by Simon Brett
‘Ah.’
‘Unfortunately, he didn’t understand what I meant.’
‘Oh.’ Another embarrassment arising from the fatal ambiguity of the word ‘coffee’. Charles found he was now avoiding Felicia’s eyes.
‘Russ thought I was inviting him to come to bed with me.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘It was embarrassing. He’s very young. He took it as a personal slight.’
‘I’m afraid men often do,’ Charles mumbled.
‘I couldn’t make him understand that it wasn’t just him. It was any man.’
For a moment Charles wondered if he was about to receive a confession of lesbianism, but Felicia’s next words fortunately cleared that up.
‘Not while I’m in rehearsal,’ she said, speaking of the mystery in an awed voice.
‘You mean . . .’ asked Charles, having difficulty piecing the idea together . . . you don’t have sex while you’re rehearsing?’
‘No. I find it spoils my concentration.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘What – find it spoils my concentration?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, no, I don’t think I do, really. Seems to help it, actually . . .’
But she didn’t pick up the hint and volunteer to experiment with this novel approach. ‘No, I just can’t do it,’ she said.
Charles, whose recent edifice of plans for the rest of the evening had just crumbled in jerry-built chaos, was intrigued. ‘What about when you’re actually running . . . you know, when a show’s on . . . do you find you can manage it then?’
She shook her head. ‘Very rarely. I have tried, but it still does affect the concentration.’
Hmm. Charles hoped she wasn’t very highly-sexed. If she was, and insisted on maintaining this Spartan discipline, she had certainly chosen the wrong profession. And all that time at Stratford . . . working in repertory, getting one show on and going straight into rehearsal for another . . . good heavens, it must have been years since she had had anything.
Poor Russ. Barking up the wrong tree.
Never mind. At least the boy wasn’t a murderer.
‘Actually, Charles, there was a reason why I invited you back here this evening . . .’
Oh well, that was nice to know. He wondered what it was. Not just the massage, surely. And definitely not sex. What? Maybe the odd light-bulb needed changing.
‘No, it’s because you’re an educated man . . .’
That was different, at least.
‘You read English at Oxford, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Over thirty years ago, though.’
‘Well, I wanted to ask you about the interpretation of some of Lady Macbeth’s lines.’ She eagerly pulled the table of books across towards them. ‘I mean, particularly the “I have given suck” problem.’
‘The “I have given suck” problem?’
‘Yes, I mean it’s a crux which has been discussed for centuries. Because of course it’s at odds with Macduff’s “He has no children”.’
‘Of course.’ It dawned on Charles that, now Russ had blotted his copybook, Felicia was in need of someone else to discuss her work with. He groaned inwardly as he realised that he had drawn this particular short straw.
‘So, you see, I think you have to get into Lady Macbeth this sense of bereavement, because clearly she has had a child which has died in infancy.’
‘Ah.’
‘But this raises particular problems in some of her scenes with Macbeth. And when we first see her and she speaks of “the milk of human-kindness”, surely she must feel a pang, thinking of her own milk which was inadequate to sustain the life of her child. Incidentally, of course, there’s quite a valid alternative reading of that as “the milk of humane kindness”, which, I’m sure you agree, puts a rather different complexion on . . .
Felicia Chatterton continued for some time. Charles provided the occasional agreement or grunt, but she didn’t seem to need them.
After a time, his chin sank on to his chest. His eyes closed and he slipped easily into a comfortable slumber.
Oblivious, Felicia Chatterton talked on.
Chapter Fifteen
CHARLES SPENT A restless weekend after the Saturday run-through. John B. Murgatroyd had offered another Sunday tour of the locals of the locality, but the idea of comparing the size of the lemon slices with which various pubs garnished their Perrier water did not appeal. So John B. went off with a couple of other actors from the company, leaving Charles feeling like the last child in the playground to be picked for either team.
He felt restless about Frances, too. He must make contact with her. But he’d promised himself a week of abstinence before he did, and he’d had his last drink at closing time on the previous Monday.
Even as he worked these sums out, though, he knew he was deceiving himself, and he came round reluctantly to the idea that he was actually afraid of contacting Frances. Her unwillingness to see him made him feel raw and adolescent again, fearing another rebuff. It was stupid to feel like that about his wife.
And yet he had to admit that Frances had put up with a lot. But always before, when he had suddenly turned up again in her life, she had been wryly welcoming. Now, for the first time, he wondered whether she actually meant what she said about their being better off permanently apart. Maybe she really could get on with her own life more effectively without the ever-present threat of her husband’s reappearance.
It was a bleakly plausible possibility, and thinking about it did little to improve his mood. Her determination not to see him, combined with his own natural dilatoriness, could actually mean that they might never meet again.
Picking at the scab, he indulged this painful fantasy. Yes, it could easily happen. And then, finally, one of them would hear of the other’s death through a third party. If Frances died, he would hear from his daughter, Juliet, from whom he now seemed to be equally estranged.
And if he died, how would Frances hear about it? His stature in the theatre would not warrant newspaper obituaries. Maurice Skellern would know, obviously, but Charles couldn’t envisage his agent taking the trouble to contact Frances. (Actually, given the nature of their relationship, Charles could imagine some months elapsing before Maurice even realised his client was dead.)
He also wondered what their respective reactions would be to the news. Maybe, by the time it happened, Frances would have achieved the hermetic isolation from him that she seemed to crave, and be able to greet the event with a single philosophical tear.
If it were the other way round, he knew that hearing of Frances’s death would tear him apart. She still meant so much to him.
‘I must make contact with her,’ he thought desperately. Even as he thought it, though, he added the automatic rider, ‘but not quite yet.’
It wasn’t just thoughts of Frances that dampened his spirits. There was also the unsolved murder at the Pinero to trouble him.
There hadn’t been much evidence of the police round the theatre in the latter half of the previous week, but Charles didn’t feel confident that they had completed their investigations. He still had the uncomfortable sense of being under suspicion. There was to be an inquest on Warnock Belvedere on the Monday morning, and he was anxious about the findings of that inquest.
Also, he didn’t like the direction in which the compass of his own suspicions was pointing. Granted, the crime might have been the work of an outsider. Russ Lavery’s revelation of the broken window-lock opened up all kinds of alternative possibilities; anyone in the company could have concealed himself (or herself) in the dressing room area, killed Warnock and escaped at will.
But the most likely suspects remained those who had been present in the bar when Norman called ‘Time’ the previous Monday evening. If one excluded elaborate conspiracy theories, Lady Macduff and the two Witches were out of the reckoning. The two couples, Norman and Sandra Phipps, and Felicia and Russ, both had mutual alibis, the one of s
exual indulgence, the other of sexual abstinence.
Which left only Gavin Scholes.
He was uniquely positioned from the point of view of opportunity. He knew the Pinero inside out, he had his own keys. And, Charles kept remembering, he had been wide awake in the middle of the night when phoned with the news of Wamock’s death.
With regard to motivation, the old actor had been a serious threat to the director’s authority. By the Monday Gavin was beginning to lose control of the production, and Warnock Belvedere’s constant sniping was fomenting disaffection within the company. Also, Charles now knew, Felicia Chatterton was actually threatening to walk out of rehearsals if Warnock were not removed. And, though replacing a Macduff’s Son, or even a Duncan, was not an insurmountable problem, replacing a Lady Macbeth at that notice would have been nearly impossible.
After the disasters of that Monday’s rehearsal, Gavin might well have contemplated desperate measures to regain control of his production.
Charles didn’t like thinking ill of his old friend, but it was a matter of survival. If the inquest concluded that Warnock Belvedere had been murdered, the prime suspect for that crime was Charles Paris, and he might only be able to escape that charge by producing an alternative murderer.
He decided to watch Gavin Scholes very closely over the next few days.
The results of the inquest were good news and bad news. The good news was that the coroner did not reach a verdict of murder. The bad news was that he did not reach any verdict at all. The inquest was adjourned to give the police time to complete their investigations.
That was not very comforting for Charles, implying as it inevitably did that the police had further investigations to make. He wondered anxiously how long it would be before he was hauled out of rehearsal for another little chat with Detective Inspector Dowling.
But the Pinero Theatre’s Macbeth was gaining momentum, and he had little time to brood. It was a long time since he had been so involved in a production. Charles was used to long lulls in rehearsal, while he sat vaguely watching the principals being coached, drinking too many cups of coffee, sharing whispered professional gossip with other lesser members of the company, whingeing about agents and the Inland Revenue, or toying with The Times crossword.
But there was very little chance for all that in Macbeth. Though none of his roles was a principal one, Charles had so many of them that he was rarely off the stage, and when he was, he was preoccupied trying to remember where the hell, and in what identity, he had to come on next.
The silly, optimistic fantasy grew that some sharp-eyed critic might recognise his prodigious work-rate. ‘Charles Paris presented an amazing gallery of characters, each one so subtly distinguished from the others that I had to check my programme to assure myself they really all were the work of one actor.’ Yes, that’d do. Or how about . . . ‘Charles Paris demonstrated a Protean ability which stands comparison with that of Olivier’? Or maybe – He curbed his galloping thoughts. No, be realistic, Charles. Remember the last time you played more than two parts in a production. What was it the Lancashire Evening Post had said?
‘It’s no secret that the theatre’s hard up, but to have Charles Paris shambling on giving the same performance as three supposedly different characters seems to be a false economy.’
The mood of a company goes through many changes during a rehearsal period. There is the initial diffidence, frequently followed by a flood of confidence if the first few days rehearsal go well. This quickly gives way to total despair at the first set-back, which usually coincides with the cast ‘getting off the book’ and suddenly, in the desperate hunt for lines, forgetting all the subtleties they so easily performed with scripts in their hands.
This is frequently followed by a period of doldrums, when the progress of the production is so slow as to seem imperceptible. That may well give way to another nadir of despair after a run-through in which everything goes wrong.
Then, with a bit of luck, comes a sunny period of mounting confidence, as performances burgeon and the company begins to feel that really, after all, the show could be pretty bloody good. This mood will be bolstered by a good director, building the self-esteem of his cast, following that golden rule of all creative work that, even if part of you knows it’s rubbish, for the period of most intense hard work you have to suppress that feeling and convince yourself that it’s worth doing.
This fragile, but sometimes aggressively confident attitude is usually destroyed in the week before the opening by technical problems. The set, when actually erected on stage, bears no relation to the proportions of the furniture which has represented it for some weeks. Bulky costumes do not allow entrances which have been glibly rehearsed from Day One. Real props turn out to be the wrong shape for bits of business which worked perfectly well with rehearsal props. Doors will not open, swords will not come out of scabbards, helmets blindfold their wearers, cauldrons do not fit over the trapdoors for which they are designed. Anything that can go wrong goes wrong.
And that’s before you get on to the problems raised by lighting.
Any pace that has been injected into the production goes, and with it the company confidence slinks away. It seems impossible that the show can ever open. No, never in a thousand years. And if it does manage to, then it shouldn’t. It should be put out of its misery now, its sickly life terminated by a quick humane decision of the management. It’s going to be the naffest, most incompetent, most amateur-looking production that has ever disgraced the boards of a theatre.
This mood shifts to a stoicism through the long torture of the first (and in many cases last) technical run, during which everything gets slower and slower as the company works deeper into the small hours, and the director, who’s been up most of the night before plotting the lights, presses doggedly on, shutting his mind to what it’s costing in overtime.
Then a dress rehearsal (or if they’re lucky, more than one dress rehearsal), unsatisfactory for the actors however it goes. If it’s good, they feel falsely reassured . . . first night bound to be a disappointment. If it’s bad, they can comfort themselves with the old cliché about bad dress rehearsals. But that comfort is inadequate, too. Suppose the magic doesn’t work this time. Suppose this time a bad dress rehearsal prefigures an even worse first night.
Then the seesawing from manic elation to nauseous panic of the opening day, the false bonhomie, the snapping nerves, the anticipated surprise of cards and presents. And the awful elasticity of time, moving too fast for the urgent things that still need doing, not moving at all for those of the company who have nothing to do but wait.
This is the day for private rituals, for walking to the theatre by special routes, for avoiding certain totems and seeking out others, for touching long-treasured mascots. For many, it is also the day of vowing to leave the profession, swearing that it’s an inhuman strain, that it’s ridiculous to put oneself under such intolerable emotional pressure.
And, finally, all of that is forgotten in the release of actual performance. Good or bad, however many reputations have been made or lost, however much work is still needed, at least the bloody thing has happened.
All of these changes, all of these swings of mood, all of these alternating images of triumph and disaster, were experienced by the Pinero company in the run-up to the opening of their production of Macbeth.
For Charles Paris, the most daunting moment of the third week of rehearsal came when his dressing room door was pushed open to admit a huge bundle of clothes, which advanced panting towards him.
‘Um, can I help you?’ he asked uncertain of the appropriate way to address a bundle of clothes.
He heard the muffled word, ‘Wardrobe,’ which suggested that the bundle of clothes had a voice. When he looked towards the floor, he saw that it also had feet wearing grubby tennis shoes.
‘I’ll just put them down on the table.’
The bundle of clothes heaved up in the air for a moment, then flopped down on to the dressing room t
able to reveal a gormless-looking girl with orange-streaked hair and a designer-torn black T-shirt.
‘Those are all mine, are they?’ asked Charles.
‘Yes.’ The girl picked up each of the garments as she itemised them in an impassively nasal voice. ‘Right, Bleeding Sergeant.’
A leather jerkin, irregularly decorated with metal rings, and a pair of rough hopsack trousers. Those’re going to tickle, thought Charles gloomily.
‘What about the blood? Do you mind if this lot gets covered in Kensington Gore?’ he asked.
‘Kensington who?’
‘Stage blood.’
‘Oh, nobody said anything about that. I don’t think they’ll want blood on the costumes.’
‘He is a Bleeding Sergeant. Shakespeare did specify that in the stage directions.’
‘I don’t care what anyone else said. I take my orders from the Wardrobe Mistress.’
Charles did not bother to argue. ‘All right. I’ll try to keep the blood just on my face and forearms. A few nice gashes, I think.’ He relished the challenge of doing the gashes. Like being back in the old days of really elaborate make-up. That was the trouble with all this modern lighting, you hardly needed any slap, no matter what part you were doing. Still, a gash could be fun. Build up something gruesome with nose-putty. Even latex, yes. Then discolour the jagged edges with a touch of Lake, slap on the old Leichner’s Arterial Blood and –
Oh no, sod it. That would only work for someone who wasn’t about to enter in Act One Scene Seven as a Sewer. Shakespeare just didn’t think ahead, did he? If only he’d written, ‘Enter a Bleeding Sewer’, as well. As it was, Charles would have to settle for less elaborate wounds.
The girl with the orange-streaked hair held up a long dark-blue velvet garment that looked like a mangy housecoat. ‘For the Sewer.’
‘Looks a bit grubby. The Macbeths aren’t on the breadline, you know.’
‘Be all right under the lights.’
‘Oh yes?’
