Sicken and So Die

by Simon Brett

  One unexpected side-effect of this domesticity was that Charles was drinking less. The automatic loose-end recourse to the pub at the end of rehearsals seemed less imperative, and the too-many nightcaps of Bell’s to deaden the end of the day were no longer necessary. He and Frances would share a bottle of wine over dinner, but often that was the sum total of his day’s intake. For Charles Paris, that made quite a change.

  His new circumstances generally made quite a change.

  It was early days, mind. Less than two weeks they’d been cohabiting, and neither of them wanted to threaten the fragility of what was happening by talking about it.

  Promising, though. Somehow, Charles felt confident that the thoughts going through Frances’s mind matched his own. It still wasn’t too late for them to make something of their lives together.

  Yes, Charles Paris reflected, as the train sped towards Great Wensham and the Twelfth Night photocall, things are actually going rather well.

  Chapter Two

  THE FORMAL Elizabethan gardens of Chailey Ferrars could have been designed as a setting for Twelfth Night. Their geometric patterns offered a choice of avenues down which Malvolio could walk. Their statuary, low walls and neatly clipped box trees offered manifold hiding places from which Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Fabian could observe the steward picking up the letter from ‘The Fortunate Unhappy’ and falling for Maria’s trick to make him believe his mistress Olivia loved him.

  The Asphodel production of the play was not to be performed in the formal gardens, however. They were far too precious, far too carefully maintained, to be overrun by actors and picnic-toting members of the public. The acting area for Twelfth Night was further away from the house, in a walled field at one end of which a natural amphitheatrical shape had been enhanced by the construction of a grass-covered mound and the planting of a semicircle of trees around it. For performances a wooden stage was erected on the mound and the backstage area cordoned off with hessian screens.

  It was the Chailey Ferrars Trustees who imposed conditions on which parts of the estate could be used. They were a body of men and women of prelapsarian conservatism, who saw it as their God-given mission to resist every proposed change to the house or gardens. They would really have liked the public excluded totally from the premises, but had been grudgingly forced to accept the financial necessity of paying visitors.

  At first the Trustees had resisted the overtures of the Great Wensham Festival Society to stage plays at Chailey Ferrars. But by the third year, having seen how much other businesses had benefited from the new custom attracted by the festival, they had agreed to very limited access to the grounds for two public performances of Much Ado About Nothing. Again, grudgingly, they had had to concede that the experiment had not led to wholesale vandalism of their precious property, and that, as well as being an artistic success, it had indeed proved rather profitable to the Trust.

  From then on the Chailey Ferrars Shakespeare had become a regular feature – in fact, the main focus – of the Great Wensham Festival, though the Trustees never allowed its continuance to be taken for granted. Each year the Festival Director, Julian Roxborough-Smith – or, in the event, his administrator, Moira Handley – had to go through an elaborate square dance of application and supplication until the Trustees – with an ever-increasing number of cautions and provisos – agreed to let the Chailey Ferrars grounds be used for yet another Shakespearean production.

  It was a measure of Moira Handley’s skilful management of the Trustees that, though there would never be any possibility of the play being staged in the formal gardens, she had elicited permission for the Twelfth Night photocall to be held there.

  As an even greater concession, the Trustees had allowed the accompanying press conference to be conducted in the Chailey Ferrars dining hall. The magnitude of this honour was continuously emphasised, though, since Asphodel were being forced to pay well over the odds for the Chailey Ferrars in-house catering services, the Trustees’ attitude did seem a little hypocritical.

  Still, Charles Paris wasn’t that worried. A photocall and a press conference had to mean a few free drinks.

  He had been unperturbed by the prospect of a visit to Great Wensham, though many of the other company members had made a big fuss about it. Gavin Scholes objected to losing a day’s rehearsal, even though his presence at the press conference was written into the contract between Asphodel and the Great Wensham Festival. His wardrobe mistress resented the demand for costumes to be worn at the photocall; she grumbled that it was only local press, anyway, surely they could be fobbed off with rehearsal stills. But again a fully dressed on-site photocall was written into the contract.

  These complaints, however, were as nothing to those raised by the cast. Few of the principals wanted to drag out to Great Wensham for some bloody photocall; they regarded a day without rehearsals as a day off, and at the beginning of several months’ intensive work they weren’t going to miss out on that.

  Russ Lavery was particularly vehement in his refusal when Gavin Scholes tried to cajole him into being part of the outing. Up until that point he had been very meek and unstarry at rehearsal – except for one violent blow-up with the wardrobe mistress who’d wanted to give Viola’s and Sebastian’s costumes shorter sleeves than Russ Lavery thought appropriate. Needless to say, the star had won; the sleeves were lengthened.

  But the press conference prompted another tantrum. Russ’s agent had set up a meeting for that day with a Hollywood director who’d got a project he might be interested in. When Gavin rather tentatively pointed out that ‘availability for promotion of the production’ was written into Russ’s contract, he was nearly blown out of the water.

  ‘I don’t have to make myself available for bloody local hacks!’ the star of Air-Sea Rescue stormed. ‘My publicist and I spend most of our time avoiding publicity, not courting it.’

  ‘It’s not going to be just local coverage,’ Gavin asserted. ‘The festival press officer I spoke to said they’ve invited all the nationals as well.’

  ‘I don’t care if they’ve invited the Pope, Barbra Streisand and Nelson Mandela,’ said Russ Lavery. ‘I won’t be there.’

  So the party who actually did attend the photocall and press conference were the amenable ones who tended not to make a fuss, like Charles Paris and Tottie Roundwood, the actress who was playing Maria; and those who were desperate for publicity in whatever form it came – Vasile Bogdan, who played Fabian, Sally Luther, the production’s Viola, and Talya Northcott, whose first professional job this was.

  Talya had been cast in the non-speaking role of Olivia’s Handmaiden, with the additional responsibility of understudying all three female parts. For someone so new to the profession, just working in the theatre was profoundly exciting. And any newspaper picture of her in costume would be religiously snipped out and scrapbooked by the worshipping ‘Mummy’ to whom her conversation frequently reverted.

  Vasile Bogdan, a gloweringly handsome dark-haired actor in his twenties, may have had an obscure European name, but spoke without any trace of an accent. He was fiercely ambitious, and his own opinion of his talents manifested itself in a slight contempt for the rest of the company. His Twelfth Night casting in the ungrateful role of Fabian was a stage which he considered himself to be passing through only briefly on his way to greater things. An opportunity to get his photograph in a newspaper – any newspaper – was not one that at this phase of his career he would ever pass up.

  Sally Luther’s relationship with the publicity machine was more complex. In her early twenties she had been the tabloids’ darling. A pretty blonde ingenue, she had been cast effortlessly, straight out of drama school, as one of the leads in the ITV sitcom Up To No Good. In that show she had charmed the nation through four series, and become a familiar presence failing to answer the questions on showbiz quizzes, guesting daffily on game shows and manning phone-lines on charity telethons. She described the interior of her flat to colour supplements, her
kind of day to the Radio Times, and her first kiss to teenage magazines. She had all the trappings of stardom: a fan club, a rose named after her, and even the unwanted attentions of obsessive fan letters and a mysterious stalker. The public loved her, she could do no wrong, and she made a very good living.

  Sally Luther’s fall from this state of grace was not dramatic. No messy break-ups from famous boyfriends, no arrests for drunken driving, no allegations of drug abuse. She just slowly dropped out of the public consciousness. Up To No Good was not recommissioned for a fifth series. The pilot for a new Sally Luther sitcom was rejected. Guest appearances in other sitcoms became more spaced out and finally dried up.

  The public did not fall out of love with Sally Luther; they simply forgot about her. Without a weekly reminder of her face on their television screens, she slipped imperceptibly out of the collective memory.

  She wasn’t out of work. She wasn’t broke. She didn’t crack up. She was just brought up hard against the fact that she’d had a lucky start, and if she was going to continue in the business, then she’d have to rebuild her career from scratch.

  And she’d have to rebuild it from different elements. The baby face that had floated her through her early twenties had grown harder and more lined. The natural blonde of her hair had darkened to a light brown. She could of course have kept the colour artificially, but decided not to. The new Sally Luther was not going to be a clone of the old.

  She had never been as stupid as she appeared on the screen. She applied her considerable intelligence and pragmatism to starting again.

  Charles Paris admired the determination with which Sally Luther had hit the comeback trail. She had immersed herself in stage work, learning the basics of a trade which her television success had bypassed. She had taken small parts in out-of-the-way theatres, slowly building competence and experience. She had worked her way up from being a pretty face to a respectable actress, and the Asphodel Productions’ Viola was the highest point yet of her reconstituted career.

  It was Charles’s secret opinion that Sally Luther, even with all her grafting away, was not really a good enough actress to play Viola. But he respected her professionalism and enjoyed working with her.

  The Trustees of Chailey Ferrars grudgingly – it was the adverb with which they performed their every action – allowed the Twelfth Night cast a small room off the ground floor administrative office in which to change. So, amidst coffee machines-and photocopiers, and in cramped proximity to Vasile Bogdan and the three – mercifully small – actresses, Charles Paris donned his Sir Toby Belch costume.

  He was pleased that Gavin Scholes was doing the play in what he, Charles, thought of as the ‘right’ period – in other words, contemporary with when it had been written. Charles Paris had had enough of gimmicky productions of Shakespeare. He’d been in a nineteen-twenties flapper-style Love’s Labour’s Lost; he’d worn cut-off jeans as Bardolph in Henry V, a pin-striped suit as one of the tribunes in Coriolanus, a hippie kaftan as Lancelot Gobbo, and even a tutu in a hopelessly misconceived cross-dressing All’s Well . . . (‘All’s Well That Ends Well, but here was a production which neither started nor ended well. In fact, so far as this critic’s concerned, it would have ended much better three hours before it actually did’ – Financial Times).

  What a relief, after all that, to be playing Shakespeare in appropriate dress. Gavin Scholes’ lack of imagination did have its advantages.

  Also, for once, Charles actually had a new costume. For most period productions of his career he’d been dressed in something hired from a theatrical costumier or tatted together from whatever could be found in Wardrobe. He’d become accustomed to other men’s clothes, to walking around in the aura – or, in certain regrettable instances, the smell – of another actor.

  But Asphodel employed a pukka costume designer for all their shows. This was partly so that the costumes could reflect a production design concept; but there were practical reasons too. A four-month engagement justified the expense of specially made costumes, and the company was also shrewdly building up its own wardrobe stock which was increasingly hired out to other managements. There were astute business brains behind Asphodel Productions.

  Charles Paris liked his Sir Toby Belch costume. The designer’s overall theme was muted greys and silver, which reflected Twelfth Night’s underlying melancholy – and also pointed up even more the virulent shock of Malvolio’s yellow cross-gartering.

  And the designer had not succumbed to the common error of making Sir Toby scruffy. The man was a gentleman of the court, after all, so Charles Paris was dressed in charcoal velvet doublet and hose, piped with silver and slashed with oyster-coloured silk. He had a silver-frosted ruff and a small charcoal hat with a fluffy pale-grey feather. As Charles donned the costume in the Chailey Ferrars office, he did feel rather pleased with himself.

  He felt particularly pleased that the costume’s generous cut rendered his own paunch inadequate and forced him actually to pad for the role. This gave Charles a spurious sense of righteousness, as did the fact that he also had to redden his face with make-up. The Bell’s whisky may have taken its toll, but it had not yet sufficiently ravaged his complexion for him to play Sir Toby without cosmetic help. All encouraging stuff.

  As well as a specially made costume, Charles had had a customised beard constructed by Wig Creations, and this too gave him a sense of being pampered. As he peered into the tiny mirror, the familiar alcohol smell of spirit gum in his nostrils, and pressed Sir Toby’s luxuriant moustache on to his upper lip, Charles Paris felt good.

  His self-satisfaction must have expressed itself in his body language, because Tottie Roundwood, reaching round to pull up the zip of her jet-black Maria costume, grinned and said, ‘Yes, very handsome indeed.’

  Charles grinned back. ‘Let me.’ He reached across to help her with the zip.

  Tottie Roundwood was probably around the fifty mark, short, plumpish, dark hair beginning to be streaked with grey. She was one of those actresses capable of enormous fireworks on stage, but quiet and reserved the rest of the time. Charles liked her, though he knew little about her, except that she was interested in some system of alternative medicine. Reflexology? Healing? Homeopathy? One of those, anyway, he couldn’t remember.

  He patted her shoulder to indicate that the dress was secure, and reflected on the total lack of sexual charge the contact gave him. Actors and actresses are so used to sharing dressing rooms that gender becomes irrelevant. Charles couldn’t help noticing out of the corner of his eye that Sally Luther still had a pretty good body, though.

  To his surprise, this little glancing thought made him feel guilty. There was a tiny pang of disloyalty to Frances, with whom he’d made tender and extended love the night before. Obviously his wife’s body had to give Sally Luther’s twenty years, but it was still looking pretty terrific. And, he concluded virtuously after a covert look at Talya Northcott slipping into her costume, I don’t fancy that really young one at all. Neat little figure, nice blonde hair maybe, but it doesn’t do a thing for me.

  Goodness, thought Charles Paris, I am changing. If this goes on, I’ll soon be positively uxorious.

  Gavin Scholes came bustling into the office. ‘OK, are you set? The press – such as they are – are all here, and we’re ready to go.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘. . . BUT PERHAPS the Shakespeare is the jewel in our crown – though of course the Great Wensham Festival is a crown of many jewels – as you will be able to see from the press releases that are on the table over there. Anyway, we of the Festival Society are absolutely delighted to welcome, for the third year running. Asphodel Productions. I’m sure you all enjoyed their Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It and I am confident that we can look forward to the same qualities of robust storytelling in this year’s Twelfth Night – whose performance, incidentally, is made possible by the generous sponsorship of Mutual Rel –’

  At a warning cough from a dark-haired woman besid
e him, the Festival Director, Julian Roxborough-Smith, hastily corrected himself. ‘– of a variety of national and local businesses which you will find listed in the press release. I would also like to acknowledge at this point the invaluable contribution made by Hertfordshire Arts Network, without which the scope of the Great Wensham Festival would be considerably less broad.

  ‘As you see, some members of the Twelfth Night cast have been good enough to join us today. Yes, they are in costume – those aren’t their normal street clothes.’ A little pause for the even littler joke. No reaction. ‘But before we become more informal and you get a chance to chat to them, I’m going to call on Twelfth Night’s director to say a few words about the production. Ladies and gentlemen of the press, will you please welcome Mr Gavin Scholes.’

  ‘Lady and gentleman of the press’ might have been more accurate, Charles reflected. Though there were lavish amounts of sandwiches and other snacks – and a gratifying number of wine bottles – laid out in the dining hall of Chailey Ferrars for the press’ conference, there did seem to be a marked lack of press.

  A bored-looking man in his fifties held a notebook and pencil, but had not yet heard anything he deemed worthy of recording; and an earnest-looking girl, barely out of her teens, pointed a cassette player with great concentration at whoever happened to be speaking. Otherwise, a single photographer, burdened down by a shoulder bag of camera impedimenta, shifted from one foot to the other at the back of the hall, with the expression of someone who should already have moved on to cover the local primary school’s Wildfowl Week.

  Julian Roxborough-Smith’s address was unlikely to have stirred much excitement among the press, even if more of them had been present. It was not what he said that was uncharismatic; it was the manner of his saying it. The Festival Director had one of those languid, slightly theatrical voices which suggests he is doing everyone a favour by speaking at all, and imparts an unintentional tinge of contempt to everything. He was a tall man pushing sixty and turning to fat. His sandy hair was thinning. He wore a suit in broad pin-stripe. The thick-framed glasses and spotted bow-tie seemed to accentuate rather than obscure the nondescript nature of his face.