Dead Room Farce

by Simon Brett

  Lisa returned with the coffee, and also a printed list on a laminated plastic sheet. ‘Sandwiches,’ she announced. ‘If you say what you want, Charles, I’ll ring through and then they’ll deliver round lunch-time.’

  ‘Oh, I think we’ll go to the pub,’ said Mark. ‘It’s so much easier.’

  Lisa looked peeved, and spoke as if this was not a new argument. ‘It may be easier, but it always takes longer, and we’re already behind . . .’

  ‘See how far we’ve got by one o’clock,’ said Mark. ‘If we’ve picked up a bit of time, we’ll go to the pub.’

  Maybe that wasn’t the reason why the morning’s second session of reading was more fluent than the first. Maybe Charles Paris was just getting into his stride. But the prospect of a drink was a real incentive.

  Throughout the morning Lisa had given the orders, but as the hands of the studio clock approached one, it was Mark who said, ‘OK, let’s break it there. Well, we’ve done pretty well. Think we’ve earned lunch at the pub.’ He turned defiantly to Lisa as he said the words, daring her to challenge him.

  She didn’t. She held back, and replied lightly, ‘As you wish.’

  ‘You coming?’

  The blonde head shook. ‘Got a few phone calls to do. And a bit of editing.’ As Mark and Charles gathered up their coats, she couldn’t help saying, ‘Be sure you’re back by two.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mark. And then, with the slightest edge of irony, ‘Of course, my dear.’

  As a general rule, Charles Paris tried to avoid having a lunch-time drink when he was working, particularly working on something that required as much concentration as Dark Promises. But this time he wouldn’t be having a drink for purely recreational reasons; it was a medical necessity. His system cried out for irrigation, and that had to be a pint of bitter.

  As he felt the first mouthful go down, he knew his decision had been the right one. God, it made him feel better.

  Chapter Three

  HE WAS QUITE good. Really. At least he reckoned he was. Just a couple of pints, and two sandwiches to do the blotting-paper job. And it was only a few minutes after two – well, two-fifteen – when they got back to the studio.

  But Lisa Wilson’s face was unamused. It wore the kind of unamused look that, from primeval times, wives have perfected to greet husbands coming home later than they promised. Charles reflected that Mark Lear had maybe not landed so perfectly on his feet, after all. The attractions of a younger woman were presumably avid sex and blind adoration, not the cross-armed resentment of an aggrieved spouse.

  ‘OK, straight through to studio,’ Lisa said brusquely. ‘We’re behind schedule.’

  ‘Yes, just nip for a pee,’ said Charles. He wasn’t sure this was a good idea. A pee so soon after two pints of bitter could frequently be the precursor to a busy sequence of pees. Still, he did feel the need.

  When he came back, Lisa was bringing Mark up to date on the phone calls she had made during the lunch break. ‘I think you should follow up on it.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mark breezily.

  ‘No, soon. I’ve found out that the market’s there. I thought we’d agreed that you would do the follow-up on those kind of openings.’

  ‘Yes, sure, sure.’

  She lifted the cordless phone off its base and held it out to him, along with a business card. ‘There’s the number.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m not going to do it right now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s only half-past two. Everyone knows publishers don’t get back from lunch till three.’

  ‘You could leave a message.’

  ‘Not on a Friday afternoon. They all go home early on a Friday. POETS. Piss Off Early – Tomorrow’s Saturday.’ He sniggered at the recollected BBC joke.

  Lisa didn’t share his amusement. ‘I think you’ve got an outdated concept of how publishers work these days, Mark. It’s a hard-nosed, accountable business, like everything else.’ She waved the cordless phone in front of him. ‘Come on, are you going to do it?’

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Will you kindly allow me to be the judge of how I conduct my own business!’

  ‘Our business,’ said Lisa. But she didn’t press further. She put the phone back on its base, and they both seemed aware of Charles for the first time. Lisa answered the unintended interrogation in his expression. ‘Possibility of more work,’ she explained. ‘A lot of publishers going multimedia. CD-ROMs.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Charles, to whom these expressions were vaguely familiar, but not subjects of which he had a full understanding.

  ‘A lot of CD-ROM reference packages need an audio component,’ she elaborated. ‘Pronunciation dictionaries, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ said Charles, sounding as if he knew what she was talking about.

  Lisa Wilson looked at her watch with a degree of exasperation. ‘OK, we’d better get on.’

  Charles was incarcerated back in the studio, which was quite pleasant at first because the air-conditioning had been on throughout the lunch break. He set off again up the North Face of Madeleine Eglantine’s prose. It was currently the Second World War that was keeping Dark Promises’ perfectly matched lovers apart. Not only that, but the hero was also now at risk from the blandishments of a tempestuous Italian partisan beauty. Since the tempestuous Italian partisan beauty and the heroine seemed interchangeably wet, and the hero’s dullness was unalleviated, Charles Paris still found it difficult to summon up much interest in the proceedings.

  But the drink had helped. His body’s individual components felt more as if they were part of some functioning whole, and the pain behind his eyes had lifted. There were a few fluffs arising from his reduced sense of inhibition, but not as many as there had been before lunch.

  At least that was how the afternoon’s recording started. After three-quarters of an hour, however, the alcohol was beginning to wear off, the air had grown stale, and Charles felt his energy flagging. The dull headache had returned, his tongue seemed again swollen and ungainly, Madeleine Eglantine’s writing increasingly indigestible. As he stumbled to the end of a page on which there had been some dozen stops and starts, Lisa Wilson threw in the towel. ‘I’ve got to change the reel. Take a coffee break there.’

  ‘OK,’ said Charles gratefully. ‘And let me have some air, eh?’

  ‘Sure. Let him out, Mark.’ Lisa, preoccupied with the large reel-to-reel tape recorder, turned her back to the studio.

  There was no response and Charles noticed, through the refraction of the double glass, that his friend had gone to sleep. Lisa spotted this at the same moment and, though Charles couldn’t hear the words she actually used to wake Mark up, by a combination of lip-reading and simple deduction he managed to piece them together.

  Mark Lear rose to his feet, stretching, and pulled open the double doors. ‘Want to come out?’ He twiddled the key of the door’s dead-bolt, and asked inanely, ‘Or would you rather I incarcerated you in there for good?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Charles, rising from his seat and going through into the relatively fresh air of the cubicle. He too stretched out his arms. ‘Always worst bit of the day, early afternoon. That’s when most of us are at our biorhythmically lowest.’

  Lisa flashed a sharp look at Mark. ‘With some people, it’s hard to tell.’

  Her partner ignored the gibe. ‘Do you want a coffee, love?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Did you get a sandwich at lunch?’

  ‘Wasn’t time,’ Lisa answered shortly, as she reached for the telephone.

  ‘You’ve got a good business partner there,’ said Charles, when they were through in the sitting area and the kettle had been switched on.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mark agreed casually. ‘I’ve always been lucky with my back-up.’

  It was a splendidly dismissive remark, the kind that a BBC producer might often have made about his secretary. Charles wondered whether Mark was genuinely unaware that Lisa was doing all the work withi
n their partnership. But maybe that was just a reflection of another old BBC tradition. There had always been plenty of producers whose offices had been run entirely by their secretaries, and it had been a point of honour that that fact was never acknowledged. Charles wondered idly how the balance of power operated in Mark and Lisa’s personal relationship.

  His head was now aching horribly again. His mouth was dry and the dryness permeated his body; parts of his anatomy seemed to grind unlubricated against other parts. Mark saw the hand Charles passed painfully across his brow and said, ‘You need a top-up.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Alcohol level. Dropping below critical. Serious malfunction could result.’

  The conspiratorial tone and the pseudo-scientific jargon made Mark Lear sound like a naughty schoolboy, and this image was reinforced when he showed Charles the half-bottle of Teacher’s he had hidden in the cistern of the Gents’ lavatory.

  Mark took a long swig. ‘Wonderful. Ideal storage place.’ He winked. ‘No ladies come in here, by definition, and the water keeps the whisky perfectly chilled.’ He proffered the bottle to Charles. ‘Go on, this’ll pick you up.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I should . . .’ Apart from anything else, he was a Bell’s man. He’d never really been that fond of Teacher’s.

  ‘Go on.’

  Charles’s hesitation went the way of most good intentions. And the injection of alcohol did give him a predictable lift. But something about the whole episode felt shabby. Two middle-aged men in the Gents’, hiding from a woman to take illicit sips of booze . . . there wasn’t much dignity in the scenario.

  Of course, it put Mark in a worse light than it did him. Mark had actually set up this private cache of whisky to hide his drinking from his partner. Charles would never have done that. He didn’t hide his drinking from anyone. But then, even as he had the thought, he realised that was probably only because he lived on his own. It’s easy enough to be overt when you know there’s no one watching. If he had been cohabiting with someone who monitored his every sip, he wondered how long it would be before he resorted to subterfuge. He had an uneasy recollection of a bit of covert swigging towards the end of the time when he and Frances had lived together.

  Mark Lear led the way back to their coffees with a smug, got-away-with-it smile. He produced a packet of Extra-Strong Mints from a pocket, and popped one into his mouth. ‘Hide the evidence, eh?’ He grinned as he offered the packet across.

  Charles felt uncomfortable. There was something too calculating in all this, too cunning. He knew he drank too much, but he felt there was a degree of spontaneity about his drinking. Surely his own approach had never been this cold-blooded . . .? He did, nonetheless, take one of the Extra-Strong Mints.

  Mark Lear grinned. ‘Should keep us going till the end of the day’s recording. The old “maintenance dose”, eh?’

  Charles resented the implication. He didn’t like the way Mark spoke of their two problems as if they were the same. Mark was clearly an alcoholic, who was in chemical need of a ‘maintenance dose’. Whereas Charles, on the other hand . . . But he knew the exaggerated pique at his friend’s words rose from a suspicion that they might be all too applicable to himself.

  On his way back to the cubicle, Charles thought he caught a flash of suspicion in Lisa’s face as she looked at her partner and Mark averted his eye. But the moment didn’t last. Lisa had clearly been busy on the phone during their absence.

  ‘I’ve talked to the publishers.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Mark sounded Olympian, detached. He was glad to have staff to sort out the minutiae for him, and glad they kept him up to date with their progress.

  ‘They’re doing a version of a Thesaurus on CD-ROM and, yes, they are accepting tenders for the audio content.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Mark smugly, as if all his careful planning was about to come to fruition.

  ‘I’ve fixed a meeting for Thursday afternoon. You’ll be free, won’t you?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Mark replied, with the air of a man in whose diary an empty space was an endangered rarity.

  Lisa’s lips pursed. ‘Well, we’d better get on. Find out what new excitements Dark Promises has in store. Through you go, Charles. Afraid I’ll have to switch off the air conditioning again.’

  The last session of the recording was the most constructive of the day. Charles Paris was more fluent, he found the rhythms of Madeleine Eglantine’s prose less alien, and a good few pages got safely recorded. Only in the last half-hour, after five-thirty, did his concentration go. Sheer tiredness took over. His voice became croaky, and the fluffs proliferated.

  At ten to six, Lisa Wilson gave up the unequal struggle. ‘OK, let’s call that a wrap. Well done, Charles. Last bit was very good.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He acknowledged the compliment with a tired grin. But inside him was the lurking fear that the recording wouldn’t have been so good without that mid-afternoon injection of alcohol. Had he really reached the stage when he needed a ‘maintenance dose’?

  As he went through into the cubicle, he ached all over, but it was a better ache than that brought on by the hangover. This was the tiredness of having achieved something.

  ‘Only about twenty pages behind where we should be,’ said Lisa, with a hint of approbation in her voice. ‘You picked up the pace quite a bit.’

  ‘Well done,’ Mark agreed. ‘I’d say that deserves a drink.’

  Charles saw the tiny spasm go through Lisa’s face, as she bit back her instinctive response. She had been living with Mark long enough to know that direct confrontation wasn’t the best way of dealing with him.

  ‘You coming, love?’ her partner asked, a slight tease in his voice, once again daring her to express disapproval.

  ‘No,’ she replied lightly. ‘Got to do a Sainsbury’s run when I finish in here.’

  ‘OK. Well, if I’m not home when you get back, we’ll be in the Queen’s Head.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Lisa Wilson, and only someone who, like Charles Paris, had witnessed her relationship with Mark throughout the day, would have known that what she meant was actually far from ‘fine’.

  ‘Happy coincidence.’ Charles raised his glass, took a long swig and felt the warm glow of a second large Bell’s irradiate his parched system. ‘I mean, your studio being in Bath and our show opening in Bath.’

  ‘What is the show? I know you told me, but I can’t remember.’ Mark Lear was also on the whisky, which he was downing as if the world’s supplies were on the verge of exhaustion.

  ‘Not On Your Wife!’

  ‘Don’t know it.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t. It’s a new play. By Bill Blunden.’

  ‘Oh.’ The monosyllable contained all that snobbish resistance the playwright’s work usually inspired in people with university educations. Bill Blunden may have been an audience-pleaser, but he didn’t strike much of a chord among the intelligentsia. When, every now and then, Sunday newspaper reviewers took it into their heads to rehabilitate farce as an acceptable medium of entertainment, they would home in invariably on Feydeau, Pinero or perhaps Ben Travers. Bill Blunden was too ordinary, too mechanical; his plays were mere clockwork toys designed to entrap laughter. He would never attain intellectual respectability; his only comfort would have to remain the huge international royalties which his plays brought in.

  ‘And you’re touring it, Charles, is that right?’

  ‘Mm, three months. Fortnight in Bath, then single weeks. Bill Blunden always takes his shows on the road, works on them, does lots of rewrites, sharpens them up.’

  ‘With a view to the West End?’

  ‘Ultimately, yes. But some’ll have three or four tours before he’s happy.’

  ‘So you haven’t got a West End option in your contract?’

  ‘Nothing so grand, no. They did check my availability for three months hence, but that’s as far as it went.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Mark Lear chuckled with sudden recollection. ‘Checked with your a
gent, eh? I’ve just remembered, when we last worked together, you were with this incredibly inefficient agent . . . what was his name? Maurice Skellern, that’s right. He was a kind of a joke throughout the whole business, the worst agent since records began.’ Mark shook his head and chuckled again. ‘Who represents you now?’

  ‘Maurice Skellern,’ Charles Paris replied.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I hope today was all right . . .?’ said Charles tentatively. ‘I mean, the recording.’

  ‘It was fine.’

  ‘I felt awful, arriving so hungover and –’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve had many worse through the studio.’

  ‘I didn’t think the studio had been open that long.’

  ‘Well, no, not through that studio, but when I was at the Beeb . . .’ A hazy look came into Mark Lear’s eyes. ‘I remember once doing a play with Everard Austick, and he was virtually on an intravenous drip of gin.’ The retired producer let out a little melancholy laugh. ‘Good times we had, back in the old days . . .’

  Charles could see what had happened. In Mark Lear’s mind, the BBC, the institution he had spent all the time he worked there berating, had become a golden city in his recollection. Now he wasn’t there, it was perfect. For Mark, perfection would always be somewhere he wasn’t. Charles suspected that the same pattern obtained in his friend’s private life too. While he had been with Vinnie, all his young girls on the side had represented the greener grass of happiness. And now he was with Lisa . . . Charles wondered where Mark’s fantasies hovered now.

  ‘No, but I hope the recording was all right. Lisa didn’t seem very happy with what I was doing . . .’ Charles ventured.

  ‘Don’t worry about Lisa. She gets very po-faced about the whole business. What she doesn’t realise is that the creative process should be fun. She’s always clock-watching and budget-watching . . . and number-of-drinks-watching. Do you think, if I’d had that kind of attitude, I’d ever have produced any of the great programmes I did when I was at the Beeb?’