Dead Room Farce Read online

  ‘Sure. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at the studio now. There are police here, and ambulances, and all kinds of . . . I’ll ring you, OK?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, it’s quite possible the police will want to speak to you, anyway – you and the other people from the not on your wife! company who were here yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Why? Is there any suspicion of foul play?’

  There was an infinitesimal pause before she replied, ‘No, I don’t think so. But I guess they always check everything out. Have to, don’t they? See if it’s just an accident . . . or I suppose . . .’ she gulped again ‘. . . it could be suicide . . . or . . .’

  She didn’t complete the thought, but left it dangling, tantalisingly, in the air.

  ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ said Charles. ‘It’s an awful thing to have happened. You must be in shock.’

  ‘Yes, I think I probably am a bit. Shock and guilt.’

  ‘You have no reason to feel guilty.’

  ‘Don’t I? You don’t know the half of it, Charles.’ She let out a harsh laugh, which broke down into a sob.

  ‘Just hang on in there, Lisa. Don’t blame yourself. There was nothing you could have done. And, when things’re a bit more sorted out, call me to fix a time to meet. Obviously we’ve got a show tonight . . . there’ll be a matinée too on Saturday, but just leave a message with my landlady – OK?’

  ‘OK. Thanks, Charles.’

  He cleared his throat and then said, ‘It may seem indelicate to ask, under the circumstances, but was your day in London good?’

  ‘What?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘Your meeting with the publishers. Did you get the job?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, we got the job.’ Sobs once again threatened. ‘Not that it actually seems very important now . . .’

  ‘No, of course it doesn’t. Look, I’m awfully sorry . . . You take care of yourself.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Back in the dining room, Charles’s fried egg looked even colder and more accusatory. He pushed the plate back. His landlady didn’t say anything, but her look demanded an explanation.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Charles Paris. ‘I’ve just had some bad news. A friend of mine’s died.’

  Chapter Seven

  AS IT TURNED out, Lisa and Charles didn’t meet till the Sunday. By then, not on your wife! had done another three performances, and the show was definitely getting better. The cast were more prepared for where the laughs were going to come, and their timing had improved considerably. The overall pace of the production had picked up, the audiences seemed to be enjoying themselves, and David J. Girton was very pleased with the way everything was going.

  Bill Blunden, the playwright, was not so positive in his approval, but then it was not in his nature to be positive. He worked on his play scripts like a mechanic tuning a Formula One car engine. He tweaked here, he tightened there, he constantly dismantled, adjusted and rebuilt his creation. He’d watched every performance so far, making extensive notes about the audience’s reaction to each line and each moment of comic business. And he’d been sitting up late in his hotel room, rewriting and reshaping the script. As yet, the cast had not been given any of the changes he was proposing to make, but there was a full company call scheduled for the Monday morning at eleven, and everyone had to be on standby for possible extra rehearsals during the second week of the Bath run.

  Charles Paris’s performances as Aubrey on the Friday and Saturday were workmanlike, but not inspired. He garnered the ration of laughs his part was allocated, but did not grow in comic stature as some of the other actors were beginning to. Charles was on automatic pilot for not on your wife!; his mind was preoccupied with Mark Lear’s death. The news of the tragedy had filtered through to the Vanbrugh Theatre, but prompted little reaction in the company.

  For Charles Paris, though, the death had been a body-blow. Mark had never been a particularly close friend, but he was someone Charles had known for many years, and his sudden absence prompted gloomy reflections on human mortality. There was also a sense of shock. It was so recent. On the Thursday, Charles had been drinking with Mark at lunch-time; less than twenty-four hours later, the man was dead.

  There were also uncomfortable parallels to be drawn. Charles Paris didn’t yet know the detailed circumstances of Mark’s death, but there seemed little doubt that excessive drinking had played its part. There had been too many occasions in Charles’s life, particularly recently, when, for the same reason, he hadn’t been entirely in control of his actions. Mark Lear’s death gave him a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God frisson. Charles Paris knew his own drinking was getting out of hand. He could all too easily have been the victim of a comparable accident.

  His reaction to this realisation, however, was not admirable. Instead of immediately cutting down on – or, ideally, completely cutting out – the booze, on the Friday and Saturday Charles actually drank more. It seemed that whisky was the only resource he had, the only palliative that could, however briefly, deaden the pain of the thoughts whirling around his head.

  Also, he was into one of those cycles of cumulative drinking when the only way he could achieve all he had to was by continuous topping-up. The sequence of half-bottles of Bell’s at his digs became a sequence of full bottles. On the Friday and Saturday nights – when he’d woken up at three, his thoughts too troubled for further sleep – he’d had recourse to the whisky. And he’d even taken a couple of solid slugs in the mornings before going down to face his landlady’s breakfast.

  Charles Paris knew he must stop, but he wasn’t quite ready yet to do that. His current dosage was necessary, medicinal even. Wait till he was feeling a bit stronger, then he’d really take the drinking in hand.

  The result of his mounting intake was that when, according to prearrangement with Lisa Wilson, he arrived at the studio at eleven o’clock on the Sunday morning, he was in the grips of another stinking hangover.

  She too looked in a dreadful state, but presumably for different reasons. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her mouth was a thin line of tension.

  Though he had never touched her before, it was instinctive for Charles to wrap an avuncular arm around her shoulders and put his lips to her cheek. She gave no sign of objecting.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You must have had a terrible couple of days.’

  She grinned wryly. ‘Known better. Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Please.’ While she crossed to switch on the kettle, Charles looked around the studio space. ‘No police tape or seals or anything like that. Does that mean they’ve finished their investigations?’

  ‘I guess so,’ she replied from the other side of the room. ‘We’ll find out for sure at the inquest, but they seemed fairly confident it was an accident . . . though one of them was asking about the possibilities of suicide.’

  ‘Would you say Mark had a death-wish?’

  She crossed to the table with two mugs of coffee. ‘At times.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Something in Charles’s intonation made her look up sharply. ‘What do you mean? What did he say on Thursday?’

  ‘Well . . . we had lunch in the Queen’s Head.’

  ‘He told me he wasn’t going to drink.’

  Charles shrugged. ‘You said so on the phone. I’m sorry. At the time I didn’t know he’d promised you to lay off.’

  ‘No reason why you should have done. So what did he say?’

  ‘He was just in a maudlin mood. Self-pitying. I’m sure you know what he could be like . . .’ Lisa Wilson nodded with feeling. ‘Well, Mark was saying that life was a mess and that kind of stuff. But I don’t know that that would qualify as having a death-wish. I mean, he didn’t talk about suicide or . . . He was just gloomy, depressed if you like.’

  ‘Hm . . .’ Lisa fiddled with the handle of her coffee mug. Charles hadn’t seen her in a state like this before. He suddenly realised it wasn’t simply shock she was sufferi
ng from; she was actually nervous of something. Not of him, surely?

  ‘Did Mark say anything about me?’ Lisa asked diffidently.

  ‘He did mention you, yes.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He implied that . . . that things weren’t . . . Look, I’m sorry, the state of your relationship is none of my business. I –’

  ‘What did he say?’ she insisted.

  ‘He, sort of, said that he was too old for you and that things weren’t going too well.’

  Lisa nodded her head slowly. ‘Did he say anything about other men?’

  ‘Other men?’

  ‘Other boyfriends of mine.’

  ‘Yes, he did, um . . . he said that you must have had other boyfriends in the past.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And perhaps you still kept in touch with some of them.’

  ‘Oh. Oh God.’ Her blonde head sank down on to the table, and her shoulders shook with sobs. ‘I should have come back. I could have saved him. I shouldn’t have stayed in London overnight.’

  ‘Come on, Lisa, you had things to do. You were having that meeting with the publishers, trying to get work.’

  She looked up at him, her eyes smudged with tears. ‘My meeting with the publishers finished at five o’clock. I spent the rest of the evening – and the night – with an ex-boyfriend.’

  ‘Ah. Did Mark know that was what you were doing?’

  ‘Yes, otherwise he wouldn’t have . . .’ She recovered herself, and shook her head. ‘I think he may have suspected.’

  Charles nodded. That would certainly make sense of some of the things that had been said in the pub. ‘But you can’t blame yourself for that,’ he urged. ‘It was just bad luck that you were away when he passed out in the studio, just incredibly bad luck.’

  She shook her blonde head decisively. ‘No, it was more than bad luck.’

  There was a silence. Charles’s head was still drumming with a dull, low pain. He took a long swallow from his coffee. It had gone cold. Oh, he needed a drink.

  Lisa Wilson sat up straight and flicked her head briskly from side to side, as if to flush out morbid thoughts. ‘Incidentally, do you want some work, Charles?’

  Her question got every actor’s knee-jerk response. ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘What? Not another finely chiselled literary gem from the deathless Madeleine Eglantine canon?’

  ‘No. It’s what I went to London about. This CD-ROM thing. The Thesaurus.’

  ‘I remember you mentioning it. I didn’t quite understand what it was about.’ The advances of computers and the information revolution they had brought about had rather passed Charles by.

  ‘A lot of CD-ROM reference works these days are multimedia,’ Lisa explained patiently. ‘So when you look up a word or phrase, you hear it as well as seeing it.’

  ‘I think I’m with you so far.’

  ‘Well, to get all those words and phrases so that they can be heard, someone has to record them.’

  ‘And that’s the contract you’ve got?’

  ‘Exactly. Does recording that kind of thing appeal to you?’

  ‘I am gobsmacked,’ said Charles, ‘chuffed, over the moon, delighted, ecstatic, jumping for joy, happy as Larry, glad all over, jumping for –’

  ‘Yes, all right. You’ve got the idea. Well, the publishers need a whole Thesaurus recorded – and pretty damned quickly. I was thinking . . . now your show’s up and running, you’ll be free during the days, won’t you?’

  ‘Most of the time, yes. May have the odd call for rewrites and extra rehearsal of bits and pieces, but basically I should be free.’

  ‘Well, in that case, we should be able to get the whole lot recorded before you move on to . . . where’s your next port of call?’

  ‘Norwich.’

  ‘Be good if we could get it all done, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles, thinking of the money. ‘How many words and phrases are there in a whole Thesaurus?’

  ‘About a hundred thousand in this one.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Charles Paris. ‘And they all have to be spoken absolutely straight? No inflection, no vocal colouring?’

  ‘None at all.’ There was a gleam of amusement in her voice as she asked, ‘Do you think you could do it, Charles?’

  ‘Well, I could have a go.’ He grimaced. ‘Remember, though, you’re dealing with someone who couldn’t say, “Side One – End of Side One” without sounding “actorish”.’

  ‘Dead,’ said Charles Paris into the microphone. Then he left a two-second pause, and went on, ‘Deceased’ – two-second pause – ‘Defunct’ – two-second pause – ‘Died out’ – two-second pause – ‘Dead and gone’ – two-second pause – ‘Inert’ – two-second pause – ‘Lost and gone for ever’ –

  Lisa Wilson’s voice came through the talkback before he completed the next two-second pause. ‘No, I’m sorry, that had intonation in it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Lost and gone for ever”.’

  ‘What kind of intonation?’

  ‘Well, you were almost singing it.’

  ‘Singing it?’

  ‘Yes. Like in Clementine. “Thou art lost and gone for ever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.”’

  ‘Oh, sorry, yes. I wasn’t aware I was doing it. It’s something so deep and atavistic, it’s almost impossible to get it out of my mind.’

  ‘Well, you must try,’ said Lisa’s voice firmly.

  ‘Yes, OK.’

  They had started recording more or less straight away. For one thing, the publishers’ deadline was tight, but also Lisa Wilson was in need of displacement activity. Work, any kind of work, might stop the repetitive churning of guilt and horror in her mind. She’d quickly agreed an hourly rate with Charles and, as soon as she’d set up the small studio, they had started recording. They reckoned they could get an hour in before they broke for lunch.

  It was still stuffy in the little dead room. Lisa had arranged for the air conditioning engineers to come the next day, and the police had offered no objection, which presumably confirmed that their investigations were at an end. But the airlessness in the studio cast a shadow over Charles. It did not allow him to forget that he was sitting in the very seat where Mark Lear had breathed his last.

  Trying to blank that memory – and indeed all received memory – out of his mind, he once again pronounced, ‘Lost and gone for ever.’ He must’ve got it right, because there was no further interruption. ‘Non-existent’ – two-second pause – ‘Obsolete’ – two-second pause – ‘Passed away’ – two-second pause – ‘Released’ – two-second pause – ‘Six feet under’ – two-second pause – ‘Dead as a dodo’ – two-second pause – ‘Dead as a doornail’ – two-second pause – ‘Dead as mutton’ – two-second pause – ‘Dead as –’

  ‘No, sorry, Charles,’ Lisa’s voice broke in again. ‘You’re getting a rhythm to the words. You’re making them sound like a catalogue.’

  ‘Well, it’s bloody difficult not to,’ Charles Paris complained. ‘Bloody hard – bloody tough – bloody arduous – bloody challenging – bloody problematic . . .’

  They broke at one. ‘Shall we go to the pub?’ Charles suggested.

  One look at Lisa’s face told him it was a bad idea. ‘Not if we’re going to do any more recording this afternoon.’

  ‘No, no, OK.’ But, God, how his body screamed out for a quick injection of alcohol. ‘Don’t you drink at all, Lisa?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Health reasons? Or don’t you like the taste?’

  ‘No. No, I like the taste all right. I like the taste very much indeed. Too much.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I used to drink a lot, but then . . . I stopped.’

  ‘Was that after your father was killed?’

  She nodded. The recollection was still powerful enough to deprive her of words. ‘Yes, I stopped then completely. I could see the way I was going. I didn’t want history to repeat itself.’

 
‘No. Was it easy to stop?’

  She let out a harsh little laugh. ‘Easy? No, it wasn’t easy. It still isn’t easy. Still, when I see people drinking on television, when I smell a glass of wine, when I . . . No, it’s not easy.’

  ‘Cohabiting with Mark can’t have made it any less difficult.’

  ‘True.’ She grinned wryly. ‘Mind you, compared to the other difficulties of cohabiting with Mark, the booze was kind of a detail.’

  ‘Ah. So how did you give up? Just will-power? Or did you go to Alcoholics Anonymous or something like that?’

  ‘No, I suppose it was just will-power. Well, I say “just willpower”. Shock helped too.’

  ‘Shock?’

  She nodded. ‘My father’s death. We were very close. He did mean an enormous amount to me.’

  ‘Presumably part of the appeal of someone like Mark? The older man?’

  ‘I didn’t have you down as an amateur psychologist, Charles.’

  ‘No, well, most actors . . . it’s kind of part of the job.’

  ‘I didn’t need Alcoholics Anonymous,’ Lisa continued. ‘When I’d seen how destructive the booze could be, when I’d seen what it’d done to my father . . . I didn’t need any Twelve-Step programme. I was there in one step.’

  ‘So presumably you tried to stop Mark drinking too?’

  ‘Tried. Early on in our relationship, anyway.’ She jutted out a rueful lower lip. ‘Huh. I think I probably made it worse in his case. He drank more to get back at me.’

  ‘What do you mean – “get back at you”?’

  ‘Well, increasingly he kind of couldn’t hold his own with me in the normal ways. I mean, the break-up of his marriage and being kicked out of the BBC . . . I didn’t realise, when we first met, how much those two events had taken out of him. They’d totally destroyed his confidence. So, in our business venture here, I’m afraid Mark was really just a passenger.’

  ‘That was rather the impression I got.’

  ‘And then, in our private life . . .’ She coloured. ‘Well, I guess that wasn’t very equal either, not after the first flush of meeting each other, anyway. And the booze was the one thing that Mark felt gave him a kind of power over me.’