Roger Nicholas Holmes was born in the Bushey Maternity Hospital, three weeks after the last episode of the third series had been broadcast. It was a relatively short labour, five hours, but it seemed like an eternity to Tony. He had started off in the corridor outside the maternity ward, smoking and attempting to do the Times crossword, but the terrible noises and the occasionally urgent dashes of the midwives and nurses upset him too much, so in the end he went to the pub, and came back on the hour every hour until eventually he was presented with a thirty-five-minute-old son.
He’d been worried that he wouldn’t feel enough. He’d wept when Barbara had had her baby in the series, which he’d hoped at the time was an indication of normal human emotions, but afterwards he wondered whether the tears had come because of his investment in the programme, or because he always found it easy to cry at things that weren’t real. He’d been in a right mess at the end of The Sound of Music, for example. But when he held his son for the first time, he was beset immediately by spasmodic and uncontrollable sobs that seemed to start right deep in his stomach. He needn’t have worried. Everyone loved their own children, it turned out. Tony wished there was a way that homosexual men could be given this moment. He’d like Bill to feel what he was feeling.
‘You OK?’ said June.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very. Thank you.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘I meant, thank you for everything, not thank you for asking. Thank you for sticking with it. Thank you for him.’
It was an inappropriate thought, but the baby wasn’t so much like a love child, the effortless product of the blissful or even oblivious union of two people. He was a different sort of miracle, the effortful product of a tricky collaboration between unlikely partners. He was their version of a television programme.
June and Tony spent a contented few weeks walking and sitting in parks eating ice creams while their newborn slept, and then, after the phoney war, the job of being a husband and a father started properly. It turned out to be a difficult job too. The baby had made everything seem solid and frightening, and Tony was finding it much harder to breathe, all of a sudden. If being part of a family was a job like any other, then Tony would have been counting the days until Christmas, and the other holidays to come, but there was no respite, and there never would be. He didn’t even enjoy the return to the office, because he had a living to earn – a proper, serious living, enough for three people. Everything was down to him, now that June had given up work. He had to turn the contents of his head into prams and rusks and reins and mortgage payments, and suddenly there seemed to be less in there than he’d hoped. Each listless hour spent shooting paperclips at the light fittings with a rubber band, or listening to music on the record player they kept in the office, seemed ominous, rather than an indulgent part of the routine. Could he seriously keep this going for ever? Was it really possible to come up with enough ideas – for lines, jokes, characters, plots, episodes – to feed and clothe and educate a child?
He was relying on Bill, and Bill had disappeared. He came to the office every day, but he wasn’t there, and didn’t even seem to want to be there. He spent most of the time playing the Beatles’ Revolver LP over and over and over again, until Tony started to dislike it.
‘Do you remember when they were all “I love you yeah yeah yeah”?’ said Bill.
‘ “She loves you”, I think,’ said Tony.
‘Same difference.’
‘What about it anyway?’
‘They’ve gone from that to this in whatever it is … three years. Where have we gone?’
‘Where do you want to go? Where should we be going?’
‘Moving.’
‘Moving where?’
‘I can’t think of a single new permutation of domestic life. The in-laws to stay. Going to stay with the in-laws. Anniversaries. Embarrassing dinner parties at home. Embarrassing dinner parties out. Babies. Bathrooms. Nannies. New carpets.’
‘Moving!’ said Tony. ‘That’s brilliant! “The New House”.’
Bill shrugged.
‘Might as well. We haven’t got anything else.’
‘You don’t seem very excited about it.’
‘It’s not a seam we’re going to be mining in five years’ time, is it? If we’re still banging on about it in episode two we’ll be stretching it thin.’
‘What’s brought this on?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Till Death Us Do Part?’
The series was showing now, and everybody was talking about it, and nobody was talking about Barbara (and Jim) any more because nobody ever talked about two television programmes at once, especially when one of them was old hat. Alf Ramsey had turned into Alf Garnett – Alf Ramsey had just won the World Cup for England, and nobody, least of all the BBC, wanted his newly hallowed name besmirched by the fictional character’s bigotry and belligerence. But otherwise Alf was the same character, and, somewhat alarmingly, the people of Britain loved him, in ways that his creator might not have intended.