Killings on Jubilee Terrace

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Is tuberculosis rife in San Francisco?’ Winnie asked faintly. But Reggie was edging away.

  ‘Who cares? We’ll have got in first. It’s a plotline to die for, and a real trail-blazer.’

  To his departing back Winnie Hey wailed: ‘Not Cyril. Please Reggie. Not Hamish Fawley.’

  But by then Reggie had disappeared through the swing doors. It was some time before Winnie thought of a crumb of comfort: if this was to be the story-line that brought him back, it was likely that his reappearance would be terminal.

  Bill Garrett had phoned his wife from the car, so when he arrived home she already had her coat on and they did no more than pass in the doorway.

  ‘Angela’s out, Debbie and Rosie are in their rooms. You can fucking babysit – I’ve had them all day.’

  ‘They’re not babies, and they’ve been at school most of the day. Where are you going?’

  ‘What do you care? Anyway, you’re not my fucking probation officer.’

  And she breezed out.

  Bill went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea. Upstairs he heard his two younger daughters shouting between bedrooms. They always gave him a bit of time when he got home – to stop being Bob Worseley and to start being Bill again was how they put it – and he appreciated their consideration. They were lovely girls, all three of them, the centre of his life. It was as if nothing of their mother had gone into their making. They were kind, concerned, intelligent – none of those words you could apply to Bet.

  Sipping his tea, Bill considered his resolution to divorce his wife. Certainly she had given him more than enough reason, and she gave him almost daily evidence that she only stayed with him for materialistic reasons – food, drink, heating, lighting, pocket money and a degree of local cachet as the wife of a television personality.

  There was, in fact, nothing left of the marriage, not for her and certainly not for him. He had no doubt she would prefer him to have custody of the children. Why had he not cut the knot years ago? He could only assume it was the pull of habit, a fear of having full responsibility for the girls. But that wasn’t something he feared – more something he desired. He would protect them from the contamination of contact with their mother. He concluded it was his habitual lethargy that held him back, just as it had held him back from quitting Jubilee Terrace and entering the unknown, terrifying world of being a jobbing actor, one with no clear idea of where the next job, and the next money, was going to come from. He had been guilty of lethargy – lethargy and cowardice. Well, no longer.

  ‘Daddy,’ said Rosie, as she and Debbie and the returned Angela – nine, twelve and blooming fifteen – sat on or around him on the sofa half an hour later. ‘Did Mummy tell you?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Bill. ‘We didn’t have time for many words.’

  ‘She’s going back into Jubilee Terrace. Three weeks’ work.’

  ‘They might have told me. When’s this?’

  ‘Early next month.’

  ‘So soon. Why didn’t they let her know earlier?’

  ‘I don’t know. She seemed pleased.’

  I bet she seemed pleased, said Bill to himself. Bet loved her occasional sorties into the Terrace. They were a heaven-sent opportunity to humiliate him. Who would it be this time? Reggie? James? No, not the latter. He couldn’t see the suave young man courting sneers by going with a brassy woman of forty-two. Maybe the returned Hamish, who was in real life as hetero as the character he played was homo.

  One thing was for certain: she would be out to humiliate him, but now he would be just as determined to humiliate her. He remembered, back in the days when EastEnders was watchable, Dirty Den serving divorce papers on Angie as her much-trumpeted Christmas present. Pity Christmas was so far in the future. Hallowe’en would hardly have the same effect. Even Easter would have been something. Still, he could make it as public as possible.

  Then he sighed.

  He wasn’t that sort of man. Not loud, not public, not demonstrative. He’d do things privately, softly, considerately. He wondered in his mind whether Bet had ever done anything considerately in her life. Never, he thought. Never.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Wedding

  The vicar who married Arthur Bradley and Maureen Cooke was drunk.

  ‘Will you shake this woman—?’ he asked, his voice wet with spittle.

  Arthur and Maureen stood there, he uncomfortable in his best suit, she in a white dress she was scarcely entitled to, and both looking miserable and embarrassed.

  ‘Will you take this woman,’ the vicar tried again, ‘to be your awful wedded wife. Hey! Thatsh Dylan Thomash. I was in that play once.’

  ‘Cut!’ shouted Reggie Friedman. He marched up to the vicar in one of his great rages. ‘You… are…drunk.’

  ‘Sho what? The vicar of St Jude’s has an alcohol problem. Wouldn’t be the firsht time in the Shurch of England.’

  Reggie, getting pinker by the moment, poked his finger into the vicar’s surplice.

  ‘The vicar of St Jude’s does not have an alcohol problem. You have an alcohol problem. Or, to put it more plainly, you have become a congenital drunk. You have also become a liability to Jubilee Terrace. Go away and put your head under the cold tap, and come back in five minutes. If you can’t get it right then, you’re out. Get me? OUT! Location filming costs money, and I’m not going to waste any more of it on your imbecilities.’

  He strode back down the aisle of St Peter’s, Northwick, the Victorian Gothic edifice that always stood in as St Jude’s, the Jubilee Terrace parish church, on such occasions. Reggie was livid. George Price had once been a reliable small-part actor. Now he was a lush. He felt the sleeve of his jacket being pulled, and he looked down to see Gladys Porter, in the shape of Marjorie Harcourt-Smith.

  ‘You can’t really mean that you’d sack George,’ she said, too short-sighted to see the implacable expression on Reggie’s face. ‘He’s always been the St Jude’s vicar. He married the Kerridge boy, did Dawn’s confirmation and buried—’

  ‘Spare me the hatches, matches and dispatches, Marjorie.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t sack him, would you, Reggie? So publicly? He’s always been the Jubilee Terrace vicar.’

  ‘So you keep saying. But actually it’s only been for the last five years. I gave him the part, and I’ve had my eye on him, believe you me. He’s made most of the funerals almost jolly. So unless he comes back sober, this is the last sacrament of holy matrimony he will conduct in this church.’

  Marjorie and Carol Chisholm, sitting together, looked shocked at his relish. He could have been a malignant Archbishop of Canterbury.

  ‘But how will you explain his being replaced?’

  ‘Crisis of faith? Gone to a retreat? Gone into rehab?’ He straightened and regarded the congregation – Winnie in the row behind, Bet Garrett, just slipping in through the front door, Susan and James, sitting together but separate, Liza Croome looking concerned but understanding. Then he swivelled round to see the happy couple, with Bill Garrett being best man before the altar. He muttered to Marjorie in a very distinct and determined mutter: ‘Upstairs in my filing cabinet I’ve got a hundred reasons for writing new characters in and a thousand for writing old characters out, either temporarily or permanently. None of you is indispensable. Got it?’

  Oh, they had got it. At heart they had always known it. And in fact it was in its way heartening, especially for the younger actors: should that call come from the National, should that Hollywood film materialise, they would not be letting the side down by accepting. The show would go on.

  The show, at present, was a wedding that could have taken place at any time over the past three or four years. Arthur Bradley had come to Jubilee Terrace as a bluff, slightly randy art teacher. Then, with the versatility that characterises soap-opera destinies, he had taken over the corner shop. Maureen Cooke was at the time in the throes of marital difficulties which had viewers ringing and writing in with advice and support. After the divor
ce it was not long before she took up with Arthur, and soon she was moving in with him, taking her children, and helping to run the shop. By now she also had a baby by him. Whether the Bradleys should have been, or could have been, married in church was a point that did not bother the writers of Jubilee Terrace. They were being married now so that the event could joyfully offset the death of Bert Porter. A registry office do wouldn’t have fitted the bill at all.

  Now Garry Kopps and Shirley Merritt (who played Arthur and Maureen) were standing at the altar feeling rather foolish. This seemed like a very ceremonial form of coitus interruptus. Bill Garrett, holding the ring as if it was a hot potato, looked equally disconcerted, but that was by the sudden appearance of his wife. She was not a good argument for weddings in any of their forms. Reggie Friedman had gone to the back of the church, where a finishing class from the West Yorkshire College of Music and Drama was watching filming. Reggie was eyeing them speculatively. The congregation, meanwhile, was talking in low tones, as congregations will do in real life. The fact of being in church was affecting the actors.

  ‘I think it’ll be an awful shame if he does replace the vicar,’ said Winnie Hey, Lady Wharton, leaning forward to talk to Marjorie Harcourt-Smith in almost inaudible tones. ‘The vicar and Dr Losborne are not exactly characters, but they’re both what you might call touchstones in Jubilee Terrace.’

  ‘A drunken vicar is no sort of touchstone,’ said Marjorie, reasonably. ‘Now I’ve thought it over, I see Reggie’s point. He has no choice. If he filmed him in his present state he’d get protests from Alcohol Concern, and probably from the Church of England high-ups as well.’

  ‘I hate to see the old characters go,’ said Carol Chisholm.

  ‘I hate to see some of them come back,’ said Winnie. ‘Hamish Fawley being a case in point. But not the old dependables who represent the community at large.’

  ‘I suppose a drunken vicar could represent the community,’ said Marjorie thoughtfully. ‘Characters in soaps seem to spend even more time drinking than they do sleeping around.’

  Winnie Hey nodded, taking the point seriously.

  ‘I love this sort of session,’ she said contentedly. ‘When you get paid just for sitting around and being seen, and having hardly any lines.’

  ‘You’ll be getting your share of the action when your Cyril comes back,’ said Carol. Winnie shuddered.

  ‘Don’t mention his Second Coming,’ she said. ‘I did go to the scriptwriters and put it to them that the treatment should be mainly Hamish lying in bed looking pale and interesting, and me sitting by it looking anguished. Even that would have taxed my acting abilities, because a wasting disease is what Hamish has been asking for for years. My God, what a toad that man is! Anyway, they weren’t having any. They said it would be an inadequate representation of the Jubilee Terrace response to the renewed threat of TB.’

  ‘What did they mean by that?’

  ‘I don’t imagine even they knew. But what was clear is that there are going to be a lot of confrontations between him and other characters, and lots of dramatic scenes between him and me. Sheer hell – and millions of lines to learn.’

  James Selcott and Susan Fyldes – as Will and Dawn, much written about and photographed in Hello, Hi! and Girlie Talk magazines – sat towards the back, slumped in their pew, their faces a mingling of boredom, melancholy and contempt. It was in just such a mood that James, in reply to the inevitable question from a Hi! reporter as to whether there was ‘anything’ between him and Susan, had replied: ‘I can have any chick I want at the click of my fingers. Why should I settle for one?’ He had been not just ungrateful when Hi! tactfully suppressed the quote but convulsed with rage.

  ‘I loathe this sort of scene,’ said James, deciding that talking was the lesser of two evils. ‘Nothing to do, no point to make – not even the usual dim, soap-opera kind of point.’

  ‘I think,’ said the coy voice of an extra from the pew behind, ‘that you’re both meant to be sitting there wondering whether it will be your turn next.’

  ‘I’d rather die,’ said James and Susan simultaneously.

  Suddenly the congregation was hushed. The vicar had returned. He was not walking straight, neither was he looking penitent. And he could be smelt from the tenth row. Whatever he had put his head under, it had not been water.

  ‘Dearly beloved,’ he yelled cheerily, producing a bottle from under his surplice, ‘we are tethered together—’

  ‘Right!’ said Reggie Friedman, marching forward. ‘That’s it! That’s the end! You’re de-frocked, or unsmocked, or whatever the damned word is. You’re fired!’

  ‘You can’t fire me,’ said the vicar, weaving joyously backwards to gain support from the altar. ‘How are you going to get this fucking pair married?’

  ‘They’ll get married if I have to do it myself.’ Reggie turned to two stalwart props men. ‘Get him out of here, get that bloody surplice off him, and boot him out of the church. And dig out some air-fresheners. The place smells like a distillery. We’ll be lucky if we don’t have to pay to have it reconsecrated.

  Without waiting to see whether his orders were obeyed (rather as Queen Victoria sat down without looking to see whether the chair was there, knowing it would be), Reggie strode down the aisle to the gaggle of drama students at the back of the church.

  ‘Right. How many of you have got Equity cards?’

  A straggling six or seven put up their hands, expressions of pathetic eagerness on their faces.

  ‘Men – it’s got to be a man.’

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ said an eager girl. ‘Women can conduct marriage services or do anything else you can name in the C of E these days.’

  ‘Not in Jubilee Terrace they can’t… Let’s see… You.’ Reggie pointed to a gangling youth, a beanpole six-foot body topped by a cherubic face. ‘Let’s hear your voice.’

  ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the sight of God—’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Stephen Barrymore.’

  ‘Good man. Might be lucky. Now, you’re on. Go to Make-Up in the vestry, then get the surplice on. It’ll be too short, but we’ll make do with close-ups of head and shoulders. And we’ll call you…let’s think…Kevin Plunkett. Right?’

  It was a fairy-tale transformation, the British equivalent of the waitress in the Hollywood soda-fountain. Stephen Barrymore would get national coverage in a top-of-the-viewing-figures episode of Terrace.

  The other students’ faces showed a mixture of wonder, delight and biliousness.

  Reggie, in the wait, improvised like the professional he was. He walked up the aisle, looking around him speculatively. He picked on Lady Wharton and the Kerridges, and sat down on his haunches in the aisle beside them, summoning cameras and sound equipment in a lordly manner with his hands.

  ‘Something to paper over the change,’ he said. ‘Why isn’t the usual vicar doing the service? What’s the best line? Has he gone into a retreat?’

  ‘Hospital would be better,’ said Philip Marston, who played Peter Kerridge. ‘People don’t always come out of hospital.’

  ‘Right. Good thinking. Here’s what you say…’

  And so it was filmed. Lady Wharton leant over to the Kerridges and whispered: ‘It’s the new curate. While the vicar is in hospital.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ asked Norma Kerridge.

  ‘I don’t know. But his family are looking very worried.’

  And so the way was paved for George Price’s departure from the serial. A drunken star might perforce be tolerated, had been often enough in this and other soaps, but a drunken bit-part player was as expendable as a spent match.

  Particularly as the new curate looked and spoke the part to perfection.

  ‘Will you, Arthur Bradley,’ he piped, in a voice that seemed to have broken only yesterday, with a benign smile that suggested he had no notion they had been sleeping together for years, ‘take this woman, Maureen Cooke…’

&nb
sp; The pair stood there, half-proud, half-sheepish, making their responses firmly. The congregation buzzed with satisfaction. It was going to be a lovely wedding. Bet Garrett, Bill’s wife, who played Rita Somerville, a florist with a fine line in snobbery and spite, whispered cynically to her neighbour: ‘Bill’s enjoying this, the bastard. All we had was a measly registry office affair.’

  ‘That’d be all Arthur and Maureen would have had,’ said the neighbour, ‘in real life.’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk about real life. In real life Bill’s a lousy husband, but he’s obviously going to be a pillar of strength to Maureen, Arthur and the kids. It ought to be as unlucky to mention real life on a soap set as to say “Macbeth” in the theatre…’

  The ring bit went well, with Bill, as Bob Worseley the best man, making a nice thing out of forgetting which pocket it was in. Actually he had forgotten which pocket he had it in. Maureen squeezed some genuine tears as they were made man and wife, and the cameras caught their glisten. Garry Kopps as Arthur looked proud and pleased as punch as they walked down the aisle, and there was a jolly little scene as they signed the book.

  ‘Do you know that was my first wedding?’ the new curate improvised, as he shook their hands and wished them well.

  ‘I couldn’t have done it better myself,’ said Arthur.

  Reggie was delighted, and said he’d keep it in. He took the new curate’s address for Accounts and Casting, and said that – who knew? – there might be something else for him before too long.

  ‘We’ve got a TB sequence coming soon. You know – young man dying. The curate could play a part.’

  ‘Strike a blow against the “brought here from the Indian sub-continent” school of thought?’ asked Stephen Barrymore sagely.

  ‘Right. That could be effective. Start a lot of discussion which is what we like. With all these programmes where the viewer talks back, discussion is of the essence though, God knows, ninety-five per cent of it is unutterable tripe. Well, as I say, we may be in touch…Kevin Plunkett. Nice sound, eh?’