Keith Waterhouse: Collected Plays

JUDITH now bears down on them.

JUDITH: Do you live here in Ealing, Miss Caxton?

ANGIE: No, Islington.

JUDITH: Oh good. Then you don’t have far to go.

ANGIE: Even so, I must dash. (Shaking hands with JUDITH.) Thank you for having me. Goodbye.

ANGIE exits.

JUDITH, showing her out, turns back to ROGER.

JUDITH: I certainly haven’t had her — how about you?

ROGER now addresses the now absent ANGIE.

ROGER: Later I found the christening present you’d left for Timothy on the hall table. We’d met only twice before but that early Victorian silver rattle must have cost your overdraft a good eighty to a hundred pounds. I was touched and exasperated. It was preposterous. At my time of life I was falling in love with you — and that was preposterous too…

The christening party scene is lost as ROGER steps into his London office at Peck and Piper.

ROGER’s office/ANGIE’s dingy flat.

ROGER dials ANGIE’s number. It rings for a moment, then we hear her answering machine.

ANGIE’s voice: This is Angela Caxton and Belle Parsons. We’re not taking calls at the moment but if you’d care to leave a message we’ll get back to you. Speak after the bleep…

There’s an electronic bleep.

ROGER: (Into the phone.) Angie, it’s Roger — Roger Piper. About our lunch. I wonder if you could manage Wednesday at Le Bistro. Would you ring me back? Bye… Er — at my office number, that is. (He hangs up.) The bureaucracy involved in starting an affair is incredible. I rang you but you were out. Or rather you said you were out. I rang again. This time you’d forgotten to switch on your answering machine. Or you said you had. (He picks up the phone and dials her number again.)

The telephone rings several times.

ANGELA appears in her dressing gown. She looks impassively at the telephone until it stops ringing. She is petulant as she and ROGER launch into the subsequent conversation. She changes to go out for lunch during the following:

ANGIE: If I said I was out, how could I have been in?

ROGER: It’s possible.

ANGIE: That I was in when I was out, or out when I was in?

ROGER: Don’t be more confusing than you can help, Angie.

ANGIE: Angela, thank you very much. You’re the one who’s confusing. How do you make out I was out, when I was in to say I wasn’t in?

ROGER: I’m talking about what you said later, Angela ! You said you were out and you never got my message.

ANGIE: It’s true — I didn’t. My answering machine wasn’t working.

ROGER: But I spoke to your answering machine. Several times!

ANGIE: It never passed on the message.

ROGER: (With a great effort at patience.) All right. I had your address. I sent you a note. Would you meet me at Le Bistro, and if you couldn’t make it would you ring me?

ANGIE: I wasn’t able to. I told you — my answering machine wasn’t working.

ROGER: You don’t make telephone calls with your answering machine! Anyway, that isn’t the point. The point is that you didn’t turn up.

ANGIE: Well, perhaps I had to see someone.

ROGER: Then why couldn’t you just say so? (Pause.) Whom did you have to see?

ANGIE: It’s ages ago. How can I possibly remember?

ROGER: By looking in your diary.

ANGIE: I don’t always put things in my diary. If you really want to know, I think I had to have lunch with Ben Cheevers.

ROGER: Oh, him.

ANGIE: He’s a friend. Or aren’t I allowed to have friends?

ROGER: Of course you are, but why did you never call me back to make it another day? Why did I have to keep calling you ?

ANGIE: There you go again — raking up the past.

ROGER: You can be so bloody exasperating.

ANGIE: Now you’re raking up the present.

She exits. CHARLES enters ROGER’s office carrying a file.

CHARLES: We ought to discuss the Penn’s Shortbread Products account. How about lunch?

ROGER: Sorry, I have a lunch, Charles.

CHARLES: Entertaining a client?

ROGER: Prospective one, since you ask.

CHARLES: I hope she turns up this time. (He tosses the file on ROGER’s desk.) None of my business, Roger, but if you take this with you, you won’t be reduced to doing the Evening Standard word game.

CHARLES exits.

ROGER crosses to:

A restaurant.

ROGER pours himself a glass of champagne.

ROGER: But turn up you did, eventually… I arrived half an hour early, like a teenager on his first date. And I wonder how many hours amounting to days, weeks, I’ve whiled away in souvenir boutiques and Hallmark card shops during that long, last haul between half-past twelve and one. And always you’d arrive half an hour late gushing apologies and within seconds you’d have the restaurant in turmoil.

ANGIE flurries in as anticipated, kisses him on both cheeks and knocks over the champagne bottle.

ANGIE: Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry — I had to wait for Belle coming home — she’s lost her key again — oh dear, did I do that? — how stupid of me — but it is quite a small table, isn’t it? Not really a table for two at all.

ROGER: It has been a table for one in its time.

ANGIE: What’s wrong with that nice big table over there?

ROGER: That’s a table for six.

ANGIE: We could play musical chairs round it.

ROGER: And it’s permanently reserved for Saatchi and Saatchi. Waiter — another bottle.

ANGIE: Do you always drink champagne?

ROGER: When I’m with effervescent company. That’s a lovely dress.

ANGIE: Thank you. It was given to me.

ROGER: By?

ANGIE: Oh, just a friend. He found it among some stuff his wife had sorted out for Oxfam, and thought I’d like it.

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) The mysterious Ben Cheevers, I had no doubt. For a long time after you told me that story I gleaned a good deal of comfort, on a juvenile, snickering level, out of thinking what a cheapskate he must be. (To ANGIE.) I hope you’re hungry.

ANGIE: Starving. You must be too. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting — were you in a tizz?

ROGER: I might have been if your friend Belle had been a little later getting home.

ANGIE: I was furious. Usually when she loses her key she’s back in time for breakfast.

ROGER: What does this night-owl do?

ANGIE: I’ve never been really sure.

ROGER: But you’re flatmates.

ANGIE: I know. She used to work at the Chelsea Auction Galleries. That’s where we first met. The only real job I’ve ever had.

ROGER: With Ben Cheevers.

ANGIE: (Guardedly.) Do you know him?

ROGER: Only by reputation.

ANGIE: Reputations aren’t always what they’re reputed to be.

ROGER: So when was this?

ANGIE: Six years ago. But then Belle was fired — for going to bed with one of the porters.

ROGER: Was that anybody’s business but theirs?

ANGIE: In company time? On a Louis the sixteenth chaise-longue ? In the firm’s pantechnicon? On a double yellow line in the King’s Road?

ROGER: Ah.

ANGIE: So perhaps you can work out for yourself what she’s been doing since.

ROGER: She doesn’t bounce up and down on beds for a living, does she?

ANGIE: I believe so.

ROGER: You mean she’s a prostitute?

ANGIE: I think it’s called being an escort. She’s got a terrific collection of hotel bookmatches.

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) And the subject was not so much dismissed as banished. I don’t believe we ever had a single conversation we reached the end of. We did get one or two things settled, thought. (To ANGIE.) Background?