Sleep of Death

by Anne Morice

  Aware of this and also of the unfavourable circumstances into which Philip had been thrown, with the rest of us all now getting well into our parts and he having had no opportunity for more than a single reading of the script, every allowance had been made. The entire company had striven like maniacs to make things as easy as possible for him and, at first, the response had not been discouraging. He had certainly got the portrayal of old age, with its occasional lapses into near senility, to perfection. Disillusionment had only begun to set in when it gradually became clear that this had little to do with acting, but was merely the manifestation of his own physical and mental condition. At the end of three weeks he was almost as shaky over his lines as he had been at the start and there were still worse trials than that.

  There was a scene in the first act, for instance, between the old man and his grandson, which gradually developed into an impassioned monologue and plea for support and understanding on the part of the boy, brought to an end by my own entrance, in the role of the boy’s sister, who instantly and smugly drew his attention to the fact that his grandfather was fast asleep. Twice, so far, during rehearsals, it had turned out that Philip actually was fast asleep, which was perfectly all right for him, since a display of fluster and incoherence was quite appropriate when he was shaken awake by the young people, but not so good for the young people themselves, who waited in vain for their cues.

  Hardly a day had passed since then without some such incident to rock us back on our heels and, since there is no more fertile breeding ground for bad luck than a patch where a lot of it has sprung up already, it was not to be wondered at that pessimism was now becoming rampant. It had obviously taken a hold on Oliver too and we noticed with growing dismay that he was becoming daily more elusive and inaccessible, ever more inclined to leave administrative problems to his inexperienced junior partner, Benjamin Hartman, whose only, though far from negligible, asset was a father whose address book was stuffed with the names of people with money to burn, a surprising number of whom were not averse to seeing some of it go up in smoke in the entertainment business.

  He was not a bad young man either, this Benjie, full of enthusiasm, eager to please and quite unashamedly stage struck. There could be no question that he had bought his way into the theatre through a genuine love of it, which was a mark in his favour, specially as the purchase was liable to prove so expensive. On the other hand, he was rather too apt to throw his weight about, oblivious of the fact that his weight, measured in terms of knowledge and experience, was far too light to stand up to such treatment.

  These, among other depressing reflections, had been passing through my mind as I plodded slowly upstairs and, when Philip was safely at the top and had turned left down the corridor towards his dressing room, which was in the opposite direction to my own, I bounded up the last of them, sped along to the right and then, with my hand on the doorknob, changed course and continued on to the room next to it. The door was half open, a sure sign that the occupant was inside and in a mood for visitors and, since twenty minutes remained before the rehearsal call, I decided that I could do worse than spend them catching up with developments in the dramatic life of my old friend, Clarissa Jones.

  II

  She had not been born Clarissa Jones, but had adopted the name when setting out to become an actress, on the grounds that her real one, which was Charity Jenkins, was unsuitable for the stage, although I could never see why, since one seemed to have as good a ring about it as the other. From her admission that she had been tempted at one time to call herself Jezebel Harlett, I concluded that it had most likely been a gesture of revolt against her strict Low Church upbringing. Until she walked out of it and came to London at the age of seventeen, she had spent all her life in a shabby, draughty and hideously uncomfortable Victorian parsonage, being nagged into stupors by her parents and two elder sisters, who were called Prudence and Faith.

  Thereafter, change of nomenclature had tended to become a habit and she had already swept through two marriages, not to mention numerous other liaisons, with the speed of a hurricane rushing down the east coast of America. She may well have been unique among drama students in having paid her final year’s fees out of the alimony she received from her first husband.

  She had recently acquired what she called a new steady, although firmly denying that she had any intention of marrying him and, with such a rapid turnover always on the go, it was sometimes quite hard to remember the name of the current amour. I often suspected that Clarrie may also have experienced a little difficulty here. It was her invariable practice to address him simply as “Darling” or “my angel,” while referring to him in his absence in such vague terms as “the old man,” or “that brute.”

  She and I had first met at a very early stage in our careers, when we were playing in rep. in the Midlands and, despite some marked differences in tastes and temperaments, had remained friends, in a detached and offhand way, ever since. In fact, in the early days, before the disasters began to rain down, we had both regarded it as a propitious omen that we should have teamed up again in this exciting new production.

  The joke was that she had been cast as the placid, besotted, somewhat bovine granddaughter, married to an excessively tiresome man, in whom she could see no fault at all, whereas I played the neurotic, discontented one, forever knocking back whisky and doing her utmost to gum things up for the rest of the family.

  Nevertheless, so far as Clarrie was concerned, I could see why the parts had been doled out in this way, for there was often something sleepy in her expression and this, combined with her luxuriant dark hair, creamy complexion and tendency to plumpness, produced an overall effect of complaisant serenity, verging on indolence. It was deceptive, however, because she was fiery and volatile by nature, highly extroverted and capable on occasions of extreme ruthlessness. There was certainly nothing placid about her mood that morning, although the rage and self-pity were only indirectly connected with our professional problems.

  “You’re never going to believe me when I tell you what that rotten imbecile has gone and done now,” she informed me.

  “Which rotten imbecile? Pete?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What has he done now?”

  “Been chatting up her ladyship and invited them both over to lunch on Sunday. Did you ever hear of anything so ghoulish?”

  Unlike the rotten imbecile, no explanation was required as to who was meant by “her ladyship.” She was referring to Dolly Mickleton, Philip’s wife, a domineering and self-opinionated woman, only saved from being thoroughly detestable by the pathetic absurdity of her name-dropping snobbery, and who never allowed anyone to forget that she now had a title.

  Nor was it necessary to explain why she and Pete were on these chummy terms, for in a sense they were both in the same boat, united in being on the periphery of the action. Pete made a regular practice of collecting Clarrie between and at the end of rehearsal sessions, which inevitably involved a good deal of hanging about at the theatre, whereas Dolly was almost always somewhere on the premises, ready to minister to Philip’s every need, to make sure that he took his pills and got every minute of rest that the schedule would allow.

  “Never,” I admitted. “Why do you suppose he would do a thing like that?”

  “Devilment, as my poor mother used to say. He’s a great little mixer, you know. Show him a flock of pigeons and he’ll put the cat in. Other people’s hell sends him into hysterics. It’ll get him into trouble one of these days, as I’m always telling him. Your sins will find you out, I say. Hope it doesn’t happen to you and me too, dear! Well, you’re in no danger, I daresay, in your snug little rut.”

  “Nor you either, since you broadcast your sins, even as you commit them, and treat the world as your private confessional. It must be a safeguard. But listen, Clarrie, aren’t you even more surprised, in a way, that her ladyship accepted?”

  “No, I’m not. Stingy brutes, I bet they’d go anywhere for a
free meal.”

  “Oh, I agree and they probably don’t get offered one all that often, but just think what it’ll cost them in petrol. Don’t they spend all their weekends in that Old Rectory place near Goring?”

  “Which happens to be about eight miles from the hilltop cottage where Pete and I spend our weekends.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know.”

  “Well, it’s pretty crummy, so I don’t often invite people and, anyway, come Sunday, I’m usually too exhausted to bother with cooking proper meals, even for my friends. I’m really livid about it, but I suppose I can’t exactly tell them not to come?”

  “No, I doubt if that would do very much to brighten the atmosphere.”

  “Well, in that case . . . listen, Tessa!”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Why don’t you and Robin have mercy on me and come and help out?”

  “Then you’d be cooking for six people, instead of four.”

  “Oh, come on! You know damn well how much difference that would make! Besides, you’d be able to help with the washing-up,” she added, not being without the cunning streak. “But the main thing is that between us we might be able to keep her ladyship in order. If I have to take her on single-handed, she’ll be mopping up the floor with me, passing remarks about chipped plates and paper napkins and saying she hopes I haven’t put any onions in the stew because they bring Philip out in a rash. Oh, be a sport, for once in your miserable life!”

  “All right, we will, if we can, but I’ll have to check with Robin. He may have something on.”

  “In that case, nothing to stop you coming on your own,” she replied cheerfully, showing the cunning and ruthless streaks running in harness.

  In fact, no proposal could have appealed to me less, because the most blissful thing about Sunday at this period was that it was the one day of the week when I did not have to set eyes on, or allow my mind to dwell very much on, Philip Mickleton, a factor which normally outweighed all other considerations, including the ties of friendship, but when I pointed this out to Clarrie she had reminded me airily that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I was inclined to agree with her, although my conditional consent had been based on more practical grounds. Her remark about the cottage being in the hills about eight miles north of Goring had suggested that it might not be much further from Roakes Common, one of whose prominent citizens is my cousin, Toby Crichton. He leads a self-centred and reclusive life there, pretending to be hard at work writing plays and just occasionally committing a line or two to paper. He rarely comes to London and also has a phobia about picking up the telephone, all of this making communication uphill work. However, he never seems displeased when Robin and I invite ourselves to Roakes for the weekend and, since it was now some time since we had taken advantage of this, it had struck me that what we had here was an opportunity to repair the omission, while at the same time throwing in a small, heavily solicited favour to my old friend, Clarissa Jones.

  Chapter Two

  “Are you sure you won’t come with us?” I asked for the second time. “I know Clarrie would be enchanted to see you.”

  “No, thank you. I’m another who doesn’t much care for chipped plates and paper napkins. I also detest stew, with or without onions, and I’m not mad about Dolly Mickleton either.”

  “I didn’t know you’d ever met her.”

  “It was a long time ago, but the scars have never quite healed. She had a tiny part in the very first play of mine to be put on. It was very tiny indeed, but she managed to wreck it.”

  “Neither did I know she’d been on the stage.”

  “Very few people do and it is best forgotten. She chose the wrong calling, as she soon realised, and threw it up at the first opportunity, in favour of a rich husband from South Africa.”

  “Not Philip, presumably?”

  “No, this was twenty years ago. It didn’t last any longer than her theatrical venture, but turned out to be a lot more profitable, I understand.”

  “What happened to that one?” Robin asked.

  “He walked to the top of Table Mountain and jumped off, during the honeymoon as far as I remember. One can’t really blame him.”

  “All the same, and to be absolutely fair,” I pointed out, “she does seem to suit Philip pretty well. Naturally, I try to keep out of their way, as far as possible, but they seem to have a very good understanding. They’re always together and she guards him like a lioness protecting her favourite cub.”

  “Oh well, she must be in her fifties by now. I daresay the years have mellowed her.”

  “But you still won’t let Tessa persuade you to come?”

  “No, thank you. I doubt if they have mellowed her enough for that.”

  We arrived late because I had underestimated the distance, although, unlike Robin, I did not blame myself for this. When I had suggested to Clarrie that it was probably not more than ten or twelve miles, she had instantly agreed, giving it as her opinion that it could well be less, although it turned out to be more like fifteen. My only mistake was in failing to grasp that, having almost ensnared us, she would have agreed to anything at all, very likely putting it as low as three or four, rather than give us an excuse to escape; and, in the mild flurry which so often comes from realising that one is running late, we compounded the evil by swooping past that very turning which we had been assured we could not miss.

  Not, to all appearances, that it mattered in the least to Clarrie and Pete, who were both lounging around in a relaxed manner on the narrow strip of enclosed verandah at the side of the cottage. There was no smell of burning from the kitchen, nothing to suggest that anything had so far gone into the oven. All the same, if I had allowed Robin to lose still more time, by stopping at a telephone kiosk to announce that we were going to be late, it might at least have brought a grain of comfort to the other guests, who had obviously arrived punctually and were now paying the penalty.

  Dolly, who had ornamented herself with dark glasses, a flamboyant silk scarf, printed all over with the maker’s name, and a lot of clanking bracelets, was sitting bolt upright on a garden chair, which was quite a feat, since the two squares of canvas which formed the seat and the back had seen better days and now showed signs of parting company with the frame.

  Philip was slightly better off in a wooden deck chair but had doubtless added to his wife’s discomfort by embarking on a long and involved anecdote concerning a fellow member of his club. We could tell that it had been going on for some time because, after a perfunctory acknowledgement of our arrival, and egged on by bewitching smiles from his hostess, he took it up again, as though there had been no interruption, thereby frustrating Pete’s efforts to find out what Robin and I wanted to drink.

  He eventually overcame the problem by stationing himself behind Philip and beside the table where the bottles and other impedimenta were set out, holding up one item after another for our acceptance or otherwise, to which we responded with the appropriate nod or shake of the head. It was rather like being in a dream auction sale and provided me with a unique opportunity to study him quite openly for several minutes.

  He was a dark-haired, slant-eyed young man, very neat looking and light on his feet and with graceful, expressive movements, which made me wonder if he had been trained as a dancer at some period, although, if so, it cannot have been a serious vocation. One of the few facts I had learnt about him from Clarrie was that he worked in a snobby and expensive antique shop in Sloane Street. He was doing pretty well out of it too, judging by the lavish display on the bar table, although I guessed him to be not more than twenty-five or six.

  By the time this business had been completed, Philip had reached the end of his anecdote, whose only point seemed to have been to introduce the names of some illustrious members of his club, and Pete turned his attention to him and Dolly.

  “Thank you, but I’m driving,” Dolly said curtly, when offered another drink, but Philip held up his glass with a shaky hand and announced
that the same again would suit him. I considered this to be quite untrue, but Pete darted forward like a moth to the flame, took the glass from him and refilled it to the brim with what appeared to be equal parts of gin and tonic. Having done so, he repeated the performance for Clarrie and then draped himself in an elegant pose on the arm of her chair, his left hand clasping the back of her neck, which she did not appear to notice.

  Leaning forward and addressing me as though we were alone together in a railway carriage, Dolly subjected me to a barrage of questions about Toby, saying what good times they had shared during the run of one of his early plays and how much she regretted that she so seldom saw him nowadays.

  Responding to this with about the same degree of realism, I assured her that he regretted it too, but that pressure of work made it hard for him to keep up with old friends. Going off at a tangent, she next asked me whether it was true that his daughter, Ellen, was married to Lord Roxburgh’s elder son.

  “Quite true,” I admitted, “but he wasn’t a lord when they married and, anyway, it’s only a life peerage, so, in any case, I doubt whether that would have influenced her.”

  “Oh, I’m well aware of that, my dear, but what a small world, isn’t it? Sybil Roxburgh is one of my oldest friends. We sit on several of the same charity committees. No, really, thank you, Pete. Philip and I have both had quite enough and I’m sure Clarrie will be herding us all into lunch before much longer.”