Keith Waterhouse - Collected Plays

ANGIE: Daddy was a lieutenant-general.

ROGER: But your bedsitter accent demoted him to major. Education?

ANGIE: I ran away from all the best schools.

ROGER: CV?

ANGIE: I try to remain self-employed.

ROGER: Marital status?

ANGIE: The same.

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) And then, over that last glass of champagne, and possibly influenced by the fact that it was the last of seven, not counting the intervening claret, you launched into a completely new scenario, the opening line being:

ANGIE: I think I’m in love.

ROGER: I thought at first you didn’t mean me at all and I was to be your agony uncle. (To ANGIE.) I bet he’s married.

ANGIE: Yes, he is, much to my annoyance.

ROGER: Are they always?

ANGIE: There’s no always about it. I don’t make a practice of falling in love.

ROGER: And are we allowed to know who is the lucky recipient of this exclusive affection?

ANGIE: It would be you, silly, if you weren’t being so pompous.

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) It was a good lunch we were having, the champagne was flowing, you were relaxed and happy, and you did feel a wave of love towards me… (To ANGIE.) I’m not really pompous, am I?

ANGIE: You can be. I don’t mind, it’s quite endearing.

ROGER: And how do I unpompously get you to repeat what you’ve just said?

ANGIE: That I’m in love?

ROGER: That you think you’re in love.

ANGIE: I am. Madly.

ROGER: So what’s to be done about it?

ANGIE: That’s rather up to you.

ROGER: I wish it were. But you know my situation.

ANGIE: Yes, and you have an adorable baby boy with whom I’m even more in love, and I’m talking lots of nonsense. Thank you for a lovely lunch. Must dash. (She gathers up her things and plants a big kiss on his cheek.) Mmm — there!

She exits.

He contemplates for a moment and then crosses into:

The patio of ROGER’s house/ANGIE’s flat.

GUNBY T. GUNBY is present, having drinks with JUDITH. Helping himself to a drink, ROGER joins them. GUNBY and JUDITH remain in conversation during the following narrative aside:

ROGER: That evening Gunby T. Gunby came in for drinks on his way back from slagging off a restaurant in Slough for the Good Living Guide. I was glad of the intrusion. You and I had only had lunch. But the deception had started, and I was already leading a double life. Forever after, for so long as it lasted, I should be two people, one going through the motions of domestic and business life, the other involved, on whatever level, with you. (He reluctantly tries to come down to earth.)

GUNBY: What do you think, Roger?

ROGER: About?

GUNBY: I was saying Judith ought to try her hand at television.

ROGER: Doing what?

JUDITH: Well — not reading the weather!

GUNBY: She is a cookery writer! Her own programme! I’ve some good contacts with daytime TV in the North. Worth exploring, wouldn’t you say?

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) And immediately I thought: the North, that means overnight, I could take you to a hotel. It was how I beginning to think and that was how it was to be for sixteen months. God forgive me, if Timothy had been rushed to hospital and Judith had gone along to hold his little hand, I should have thought that gives me more time with Angie. (To JUDITH and GUNBY.) Well worth exploring. Good idea.

JUDITH: (To GUNBY.) Would you like some more olives?

GUNBY: Oh, please…and some of those little salty bikkies!

JUDITH exits into the house. ANGIE enters her flat where she takes off her coat and begins brushing her hair.

(Confidentially.) I saw that mysterious young lady of yours a couple of nights ago.

ROGER: Angie.

GUNBY: With that little turd Ben Cheevers.

ROGER: Yes, it turns out she used to work for him. Where was this, then?

GUNBY: At Le Bistro.

ROGER: Two nights ago.

GUNBY: God, that chocolate soufflé!

JUDITH enters with a plate of canapés.

As JUDITH and GUNBY converse, ROGER enters into a future conversation with ANGIE.

ROGER: I wanted every scrap of news about you, anything that might be a piece of the jigsaw. I wish you’d said you knew Le Bistro almost as well as I did, Angie — that you’d been taken there so often it was a marvel we hadn’t seen one another there.

ANGIE: I never said it was my first visit.

ROGER: You never said it wasn’t. And why didn’t you tell me you’d been there with Ben Cheevers a couple of nights earlier?

ANGIE: Why should I? It wasn’t important.

ROGER: You could have said you’d forgotten.

ANGIE: I had, almost. And it isn’t important, darling. Going to places with you makes them seem altogether different from going to them with him.

ROGER: What places? Which places?

ANGIE: Roger, you are not going to put me in the witness box! (She turns her back on him.)

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) I just couldn’t help myself, Angie. I didn’t even want to know, that was the ridiculous thing. What the hell did it matter where you’d been with him? Then it came back to me that that wasn’t what I’d asked. What I did want to know was why you were so cagey about telling me what you said was of no importance anyway.

JUDITH and GUNBY bring him back to the present.

JUDITH: Roger?

ROGER: Yes?

JUDITH: Gunby’s leaving.

GUNBY: I have a table booked at the Ivy. An urgent appointment with the eggs Benedict.

ROGER: Give my regards to anyone I know…

JUDITH shows GUNBY out.

(In another future conversation.) Our third or was it our fourth lunch was at the Ivy, when with our ankles intertwined under the tablecloth I blurted out: Look, are we having an affair or not?

ANGIE: (Demurely.) It’s not for me to say.

ROGER: We’re not getting anywhere, are we?

ANGIE: You can always turn back if you want to.

ROGER: Do you want me to?

ANGIE: No, I should be very sad if you did.

ROGER: Then we are having an affair. Or we’re about to.

ANGIE: We must be.

ROGER: (As a narrative aside; returning to the patio scene.) But you wouldn’t say where we were going to have it.

JUDITH returns and clears away the glasses.

JUDITH: I wish you wouldn’t come home with lipstick on your cheek, Roger. You know it doesn’t suit you.

ROGER: Sorry. A gushing client.

JUDITH: You might at least invent a name for her. You’re not having it off somewhere, are you?

ROGER: If I were, I’d very much like to know when.

JUDITH: Well, I don’t know what you get up to when you’re locked away in your creative sessions, do I? Or who you get up.

JUDITH goes back into the house.

ROGER moves to:

A champagne bar/the patio of ROGER’s house.

There are two full champagne glasses on the bar, and ANGIE’s coat is draped over a bar stool. ROGER picks up his glass.

ROGER: We did get into one bad habit, though — staggering round to Freddy’s Club for one more bottle of champagne after a long, long lunch… So it was that during all those sixteen months with you I was never entirely sober. If we didn’t have an Our Restaurant, my darling, we certainly had an Our Drink. I bet we must have put away a good six hundred bottles of Lanson Black Label from the start to the finish of our loving. Three hundred magnums. Seventy-odd Methuselahs. Christ — if they gave you fivepence back on the bottle like they do with Newcastle Brown, we could have stayed legless for three days on the empties. I’m bleeding, Angie. Think of the good things, that’s what you always said.