Dead Room Farce

by Simon Brett

  And, as so often after an unsatisfactory skirmish with a member of the opposite sex, all Charles could think about was his wife Frances. Though there seemed almost nothing now left between them, he still felt as if he had betrayed her. There was even, at the back of his mind, the appalling thought that at some point during the events of the previous evening, he’d found a message from Frances on his answering machine. Surely that couldn’t be true, surely that was just the guilt getting at him?

  Even worse, though, was the fear that he’d actually phoned his wife back, just a quick call to establish contact, and that she’d said she wouldn’t talk to him until he was sober.

  No, that bit couldn’t be true, he felt sure. It was just his mind providing another prompt of guilt to add to the muddy swirl of self-recrimination. But, hallucination or not, it wasn’t a thought that improved his mood.

  As it had transpired, in spite of his heroic rush to the station, Charles had just missed his train at Paddington and had to wait nearly a full hour for the 8.15. He’d hung mournfully about the concourse, clutching a copy of The Times he didn’t feel up to reading, and wishing the owners of the privatised station had made more seats available. At one point he contemplated the rough remedy of a Full English Breakfast, but the smell of food as he entered the cafeteria brought nausea back to his throat and he had had to hurry out again.

  The train had arrived in Bath on time, at 9.38, but there had been a queue for taxis and, as luck would have it, the driver Charles finally got seemed to be spending his first day in the city. The address of the studio was not familiar to him and, when they at last reached the relevant road, they had difficulty finding the right building. The studio was a recent conversion, and its name had not yet been put up outside.

  As a result, instead of arriving in good time for a relaxed chat before the contractual ten o’clock start of recording, Charles had bumbled in at ten-twenty, panicked and deeply hungover. His producer said it really didn’t matter, missing the train could have happened to anyone, but the girl who seemed to be looking after the technical side looked less than amused.

  But then, if anyone was going to sympathise with Charles Paris’s condition, his producer was that person. Mark Lear himself was certainly not unacquainted with the bottle. Charles had known him for years, and they had worked together when Mark was a BBC Radio producer of Further Education, a department which had later become known as ‘Continuing Education’ and no doubt gone through a whole raft of other name-changes in the years since.

  Mark Lear had always been a licensed BBC malcontent, continually moaning about the Corporation and asserting that he wasn’t going to stay, that soon he would be ‘out in the real world, doing my own thing’. Well, in the late 1980s, along with a great many other members of the BBC staff, he got his wish, though not perhaps in the way he would have wanted. Mark Lear had been offered an early retirement package that didn’t carry the option of refusal, and at the age of fifty found himself being taken at his word and having the opportunity to ‘do his own thing’.

  The ‘thing’ he chose to do – or perhaps ‘chose’ is too positive a word to describe the way he drifted into it – was to set up an audio production company with its own tiny recording studios in Bath. It was an initiative Mark Lear could never have managed on his own. However much he banged on about BBC bureaucracy stifling his creativity, about his longing to shake the dust of the place off his heels and be his own boss, in reality he revelled in the cosiness of a big institution. Whether he’d had much initiative when he started his career was questionable, but twenty years in the Corporation had drained any he did have out of him. Mark Lear would never have started his own company without someone else to push him.

  The person who had done the pushing was the girl behind the control panel in the studio that morning. Her name was Lisa Wilson, and two things about her relationship with Mark quickly became apparent. First, it was not exclusively professional. And, second, in their business venture she was at least an equal partner.

  Charles reckoned he could piece together how Mark and Lisa had met. As a producer in the BBC, Mark Lear had always taken full advantage of the regular supply of attractive single girls who worked there, and his wife Vinnie had either remained in ignorance or, more likely, turned a blind eye to his serial infidelities. For many years, Mark had enjoyed a very convenient life-style, using the excuse of ‘late bookings in the studio’ to cover his philanderings, and always returning to the safety of the elegant Hampstead house which Vinnie’s private income had bought them. The set-up was not one that Mark had ever had any need – or indeed desire – to alter.

  The impetus for change, when it did come, came from Vinnie. She fell in love. She felt she’d done her duty by their three daughters, who were by then off at university, and for the first time in her life, Vinnie Lear behaved with total selfishness. She had no choice. The love she felt for her new man was unanswerably powerful. Within three months – in spite of Mark’s self-justifying whingeing, in spite of their children’s reactions, including the development of an eating disorder in the youngest, Claudia – the divorce had been finalised, the Hampstead house sold, and Vinnie had moved in with her new lover. Within another three months, Vinnie Lear, now insisting on being called ‘Lavinia’, had had her face and body expensively remodelled by plastic surgery, and remarried.

  Mark Lear, for whom these events coincided with early retirement, spun reeling into a small flat in Pimlico. Once again, he’d achieved what had been long wished for. He’d said frequently to anyone who’d listen – and particularly to his sequence of young paramours – that what a free spirit like him really needed was ‘my own pad, a bachelor place where I can just, you know, like, be myself’. And, in case this might raise in his listeners any inconvenient ideas of potential cohabitation, he would swiftly add, ‘but of course, I couldn’t do that, you know, because of the children’.

  The reality of freedom, the realisation that there were now no restrictions on his free spirit, did not prove to be quite the nirvana Mark Lear had hoped for. No longer being in the BBC had reduced his supply of nubile young women. And those he did manage to lure out to Pimlico, though quite happy to have a bit of quick sex, proved less willing to listen to the witterings of a worried fifty-year-old – and deeply unwilling to provide any domestic back-up for him. Mark had been spoilt by living with Vinnie, and assumed that anyone vouchsafed the rich gift of his body would feel automatically obliged to reciprocate by doing his washing and cooking. But the single younger women he encountered in 1990s London were unaware of any such obligation.

  It didn’t take Mark Lear long to realise that, if he was going to find someone else to look after him, it would have to be in the context of another ongoing relationship. And it was around the time this message sank in that he met Lisa Wilson.

  She was some twelve years younger, and had also worked in BBC Radio. She had never been on the staff – in the organisation’s changed climate almost everyone worked on short contracts – but Lisa had shown sufficient flair and energy to be in demand and be offered many such contracts. Her departure from the BBC had been voluntary. She genuinely wanted to set up her own business.

  Since this decision coincided with the establishment of her relationship with Mark Lear, since he was an experienced producer, and since he had come out of his divorce with a lump sum from the sale of the house, it seemed logical for the two of them to set up in partnership.

  Lisa had organised everything. She it was who had done the research and costings for the project, and who had made the economic decision that they’d do better out of London. She had found the premises in Bath, she had designed and overseen their conversion into studios. She had dealt with planning problems and building regulations. She had sorted out the insurance, checking quote against quote. She had arranged for the fixing of the security systems the insurance companies demanded – window-locks, dead-bolts on the outer doors – and on the studio and cubicle doors too, because valuable
equipment might be stored in there.

  It was Lisa Wilson too who had touted for work to keep the studios filled. She had selected where to place advertisements. She had had business cards and flyers printed. She had relentlessly followed up any contacts which might result in bookings.

  And Mark, apart from the occasional whinge about moving out of London, had been content to be swept along in Lisa’s wake. His skills, after all, were on the creative side of things; his sensitive mind couldn’t be cluttered with managerial details.

  But even in the studio, the environment in which Mark’s skills were supposed to blossom, Lisa was taking the dominant role. When Charles arrived, Mark, who seemed to be nursing a hangover of his own, had been quite content to natter away for a while over a cup of coffee. It was Lisa who had pressed for them to start recording, pointing out that they only had two days to complete a full-length book.

  The work in question was not one that Charles Paris would have read for anything other than money. It was entitled Dark Promises, and written by someone called Madeleine Eglantine, with the rest of whose oeuvre he was unfamiliar. The book was one of those standard-issue romances, in which the right man and woman meet in Chapter One, and are then kept apart for two hundred pages by misunderstandings and external circumstances, until being joyfully reunited, and presumably married, in the last chapter. Charles, who was of the view that everything necessary in the romantic genre had been achieved by Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, found it difficult to summon up much interest in the characters. The heroine, despite Madeleine Eglantine’s constant assertions of how strong-willed and feisty she was, came across as totally insipid. And the hero, although there were frequent references to his ‘struggles with his own demons’, seemed plain dull. Nor could Charles find much good to say about the author’s prose style.

  Still, it was work, and work that could lead to other work. Lisa Wilson had organised a deal with a publisher to record a whole series of such romances. The audio book market was a growing one, and it would be handy for Charles to join that select list of not-very-famous but reliable actors who spend much of their time in the intimacy of small recording studios reading books out loud.

  It was an opportunity, and Charles wished he was feeling less shitty as he faced that opportunity. He thanked God that he had actually done his homework on the book a few days before. If he’d left it till the train that morning, the text would have seemed more alien than it already did.

  Even without the hangover, he wouldn’t have found it easy. As a bit of a writer himself, Charles found the book’s style awkward, and kept wanting to change sentences to give them greater fluency. But he wasn’t allowed to do that. Every time he deviated by a word from Madeleine Eglantine’s text, Lisa Wilson would put down the talkback key from the control cubicle and say patiently, ‘Sorry, can we go back on that?’

  ‘But what I said was much better,’ Charles had complained the first few times. ‘I mean, it’s not as if we’re dealing with Shakespeare here, is it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lisa had responded firmly. ‘We have to do the book as printed.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ And Charles reread the unamended text.

  What with these interruptions, and the fluffs caused by a tongue that seemed to be the wrong size for his mouth, and the retakes necessitated by intrusive stomach rumbles, the morning’s reading made slow progress.

  Charles hadn’t realised how difficult it would be. He was an experienced actor, after all. But most of his work had involved other actors, whose performances his own could bounce off. Acting with others shared the burden; the maximum pressure was sometimes on one, sometimes on another. But in that tiny, airless studio, he was on his own. It was just Charles Paris and Madeleine Eglantine. His concentration had to be total all the time.

  In fact, the part of the proceedings Charles had found most difficult had arisen before they even started on Madeleine Eglantine’s text. Once Lisa Wilson had checked Charles’s voice level and made a few adjustments to the settings in the control cubicle, she had said, ‘Can we start by doing the cassette numbering?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We have to get you to do the announcements that come at the beginning and end of each side. “Side One” – “End of Side One” – “Side Two” and so on.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Mm. With this book you’ll have to go up to “Side Twelve”. Six cassettes, you see. If you could just do them all on the trot, leaving, like, a couple of seconds’ pause between each announcement . . .?’

  Charles Paris chuckled, which was an unwise thing to do with a hangover like his. The chuckle seemed to shake together all the bits of him that hurt. Nevertheless, he managed to say, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound too difficult.’

  ‘OK. Tape’s rolling. In your own time.’

  Charles left a silence and then intoned, ‘Side One . . .’

  His pause was interrupted by Lisa’s voice on the talkback. ‘No, sorry, can you do it again?’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘Too much intonation.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘They should have no intonation at all. Just completely flat. No rhythm. Like the football results.’

  Charles Paris tried again. ‘Side One . . .’

  ‘No, sorry. You’re still making it sound like it means something.’

  ‘Well, it does. It means “Side One”.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re making it sound like “Side One” has some hidden significance.’

  ‘OK. I will try to bleach the words of all significance. Is the tape still rolling?’ Through the glass, Lisa Wilson’s blonde head nodded. Pretty girl, thought Charles, I could envy Mark a bit of that. Even as he had the thought, came the recrimination. How on earth, after what had happened the night before, could he ever again find the nerve to have a sexual thought about any woman? ‘Side One . . .’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lisa’s voice broke in. ‘Still sounds a bit actorish.’

  Charles Paris found it very hard. He sounded ‘actorish’ because he was an actor. And an actor is trained to give significance to words. To be asked to bleach them of all intonation and rhythm was to be asked to unlearn decades of technique.

  He made another attempt. ‘Side One . . .’

  ‘Nearly,’ said Lisa. ‘Getting close. Just one more try and I think we’ll be there.’

  As Charles Paris struggled to get his tongue round Madeleine Eglantine’s prose, he realised he was feeling worse. The hangover showed no signs of shifting. The pain across his eyebrows was intensifying.

  Partly, it was the claustrophobia of his setting. The premises that Lisa Wilson had had converted into studios had been the ground floor of a corner shop. There were now, crammed into the space, a tiny reception, small sitting area, kitchenette, toilets and two recording studios. The larger could just about accommodate a small drama production or a musical group. It was walled with movable acoustic screens, which could be set up to muffle the recorded sound, or reversed to show a shiny surface which produced a more echoey or ‘live’ sound quality.

  The other studio, in which Charles Paris was working, was little more than a cupboard, separated from its tiny control cubicle by thick double doors. There was just room inside for one chair, and a cloth-covered table with a cloth-covered book-rest on it. Beside this stood an Anglepoise lamp, a jug of water and a glass. The studio’s walls were heavily upholstered with dark sound-proofing material, which seemed to press down and take away more of the available space.

  ‘It’s very dead in here,’ Lisa had said, when she first showed Charles inside. ‘This is our dead room. That’s what you want for an audio book. No ambient atmosphere. It makes the sound more intimate.’

  As he read on, Charles was increasingly aware of how quickly intimacy could become claustrophobia. The narrow focus of light on the book intensified the feeling of encroaching darkness around him. The air he breathed felt stale and recycled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, about three-
quarters of an hour into the session, after a particularly messy sequence of fluffs. ‘Do you mind if I just come out and get a breath of air?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Lisa. ‘Apologies, I should have thought. We try to open up the studio doors every half hour or so, but because we started so late, I forgot.’ She pulled the two heavy doors open. Their draught-excluding strips hissed against the carpet. ‘Come on, Charles, stretch your legs.’ She shook her head in apology. ‘Sorry. The air conditioning in there isn’t working. Well, it is working, but we can’t use it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Boring and technical, but they swore blind they’d installed a system that was completely silent. Sadly, as soon as we switched it on, it started to hum. Not very loud, but enough to come across on the tape. They should be here to sort it out tomorrow.’ Lisa looked with sudden sharpness across to Mark. ‘You did ring the engineers, didn’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The engineers. To come and sort out this air conditioning.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Mark said vaguely.

  ‘Did you call them? Go on, Mark, did you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I bloody called them! For Christ’s sake, Lisa, stop treating me like a child.’

  ‘So when are they coming?’

  ‘Tomorrow. They’re coming to-bloody-morrow!’

  Charles Paris cleared his throat uneasily, and Lisa realised this wasn’t the moment for a domestic row. ‘Sorry, Charles. Would you like a coffee or something?’

  ‘Please.’

  While Lisa went off to make the coffee, Mark Lear, who had hardly stirred from his chair all morning, grinned knowingly at his friend. ‘Could do with something stronger than coffee, I dare say, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Well . . . I have got a little bit of a hangover this morning,’ said Charles, with breathtaking understatement.

  ‘Me too. Incidentally, sorry about the stuffiness. I’ll put the air conditioning on now, to cool the studio down.’ Mark Lear threw a switch. ‘You see, it’s all right so long as we’re not actually trying to record. And, so long as we remember to open the studio doors every half hour or so, you’ll be fine.’ He chuckled. ‘Basic rule of production – don’t suffocate your artistes.’