‘Well, I presume she’s going to make a right mess of it,’ he said. ‘Otherwise there’s no show.’
‘She will make a mess of it, yes,’ said Tony. ‘But the idea of a woman plumbing a bathroom isn’t funny per se.’
‘I disagree,’ said Clive.
The conversation, Tony thought later, neatly captured all the maddening contradictions of the show. Jim plumbing the bathroom was boring and obvious; Barbara making a mess of it was funny and fresh and then entirely predictable. Maybe that was how television – and, he supposed, life – always worked.
One member of the audience was physically sick during the recording. Laughter took hold of her body and shook it and shook it until she was forced to vomit all over the back of the seat in front of her. The business with the flood – and admittedly Tony and Bill had rebuilt and polished and tinkered until the script was a gleaming, ugly, loud machine, an American motorcycle of an episode – had to be re-recorded because the delight of the audience drowned out the dialogue. Sophie plumbed and flooded with such artful dizziness that finally she earned comparisons with Lucille Ball, in the popular press anyway. The scene in which Jim comes in to find Barbara standing on the toilet cistern, whereupon she pretends that nothing has happened, was shown in the BBC’s Christmas highlights programme four years in a row, and came to define Barbara (and Jim). And Bill, in a spirit of desperation, began to take his novel seriously.
15
Dennis had been invited to more dinner parties since Edith’s departure than he had during his entire marriage, even if he discounted the ones that his mother had been throwing with humiliating regularity. He seemed to have become an official Eligible Bachelor. He had been introduced to single women who were terrifyingly similar to Edith, and single women who were clearly intended to be the opposite. The Ediths were tall and skinny and intellectual; the opposites were short and stout and intellectual. Dennis’s Cambridge degree, which was apparently as cramping and defining as a devout religious belief, meant that the cleverness was an unalterable given, but he found it hard to convince himself that short, stout intellectuals were his type. This was, he was sure, due to his shallowness, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.
Edith’s true opposite was a quick-witted, unpretentious, high-spirited, funny, curvy, clever, beautiful blonde. Dennis had been in love with Sophie for far longer than he would ever admit, but it had only occurred to him relatively recently, probably because of this plague of anti-Ediths that was being visited upon him, that every single one of the qualities that he worshipped in Sophie was absent in his former wife. Maybe he was being unfair and she’d changed since he’d last seen her, but he doubted it. It was hard to imagine that Vernon Whitfield had brought out Edith’s previously buried fun-loving side.
He wasn’t, as far as he could tell, Sophie’s type. Both Clive and Maurice were what one might call conventionally good-looking, if you were prepared to overlook Clive’s rugger nose and Maurice’s deranged smile. They were also famous, and though Sophie would be horrified by the implication of the observation, he knew to his cost that it made a difference. Maybe Edith had gone off with Vernon Whitfield because of his mind, but if that mind had been buried deep in some dusty varsity history department, then she might have decided that it was best enjoyed in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement rather than in bed.
Dennis had been working on the assumption that it was best to suffer in silence. A declaration of love would almost certainly be met by embarrassment and, if he was lucky, a little speech about how lovely he was, how much she valued his friendship and professional support. And anyway, what kind of producer would risk damaging his relationship with his leading lady and possibly, if Sophie were indiscreet, his leading man, by confessing a devotion that might well be a direct result of recent psychological trauma anyway?
He was finding it increasingly hard to keep it bottled up, however. That wasn’t the point of love, in his opinion. Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn’t tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her. He had finally decided that he had to say something when Clive and Sophie announced their engagement.