Killings on Jubilee Terrace

by Robert Barnard

  Outside the police had thrown a cordon round the spectators, the real spectators, come to see the cast of Jubilee Terrace. They were kept well back, while the mock spectators – the congregation at the wedding of Arthur and Maureen – gathered on the steps of the church, little bags of confetti in their hands. Reggie Friedman was in an ecstasy of busyness arranging the cast and the extras in the best positions.

  ‘I’m going to do it once,’ he said, ‘just the once. They’re going to come out, and your reactions will be what’s shown. So get it right.’

  It was in the final moments before Arthur and Maureen came through the door that a youngish man approached one of the policemen keeping back the knot of real spectators. Luckily the constable had been a viewer before he joined the force (there had been precious little time since), and he recognised the man and let him through. He strolled down the street, smiling an inward brooding smile, as the cheers were rehearsed and as, eventually, the happy couple emerged through the church door. The cheers were joyous, the confetti hit its target and the couple walked through the church gate to the waiting limousine.

  The man strolled up to the gate, where Bet Garrett was watching the regulars in the cast. She and the man stood for a moment together.

  ‘Hi, Terracers, I’m back,’ he shouted.

  It was well that the scene of jubilation was in the can.

  ‘Bloody Hamish,’ hissed Winnie Hey, and next to her, she could feel Bill Garrett’s body stiffen at the sight of Bet. The St Jude’s congregation stared at the young man, stony-faced.

  Only Reggie Friedman, smiling and enthusiastic, ran down the church steps to greet him.

  ‘Hamish!’ he said. ‘Welcome home!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  In Sickness and in Health

  The face on the bed was fearsomely white. Hamish Fawley had never played Cyril as one of the box’s perma-tanned homosexuals, but this was extreme. It was the make-up department’s way of saying to the viewers: this is serious, my friends. This may not be a deathbed, but it sure as hell is going to lead to one.

  Winnie Hey was flustered. She had read her scripts in the chronological order of her scenes, and had forgotten to check the order of their filming. If she had she would have realised that Cyril’s first bout of serious illness after his homecoming was to be filmed before the homecoming itself, at Leeds–Bradford airport. She was word-perfect, or as near as she ever got, for the airport sequence, but a long way from it for the bedroom scene.

  ‘Mother,’ croaked Cyril, in an interestingly attenuated voice, ‘there’s something I haven’t told you.’

  ‘I’m sure there are many things you haven’t told me,’ the old lady said grimly.

  ‘No, but this is…different. Not boyfriends. The fact is I’ve got tuberculosis.’

  There was a long silence. Eventually the pathetically dying face twisted into a snarl.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, you stupid old cow. You’ve forgotten your lines again. Why do I have to have all my big scenes with someone in the Alzheimer zone?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten my lines,’ protested Winnie. ‘She’s flabbergasted by the news. Naturally. She thought tuberculosis was something in the past. She doesn’t know how to react.’

  ‘Doesn’t know how to react? Why – does she think tuberculosis is a garden flower?’

  ‘There’s no pause in the script, Winnie,’ said Reggie Friedman. ‘If you put one in as long as you have done it’ll only be cut out. Your next line is “But nobody gets TB these days!”’

  ‘Of course it is. I knew that,’ said Winnie unconvincingly. ‘Let’s go back to Cyril’s last line.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ muttered Cyril. He laid his head back on the pillow, assumed a faraway expression, and brought back the distant tones of visiting royalty. ‘But this is different, Mother. Not boyfriends. The fact is I’ve got tuberculosis.’

  Winnie left a small pause to make a point, then said: ‘Tuberculosis? But nobody gets tuberculosis these days.’

  She did it rather well, managing to get incredulity and fear into her voice.

  ‘Oh, but they do, Mumsie. It’s been hibernating, biding its time. And now it’s come back, with a vengeance.’

  ‘But there must be drugs these days, things to cure it.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But there isn’t. There are things that sometimes work, or slow things down. I’ve tried all of them.’

  There was another long pause.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ came again from the bed.

  ‘Look Winnie,’ said Reggie, ‘here’s the script. Read the lines, and we’ll film you from behind.’

  ‘Why don’t you just film her ankles,’ said Hamish. ‘She says they used to be her best feature a century or so ago. They’re probably the only part of her that can act.’

  ‘Just get the words approximately right,’ said Reggie, encouragingly. ‘Say something appropriate to the situation.’

  ‘I’m finding it difficult to find words that express anything except my delight at Cyril’s approaching death,’ said Winnie.

  It was Garry Kopps and Shirley Merritt’s first day back on the Jubilee Terrace sets after their ‘marriage’. They had been granted a rather lavish four weeks’ break, approximating to a honeymoon, which according to the script had been spent in the Bahamas. Now they were back, and Shirley had to be made up differently, to hide the fact that she had spent the four free weeks at home in York.

  When they’d filmed Arthur and Maureen’s arrival back at the shop their time was free until four, so they did what they often did – took sandwiches and a couple of cans of beer out to one of the Leeds parks. This time they went to Kirkstall, and sat on the medieval masonry in weather that was ridiculously warm for October. Garry was meditating a cosy and personal book on his time on Jubilee Terrace and another on soaps in general, their codes and their limitations as social documents. Garry was the intellectual of the cast.

  ‘So what’s gone on while I’ve been away?’ he asked.

  ‘Hmmm. I haven’t been hanging around the studio, so I may have missed all sorts of things.’

  ‘Come off it. Someone will have been on the phone to you with all the important stuff. And failing that you’d have phoned someone and prised it out of them.’

  ‘Well, I only do it for you, Garry. I’m only interested in my painting. Let’s see: Hamish’s return you saw yourself. All that followed it was entirely predictable: he spread his usual bile and contempt for all and every one of us, mainly, of course, Winnie.’

  ‘I suppose you talked to her. How’s she taking it?’

  ‘She’s upset of course, but comforting herself that there will soon be an end to Cyril without it entailing an end for her. The trouble is that all the emotional disturbance means she finds it still more difficult to concentrate on her scripts. She’s beginning to improvise on her scripts, which gives Hamish more ammunition.’

  ‘I frankly don’t see Hamish having many good scenes before he snuffs it. In the nature of things there aren’t many likely situations he can be put into.’

  ‘Reggie is thinking of bringing back the curate.’

  ‘The one in the church? The student? A bit untried, isn’t he? An unknown quantity.’

  ‘He struck me as a lovely lad.’

  ‘No,’ said Garry, with all the pedantry of an academic sociologist. ‘He played the part of a lovely lad very convincingly. You love confusing real life with unreal life.’

  ‘Oh well, I bet he’ll fit in beautifully. There’s already a debate started on whether he could get Cyril to pray with him on his deathbed.’

  ‘Good God! That’s a bit different from our usual debates about whether X should sleep with Y, or whether Z should give up smoking.’

  ‘It’s the fact that it’s a bit different that’s making people want it. If it’s done, it’ll be done very tactfully. No chorus of welcoming angels heralding Cyril’s entry to heaven. Nothing Gounod-ish.’

  ‘OK – wha
t else?’

  ‘Hamish has taken a strong dislike to Susan and James.’

  ‘Tell me something surprising. I’d have thought he’d have taken against Susan ages ago. James is too recent.’

  ‘Hamish and Susan hardly had any scenes together during his first spell on the Terrace. He was usually in the pub with his mother, Susan usually in the family home. Now he finds the romance between them saccharine (as we all do) and horribly politically correct. Most people think he’s just jealous of James’s good looks.’

  ‘What form has the bile taken?’

  ‘One thing Marjorie quoted to me was: “These days young dimwits go to drama school because they can’t get an apprenticeship in plumbing”.’

  ‘Charming. As opposed to those young ladies in our day who went to drama school as a cheaper alternative to finishing school in Switzerland.’

  ‘They still do, actually. And can you just see James as a plumber?’

  ‘Never in a million years. That’s one of the interesting things about Hamish. His bile comes out with tremendous venom, but it is nearly always misdirected, remote from the truth. It’s like scatter-shot: only one in fifty missiles hits its target.’

  ‘Anyway, the truth is that the atmosphere on the set has deteriorated significantly.’

  ‘What was Reggie thinking of, bringing Hamish back?’

  ‘Bill Garrett asked him that. Reggie said a fiery atmosphere keeps everyone on their toes. Too much sweetness and light and all the viewers sense is lethargy.’

  ‘Ho-ho! I think he doth protest too much.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean there must have been some other reason – at present not known – for bringing him back. Watch this space.’

  ‘Reggie is almost the only one around who’s speaking to Hamish. That niggles our Hamish. He needs someone to make his vicious remarks to. That remark about apprentice plumbers was made in the canteen to Reggie. He should have protested and put him in his place, but he only made his excuses and left.’

  ‘Coward. Ah well, you could say it’s business as usual.’

  ‘No. Marjorie says it’s much worse than usual.’

  ‘People romanticise the past when they’re thinking about the present. I must say when I first heard of the death of Vernon Watts I assumed someone had pushed him under that bus.’

  ‘All of us felt the need to, at one time or another.’

  ‘Well, if anyone took action, they’ve got away with it nicely.’

  The name of Vernon Watts came up in the Jubilee Terrace studio that same day. Filming was ‘outside’ in the Terrace itself, and there were plenty of places on the much-used permanent set to sit around and gossip.

  ‘Oh, I do miss Vernon,’ sighed Marjorie to Philip Marston.

  ‘Someone familiar you know through and through?’ he suggested.

  ‘Something like that. Someone whose reactions I know through and through is perhaps closer. Someone who I could have a really convincing row with, even someone I could at a pinch enjoy making up with.’

  ‘Sounds like real-life matrimony,’ said Philip.

  ‘Well, it was in many ways. A love-hate affair. The love part just means it’s someone you know, are totally familiar with.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the truth about Bill and Bet.’

  ‘I think the love there is even feebler than Vernon’s and mine.’

  ‘Anyway, there’s Melvin. Visiting the toilers at the coal face. Why don’t you have a word with him?’ And he gestured to the man with the cravat and velvet jacket which told anyone who wondered that he was essentially, or at least wanted to be thought, an artistic gentleman of a bygone era.

  Melvin’s official title was Head of Scripts. There was in fact a legion of writers for the five-times-a-week soap, but Melvin was keeper of the flame, the one who had absolute power of sanction or veto on all plot developments and even over casual fill-in material. He was, as far as anybody knew, a happily married man who had a family in Ilkley but who, at work, had a power nearly absolute, especially as he and Reggie tended to be of one mind. Melvin liked his power: ‘Your life or your death are in my hands,’ he would say; ‘you are just the putty, for me to make what I like with.’ Sometimes cast members begged him to kill them off, making for them the decision which, because of family commitments, they were not strong enough to make for themselves. But most of the cast regarded him with a sort of affectionate fear.

  ‘So what is occupying the minds of you dear people?’ he enquired (even his vocabulary was a thing of the past).

  ‘It’s Marjorie,’ said Philip. ‘She needs a new somebody in her life.’

  ‘Ah – the usual thing,’ said Melvin, instantly sympathetic. ‘You didn’t expect to, but you miss Vernon.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ admitted Marjorie. ‘All those rows we had, but at least he was somebody who could be – well, a sort of sounding-board. Now Gladys Porter has nobody in her life like that – nobody of first-rate importance to her. Do you get my meaning?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. Everybody who suffers loss feels the same, whether it’s soap loss or real-life loss. If we’d just written Vernon out you wouldn’t be feeling so very different. He wouldn’t have been around for you any more. It’s perfectly natural.’

  ‘The question is, what are you going to do about it?’ said Philip.

  Melvin thought.

  ‘Well, I don’t have to do anything, you know. New widows don’t find that God immediately provides them with a new Significant Other. He just lets the bereaved one jog on in loneliness as often as not.’

  ‘But you could put someone into my life – a love or a hate – to give meaning to what I do,’ said Marjorie in a wheedling voice.

  ‘Oh yes – I’m far nicer than God in many respects. I will think it over, bring it up at Thursday’s script conference.’ He was starting away when his eye was caught by the set of the Terrace. From the house that was the Whartons’ home Cyril had emerged, white-faced, stepping mincingly across the cobbles, triumphantly resurrecting the walk that had been discarded by homosexuals two decades before. Melvin turned to the other two.

  ‘You know, when you called me over I thought you were going to protest about Hamish’s return. Why didn’t you? Everyone else has.’

  ‘We knew they would have,’ said Philip. ‘So why bother? We do like to be a bit original, Marjorie and I. But what possessed Reggie to bring him back?’

  ‘He fills the gap left by Vernon. As you know Marjorie, you and Vernon were to have had a strong storyline about now. Cyril is the substitute, as to a lesser degree Bet Garrett is too. Both are stopgaps, of course.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Philip.

  ‘Well all I can say is, you owe me a good storyline,’ said Marjorie.

  ‘Point taken.’ Melvin paused again in his exit. ‘You know I once knew someone quite as horrible as Hamish…many years ago, when I was a young man, thinking to write the Great Novel. He was utterly contemptuous of all moral codes, kicked over all the usual restraints people observe, made clear he loved hurting people, watching them flinch… He was just a bundle of putrefaction.’

  ‘Who was he? What did he do?’

  ‘Actually he was a pimp. With a train of suffering women anxious to break free of him but not able to. I disliked the sex trade then, and I still do. We’ve never had a prostitute in Jubilee Terrace.’

  ‘Name me a soap that has had a prostitute in it,’ said Philip.

  ‘Corrie’s had an “escort”,’ said Melvin thoughtfully. ‘But a common-or-garden prostitute – no… Interesting.’

  Cyril Wharton tiptoed into the news agency, each step becoming teensy-weenier the closer he got to the camera. The presentation of Cyril in Jubilee Terrace was double-headed, after initial consultations between Hamish, Melvin and Reggie. With his intimate friends – notably his mother and the Kerridges – he was a man like any other, straightforward, opinionated, natural. With the Terrace in general, the solidly working-class charac
ters, he was the typical homosexual of popular myth, the camp queen of radio and television humour now decades out of date. It was intended as an emetic, to flush out prejudice and buried fear. In the present scene he was regarded with distaste by Harry Hornby, the shop’s proprietor – a distaste dictated by homophobia but also simply a reaction to Hamish himself.

  ‘The Guardian is it?’ he asked, putting his voice into neutral.

  ‘Oh yes. One must keep up, mustn’t one, for as long as one can.’ He looked around the little shop. ‘And there is something else – but it’s rather embarrassing.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’m that most pathetic creature – a gay so short he can’t reach up to the top shelf in a newsagents.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ Hornby was still more extravagantly neutral as he came round from behind the counter and peered upwards. ‘Was it Physique Pictorial, All Male or Muscle Monthly you were after?’

  ‘I’d really like to have all three, ducky, because you can’t have too much of a good thing, can you? Still, the old ready is in short supply, so I’ll just take All Male.’

  ‘I hear you’re not too well,’ said Hornby, holding out his change. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be. We’re all suffering from the same thing, and in the end it always proves fatal. It’s called life.’

  As the sequence ended Hamish turned, reassumed his natural real-life role as an unusually vicious heterosexual, and turning to Melvin Settle, just off-set, said:

  ‘That is the most corny and sick-making line I’ve ever had to speak on television. I suppose it’s one of yours, is it, Melvin? One of your concentrated essences of worldly wisdom scattered before this nation’s yobs and dimwits? It has the ring of you, the mark of your pen. Tell me it’s one of your calendar maxims, meant to give the nation its daily ration of thought.’