Dead Room Farce Read online

  But, thought Charles wryly, Bernard Walton wouldn’t be the first star to have maintained a front of devoted domesticity and had a vibrantly active alternative sex-life going on. Nonetheless, the whispered words to Pippa Trewin did still seem out of character. Apart from anything else, dalliances with young actresses weren’t recommended for an actor with his sights set on a knighthood.

  Still, the conjectural infidelity of Bernard Walton wasn’t Charles Paris’s problem, and, besides, he was in no position to contemplate first-stone-casting. Charles’s own sex-life was currently moribund, and he was at that worrying stage of a man’s life, his late fifties, when ‘moribund’ could easily become ‘over’. Maybe he never would make love to a woman again. The current frostiness of his relationship with Frances, the woman to whom he was still technically married, offered little hope of a rapprochement, and there weren’t currently any other contenders for the role of Charles Paris’s bed-mate.

  The only detail about the whole sad subject that gave him the occasional flicker of optimism was that, although nothing was actually happening, he hadn’t lost the desire for something to happen. He still woke up randy in the mornings, and the flash of a leg, an image on the television, the glimpse of a woman on a poster, could still work their old, predictable, frustrating magic.

  These were his thoughts as Charles Paris made his way through to the cloakroom at the end of rehearsal. The coat that he lifted off its hook felt lopsidedly heavy, and Charles remembered with relief that he’d got a half-bottle of Bell’s whisky in the pocket. Not a full half-bottle, probably a half-full half-bottle, but it was still a reassuring presence. He had a sudden urge to feel the slight resistance of the metal cap turning in his hand, the touch of upturned glass against his lips, the burn of the liquor in his throat.

  He looked around. He was alone in the cloakroom. Just a quick sip . . .? But no. Someone might walk in, and there are certain reputations no actor wants to get in a company – particularly at the beginning of a three-month tour.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t need a pee, anyway. Charles slipped on his coat and went through into the Gents’. Once there, although the pressure was only on his bladder, he ignored the urinals in favour of a cubicle. He went in and locked the door.

  Just one quick swig. To make him more relaxed when he joined the rest of the company.

  Mm, God, it was good. He felt the whisky trickle down, performing its Midas touch, sending a golden glow right through his body. Mm, just one more. Lovely.

  And a third. But that was it. Charles Paris knew when to stop. He firmly screwed down the cap on the bottle, thrust it deep into his coat pocket, and went off to join the rest of the company in the pub.

  ‘Sorry, old boy. Didn’t have time to get to the cash machine and it’s my round. Don’t suppose you could sub me a tenner?’

  ‘Of course.’ Charles opened his wallet expansively. It was Thursday; he’d just been paid. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take twenty, just to be sure. But you’ll have it back tomorrow, promise. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being in debt to anyone.’

  ‘No problem.’ Charles was feeling in a generous mood. His Bell’s level had been topped up by a double from David J. Girton’s first round, and then a couple more. Now, ever the one to know how to moderate his drinking, Charles Paris was on the red wine. And that seemed to be slipping down a treat too. He was feeling really bloody good.

  The beneficiary of his bountiful mood had taken the two ten-pound notes, folded them and stuck them firmly in his inside pocket, before handing the wallet back.

  ‘You’re a saint, Charles,’ said Ransome George. He was one of those actors, of indeterminate age, who was never out of work. Though he was not the most intelligent or subtlest interpreter of a part, Ransome George’s face was, quite literally, his fortune. It was a funny face, in repose a melancholy boxer dog, in animation an affronted bullfrog. He had only to appear on stage, or on a television screen, for the audience to start feeling indulgent, for them to experience the little tug of a smile at the corner of their lips.

  He was also blessed with intuitive comic timing. Whatever the situation, some internal clock told him exactly how long to hold a pause, when to slam in quickly with his next line, when to extend the silence almost unbearably. And he never failed to catch the reward of a laugh.

  That was all Ransome George could do. Whatever the part, whatever the play, the performance was identical. Whether the lines were spoken in Yorkshire, Cornish, Welsh, Scottish, Transylvanian – or an approximation to these, because he wasn’t very good at accents – they would be delivered in exactly the same way. And they’d always get the laughs. That guarantee he carried with him made Ransome George – or ‘Ran’, as he was known to everyone in the business – an invaluable character to have in comedy sketches.

  In a full-length play his value was less certain. Though a good comedy performer, Ran was not in truth much of an actor. He was good at individual moments, but couldn’t lose his own personality in a character throughout the length of a play. This deficiency perhaps mattered less in farce than it would have done in more serious areas of the theatre, but Charles Paris was still quite surprised at Ransome George’s casting in not on your wife! Still, Ran seemed to have worked a lot with Bernard Walton over the years. Maybe the old pals’ act, a phenomenon all too common in the theatre, had been once again in operation.

  In not on your wife! Ransome George was playing the part of Willie, the flamboyant (for ‘flamboyant’ in British farce scripts, always read ‘gay stereotype’) interior designer. He wasn’t playing the part particularly gay – indeed he was delivering the Standard Mark One Ransome George performance – but the laughs were inevitably going to be there.

  Whether Ran was in reality gay or not, Charles Paris did not know. But from the way the actor, boosted by the loan of twenty pounds, homed back in on the dishy young assistant stage manager, it seemed unlikely. Charles did notice, though, that the girl had just placed two full glasses on their table. It wasn’t Ran’s round yet.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind came a recollection: he’d heard somewhere that Ransome George was surprisingly successful with women. In spite of his cartoon face and shapeless body, he could always make them laugh. And rumour had it he’d laughed his way into a good few beds over the years.

  The thought threw a pale cast of melancholy over Charles, as he compared his own current sexless state. His eyes glazed over, looking out at, but not taking in, the bustle of the busy pub.

  ‘Come on, it’s not that bad,’ a husky voice murmured in his ear.

  ‘Sorry?’ He turned to face Cookie Stone, the actress playing Gilly, who’d just moved across to sit beside him. Though not as cartoon-like as Ran’s, Cookie’s face too was perfect for comedy. A pert snub nose had difficulty separating two mischievous dark brown eyes, and her broad mouth seemed to contain more than the standard ration of teeth. But her body, Charles couldn’t help noticing as she leant her pointed breasts towards him, was firm and trim.

  He reckoned Cookie must be late thirties now, maybe a bit more, and, like Ran, she was never out of work. She’d started in her teens as the female stooge for television comedians, playing all those roles – secretaries, nurses, receptionists, shop assistants – that the sketches of the time demanded. And she’d always got the laughs by her mixture of sex and mischief. The body was undeniably sexy, but the jokey face – by no means traditionally beautiful – suggested another dimension to her character, an ironic awareness of the roles in which she found herself.

  This quality had stood Cookie Stone in good stead when the priorities of comedy changed, when political correctness emerged as an issue, and women comedians started to take a more central role. That revolution had put out of business many of the pretty little things who’d formerly adorned television comedy. It was now unacceptable for a woman to be on screen simply because she was sexy, and for that to be the basis of an item’s humour. But an actr
ess who could look sexy while at the same time, by her expression, giving a post-modernist gloss to her sexiness, was worth her weight in gold. So there had been no blip in the career of Cookie Stone.

  But her ranking in the comedy business hadn’t changed. After a decade of playing stooge to a series of male comedians who commanded the lion’s share of the show’s funny lines (not to mention its budget), she now played stooge to a series of female comedians who commanded the lion’s share of the show’s funny lines (not to mention its budget). Cookie still had no power; she had simply changed bosses.

  And, in a way, that was fair. Cookie Stone had no originating talent, but she was a very good mimic and a quick learner. She absorbed the comedy technique of everyone she worked with and, as a result, had become a consummately skilful comedy actress. Her every take, her every pause, her every intonation, had been copied from another performer, but her armoury of them was now so large, and her skill in selecting them so great, that she was almost indistinguishable from an actress of intuitive comedy skills.

  ‘I was saying, Charles . . .’ she continued, in a favourite voice, the humorous right-on feminist learnt from one of the first female stand-ups to do menstruation jokes on television, ‘I was saying that, like, you really look as though you’ve just had a fax saying the world’s about to end.’

  ‘No. Rubbish. Someone just walked over my grave, that’s all. You OK for a drink?’

  Cookie raised a half-full glass of red. ‘Cheers, I’m entirely OK, thank you,’ she slurred, in the remembered voice of a comedian who’d killed himself with exhaust fumes after rather nasty tabloid allegations about rent boys.

  They talked and had a couple more glasses of red wine, and then looked round and realised there was nobody they recognised left in the pub. The rest of the not on your wife! company had all gone home, or on to eat. Maybe some of them, flushed with the success of the day’s rehearsal and the fact that it was pay-day, had even gone to join David J. Girton at some smart restaurant.

  Charles and Cookie could have had another drink, but it seemed the moment for him to say, ‘You fancy eating something?’ He wasn’t sure whether he was hungry or not, but he knew some kind of blotting paper was a good idea.

  Outside the pub, they swayed on the kerb. ‘Where we going then, Daddy?’ asked Cookie, in the voice of an American comedian who’d been given her own short-lived series at the moment when television had first fallen in love with female stand-ups.

  ‘Erm . . .’ A taxi drew up in obedience to Charles’s wavering hand. ‘I know.’ He couldn’t think of anywhere else. There was an Italian on Westbourne Grove, just round the corner from his tiny studio flat.

  Inside the restaurant, he ordered a bottle of Chianti Classico. They also ordered some pasta – at least he was fairly sure it was pasta, though he had no recollection of eating it. Maybe it was one of those evenings when at the end of the meal impassive waiters had gathered up virtually untouched plates.

  Charles did remember them ordering a few sambucas, though, and joking as they blew out the blue flames that rose from the top of their glasses. He remembered Cookie’s head leant close to his across the table, her tongue constantly licking over her prominent teeth as she talked. And he remembered, in a fit of righteousness, ordering each of them a large espresso ‘to sober up a bit’.

  He also remembered listening with great concentration to Cookie Stone, though he was a little vague about what she actually said. He knew, however, that it was said in many different voices, that there was a lot about the actor’s identity, and how every actor hid his or her true, snivelling, abject self under the comforting carapace of fictional characters, and how few men bothered to probe into what the real Cookie Stone was like, and, generally speaking, what bastards men were, and how all most of them wanted was just to get her back to their place for a quick shag.

  And Charles remembered being very understanding and very sympathetic to Cookie, and saying she was right, yes, she was right, she’d really put her finger on it, and how if only men and women talked more, communicated more, then maybe there’d be a bit more understanding between them and they’d be able to break away from these old-fashioned stereotypes. Men and women were both people, after all, that was the important thing about what they were, people. Men and women were people.

  He must also have paid the bill at some point, presumably with a credit card. He couldn’t actually remember doing it, but the fact that he and Cookie were allowed to leave the restaurant suggested that the relevant transaction had somehow taken place.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t remember the conversation that must have ensued on the pavement outside the restaurant, the precise form of words – and who they were spoken by – which led to Cookie Stone going back to his place.

  He must have been drunk, though, for that to have happened. To let someone else see the shambles of old newspapers and grubby clothes in which he lived, he must’ve had a few.

  Charles had recollections of finding an unopened bottle of Bell’s at Hereford Road, and of opening it. He had recollections of charging a couple of glasses, then of moving a pile of newspapers and books off the bed, and of lying down on it with Cookie.

  But of what happened next, he couldn’t be exactly sure. Certainly, when he woke at three-fifteen, she was entirely naked. She lay on her back, breasts pointing firmly upwards, and snored nasally. Charles was wearing his socks and, somewhere round his shins, telescoped trousers and briefs.

  But he didn’t have time to explore further. His head was drumming, his throat was as dry as a desert of sandpaper, and he felt violently and urgently sick. He just managed to make it to the bathroom, where he threw up loudly and copiously into the toilet bowl.

  Charles Paris finished the day, as he had begun it, with his trousers round his ankles, though this time it was not for professional reasons.

  Chapter Two

  IT WAS’NT GOOD. It really wasn’t good. The words swam in front of his eyes, and if there’s one thing you don’t want when you’re being paid to read a book for audio cassette, it’s the words swimming in front of your eyes.

  In the not-inconsiderable annals of Charles Paris’s hangovers, this one stood out. He’d never felt as bad as he did at that moment. He knew whenever he had a hangover he thought he’d never felt as bad as he did at that moment, but this was on a different scale. It really was.

  Everything felt dreadful. His whole body ached. The joints, particularly knees and elbows, ached even more than the rest of his components. There was a pain and stiffness at the back of his neck that rendered him incapable of moving his head without moving the rest of his body too, like some awkward cardboard cut-out. The dryness in his mouth had moved on from sandpaper quality to the feeling of having been sand-blasted. His eyes stung as if he’d spent a couple of hours underwater in an over-chlorinated pool. And his digestion felt seriously at risk. The jacuzzi of his stomach threatened to overflow at any moment, and without warning of which direction that overflow might take. His guts complained at their treatment with rumbles that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the third rinse of a dishwasher cycle. And a rumbling stomach doesn’t help an audio book recording either.

  He could have tolerated the sickness of his body, if his mind had not also been infected. While his mouth continued to pronounce the swimming words on the page, his mind seethed with self-hatred and recrimination. Why on earth had he let himself get so drunk? He must’ve been aware of the way he was going, why hadn’t he put a brake on it?

  He was such a fool. A man in his late fifties behaving like a teenager at his first grown-up party. And it was hideously unprofessional – the worst insult that can be levelled at an actor – for him to get so wasted the night before he was to start on a whole new area of work. Getting the contract to record an audio book could be a breakthrough into a different, and possibly lucrative, market; he mustn’t screw it up.

  At the bottom of all these anxieties, lurking like some evil predator in the dept
hs of a murky pool, lay the question of what he’d said the night before. Worse than that, what he had done the night before.

  Cookie Stone. What had happened between him and Cookie Stone? He knew the position in which they’d found themselves at three-fifteen, but what had been the precise sequence of events that had led up to that?

  Various possibilities presented themselves. One – the most unlikely – was that they’d just gone to bed together for a cuddle, mutual support for two lonely people, and by agreement nothing else had happened. A second scenario – also, he feared, unlikely – was that they had enjoyed a long session of abandoned, passionate and satisfying love-making. The third – and the one towards which he was unwillingly inclining – was that they had prepared to make love, gone through all the soft-talking and the anticipatory blandishments, that they had started to make love, and then that he had proved incapable of completing the process, and fallen into a drunken stupor halfway through.

  Charles had a horrible feeling that that was what had happened, but his memory could offer him no help on the subject. His recollection of the previous night’s events, after their departure from the Italian restaurant, was, to use the most generous adjective possible in the circumstances, hazy.

  And there hadn’t been much chance in the morning for Charles and Cookie to compare notes. He had woken in a sweat of panic at 6.33, suddenly aware that he was supposed to be catching the 7.15 train from Paddington to Bath for the day’s recording. In the rush of his own dressing and incomplete ablutions, and of hurrying Cookie through her reduced morning ritual, there hadn’t been any opportunity for an assessment – or more likely a post mortem – of the previous night’s encounter. They had parted with their stale mouths joining in a dry kiss and a cheery ‘See you Monday’, but no mention had been made of any relationship in which they might be considered to be involved.