Dead Room Farce

by Simon Brett

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  Ransome George hit his head with the heel of his palm in annoyance. ‘Oh no, you must’ve left the note in the pocket of your costume. I bet one of those little sluts in Wardrobe nicked it.’

  The awful thing was that, for a moment, Charles actually believed it. He’d underestimated Ransome George as an actor.

  ‘So what was it like directing Bernard Walton in his first major role?’

  There was something creepy and slightly unwholesome about Curt Greenfield. He was late thirties, a showbiz journalist who’d developed a lucrative second string as a paste-and-scissors ‘biographer to the stars’. An uneven beard straggled round his chin. His clothes were sweatshirt, denim jacket, jeans and incongruously new-looking cowboy boots.

  Curt Greenfield had no social graces, made no attempt at small talk. He hadn’t offered coffee or a drink when Charles appeared in the theatre bar for the interview officially sanctioned and arranged by Tony Delaunay. All Curt Greenfield wanted was quick, quotable answers to his questions. Answers that could be shoved straight into his book with the minimum of editing.

  ‘Well, he was quite inexperienced,’ Charles replied, ‘but he had got something.’

  ‘Star quality?’ asked Curt Greenfield, ever eager for the cliché.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. More a stage presence. Even back then, when he was on stage, the audience found it difficult to concentrate on anyone else.’

  Charles saw the biographer write down ‘Star quality’, then look up and ask, ‘Why in particular did you cast him? What was it about Bernard that so impressed you?’

  ‘Well, his stammer was certainly part of it.’

  ‘So you’d say Bernard Walton’s speech impediment, something which to many people might appear as an obstacle, in his case proved the springboard to stardom?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure that I would say that,’ said Charles, reluctant to have his views reduced to journalese.

  Curt Greenfield ignored the objection. ‘And was the Cardiff production when you first met him? You didn’t know him as a child? You didn’t know any of the Miles family or –?’

  ‘I met him first at the London auditions for that production of She Stoops to Conquer.’

  ‘By which time he was already “Bernard Walton the actor”?’

  ‘I suppose you could say that. He hadn’t got much experience at that stage, but he had been around a bit.’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Curt Greenfield didn’t reckon any of that was worth writing down. His hopes for charming, winsome reminiscences of the star’s boyhood were not to be realised. ‘Anything else?’ he asked restlessly. ‘Any little anecdotes? Any stories that show what a popular member of the Cardiff company Bernard Walton was?’

  ‘No, I can’t think of any of those.’

  The biographer shrugged. ‘Oh well, if I put something like . . . “Bernard Walton’s infectious high spirits made for a relaxed and convivial backstage atmosphere”, that should cover it.’

  ‘Not really. I think that’d give rather a misleading impression of –’

  ‘And he’s been generous to you over the years, I gather?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Helping you out. Seeing you got the odd small part in shows he’s been involved in. Not forgetting the lesser figures who helped him on the way up.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t put it like that. I’d say –’

  But Charles knew his protests were in vain. Curt Greenfield had arrived with his interview virtually written. Nothing that was actually said was going to change it.

  The biographer closed his notebook with an air of finality. ‘That’s it. I’ll see any quotes I use are attributed to you by name.’

  ‘But will the words be what I actually said?’

  Curt Greenfield looked at Charles in total incomprehension. He didn’t understand the question. Then he sat back, with a reptilian expression, and said, ‘By the way, you know what I’m writing about Bernard is, like, the official, authorised biography.”

  ‘I got that impression. Be closer to a hagiography, I gather.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘A “hagiography” is the life of a saint.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘A biography devoid of criticism.’

  ‘Oh, right, get your drift. I’m with you. And because it’s that kind of book, that’s why your nice camp little company manager . . . Tony . . .?’

  ‘Tony Delaunay,’ Charles supplied.

  ‘That’s right. Well, that’s why he’s been so co-operative to me, setting up all these interviews. Anything that builds up Bernard Walton’s image is presumably good for Mr Delaunay’s business.’

  ‘I guess so. Good for Parrott Fashion Productions.’

  ‘On the other hand . . .’ Curt Greenfield began slowly, ‘if there’s any other stuff you’ve got on Bernard Walton . . .’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Let’s say stuff that’s less flattering, less hagi . . . whatever you said, less “Lives of the Saints” stuff, eh? Well, I’d be interested to hear that too.’

  ‘So you’ve taken a commission to write a book that’s a whitewash, but in fact you’re going to make it subversive, is that right?’

  ‘No, no, Mr Paris. The book will be exactly what the publisher wants . . . and, incidentally, what Bernard Walton’s management wants – they’ve put some money into the project too – but, while I’m doing all this research, while I’m meeting all the relevant people . . . well, if there’s any dirt around on Bernard Walton, I’ve probably got a market for that too.’

  ‘You’d sell it on anonymously?’

  ‘Oh, you bet. So, if there is anything . . .?’

  Charles shook his head.

  ‘I’d pay, if it’s good. Ransome George gave me some good stuff.’

  Suddenly Ran’s remarks about paying for information began to make sense. ‘What? What did he tell you?’

  Curt Greenfield smiled an oleaginous smile. ‘Now, come on, Mr Paris. I’m the one who paid for the information, not you.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘So if you have got any stories that might show the sainted Bernard Walton in less of a stained-glass window light, I’m very happy to discuss terms.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think I’ve got anything,’ Charles said distractedly. ‘When did you talk to Ransome George? Yesterday?’

  ‘No. I caught up with him when your show was in Bath. We had a very productive three hours of chat there one afternoon.’

  ‘Which afternoon?’

  ‘Erm . . . The Thursday, I think.’

  ‘What time on the Thursday?’

  ‘Three-thirty he came to my hotel.’

  ‘It was just the two of you?’

  ‘Yes. Well, most of the time. Tony Delaunay popped in . . . I don’t know, half-past four, fivish, I suppose . . . just to see that everything was OK. He’d set up the interview, you see.’

  ‘Hm. Can you be absolutely sure it was the Thursday?’ asked Charles.

  The biographer wrinkled his forehead. ‘Fairly sure.’

  ‘I mean, for instance, did Ransome George say he’d come from recording a radio commercial?’

  ‘That’s right. He did.’

  Damn, thought Charles Paris. Because if Ransome George was in a hotel with Curt Greenfield telling tales out of school about Bernard Walton, then there was no way he could have been in a studio murdering Mark Lear.

  It was something to do with Bernard. Charles kept coming back to that fact. His thoughts distracted him from whatever Cookie Stone was saying over dinner on the Saturday night after the show.

  He shouldn’t have been there with Cookie, anyway. Delaying the clean break, trying to let her down gently, wasn’t going to work. It would only build up troubles for him later, because, from the bits of her monologue he caught, Cookie Stone was still as deeply in love with Charles Paris as ever.

  His mind homed back in on Bernard Walton. It must be some secret in the st
ar’s private life, something Mark Lear had found out about. But what? Well, he still hadn’t fully investigated the Pippa Trewin connection. Maybe there had been company gossip on the subject . . .? It was quite possible that he’d missed it. Charles Paris had incredibly unresponsive antennae for gossip.

  ‘Cookie,’ he said suddenly, ‘about Pippa Trewin . . .?’

  Cookie Stone looked surprised. She had been in the middle of saying how wonderful it was to be with someone to whom you didn’t have to explain everything, someone with whom you felt companionable enough to share silence, someone whose every thought you could anticipate . . . But she hadn’t anticipated that Charles’s thoughts would be currently centred on Pippa Trewin.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘How long has her affair with Bernard Walton been going on?’

  ‘What!’ Cookie let out a screech that turned every head in the restaurant. Then, in an elaborate stage whisper, she went on, ‘What on earth are you talking about, Charles?’

  ‘Well, they seem to be very pally, they keep talking about mutual arrangements, they seem to see each other over the weekends . . . Apart from anything else, ask yourself: “Why is Pippa Trewin in the show, anyway?”’

  ‘Pippa Trewin is in the show,’ said Cookie Stone icily, ‘because she has better contacts than anyone else in the business.’

  ‘Yes, but Bernard must be getting some payback for –’

  ‘Bernard Walton is her godfather.’ The frost hadn’t left Cookie’s voice, as she went on. ‘Her parents are Patti Urquhart and Julian Strange. That is why she’s with a top agency, that is why she’s got a fast track to television casting Directors and movies. That is why her career is set fair, and why for the rest of her professional life she will continue to take parts that should be going to other, more talented, actresses who happen to have been born to different parents.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Charles Paris. ‘I think I’ve been a bit stupid not to realise that earlier.’

  God, that wasn’t the only way he was stupid. As they left the restaurant, Cookie had said, ‘I don’t care about my bloody po-faced landlady. I’ll never have to see the old bag again after tomorrow morning. Come back to my place.’

  And like a fool, he had done so. He blamed the hurt in Cookie’s eyes, which had been intensified by the furious sense of professional injustice their talk about Pippa Trewin had revived. But the only thing he could really blame was his own spinelessness.

  And then, because of his tiredness, because of the prospect of seeing Lisa Wilson the next day, because of his confusion about Mark’s death, Charles hadn’t been very good in bed. And, although that was completely his fault, Cookie had blamed herself and started asking questions on ‘Don’t you love me any more? Have you stopped fancying me?’ lines.

  So, amidst all the recriminations and the angst, very little sleeping had taken place that night.

  Charles’s return to Ruth’s house, early on the Sunday morning, to pick up his things, had exacerbated the feeling of being an emotional disaster area, unable to move in any direction without causing more pain.

  Ruth didn’t pass any comment on his overnight absence, but her expression didn’t need words to back it up. All she said was: ‘There was a message for you last night from a Lavinia Bradshaw. Wants you to ring her. Another of your women, I suppose?’

  ‘Lavinia Bradshaw? I don’t know anyone called Lavinia Bradshaw.’

  ‘Oh no?’ said Ruth, disbelieving.

  ‘No, I don’t. I really don’t.’

  He packed his bits in silence, and they almost parted in silence. But when he got to the door and looked back, Charles was astonished to see that Ruth was crying. Tears poured unchecked down her lined, grey face.

  ‘What’s the matter, love? What is it?’ He put his arms around her, and felt the unnatural thinness of her body against his. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, Charles, I just thought . . . you . . . I thought you, the eternally unreliable, eternally selfish, eternally randy . . . I thought you would . . . But now I’m too ugly and sick even for you to fancy me . . .’

  She broke into a long wail. ‘No, no,’ he said, patting the sharp ridge of her shoulder. ‘No, of course not. I just didn’t think I should take advantage of you . . . I thought . . .’

  There are some situations in which one can do nothing right. Charles Paris had been in a good few of them during his lifetime. He’d been exercising restraint, trying to do the decent thing, and all the time Ruth had actually been wanting him to make love to her.

  God, Charles Paris thought savagely on the train down to London, am I capable of doing anything that doesn’t hurt someone?

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘END,’ Charles Paris intoned, then left the required two-second pause, and went on, ‘Ending’ – two-second pause – ‘Conclusion’ – two-second pause – ‘Finale’ – two-second pause – ‘Closure’ – two-second pause – ‘Curtain’ – two-second pause – ‘Termination’ – two-second pause – ‘Halt’ – two-second pause – ‘Payoff’ – two-second pause – ‘Last words – God, I wish they bloody were!’ he concluded in exasperation.

  Nothing came from the talkback. He looked up through the glass. Lisa Wilson’s head was bowed. She showed no reaction to his lapse. Was she being professional, or was there actually a deterrent factor in her lack of response?

  Charles focused his eyes back on the photocopied list of words, which swam before him. Even without his hangover, the task would have been hard. It was incredible how much concentration doing individual words demanded. The text of a play or a book at least had a logical sequence to it, there was a continuity of thought which could be followed through. With the Thesaurus, he had to start from scratch with each new word or phrase.

  ‘Swansong,’ he continued. Two-second pause. ‘Coda’ – two-second pause – ‘Boundary’– two-second pause – ‘Terminus – two-second paus –Where the rainbow’ –

  He was suddenly and unexpectedly ambushed by giggles. ‘I’m sorry, Lisa . . . It’s just . . . “Where the rainbow ends” sounds so . . . I don’t know, so showbiz!’ Another burst of giggles ran through him. ‘I mean . . . all the others are kind of doomy and dreary . . . and then suddenly you get to . . .’ He dropped into a little Shirley Temple voice: “‘Where the rainbow ends”! Yippee! Yippee! “Somewhere, over the rainbow . . .” I’m sorry . . .’

  He looked, through his uncontrollable tears of laughter, into the cubicle and saw, with relief, that Lisa was also incapacitated. Her eyes were streaming too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Charles managed to say again. ‘It’s just hysteria . . . It’s like . . . like “gate fever” . . . you know, that thing long-term prisoners get when they’re about to be released . . . A hundred thousand bloody words and phrases we’ve done . . . suddenly the end is actually in sight and I just . . .’

  He broke down again. Lisa Wilson’s voice came giggling through the speaker into the studio, ‘You’ll never make it to the end . . . It’s like the horizon . . . the nearer you get to it, the further away it moves.’

  ‘Or one of those classical myths . . . Who is it? Tantalus having the bunch of grapes constantly whipped away when his mouth gets near them . . .’

  ‘Or Sisyphus pushing that bloody stone up the hill . . .’

  ‘And watching it roll all the bloody way down again? Oh, I’m sorry, Lisa, I’m just completely gone . . . I can’t do the next phrase. I literally cannot say the words, “Last g-g-g-g . . .”’

  He went again. By the time Lisa’s voice next came through the speaker, she had regained a degree of self-control. ‘OK, Charles. Enough. The phrase is, “Last gasp”.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charles Paris agreed soberly. ‘Last g-g-g-g-g . . .’

  And still he couldn’t shape the word.

  ‘Joke over,’ Lisa’s voice announced sternly. But, through the glass, Charles could see her mouth was still twitching uncontrollably.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. With enormous concentration, he emptied his mi
nd of everything, bleached the words he had to say of all meaning or connotation, and managed to pronounce, ‘Last gasp’ – two-second pause – ‘Last lap’ – two-second pause – ‘Home straight’ – two-second pause – ‘Last t-t-t-t-’ But this time it was the word ‘trump’ that wouldn’t come.

  Once again the two of them had dissolved into hopeless giggling.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s all done,’ said Charles Paris, as he finally staggered out of the studio just before seven that evening.

  ‘Well, it is.’ Lisa indicated the high pile of marked-up tape boxes. ‘I’ve checked. Every single word and phrase recorded. So, in a few months’ time, everyone who consults that particular CD-ROM Thesaurus will hear the dulcet tones of Charles Paris wafting out of their computer’s speakers.’

  ‘Yes.’ Charles hesitated before his admission. ‘It seems somewhat late in the day for me to ask this, Lisa, but what exactly is a CD-ROM?’

  ‘How long have you got?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Because I could give you an extended scientific description of the technology and potentialities of CD-ROMs, or I could just say they’re a means of storing information which can be presented on a computer screen with illustrations in sound and pictures.’

  ‘That’ll do.’ Charles reached out his arms behind him, joined his hands, and stretched. ‘God, it really gets you in the small of the back, that kind of concentration.’

  ‘Still, you can stop concentrating now. As I say, all done. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks. Ooof.’ He sank gratefully into a chair. ‘Really calls for a drink, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll make us some coffee,’ said Lisa Wilson tartly.

  ‘The police have been round again,’ she announced, when they were settled either side of the table, making inroads into another packet of chocolate digestives.

  ‘Really?’

  She pursed her lips. ‘Still hasn’t been an inquest yet. The first one was adjourned for a month, to give the police time to make more enquiries.’

  ‘So we’re not the only ones to suspect murder?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. I think they’re concentrating more on suicide.’