Murder Unprompted

by Simon Brett

  The one thing he was known to have done during that period was to try to get a star name for The Hooded Owl. As with theatre companies, only he knew how many he approached with the script, how many refusals he got, how many tentative agreements dependent on dates and money. There were two main male parts and one female, so presumably stars of both sexes were approached.

  All that was known was the result of his machinations. A fortnight before rehearsals were due to start, which was the time when Charles Paris was engaged to play the second male lead, it was bruited about in the business that the female lead was to be played by a young lady who had recently, ‘in order to concentrate on her career as a serious actress’, left the cast of the interminably-long-running television soap opera, Cruises.

  The fact that she wasn’t much of an actress, serious or any other sort, was irrelevant. The audience would flock to see her. It didn’t matter if she just stood on stage, they would still love her. (In fact, people who had worked with her thought it might be better if she did just stand on stage; they knew the hazards of trying to push her beyond her range.)

  Once Paul Lexington had his star name, he was happy to fall in with Peter Hickton’s suggestions for the rest of the cast. So long as they were cheap, competent and available in the event of a transfer, he didn’t much mind who they were. As a result, Peter Hickton cast largely from his regular Taunton company; he knew them, they worshipped him, and he fancied himself in the role of star-maker.

  In the lead he cast Alex Household, an actor in his late forties, who had had early success then a rather bad patch culminating in a complete breakdown. but was now coming back, in the view of Peter Hickton, twenty years his junior, ‘stronger than ever’.

  In the part of the daughter, Peter Hickton cast Lesley-Jane Decker, an actress eight years his junior, who he thought had ‘enormous potential’. And the way he looked at her didn’t suggest he thought that potential was limited to the stage.

  For the part of Alex’s failed brother, Peter reckoned he had had a brainwave. There was no one in the regular Taunton company of the right age, but he remembered an actor he had worked with when Assistant Director at Colchester, who had exactly the right ‘smell of failure’ that the part required. Peter rang the guy’s agent and found, to his delight, that he was free.

  To the agent in question, Maurice Skellem, his client’s ‘freeness’ was no surprise. Charles Paris’s engagement diary was a joke on the level of all those corny old lines about The Kosher Book of Pork Recipes, Britain’s Economic Miracle or The Pope’s Book of Birth Control. ‘I’ve sorted out a great job for you, Charles,’ the agent asserted when he rang.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Charles had replied sceptically.

  ‘Sure. Great new play called The Head Owl .’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Taunton.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Director asked for you specially.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Said he wanted someone who really smelt of failure.’

  ‘Thank you, Maurice.’

  So it was that Charles Paris joined the cast of The Hooded Owl.

  It was the day before rehearsals started that the agent of the former Cruises star rang to say that she had just signed up to do a series for West End Television of a new sit. com. set in a lingerie shop and called Knickers; so, because that was going to keep her very busy, she had flown off the day before to Kenya for a safari holiday. And no, sorry, she hadn’t actually signed The Hooded Owl contract.

  Frantic phoning ensued. Paul Lexington tried in vain to produce a star in twenty-four hours, but eventually had to accept Peter Hickton’s casting of Salome Search, a Taunton regular, ‘who’s awfully solid, Paul, and, you know, has never really had the breaks, but could be massive’.

  So it was that, while the former Cruises star pointed her camera at world-weary rhino, her predestined dressing room at the Prince’s Theatre, Taunton, was shared on the first night of The Hooded Owl by Alex Household and Charles Paris.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NERVES, LIKE hopes, Charles found, didn’t go away, however long he worked in the theatre. The fact that he had survived a few hundred first nights did not make each new one any easier. In some ways it made it more difficult; he now had more experience of the things that could go wrong than he had in his twenties, and so the dark side of his imagination had more to work on.

  But two things delayed the full impact of his nerves about the opening of The Hooded Owl. The first was having a large part, a fortune that was not often his lot. He began to realise how stars could remain cool right up till the first night. Their responsibility was greater, but the mechanics of learning all their lines and rehearsing kept them pretty busy. It was those with small parts and long gaps in rehearsal who had time to sit around twitching over endless diuretic cups of coffee.

  The other factor which staved off the assault of nerves was the work-rate Peter Hickton demanded of his cast. Because most of them had worked with him so much, they knew what to expect, that he would rehearse every waking hour (and a good few normally allocated to sleep). Equity rules about maximum hours were ignored. There was an Equity representative in the cast, duly elected by the rest, but he was one of the Peter Hickton rep. too, so he made no demur.

  Peter Hickton was one of those people who gained ascendancy over others by demonstrating how little sleep he needed. Charles, whose ideal was a whisky-sodden eight hours, found this was a contest in which he did not wish to participate, but he had no alternative. He couldn’t turn up for a nine o’clock call in the morning and complain that he hadn’t finished rehearsing till one the night before, when he knew that the director had been up till four working on the lighting plan.

  Charles also found this relentless rehearsal made serious inroads into his drinking time, a part of the day he had always regarded as sacrosanct. He wasn’t an alcoholic (he kept telling himself), but he did enjoy a drink, and he found resorting to a half-bottle of Bell’s in his pocket somewhat undignified. Apart from anything else, it gave his antiquated sports jacket a lop-sided look. And it tended to clink against things. Also it gave the wrong impression. When Salome Search caught him one day taking a surreptitious swig in the Green Room, she gave him a look that showed she had got a completely false idea of his relationship with drink. She obviously regarded it as a till-death-do-us-part marriage, whereas he liked to think of it more as a casual affair, in which either partner could drift off at will (though, when he came to think of it, neither often did).

  Peter Hickton’s rehearsal schedule (probably a misnomer for a process that was simply continuous) intensified towards the end. The Monday night’s Tech. Run, which followed a full day in the rehearsal room, finished at three-thirty a.m.. As a special concession, the next morning’s call for notes was not until nine-thirty, then rehearsal of odd scenes continued till it was time for the evening’s Dress Rehearsal, which, though intended to be played as per performance, did not end till a quarter to two a.m.. Because of this, Peter Hickton demanded a second Dress Rehearsal, on the Wednesday afternoon before the first night. This was followed by notes, taking everyone right up to ‘the half’ (the time half an hour before curtain-up, by which all members of the cast have to be in the theatre).

  So Charles didn’t even have time for the half-hour in the pub over a couple of large Bell’s, which he regarded as such an essential preparation for the full realisation of his art.

  What was more, he was down to about half an inch in his pocket-bottle thanks to the pressures of the previous days. He had been sure there’d at least be time for him to nip out and buy a replacement.

  But there wasn’t. And all the A.S.M.s and hangers-on were too busy to have this important commission delegated to them.

  It was a serious situation.

  And it didn’t improve the half-hour before curtain-up, when all the pent-up nerves came crashing in with devastating force. Normally he could control the incipient nausea and limit the number of rushes to the lavatory
by judiciously-spaced doses of Bell’s whisky, but now he felt as if he was having a leg off without anaesthetic.

  He drained the half-bottle to attain some sort of stability, but five minutes later, when something started doing macramé with his intestines, he wished he had saved it.

  Alex Household’s method of building up to a performance did not involve alcohol. He did not believe in the use of stimulants, being an advocate of the use of the mind’s internal resources to control the waywardness of the body. It was part of an elaborate philosophy he had developed from reading the first chapters of a few paperbacks about Eastern Religion and talking to other actors over cups of jasmine tea.

  His build-up method involved lying dead straight over three chairs, with the head free and lolling back and breathing deeply. A deep intake of air sounding like a gas central heating boiler igniting, a long pause, and then exhalation over a muttered phrase, which may have been some potent mantra, but to the casual observer sounded like ‘Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub’.

  Charles was becoming a decreasingly casual observer as the half-hour ticked away and his nerves were twisted tighter. Alex’s charade didn’t help. Charles, normally most accommodating about the foibles of others, began to think sharing the dressing room might have its drawbacks.

  Alex was that very common theatrical type, a faddish actor. He believed in vegetarianism, transcendental meditation, homeopathy, transmigration, the occult and a variety of other semi-digested notions. Alex was always talking about communion with nature and being at one with the world. He had a habit of producing herbal snacks in the dressing room, seeds, grasses, nettles and other less identifiable greenery. He had read a few chapters of a book called Food for Free, and kept going on about ‘the earth’s plenty’.

  Normally, Charles could accept all this with good humour – after all, he did quite like the man – but, as he again suffered the interminable pause between the intake and the inevitable ‘Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-duba-dub’ he thought he was going to scream or lash out. To avert both these dangers, he left the dressing room to go to the lavatory, though he couldn’t resist slamming the door as he went.

  In the corridor he met Lesley-Jane Decker, whose arms were full of purple tissue-wrapped parcels. She was an attractive red-head of about twenty, still full of breathless excitement about actually ‘being in the theatre’. She was quite talented, and devoutly believed Paul Lexington’s and Peter Hickton’s conviction that The Hooded Owl was going to sweep triumphantly into the West End and make them all stars.

  It had been obvious from rehearsal that Peter Hickton fancied her, but whether he had got anywhere, Charles could not judge. In fact, he couldn’t imagine how the director’s rehearsal schedule would leave any time for thoughts of sex, though, of course, all things were possible.

  On balance, Charles thought that probably nothing had developed. A part from the logistics, Lesley-Jane was so naive and bubbly, he could not imagine her keeping quiet about a love affair. He even suspected that she might be that remarkable rarity, a theatrical virgin.

  And it was more likely that Peter Hickton was saving his assault on her for the less hectic time when the play was actually running. There would be two and a half weeks then, which should give the young director plenty of time.

  ‘Oh, Charles darling, this is for you.’ Lesley-Jane thrust one of the packages into his hands.

  ‘Oh,’ he said blankly.

  ‘First-night present.’

  ‘Ah.’ Theatrical camp, he thought. What would it be? A fluffy toy? No, felt too hard. A plaster statuette of a pierrot? Yes, that’d be the sort of thing. ‘Oh, er, thank you. How are you feeling?’

  She opened her green eyes wide. ‘Scared witless, darling. Paul says he’s hoping there’ll be some people from London out front.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Charles had heard that a few too many times to get very excited about it.

  ‘And, even worse . . .’ She paused dramatically.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My mother’s come down from London to see it.’

  ‘Is that bad? Is she awful?’

  ‘No, she’s an absolute angel. But she’s got awfully high standards. Used to be in the business, you know.’

  ‘Oh.’ The need to get to the lavatory was suddenly strong again. ‘If you’ll excuse me.

  ‘Yes. Is Alex in the dressing room?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Sitting on the lavatory, Charles opened his first-night present. Oh, good, that girl would go far. He took back all his thoughts about her naiveté and theatrical camp.

  It was a quarter bottle of champagne. He drained it gratefully.

  As he went back to his dressing room, he met the author of The Hooded Owl, hanging around in the corridor like a schoolboy outside the headmaster’s study. The expression of agony on Malcolm Harris’s pallid face made Charles’s own nerves seem less crippling.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be all right. It’s a good play.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ The schoolmaster’s pouncing on this crumb of praise was almost pathetic.

  ‘Yes, of course it is. We wouldn’t have put in all this work on it if it hadn’t been.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope so. It’s just no one seems to have talked about anything for the past few days except the bits that don’t work and all the technical problems it raises and . . .’

  Poor sap. Yes, it must have been strange for him, religiously attending the last week of rehearsals, and knowing nothing about the workings of the theatre. Everyone would be far too busy to waste time assuring the author that his play worked; there would be a lot of complaint about its inadequacies and difficulties. Anyone who had had a play produced before would have been prepared for that; but for Malcolm Harris, snatched from teaching the Causes of the Thirty Years’ War to fourteen-year-olds, it must all have been a profound culture shock. Charles felt guilty for not having realised earlier what the author had been suffering.

  ‘It’ll work. Really.’

  Malcolm made a grimace that might have been intended for a smile. Maybe. My main worry is everyone getting the lines right.’

  That’s what every author wants, thought Charles. And occasionally they get it. though most actors are highly skilled in the art of paraphrase.

  ‘I do hope Alex gets that big speech about the Hooded Owl itself right. I mean, that is the key to the play, and he got the rhythms all wrong this afternoon.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Charles soothed. Poor old Alex was having a bit of difficulty with the lines, he thought complacently.

  ‘Oh, and Charles, could you watch your line at the end of Act One.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At the Dress Rehearsal, you said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing – it’s the last time I’ll come running.’

  ‘So? Isn’t that right?’

  ‘No. It should be, ‘I’ll tell you something . . .”

  Oh really! thought Charles. Bloody authors!

  But he didn’t say it. Instead he asked, ‘Anyone out front tonight?’

  ‘Oh, just my wife and my wife’s mother.’

  ‘Ah.’ Then reassuringly, ‘And maybe lots of impresarios and film producers waiting to snap up the rights. How would you feel about a film offer on the play?’

  ‘Oh, I’d . . . I’d get my agent to deal with it,’ replied the author, with an unsuccessful attempt at insouciance.

  Still, good. At least he’d got an agent. Slowly he was sorting himself out.

  Charles looked at his watch. Twenty past seven. ‘Must just go in and check the old slap,’ he said, gesturing to his make-up.

  ‘Yes, I’ll come in and wish Alex all the best.’

  Charles opened the dressing room door to discover that Alex Household had stopped his ‘Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub’ routine. In fact, though they sprang apart quickly, he appeared to be doing his giving-Lesley-Jane-Decker-a-cuddle-on-his-knee routine. Well, there’s a novelty, thought Charles.

  Alex tapped Lesley-Jane on the bottom in a way tha
t was meant to suggest the contact had just been theatrical excess, but he didn’t convince Charles.

  ‘And thank you so much for the ginseng, darling,’ said Alex, to reinforce the impression of casual contact.

  Ginseng. Of course. It would be. Lesley-Jane had got Alex’s number all right.

  ‘Um . . .’ Malcolm Harris began awkwardly. ‘Um, Alex, just came in to say good luck –’

  ‘Oh Lord!’ shouted the actor. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ The author looked mystified by the outburst.

  ‘Don’t you know anything, you bloody amateur?’

  ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘You mustn’t say what you’ve just said.’

  ‘What? I mustn’t say good –’

  ‘Don’t say it again!’ Alex shrieked. ‘It’s bad luck.’

  ‘Well, what should I say?’

  ‘Oh Lord – break a leg or . . . anything but that!’

  Charles should have remembered: amongst Alex Household’s other fads was devout observance of all the theatrical superstitions.

  Malcolm Harris’s minimal confidence had now deserted him completely.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know these –’

  ‘No, you don’t know anything!’ snapped Alex. ‘Don’t even know how to write a decent play!’

  In a second the author’s hand clenched into a fist and was raised to strike. But in the fractional pause that preceded the blow, the Stage Manager’s calming voice came over the loudspeaker.

  ‘Beginners, Act One, please.’

  Malcolm Harris lowered his fist, glowered at the lead actor of his precious play, and scurried off to find the pass-door to join his wife and his wife’s mother in the auditorium.

  Alex Household, Lesley-Jane Decker and Charles Paris hugged each other wordlessly, and passed through the corridor to the stage.

  The eruption of applause as the final curtain fell left no one in any doubt that The Hooded Owl had worked, at least for the good burghers of Taunton. Whether it would work for the supposedly more sophisticated audience of the West End remained to be seen.