride, of course: Sophie sent them the money for first-class train tickets, but they insisted on coming by coach; she booked them two rooms in the Royal Garden Hotel at the end of her road, but when they found out that the rooms cost nine guineas a night, they moved into a smaller, family-run bed and breakfast nearby.
‘That hotel had a twenty-four-hour coffee shop,’ George Parker said, outraged eyebrows hoisted as high as they would go.
He was in her flat, drinking tea and shifting uncomfortably in her Habitat chair. Marie had gone shopping.
‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘The Maze. I’ve been there.’
‘And the restaurant is on the roof.’
‘Yes. I’ve been there too. The Royal Roof. It overlooks Kensington Palace. Where Meg and Tony live. I thought you’d like it.’
‘Meg and Tony?’
‘That’s what people call them.’
‘No “people” don’t.’
It was a recurring theme of the visit: people versus people. The people versus her people. London versus the North. Show business versus the world. She had, she could see, become used to a lot of things that she once would have imagined to be a permanent source of wonder.
‘Well, we didn’t want meals on the roof, or all-night coffee.’
‘You didn’t have to have it,’ said Sophie. ‘But other people might enjoy it.’
‘That’s what we didn’t like,’ George said.
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because if there are people staying in that hotel who want to drink coffee at four o’clock in the morning, then it’s the wrong hotel for us.’
There was no arguing with them, and she let them stay where they wanted, at a considerable saving of six guineas per person per night, cooked breakfast included.
They wanted to meet Clive, and when she made the mistake of telling him they were coming, Clive said that he wanted to meet them. She told him that he would meet them, at the recording, but Clive felt that he deserved more.
‘I’m sparing you,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to be spared. I belong in a different category to Dennis and Brian and whoever else is knocking around.’
‘Why do you?’
‘Because I’m your on-screen husband, and your off-screen …’
‘What? You can’t finish that sentence in a way they’d understand.’
‘I’m going to buy you all dinner. Saturday night. I can’t just shake hands after the recording and then disappear.’
‘Well, don’t. Stay around for a drink.’
‘They feel like my in-laws.’
She knew he meant it. He would drive her mad. Sometimes they slept together and sometimes they didn’t, and she never knew where she stood, and she found herself getting jealous even though she knew that jealousy was utterly pointless, and in any case belonged to the kind of relationship she didn’t want with him.
‘They’ll get the wrong end of the stick.’
‘So let them. Where’s the harm? A stick is a stick. Doesn’t matter which end they pick up.’
‘I’d never hear the last of it.’
‘I can’t be a friend?’
‘They don’t understand friends. Not on a Saturday night. They understand husbands and wives and courting couples and that’s it.’
‘I’ll book at Sheekey’s. They’ll like it there.’