Hair ended tumultuously, with members of the audience joining the cast to dance onstage. Sophie was dragged up there by the young man with the tongue. She reached behind her for Dennis’s hand and he pretended he hadn’t noticed, but as she ran down the aisle he realized that he might never have another evening with her, and she might be whisked straight from the stage to somewhere else, a party or a discotheque or a young man’s flat, and it would be entirely due to his cowardice and awkwardness and embarrassment. So he followed her, caught up with her, and they climbed the steps to the stage together.
He wasn’t the worst dancer up there, and he made sure that he positioned himself just behind the person who was, a portly man in a pinstriped suit for whom the Age of Aquarius had clearly dawned: he was throwing himself around with the air of someone who was never going back to his merchant bank ever again. He was throwing his arms and legs around as if they were not his, and he was singing along at the top of his voice to a song whose words he didn’t know. Dennis took the view that he couldn’t compete even if he’d wanted to, and that understatement was the key.
Sophie had been pulled to the front of the stage, where the audience could see her, but she managed to edge back towards him, and she took his hand and shouted into his ear.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘What a thing.’
‘Thank you for asking me. I’ll try and think of somewhere as exciting to take you.’
‘I’d like that.’
He kept moving to the music, just in case she thought he didn’t want to be up there. To his surprise, he did – but then, he wanted to be anywhere Sophie was, no matter how much embarrassment might ensue. And anyway, proximity to Sophie meant that embarrassment was no longer the terrifying ogre he had always believed it to be. Perhaps he would wake up the next morning realizing that he’d made an utter ass of himself, but there were worse animals than the ass. And in London you saw asses wandering around everywhere. Nobody seemed to mind, much. Dennis had spent an awful lot of time not making an ass of himself, and he didn’t have anything to show for it.
The third significant advance came immediately on top of the other two: they spent the night together. That is to say, Dennis went to sleep in Sophie’s bed, alongside Sophie, and woke up with her the next morning. This was obviously of greater significance than the other advances; if anything had happened between the sleeping and the waking, he’d have described the third advance as being of greater significance than all the other advances in human history combined. Nothing did happen, however, and it didn’t happen for the reasons that most great advances don’t happen: failure of nerve, incompetence, muddled thinking, idiocy.
They had left the theatre on a high and went to a party that Sophie had been invited to while she was up on the stage dancing. She was unable to say who it was who’d invited her, or who was throwing the party, but whoever it was had taken over Sybilla’s in Piccadilly Circus, just around the corner from the theatre. There was a queue to get in, and a terrifying scrum at the bar, and there were strip lights around the dance floor that pointed artfully upwards, so that everyone wearing a miniskirt ended up providing a free show to those lucky enough to have obtained a drink and a table. Dennis would have left immediately, but he didn’t want to be the tortoise, so he stuck it out until she made a face and gestured towards the exit with her thumb.
‘Take me home and come in for scrambled eggs and a drink,’ said Sophie, so they found a taxi and went to Kensington Church Street.
Dennis wasn’t, of course, expecting to sleep in Sophie’s bed. Even when she kissed him, in the hallway of the flat, as soon as he’d closed the front door behind him, he didn’t dare to presume that it indicated anything in particular. The last girl he’d kissed in earnest had been Edith, some years before. (Kissing was not always an earnest activity, but nothing he did with Edith had ever been much fun.) An awful lot seemed to have changed in the world since then: there was, it seemed to him, simply more sex around. Only that very evening they had been to see what his mother might describe, might already have described, as a nude musical, and there had been no such thing as a nude musical, not in a respectable theatre anyway, before or during his marriage. What did he know about sex or women these days? Not very much, he suspected, and perhaps all evenings out ended like this these days, with the woman pinning the man back against a door. He hesitated for a moment before kissing her back, not because he was suddenly, after all the years of pining, confused about how he felt, but because he wanted to make sure that he wasn’t misinterpreting or overreacting in some way. Maybe she would suddenly break off the embrace and then ask him politely whether she could take his coat, and they would never mention it again. Maybe that’s what happened after you’d been to see a nude musical.
She pulled away and looked at him.
‘Gosh,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t be sorry.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Would you mind if I made you scrambled eggs in the morning?’