by Simon Brett
He saw Ken Colebourne grinning and waving, and excused himself from further reaffirmation with the three couples of how good a day it was for tennis.
‘All the arrangements went all right, did they?’
‘Fine, Ken. Yes, very grateful to you for setting the whole thing up. My wife’s absolutely delighted to be here. I must introduce you.’
‘Well, first let me introduce you to my wife. Patricia dear, this is Charles Paris.’
The sight of Patricia Colebourne was quite a shock. He had hardly noticed her, lost in the shadows under one of the umbrellas. She was agonisingly thin; the beige linen dress hung slackly from the angularity of her shoulders; and her skin had a waxy pallor. Two sticks were hooked from the lip of the table.
She was clearly a very sick woman, and yet the formalities of introduction do not traditionally include a medical bulletin, so Charles could only shake the hand that felt like a bunch of dry twigs and say, ‘Pleasure to meet you.’
‘Patricia’s a great lover of the tennis,’ said her husband. ‘Been watching it all day this week, haven’t you, love?’
His manner towards her combined embarrassment with a kind of defensive pride.
‘Yes. And I hope to see that young Yugoslav playing this afternoon. She’s amazing. Supposed to be on court at two, I think.’ She looked at the watch that dangled loosely from a skeletal wrist. ‘Probably better start walking over there now. I’m afraid I move very slowly these days, Mr Paris.’
She was joking, but the mention of her disability served to clear the atmosphere.
‘Oh, you’re not that bad, love. Anyway, we’ve got lunch to eat first. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that.’
As if on cue, Brian Tressider raised his hands, gesturing towards the interior of the marquee. ‘Going through for a spot of lunch now – set us up for the excitements of the afternoon, eh?’
There were three round tables each seating six inside the marquee (a structure, incidentally, of greater permanence than the word usually implies). Frances, who was proving a great hit with her new friends, was whisked away to sit with them. ‘Unless you’d rather sit with your husband . . .?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ she replied with a sweet grin to Charles. ‘We see quite enough of each other.’
He didn’t quite know how to take this. Inside a normal, cohabiting marriage, such a remark would be a sign of strength, of a couple so secure in their mutual affection that they didn’t need to spend every minute in each other’s pockets. Given the unusual circumstances of Charles and Frances’s marriage, though, the interpretation was potentially different. Did Frances really mean that their three or four meetings during the last year had been quite sufficient? Or was she just making a joke at his expense?
Charles inclined to the second view, though not with that total confidence which would make him feel secure. Frances was definitely playing games with him, but he couldn’t be certain how serious those games were. She had been hurt too many times to allow the progress towards any possible reconciliation to be easy for him.
So there was Frances’s table, which she seemed effortlessly to dominate; and the table towards which Brian Tressider had firmly ushered his preselected guests; and there was the third table, which was definitely lowest in the hierarchy. Charles Paris sat at the third table.
On one side of him was a young man with sleeked-back hair and a suit and tie even sharper than Charles’s; on the other, a girl with carefully frizzed blonde hair, whose trim figure was enhanced by a navy leather suit that teetered between sexiness and tartness.
It soon became apparent that they were married. The young man took Charles’s hand firmly in his and announced, rather as if presenting a business card, ‘Daryl Fletcher, and that’s my wife Shelley.’
‘Hello. My name’s Charles Paris.’
‘We’re here because it’s part of Daryl’s bonus.’ The girl had one of those Cockney voices that sound as if the owner’s just going down with a sore throat.
‘Well, it’s not exactly part of the bonus, just a kind of pat on the back. I got Top Salesman,’ he confided to Charles.
‘Oh. Oh, well done.’
‘Yes. I’m North-West Area. Quite something for a North-West salesman to beat all those jammy bastards in the South.’
‘I should think it is,’ Charles agreed sagely.
‘Don’t know they’re born, half of that lot. I got Runner-up last year, but this year I really pulled out the stops.’
‘Well done.’
‘Means me and Shelley get a weekend for two in Paris.’
‘And the car, Daryl.’
‘Yeah, and the car. Get presented with that at the sales conference. I’ll trade it in, mind. Just some little Fiesta. Not my sort of motor. But the money’ll be handy.’
‘Yeah, except you’ll just spend it on your other car.’
‘All right, what if I do, Shelley? I’ll see you get a bit of naughty lingerie, and all.’
This seemed to strike her as disproportionately funny.
‘I got a pretty nice motor, you see,’ Daryl confided to Charles. ‘I don’t mean the company car – no, I drive round day by day in a Ford Sierra, but I got this car back home with a bit of character.’
‘Oh,’ said Charles, to whom all cars had the same character.
‘Cortina,’ said Daryl airily.
‘Oh,’ said Charles, reassured. He had been afraid of being blinded by car talk, but this was all right. He had heard of the Cortina. Reliable, long-running Ford model, now out of production and a bit boring, really. But at least, he comforted himself, there’s not a lot you can say about a Cortina.
Charles couldn’t have been more wrong.
‘It’s the old Mk I,’ Daryl confided.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Picked it up at a scrap-yard four years back. Saw its potential straight off.’
Charles couldn’t conceive what possible potential a car from a scrap-yard might have.
‘Basically in good nick, but I had to do a lot of body and chassis work.’
‘Ah.’
‘Built a full roll cage inside.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah, and then while I got the body off, I give it a four-inch chop. Pleased with the way that worked, I was. Lovely job, though I say it myself.’
He looked up for approbation, but Charles wasn’t quite quick enough to replace the bewilderment in his expression with something more congratulatory.
‘You do know what I mean by a “chop” don’t you, Charles?’
‘Er, well . . .’
‘Tell you for free,’ Shelley chipped in. ‘It’s nothing to do with a chopper!’
This again struck her as extravagantly funny.
‘We are talking “custom” here,’ Daryl explained generously. “‘Chop” means you take the roof down a few inches.’
‘Ah. Why?’
‘Well, gives you a bit of style, doesn’t it?’
‘Does it?’
Daryl’s social training told him perhaps he ought to open the conversation out a bit. ‘What do you drive then, Charles?’
A chuckle. ‘Well, er, taxis, if anything.’
‘You a taxi-driver?’ asked Shelley.
‘No.’
‘What are you then?’ asked Daryl.
‘An actor.’
The answer struck both of them dumb. They wracked their brains for things that might be said to an actor, but nothing offered itself.
Charles filled the silence. ‘What I meant was that the only cars I really travel in these days are taxis. I use the tube most of the time, but if I do go in a car, it tends to be a taxi.’
‘You mean you haven’t got a motor?’ asked Daryl in softly awestruck tones.
‘No, I haven’t. Used to, when I was living with my . . .’ He caught a glimpse of Frances entertaining her new friends at the adjacent table, ‘some time back,’ he concluded lamely.
‘Blimey,’ said Daryl quietly. ‘Haven’t got a motor.’
But not for nothing had Daryl Fletcher been nominated Top Salesman. It was a salesman’s job to keep talking, and he wasn’t going to let anything – even a shock on the scale that he had just received – deter him from his duty.
‘You know, when I took the engine on the Mk I apart, I found the cylinders was still well within specs, so what I done was . . .’
After about two millennia of this monologue, during which Charles, almost without noticing, consumed smoked salmon, boeufe-en-crôute and meringue glacé, together with a lot of red wine, he became aware of a general movement around him.
Frances caught his eye and waved. She pointed at her watch. ‘Two o’clock. Match starting on the Centre Court.’
‘Oh yes, right.’
Charles started to stand up, but Frances’s words had stopped Daryl in mid-description of how he’d recalibrated the gauges from an old Cortina GT. The Top Salesman rose to his feet, ‘Great, I want to see this. Dishy pair of birds playing.’
Charles sank back into his chair. The risk of ending up sitting next to this cataract of Custom Car arcana was too great. ‘I’ll just have a cup of coffee and be right along, Frances.’
His wife shrugged and nodded. She wasn’t exactly unused to Charles making his own timetable.
The marquee did not empty completely, though most of the guests went off to watch the tennis. Ken Colebourne had gone some twenty minutes earlier, gallantly escorting his fragile wife, and Brian Tressider had led his party off soon after. But a few lingered over the last of their coffee, wine or brandy.
Shelley Fletcher, Charles observed, had made no attempt to move.
‘I’ll go along in a bit,’ she said. ‘Only women on Centre Court this match.’ She giggled. ‘I’ll wait till the hunks get out there.’
‘Ah.’
‘Daryl’s very fond of his Cortina,’ she explained, unnecessarily.
‘Yes,’ said Charles Paris. ‘Yes, he is, isn’t he?’
Chapter Thirteen
OUT OF THE corner of his eye, Charles kept catching movement on a television screen high in the corner of the marquee. White figures moved against a green background. The volume had been turned down low; applause sounded like distant sea-wash. But the picture was still distracting. He moved his chair round a little so that the screen was out of his eyeline.
This had the unintended effect of bringing him closer to Shelley. She raised her eyebrows in a quizzical, half-mocking challenge.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just, er, that monitor, sort of putting me off my stroke.’
‘Ooh. Can’t have that, can we, Charles?’
She had an engaging way of saying his name. In her husky Cockney, it came out as ‘Chowss’.
‘Look, I didn’t mean –’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve never complained about fellers getting too close to me.’
‘Ah. Ah,’ said Charles. He wasn’t used to this kind of heavy innuendo, certainly not from someone presumably in her mid-twenties. He adopted the traditional British method of taking the heat out of any situation. ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
She agreed that it was a lovely day. ‘Nice to be down here, and all.’
‘Yes. You’re a Londoner, aren’t you?’
‘Mm. Mind you, one of the disadvantages of being married to the Top Salesman in the North-West Area is you have to live up there.’ She grimaced. ‘We’re in Preston.’
‘Is it that bad?’
‘No, the people’s quite friendly and that, but all my mates is really down here.’ She put on a pious expression. ‘Still, the little woman has to go wherever Hubby goes. And do whatever Hubby tells her to, and all, doesn’t she?’
Shelley even managed to imbue this with a sexual overtone.
‘I didn’t think women thought like that nowadays. Thought you were all more liberated.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, Chowss, me and Daryl are a very liberated couple.’
He somehow didn’t think they were both using the word ‘liberated’ in the same sense.
‘And the thing is, a “liberated” couple can always find people of similar interests wherever they are. Even up in Preston. Quite a lot of “liberated” people we’ve met up there, you know.’
Charles nodded casually, not quite sure that he was hearing right. Shelley seemed to be saying that she and Daryl were into some kind of partner-swapping. In fact, her whole conversation could have come straight out of a soft-porn magazine. He had a sudden vision of the bookshelves in the Fletcher sitting-room – rows of Custom Car magazines, interleaved with Penthouses and Escorts.
‘So are you going to be stuck up there long?’ he asked uncontroversially. ‘I don’t know a lot about Daryl’s kind of work. Is it the sort of job where you move around a lot?’
‘Yeah. Lot of salesmen do. Daryl’s been with Delmoleen for a long time, working his way up, like, but now he’s got Top Salesman, it’s probably as far as he can go in the company. You know, he’s not Sales Manager material – well, not yet, anyway – so he’ll probably start looking for something else soon.’
‘Something down South?’
‘Hopefully, yeah.’
One of the discreet uniformed waitresses appeared beside them. ‘Would you like some more wine? Madam? Sir?’
‘Could probably force myself,’ said Charles expansively.
Another full bottle of red wine was placed on the table between them. He gestured with it towards Shelley’s empty glass.
‘Why not? Neither of us got to drive. The chauffeur car’s part of the day.’
‘For me too.’
‘Yeah. Hope you don’t mind my asking, Chowss, but why are you here? Funny place for an actor to be, isn’t it?’
It was a question he had been fearing, but he managed to fudge together some kind of answer about Parton Parcel and the filming that he had done at Stenley Curton.
‘Oh yeah, how is the old place?’ asked Shelley.
Charles’s detective antennae started twitching. ‘Why, did you ever work there?’
‘Yeah, I started there as a typist straight out of school. ‘Swhere I met Daryl. He was doing Midlands Area then. We got together and . . .’ She shrugged, ‘Rest is history, innit?’
‘Yes.’ He took a nonchalant sip from his glass. ‘I don’t know if you heard, but there was a dreadful accident that day we were filming in the warehouse . . .’
‘Course we heard. Dayna, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘People been saying for a long time she was going to get her comeuppance. No one thought it’d come that way, though.’
A casual ‘Oh?’ proved to be quite sufficient prompting for more information.
‘Well, Dayna really was a bit of a scrubber. I mean, she, like, used sex.’
A high moral tone had come into Shelley’s voice. Clearly she regarded Dayna’s behaviour as very different from her own. What was done within the confines of marriage – or, as it seemed from what she’d said, a series of marriages – was unimpeachably respectable, compared to using sex.
‘How do you mean, exactly?’
‘Well, Dayna, like, used her body to get things out of men. You know, early days she’d go out with blokes for nice meals and that. She thought the meal was OK, she’d give the bloke what he wanted. Meal not up to scratch, he didn’t get nothing.’
‘Not the first time that kind of transaction’s happened.’
‘No, right, I agree, but Dayna went on from there . . . you know, wanted “little presents” from blokes she went out with.’
‘What kind of presents?’
‘Jewellery, hi-fi, that kind of stuff.’
‘Money?’
‘Don’t think so. Not directly. No, I think she reckoned if it was just for money, then she might as well be a prostitute. Didn’t like that idea. Oh no, our Dayna had her standards – just they was a lot lower than most other people’s.’
‘Ah.’
‘Funny thing was, I don’t think sh
e really liked sex that much.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, back in the old days, you know, before me and Daryl got married, there used to be some fairly wild parties around the place.’ She looked straight into his eyes, daring him to be shocked and flinch away. ‘You know, lot of couples, go to someone’s house, all the bedrooms is open, play some games . . . maybe with forfeits – you have to take off this, take off that, girl has to go off with this bloke, bloke has to go off with that girl – you know the kind of thing I’m talking about . . .’
Charles nodded, as if his social life was one endless round of such parties.
‘It was only fun, you know. We all had a laugh. Anyway, Dayna come along to one or two of these parties, but seemed like it wasn’t her scene.’
‘You don’t mean she was shocked?’
‘No, no, take more than that to shock Dayna. No, she joined in all right first couple of times, but then she kind of lost interest. No percentage in it for her, you see.’
‘What do you mean exactly?’
‘Well, like I said, she used sex to get something out of blokes. Our kind of scene, you know, where we just did it for fun . . . well, nothing in it for her.’
‘Right. I see.’
Shelley giggled at some recollection. ‘Coo, we used to get up to some daft stuff, though . . .’
If she started expanding too much on what they got up to, Charles was afraid he might not be able to keep up his unshocked eye contact, so he said, ‘A girl who behaves like that’s going to be very popular – in one sense – but she’s also going to make herself pretty unpopular too, isn’t she?’
‘With the blokes she’s dumped, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Funny, though, I mean a lot of the girls at Delmoleen’s badmouthed her all the time . . . you know, what a slut she was and all that, but the blokes on the whole, certainly the blokes she’d been with – I mean, the ones who you’d expect to be really pissed off – I very rarely heard them say anything against her.’
‘That’s strange.’
‘Yeah, it is actually, isn’t it? Never really thought about it before, but it is strange. Like she had some hold over them or something.’
