Funny Girl

by Nick Hornby

  The first episode had taken them a few days to write and the second a couple of weeks. They had been talking about the third for longer than Tony wanted to calculate, but hadn’t found a story, or even a fragment of a story, and they hadn’t written a single line. Diane was convinced that Simmonds’s love life, the details of which seemed to have been borrowed wholesale from her own, was a comedy gold mine. Tony, on the other hand, was beginning to feel the urge to hang himself.

  ‘What’s her problem?’ said Tony after a day in which they’d produced a half-page about Simmonds’s cat, a sudden, new and desperate invention.

  The half-page was now lying crumpled on the floor, just next to the waste-paper basket.

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Diane.

  ‘In all these series, everyone has a problem,’ said Tony. ‘The Steptoes hate each other, and they’re poor, and Harold thinks he should be living a different kind of life altogether. Alf Garnett in Till Death, he’s a man out of time. The world’s moving on without him. Barbara and Jim were different in every way, but they loved each other, and they wanted to make their marriage work …’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re all so depressing, those programmes,’ said Diane. ‘None of my friends want to watch them.’

  Tony stared at her.

  ‘Depressing?’

  ‘What’s funny about rag-and-bone men? Or a horrible old man and his ugly wife going on and on about Winston Churchill and the Queen? And Barbara and Jim … No offence, but they spent four years arguing about books and politics and then they got divorced! Nobody watches them because they’re such a drag.’

  ‘What are you talking about, nobody watches them? Everybody watches them!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Diane. ‘My mum and dad. My granny. My cousins in Devon. People like that. But nobody I actually want to spend any time with.’

  Tony suddenly felt old. For years, he and Bill and all the other writers of their generation had fought for the right to say things about the world they lived in, and then, suddenly, they’d broken through and there was this new England, full of books and films and music and television programmes that said real things about real people. And all this stuff had made the country seem brighter, sharper, funnier, younger. Now Diane was saying to him, as far as he could make out, that she was only interested in the brightness and the youth that these things had brought into being, the clothes and the fashion and the money.

  ‘So what’s her problem?’ said Tony.

  He hoped he didn’t sound as tired to Diane as he sounded to himself, but he suspected she wouldn’t notice.

  ‘She hasn’t got any problems,’ said Diane. ‘That’s what’s so great about her. Everyone loves Sophie.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tony. ‘There’s the title, anyway. Now all we need is the rest of it.’

  Diane began the next working morning with a passionate plea for the restoration of Simmonds’s cat.

  ‘It can be someone for her to talk to,’ said Diane.

  ‘Do you have a cat?’ said Tony, just to make conversation.

  ‘Ringo’s more of a kitten, really,’ said Diane.

  ‘And do you talk to Ringo?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Diane.

  Tony had suspected as much.

  ‘And what do you say to him?’

  ‘Oh, just … I don’t know, really. I ask him whether he’s hungry, and I tell him off if he’s been naughty.’

  ‘Right,’ said Tony.

  ‘And I practise interviews on him.’

  ‘Does that work?’

  ‘He doesn’t say much back. But it helps me work out whether the questions are interesting.’

  ‘Cat body language?’

  Diane looked at him as if he were the mad one.

  ‘No. He’s a cat. He doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. But when I say them out loud I can tell whether they’re daft or not.’

  ‘Oh. Right you are.’

  ‘My flatmate used to think I was potty. It was probably why she moved out.’

  Tony had the urge to beat his head against the desk. He should never have been employed as a writer by anybody, that much was clear, but he was beginning to wonder whether he was mentally capable of any kind of work.

  ‘You had a flatmate?’

  ‘Yes. Mandy. We didn’t get on terribly well, though.’

  ‘Well, I think Simmonds should have a flatmate.’

  ‘Instead of a cat?’

  ‘Yes. Instead of a cat.’

  Somewhere in Tony’s brain, a heavy, rusting piece of machinery began to turn. He was surprised that Diane couldn’t hear the awful wheezing and clanking.

  ‘And I think she should be coloured.’

  ‘Coloured?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know any coloured people?’

  ‘One or two. Through Bill, to tell you the truth, but still.’

  ‘But … How do we get an actress to play a coloured person?’

  ‘I think what we do is find a coloured actress.’

  ‘Oh. Gosh. Yes. Of course.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Won’t it be too depressing?’

  ‘Why does it have to be depressing?’

  ‘It’s a serious problem.’

  ‘It is, but she doesn’t have to be. She could just be a person.’

  ‘And nobody ever mentions it?’

  ‘They’d mention it sometimes. But it’s still a show about Simmonds. It just gives us something extra to work with. Let’s talk to Dennis and Sophie.’

  He knew how the conversation would go; he knew that they’d be intrigued, stimulated, encouraging. He was more interested in the chat he’d have with Bill over lunch one day, in which he’d just happen to mention that he knew coloured girls, was working with one, even. Perhaps he could be proud of this job after all.

  Sophie met the odd TV company for coffee and the occasional theatre producer for lunch, but she spent a lot of time shopping, and lying in bed with Dennis in the evenings, watching TV and talking about Everyone Loves Sophie. They wanted to work together as a couple, they loved the new idea that Tony and Diane had talked about, they couldn’t wait until the new show was given the go-ahead. They never spoke about it, but they both wanted 1965 back. The peak that they had reached then was only a short distance away, just up there, and how hard could it possibly be to climb those few feet? The difficult part, surely, had been scrambling up the slope underneath them, miles and miles of it.

  Sophie put off going to see the doctor because she didn’t want to know what he would tell her. It was as simple as that. She hid everything from Dennis, and managed to delay the retching by staying in bed with her eyes closed. This seemed to work until Dennis had left the house. Once she was vertical, the nausea would overcome her and she’d spend the next hour jumping out of a hot bath to kneel beside the toilet.

  And then, finally, she knew she could ignore it no longer. She was not, of course, surprised by the news the doctor eventually gave her, after forty-eight hours in which she hardly spoke to Dennis at all. She tried to quell the feeling of dread, because she knew that there were millions of women who prayed for exactly this terrible thing to happen.

  ‘What if Sophie Simmonds were pregnant?’ she said when Dennis got home that evening.

  He laughed.

  ‘That would be very funny,’ he said, and for a moment she thought he meant that there were comic possibilities in the idea, that the show could accommodate such a calamity.

  ‘We create a completely new show because we don’t like her being a mother and she gets pregnant anyway.’

  She burst into tears then.

  ‘She is pregnant,’ said Sophie eventually, and Dennis was just about to argue with her when he understood.

  She could see that he was excited by the news but was trying to look sombre and anxious, for her benefit, and this broke her heart in a different way.

  ‘You shouldn’t have to be sad,’ she said. ‘It’s a good t
hing.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I love you, I’ve loved you since the moment I met you, and I want to have a child with you. And I know it’s bad timing, but I can make you happy. We can make you happy. The baby and I. I know it.’

  She hugged him.

  ‘And we can still do the show,’ he said. ‘Just … not yet, that’s all.’

  There was nothing to think about, but she thought about it anyway, and when she couldn’t think about it any longer, she got on a train to talk to her mother.

  Gloria took the day off work and they met in Blackpool, in the restaurant of R. H. O. Hills. It was much harder to get to Morecambe on the train, and when Gloria suggested the meeting place, Sophie felt a little thrill of something that she couldn’t quite describe. R. H. O. Hills suddenly seemed like the only place in the world where she could understand the length of the journey she had taken. It was the other end, after all. It was only when she sat down and breathed in the familiar department-store smell of pipe smoke, perfume, leather and tea that she wondered whether she was thinking about how far she’d come because she knew she’d stopped. Gloria hadn’t arrived, so she ordered the afternoon tea – sandwiches and anything you wanted from the cake trolley – and looked around, trying to see if there was anyone she recognized. She’d worn a headscarf to cover up her blonde hair, but after a little while she decided that she’d like it if somebody recognized her, so she took the scarf off. The couple on the next table stared, and by the time her mother arrived she was signing autographs.

  Gloria smiled proudly, and sat down, but fifteen minutes later they hadn’t managed more than a couple of minutes of an unbroken conversation. It was a Tuesday afternoon, so it wasn’t as if there was a queue. But those who did come to say hello were in no hurry to leave. One woman took a great deal of pleasure and a lot of time explaining that her sister had been upstairs in Toys when Sophie was downstairs in Cosmetics; the next woman was adamant that Sophie had been in her daughter’s class at school, although Sophie didn’t recognize the name.

  ‘Cynthia Johnstone?’

  ‘She’s Cynthia Perkins now,’ said the woman. ‘But that probably won’t help.’

  Sophie screwed up her face, as if to suggest that happy memories of Cynthia Johnstone were only seconds away from returning.

  ‘Well,’ said the woman. ‘It must be hard, when you’re having tea with the Prime Minister and all that.’

  Sophie could still chant the register, Anderson to Young, from her class, and there was no Johnstone. It went from Harvey to Jones. Cynthia’s mother was quite wrong: it wasn’t hard to remember. Sophie hadn’t met many people before she moved to London. There were school friends and her colleagues in the shop and a couple of boyfriends and that was it. It was everyone she’d met since that confused her, an endless stream of faces looming in front of her, all of them saying that they’d met her before, at a party or a meeting or a recording.

  ‘Oh,’ said Gloria. ‘Cynthia Johnstone. Pretty girl. Good at needlework.’

  A doubtful look crossed the woman’s face and then vanished when she realized she was being offered a way out.

  ‘That’s her,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Sophie. ‘Remember me to her, won’t you?’

  ‘I will,’ said the woman, but of course the whole point of the conversation was that Cynthia Johnstone had never forgotten her in the first place.

  They finished their tea quickly and left, before anyone else could take Cynthia’s mother’s place.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sophie on the way out. She’d put her headscarf back on.

  ‘She wasn’t going to leave until we’d given in,’ said Gloria. ‘But I suppose it’s not much to ask.’

  If she hadn’t come home, Sophie wouldn’t have understood why anyone was entitled to ask for anything at all, but now she could see that whatever it was she’d achieved had to be shared.

  They went for a walk down to the South Pier and past the baths, the scene of Sophie’s first triumph. It was sunny but very windy, and she remembered the gooseflesh on her arms that day.

  ‘I won Miss Blackpool,’ she said to her mother. ‘In 1964.’

  ‘You never did.’

  ‘I did. And I told them I didn’t want to do it.’

  It sounded preposterous now, the story of a fantasist, and she was glad she’d done something since.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to stay here for a year. I thought I’d get stuck.’

  ‘I’d have been so proud, if I’d seen that,’ said Gloria.

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. There was nothing to see. I didn’t even stand on the podium to get my tiara.’

  ‘That’s what I would have been proud of,’ said her mother. ‘I didn’t want you to stay here, looking after George. I wanted you out.’

  The conversation, with its intimations of disappointment and imprisonment, reminded her of why she’d come home and why she’d chosen her mother of all people to talk to.

  ‘Mum, I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘Oh, Sophie. You’re not even wed.’

  She’d forgotten that bit. She’d forgotten it would mean anything to her mother anyway.

  ‘That’s not the important part.’

  ‘It will be to a lot of people. It will be to your father. Are you going to tell him today too?’

  ‘I’m not going to see him. I just wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Am I allowed to know who the father is?’

  ‘You can probably guess. You saw it before I did.’

  ‘That nice Dennis?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophie, and she smiled in anticipation of her mother’s pleasure.

  ‘He’s not as nice as he looks, then.’

  ‘He’s wonderful,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Will he marry you?’

  ‘Yes, he’ll marry me, but will you forget about that side of things?’

  ‘What do you want me to say, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought you’d understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Did you want to have me? Or did you panic when you found out?’

  ‘Panic? Why would I panic? We’d been trying for two years.’

  ‘Because you couldn’t stick it.’

  ‘I couldn’t stick him. He was killing me. And then I fell in love with someone. I didn’t have what you’ve got.’

  ‘What have I got?’

  And her mother laughed – not bitterly, but with genuine disbelief.

  She hadn’t seen Brian for ages. She hadn’t needed an agent, because her career had been taking care of itself. He was at his desk, leafing through a huge pile of eight by tens, all of them featuring young, pretty, hopeful girls.

  ‘She’s nice,’ said Sophie, pointing at the photo he had just discarded.

  ‘I’m a happily married man,’ he said defensively.

  ‘I know,’ said Sophie. ‘I was just saying. She could make you some money.’

  He picked it up again, examined it and wrinkled up his nose.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She looks clever.’

  Sophie laughed. It was impossible to be offended by an agent who made no attempt to disguise his self-interest, she found. He didn’t like clever girls because they didn’t want gold paint sprayed all over them. They wanted to act, and acting was a risky business.

  ‘Talking of clever,’ he said.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘How’s your series? Have they finished writing it yet?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Brian. ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Can you imagine how many girls have come in here saying that? Nothing to do with me, by the way. Any of them.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Sophie. ‘You’re a happily married man.’

  ‘Ask Patsy, if you don’t believe me.’
/>   ‘I believe you. Anyway, what do you say to them, when they come in here and tell you they’re up the spout?’

  ‘I recommend a very nice doctor in Harley Street. He’s not cheap, but he’s safe and he’s very discreet.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘No. I’m not going to do that.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m not a medical man, but I don’t think there’s any other alternative.’

  ‘Apart from the obvious.’

  Brian looked puzzled.

  ‘It’s not obvious to me,’ he said.

  ‘Some people, when they’re pregnant, they have a baby,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘People. Everybody.’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean. But I’m presuming we’re not in that category.’

  ‘I think we might be.’

  He put the pictures he was holding down and gave her his full attention.

  ‘Start again,’ he said. ‘I’m lost.’

  ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  Telling Brian she was going to have a baby was different, she could now see, from telling him that she was pregnant. The latter was a kind of temporary affliction; the former went some way towards helping him imagine a future in which Sophie was the mother of a small human being.