‘Oh. Yes. Of course. I’m staying at the Russell Square Guest House. It’s not in Russell Square, by the way.’
‘Ah.’ And then, when no further information was forthcoming, ‘Where is it, exactly?’
‘Oh. You’re very kind. Farringdon Road. I’m going home in the morning. I’ll be leaving at around 10.30.’
‘Right-o.’
Dennis realized that a home address might be useful too. Sophie’s rage was unlikely to have subsided by the morning.
‘And actually, where do you live? Will you write it all down?’
As she fumbled in her bag for a piece of paper, Sophie’s taxi drove away.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gloria. ‘She’s gone without you.’
‘Don’t worry about that.’
‘Tell her that I don’t want anything,’ said Gloria.
‘I will.’
It was sincerely meant, but Dennis knew it couldn’t possibly be true.
He hailed a cab, and when he arrived at the restaurant he found Sophie sitting on her own. There was a God after all.
‘What were you talking to her about?’ she said.
‘Can I get a drink first?’
They stopped serving alcohol at ten o’clock on a Sunday and he wanted to get a couple of drinks down as quickly as possible. He’d been rattled by Gloria’s appearance, and the show had not gone very well. The cast had tried their best, and Nancy had tried too hard, but since Barbara and Jim had begun using the services of a marriage guidance counsellor, the jokes seemed to have been pushed out to the edge of the script. He ordered a bottle of beer and a glass of wine, and drank the beer before answering Sophie’s question.
‘I asked her where she lived.’
‘What did you do that for?’
‘In case it came in handy.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘She lives in Morecambe.’
‘Why?’
‘Maybe you should ask her yourself. I didn’t know that living in Morecambe required an explanation.’
‘After all that fuss, she’s a few miles up the coast.’
Dennis was about to point out, flippantly, that Morecambe’s proximity to Blackpool seemed like an odd detail to get snagged on, but he stopped himself just in time when he worked out why it had seemed remarkable. Clearly, Dennis had never thought about it much before, but on the whole mothers tended not to dump their children and disappear off with colleagues, never to be seen again. Sophie must have spent a lot of her younger life in a perpetual state of shame and humiliation. Gloria should be living somewhere a long, long way away, somewhere unimaginable, Patagonia or Tasmania.
‘What’s she doing in London anyway?’
‘I’m presuming that she came to see you.’
‘Well, I’m not going all the way to bloody Morecambe,’ said Sophie.
‘You don’t have to,’ said Dennis. ‘I know where she’s staying.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Sophie. ‘What should I do?’
‘Do what you want.’
‘You think I should go. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone back.’
‘No, that’s not what I think. I wanted you to have the choice. I didn’t want you sitting here all agonized because you’d made a mistake.’
‘That was it,’ said Sophie.
‘That was what?’
‘I’ve just realized. That was it, and I missed it, because I was too angry. That was what it was all about, right from the beginning. I wanted to make myself so famous that my mother would read about me in the paper or see me on the telly and come and find me.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’d tell her to bugger off.’
‘There you are. You’ve done it all.’
‘But I missed it. Because I was too angry. I didn’t notice it was happening.’
‘Well, I suppose that was always likely to happen, in the circumstances.’
‘So now what?’
‘It all depends on whether you have any use for a clearly rather pathetic and very remorseful middle-aged lady who used to be your mother.’
‘I don’t, really.’
‘Do you want an apology? Because she seemed to me like a woman who wanted to offer one.’
‘Oh, bugger,’ Sophie said. ‘I do, I think.’ And then, ‘Thank you.’
Clive, Nancy and Bill turned up, tipsy and loud and stupid. Nancy immediately launched into a story about a friend of hers who had performed a sexual act on a former government minister in a box at the Royal Opera House. She seemed to have a suspiciously large number of friends who got up to that kind of thing, Dennis had noticed, and yet the stories always seemed to contain detail that friends would never have provided. Clive also seemed to have taken the view that they were all thinly disguised autobiography, and as a consequence he always listened with rapt, gleeful attention, like a small boy sat cross-legged in front of the family radiogram during Dick Barton.
‘Could you take me home?’ Sophie said to Dennis quietly, amidst the gasps of shock and the roars of laughter.
Not only was there a God, but He was fair and just and wise: Dennis’s dealings with Gloria had somehow earned him another fifteen-minute cab ride.