Killings on Jubilee Terrace

by Robert Barnard

  ‘You’re right as always, Hamish,’ said Melvin quietly. ‘It’s one of the truisms I learnt at my mother’s knee.’

  ‘A knee worn out by scrubbing other people’s linoleum, I suppose?’

  ‘How you do hit the nail on the head, Hamish. And how I wish I could return the compliment by hitting a nail into your head.’

  Permission to film at Leeds–Bradford airport had only been given to Jubilee Terrace for one of the less busy weekdays at the end of the summer rush, so that Cyril’s arrival back in the soap had to be filmed well after the scenes in which his personality was re-established and his predicament made known. The script and direction departments were clear in their minds that it had to be the airport: a scene at the station, implying that he’d flown to Heathrow or Manchester and then changed mode of transport, was somehow not at all as dramatic as the dire flight from San Francisco to Leeds. So Lady Wharton and one or two other Terrace notables were in the public area just beyond Customs, joining a queue of real relatives meeting loved ones, and extras. Cameras were discreet but everyone, especially the members of the public, were aware of them.

  ‘Darling, don’t make me throw my arms around him,’ pleaded Lady Wharton to Reggie.

  ‘Don’t be silly Winnie. Of course she will throw her arms around her son.’

  ‘Couldn’t I, just before her arms touch him, register how sick he is looking and back away in horror?’

  The thought had never occurred to Reggie before.

  ‘Hmmm. I suppose it could work,’ he said.

  ‘Of course it would. The first thing a mother would do would be to register how her son looked.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. Particularly the mother of a gay, I suppose. Well, we’ll try it both ways, then we can choose later.’

  ‘Yuck!’ said Winnie.

  At that moment, after several families had gone past and been greeted by relatives (they were actually off a flight from Paphos) the figure of Cyril was seen walking daintily through the door from Customs. His hair was dyed blonde, his luggage was one leather bag carried over his shoulder, and he was wearing a T-shirt with ‘San Francisco, capital of Gayana’ printed on it.

  ‘Cyril!’ shouted Winnie, for once getting a line right.

  ‘Mumsie,’ said Cyril, with a lack of enthusiasm both real and appropriate. She had pulled herself up one foot from an actual touching of him.

  ‘Darling – you look—’

  ‘I know, Mumsie. Washed out. Drained. I’m perfectly all right. If you’d done fourteen hours of ghastly food, ghastly films and even ghastly classical music, you’d feel like death too. In a couple of days I’ll be right as rain.’

  ‘Are you sure, darling—?’

  But Cyril was looking round the Terracers who had – without zest – accompanied Winnie to the airport.

  ‘Oh, people,’ he said ungratefully.

  ‘Yes, darling. Isn’t it lovely of them? You know everyone—’

  But something had caught Cyril’s eye.

  ‘Cut,’ said Reggie. ‘Now we’ll go back and—’

  On his first word Cyril had begun pushing his way past Gladys Porter, past Peter Kerridge and Arthur Bradley, and as he pushed he was becoming not Cyril any longer but Hamish, and the people watching him shed their Terrace personae as the scene enacted itself before their eyes.

  Standing beside a kiosk selling magazines and almost everything else a traveller or holidaymaker could need was Bet Garrett. She was there as Bet, not as Rita Somerville, the flower-shop owner she portrayed on her rare appearances in the soap. On her face was a smile – one of anticipation which added nothing of pleasantness or humour to her appearance.

  ‘Darling,’ shouted Hamish with abundant enthusiasm. ‘You didn’t tell me you were coming!’

  ‘I thought I’d see you welcomed back to the Terrace,’ shouted Bet. ‘And it seemed a good time—’

  ‘It is! A wonderful time! Couldn’t be better.’ He turned to the assembled public, extras and fellow cast members. ‘Be happy for us, all you lot. We’re engaged to be married.’

  There was first silence, then a stunned babble:

  ‘But you can’t—’

  ‘Oh yes we can. You just watch us!’

  That night Marjorie Harcourt-Smith sat in the flat she owned in Headingley (where the neighbours congratulated themselves on having a nationally known figure among them, not one of the dreaded students who infested every other street and alleyway in that unfortunate Leeds suburb) and poured herself a third glass of white wine.

  Marjorie was puzzled. She had been, in the scene that took place at Leeds–Bradford airport, no more than an extra. After Cyril and Lady Wharton had got into Peter Kerridge’s car, she and Arthur had been filmed going towards Arthur’s car, and Gladys Porter had had the momentous line ‘Doesn’t he look sick?’ One of her less memorable days of filming.

  But what worried Marjorie was her attitude towards Cyril. She had been consumed with hatred for him. Not for Hamish, but for the character Hamish played. She had never had any homophobic prejudices: in the acting profession one met homosexuals of all shapes and sizes and it was only a very unintelligent person who could slap easy labels on them as a reason to find them all untrustworthy or contemptible.

  Yet as the scene had been played out she was conscious that she intensely disliked Cyril. Why? What reason could she give herself? He was, in character, a stage designer of limited talents, he was intent on finding himself a working-class lover (or had been before he went off to America), but both here and probably there he had failed to find any ‘rough trade’, he was both in thrall to his mother yet on occasion rude and dismissive of her. None of these were very dreadful traits, none of them a cause for hatred.

  And yet she suspected that the character of ineffectual, pathetic Cyril had somehow become merged with that of the all too effectual and constantly aggressive Hamish. When she remembered Cyril confiding the fact of his illness to his old mother she hated him because, behind the make-up and the assumed persona, she always saw the vile Hamish. In this, as his fellow participant in an apparently endless saga of conflicting personalities, she was perhaps more fortunate than the average viewer who knew not Hamish, perhaps less so.

  She wondered, not quite idly, if, supposing Hamish were ever murdered, it would be Hamish or Cyril who was the intended victim.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At Home

  Garry Kopps, who played Arthur Bradley in Jubilee Terrace, sat at home in the Leeds suburb of Cookridge. He had learnt his lines for the next day – something he was expert at – and had written two pages of his projected work on British and Australian soaps, their moral, social and psychological assumptions. Garry had a huge library of videos, going back twenty years or more, and taking in crucial and fruitful episodes of EastEnders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Waterloo Market, Casualty and even the afternoon soap, Doctors, as well as Neighbours and Home and Away from Down Under. And of course his own home territory of Jubilee Terrace. The Head of Scripts, Melvin Settle, had said of his work that it was a deep survey into a shallow pond. And he had added the comment: ‘Which is impossible’. It was a judgement Garry could only agree with.

  He got up from his desk and went through into the living room, settling into an easy chair for the Friday episode of EastEnders.

  Half an hour later, after a continuous diet of raised voices and barely suppressed violence, his notebook was richer by three quotes and two comments on the series’ social prejudices. He breathed a sigh of relief and opened a bottle of wine. He had just taken his first sip when the bell from his father’s room upstairs rang in the kitchen. Garry put down his drink and hurried up.

  ‘Anything wrong, Dad?’

  The gaunt figure on the bed creased his forehead.

  ‘I don’t know…I forget… What time is it?’

  ‘It’s just after eight. I’ve just finished watching EastEnders.’

  ‘That’s nice. Is it a play…? It’s Sunday, isn’t it?’
<
br />   ‘No, it’s not Sunday, Dad. It’s Friday. Now it’s time you settled down and had a really good sleep.’

  When he was back downstairs he took a deep breath, then an equally big intake of red wine. He loved his father, and continued to love him during his long decline into senility. He always said it was no drag on him to look after him. If he wanted to go away on holiday he took him down to his sister’s in Stockport. For short periods away he could get a nurse in. It was no trouble, he always said.

  And yet. And yet.

  The BBC was currently casting for a new dramatisation of Dombey and Son. One of Andrew Davies’ marvellous jobs. He would love to try for the role of Mr Carker. He had pretty good teeth, a requisite for the role. But what he really wanted to do was humanise Dickens’s cardboard villain – stagy, two-dimensional, unworthy of the rest of the novel.

  But he would not put himself forward. After an initial hour-long episode it would be done in twelve half-hour ones. Filming would take months, and it would be shot in London and Broadstairs, with some Continental filming if the budget ran to it. No go. Just too much disruption for Dad. He could square it with his bosses at Northern Television, but not with his conscience. Dad couldn’t just be moved in and out of a nursing home as filming dictated, and if he put him in for the whole four months he could easily die there.

  No, it was just impossible. Anyway he probably wouldn’t have got the job. Saying he wanted to make the character three-dimensional was to cover only the first stage of the process. It was the later stages that were difficult – what was to replace the staginess? How in the world was it to be done?

  It was becoming the same with his personal life: for much of the time the difficulties deterred him from having one. ‘I’m just in the way,’ Tony had said when he moved out. ‘Your mind is always in there with your dad.’ And even one of his one-night stands, a lovely boy with natural fair hair that made his heart stop, said he felt like the vegetables that accompanied the meat course. That was when Garry had tried, without much hope, to make him stay a night longer.

  The truth was that Jubilee Terrace was a bolt-hole: a job that went on and on and engaged only a tiny part of his acting skills. When he was going through drama school he had played Pinchwife in The Country Wife. Dad had come to see it – of course – and had found the play a bit ‘saucy’ but thought Garry’s performance was ‘champion’. That was typical Dad: other parents would sweat blood to prevent one of their children going to drama school, but Dad had been behind him all the way. He could have done so much better for himself, even in the cut-throat world of the current theatre. ‘I could have been a contender,’ he muttered with the Brando steaming mumble. He had been National or Royal Shakespeare material.

  ‘Sez me,’ he immediately came back with. Small parts maybe. Never good ones, interesting ones. Macduff, not Macbeth; Brabantio, not Iago.

  Three hours and a bottle of wine later, his father’s bell rang again. If he waited five minutes his father would turn over and go to sleep. But he downed the dregs of his glass and went quickly up the stairs.

  ‘How did you get this dump?’ asked Bet Garrett, as she and Hamish lay looking at the ceiling, for want of anything else to look at.

  ‘It’s not a dump. It’s a nice small house built in the last few years.’

  ‘That’s what I mean by a dump.’

  ‘It’s owned by Northern Television, our respected employers, and they let it out to short-or medium-term actors and such riff-raff artists as come within their trawling nets.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than a flat over a shop in Albion Street,’ admitted Bet.

  Hamish was in a musing mood.

  ‘Artistes,’ he said. ‘That’s a word I should have used. I wonder why it has fallen into disuse. It’s just the word for the sort of people Northern Television puts into its houses and flats. Not really serious artists, but slightly tacky, slightly tawdry ones. The alternative is one of the Identikit new hotels.’

  ‘Mind what you’re saying. You’re admitting you’re one of the tacky ones.’

  ‘As long as I’m in a soap I fit the bill exactly. And so do you, my dear.’

  ‘I am not tacky.’

  ‘You are the most tacky – wonderfully tacky – person I know. You dropped out of drama school, clung to the fringes of theatre by marrying someone who can at least do the basics, and can do a tiny bit of reinvention of himself to fill a part in a long-running soap. At least Bill is – just – an actor. If you had a regular role people would begin to notice that they saw over and over again the same facial expressions, the same body language – shrugs, hand-gestures, tosses of the head. You are an artiste, my dear, the sort of person who gets recognised in a supermarket once a month, and usually by someone who can’t put a name to you – not your real one or your soap one.’

  Bet screwed up her lip in an ugly pout.

  ‘Thanks very much. I see why everyone calls you a shit.’

  ‘Watch it, madam. Though since I’m doing shit work for you I suppose that is the aspect of my many-faceted character that you would fix on.’

  Bet giggled, a sound at once dirty and vengeful.

  ‘You jumped at the chance, you know you did.’

  ‘I’ve nothing against Bill that I can remember. And I would remember. I suppose I don’t like sturdy, trustworthy men that ageing actresses love to rely on, take their troubles to. In real life Bill would be the pivotal figure in a school staff-room, the shoulder to weep on in the works canteen. He’s the one everyone drops by on, to have a word in his ear. Silly oaf – wasting his time pretending to solve other people’s insoluble problems. That is about as useful as spending money on a lottery ticket or a scratch card. You don’t ever get thanks for it, though you get plenty of blame when things go pear-shaped.’

  ‘Poor old Bill,’ said Bet, with that giggle again. ‘Everything in his life has turned pear-shaped at the moment.’

  ‘Especially his marriage, obviously… Want a drink?’

  ‘If nothing better’s on offer.’

  ‘It isn’t. Once is enough. I’m the prostitute here. You want more, you pay for it.’

  ‘As if I would… Are you getting lots of congratulations on our engagement?’

  ‘As if I would. I’m the Terrace’s pariah. No one talks to me if they don’t have to. What about you?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not.’ She put out her hand to take her brandy and soda. Hamish knew her druthers. ‘Anyway, I’ve only had a couple of hours’ filming so far since the announcement. And they all love Bill, like you say… But I’m a bit afraid that no one is taking the engagement seriously.’

  ‘That would be a pity. Especially if Bill went along with the general scepticism.’

  Bet indulged in what passed for thought in her.

  ‘Yes, I have wondered. But he can’t be sure, can he? He will be in a permanent state of uncertainty. And then he’ll hear from my solicitor that I’m claiming custody of the girls. That will be the last thing he expects. And he’ll wonder whether I’m marrying to strengthen my claim on them.’

  ‘I’m not normally regarded as the sort who would strengthen anyone’s claim on anything. Still, I think you’re right. He’ll be unable to be sure about anything, and it will drive him up the wall. And the fact that I’m in the picture, and the picture includes his girls – it will be absolute torment for the poor chap. I like the thought.’

  Hamish laughed.

  ‘I like it too,’ said Bet.

  ‘Poor old tormented, child-fixated Bill. I’m going to enjoy seeing his face when I’m around.’

  ‘Me too. That’s what this is all about.’

  ‘They say he’s fixated these days on that snotty little juvenile Susan Fyldes.’

  ‘First I’ve heard of it. Nobody talks to me, any more than they do to you. By the look of her he’ll never get very far. She’ll use her sex for an upward curve through the acting profession. Bill was never any sort of upward curve.’

  ‘
No one will ever get anywhere with her, not if they expect emotion to be involved. It will be pure calculation. She’ll be very conscious of the ultimate Maginot Line, and sex will be part of her credit card journey to the top. Poor old Vernon Watts found that out.’

  ‘Vernon? I never knew that he was interested.’

  ‘Oh but he was. During my first stint as Cyril. Always snuffling and wheezing around her, and getting nowhere. You can just see a glorious creature like Susan (as she imagines herself to be) having anything to do with a clapped out old music-hall star, can’t you? Quite turns the stomach, thinking of her and Vernon Watts in bed together.’

  ‘Hamish, do you like anyone?’

  Hamish shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Not that I can remember offhand… Sometimes I think I could like some of the people I see on TV, but I expect I’d hate them if I met them in what is humorously called real life.’

  ‘We’re splendidly matched. I don’t like anyone either.’

  ‘Not even your fine set of daughters?’

  ‘Especially not my set of miniature harpies. If it came to the worst, my getting custody, I’d dump them on my mother as fast as I could.’

  ‘What kind of a woman is your mother?’

  ‘People often say I’m a chip off the old block.’ They both laughed. ‘The girls would survive. They’re tough. They’ve had to be.’

  ‘I’m sorry I won’t be around to see it.’

  ‘Who says you won’t be around to see it?’

  He threw back his head at her stupidity.

  ‘I’m incurably ill, remember? Cyril is incurably ill. I’m on a four-month contract – they’ve got it calculated to a nicety. And the mills of the law grind slowly, with your own solicitor seeming to manage a particularly slow grind.’

  ‘We could always get married, so you can keep up your interest in the girls.’

  ‘I have no interest in the girls. I hope you’re not trying to make out that I—’