Sicken and So Die

by Simon Brett

  Charles Paris, wondering whether his partner could ever be placated again – and indeed even whether the word ‘partner’ was still appropriate – lingered. He’d persuaded Frances to let him take her out for dinner that evening, but he didn’t approach the encounter with enthusiasm.

  Then on the Sunday she was going to visit their daughter Juliet, husband Miles and three grandchildren. Charles had been assured that he’d be welcome too, but somehow didn’t see himself going. So he recognised he was close to some sort of goodbye to Frances.

  How permanent a goodbye he couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t feel optimistic. He tried to pinpoint the moment during the last few weeks when things had started to go wrong. It really all dated from Gavin Scholes’ illness. Uncertainty over the change of director had got Charles drinking again, and the drinking had once again been a contributory factor to his soured relations with Frances.

  As he moved morosely towards the Green Room to pick up his bag, the decision formed in Charles’s mind to stop for a couple of large Bell’s on the way back to the flat. He’d a feeling he might need bracing for the evening ahead.

  He was about to enter when he heard the sound of voices from inside. He wouldn’t have stopped if he hadn’t heard a mention of his own name. In the event, he loitered out of sight and listened.

  There was no problem identifying the speakers. Charles immediately recognised the dark, guttural sounds of Vasile Bogdan and the lighter, lilting tones of Chad Pearson.

  ‘No, Charles Paris is in a different play from the rest of us,’ said Vasile.

  ‘Well, he’s a traditional kind of actor,’ Chad Pearson offered in mitigation. He had an exceptionally amiable disposition; it really hurt him to think ill of anyone.

  ‘Yes, but he’s getting in the way of what Alex is trying to do. His scenes just aren’t working.’

  ‘He’ll be fine. Everything’ll shake down when we get into the run.’ Chad Pearson still didn’t want the boat rocked. ‘It’s too late for anything to be done about it, anyway.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you’re playing Sir Andrew Aguecheek, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sorry, Vasile? I’m not with you . . .’

  ‘Until last week Sir Andrew Aguecheek was being played by another actor who didn’t fit into Alex’s scheme of things. Then fortunately he got ill, and now you’re playing the part.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I feel rotten about poor old John B., but it’s an ill wind.’

  ‘Yes. Wouldn’t it be great if another ill wind could just . . . blow away Charles Paris?’

  ‘But if that happened, who’d play Sir Toby Belch?’

  ‘I could do it,’ Vasile Bogdan replied. ‘I’d do it bloody well, actually . . . if only Charles Paris wasn’t around.’ There was a silence. ‘Still, better be moving.’

  Charles backed away from the Green Room door and tried to look as if he was fascinated by a copy of the Daily Mail somebody had left lying on a chair. But he knew it was a bad performance, and the look Vasile Bogdan gave him in passing only confirmed it.

  He knew his words had been overheard. In fact, Charles got the distinct impression Vasile had only spoken as he had because he knew Charles was listening.

  His words had been a deliberate threat.

  ‘It’s just the predictability, Charles.’

  They were in a Hampstead bistro they’d often been to before. Soon Charles would feel the need to order a second bottle of wine. On previous occasions they’d happily knocked back two and then moved on to the Armagnac. But this evening Frances was only sipping at her glass. The order for a second bottle was likely to prompt a sigh and a raised eyebrow.

  ‘How can you call me predictable? You can accuse me of a lot of things, Frances, but not that. We make an arrangement – I may turn up, I may not turn up. I say I’ll call you tomorrow, and you may not hear from me for three months. That’s the secret of my great appeal – you never know where you are with me.’

  Had he looked into her face earlier, Charles might not have completed the full speech. He’d clearly chosen the wrong tack. Light-hearted irony was not what the occasion demanded. Frances shook her head wearily and pushed the hair back out of her eyes.

  ‘It’s the predictability of your unpredictability I’m talking about, Charles. That’s what gets me down. I mean, how many new dawns am I expected to greet? How many times am I supposed to believe in you as a born-again dutiful husband? How many good intentions am I meant to listen to, while all the time I hear the Hell Paving Company truck revving away in the background?’

  Charles grinned at the conceit, then looked serious. ‘Look, I do mean everything I say at the moment I say it.’

  ‘Well, thanks. That’s a lot of help, isn’t it? I’m sure a goldfish is surprised every time it does a circuit of its bowl and sees the same bunch of weed.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That, OK, maybe you do mean everything you say at the moment you say it, but that doesn’t mean you’re always saying it to the same person.’

  He looked puzzled, so she spelt it out for him. ‘Charles, it’s very difficult for me to believe anything you say to me – anything caring, anything about loving me, for instance – when I know the next day – or the day before – you’ll either say or have said exactly the same words to someone else.’

  ‘Oh, Frances, that was ages ago. I’ve grown out of all that. I now know what I want in life, and it’s you.’

  ‘So all those other women . . .?’

  ‘There never were that many, and none who really meant anything to me.’

  ‘Must’ve been nice for them to know that, mustn’t it?’

  ‘Frances. ‘You should never worry about me and other women.’

  ‘I agree. And, generally speaking, I’ve found the best way of not worrying about them is to close my mind to the fact of their existence. Which is a lot easier to do when I’m not being constantly reminded of the fact of your existence.’

  ‘You mean when I’m not around?’

  ‘In a word, yes,’ she replied brutally.

  ‘But, Frances . . .’ He knew he was sounding pathetic. He didn’t want to sound pathetic, but that was how the words came out. ‘There’s still so much between us.’

  ‘Is there? Listen, Charles, what you don’t realise is that things change. I change. You think I’m just the same person. You go away, have an affair, and when you get bored with it or she gets bored with it, you think you can come bouncing back and I will still be exactly where you left me. Life doesn’t work like that. Every pain takes its toll. Each time you’ve hurt me it’s left a mark – and strengthened my defences against you, against the same things happening again. I’m a lot stronger than I was when you first walked out, Charles.’

  ‘I know. That’s part of your appeal for me.’

  ‘I haven’t built up that strength for your benefit. Rather the reverse, actually. I’ve built it up for me, so that I’ve got the strength to lead my own life – on my own – which is what I was doing, quite cheerfully, until, a few weeks ago, you shambled back into it.’

  ‘You were pleased to see me. You welcomed me.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I did manage to forget about the past. I managed to forget the predictability. Once again I deluded myself that – this time – it’d all be different.’

  ‘And it has been.’

  ‘Has it, Charles? Oh, the first two or three weeks were fine, yes, I agree. But would you say the last two have been very different from the way it always was?’

  ‘Well.’ Charles looked away from her and, as he did so, caught the eye of a passing waiter. He lifted up the empty wine bottle. ‘Could we have another one of these, please?’

  On the landing back at the flat, he put his arms round her. ‘Good night,’ Frances said. ‘As you know, I’m going to Juliet’s tomorrow. I don’t suppose you . . .?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No, no, I tho
ught not. Well, Charles, I hope everything goes well at Great Wensham.’

  ‘Mm. Thanks.’ He’d had plans for organising first night tickets for her and . . . But it all seemed a bit pointless now.

  ‘. . . and keep in touch, eh, Charles?’

  ‘But not too much in touch?’

  She looked up and the pain in her eyes burnt into him.

  He still had his arms around her. He really wanted her. Maybe if they made love it’d sort everything out.

  He squeezed her tighter. ‘Frances . . .’

  ‘What?’

  What indeed? There was no point in trying to make love to her if she didn’t want to. It wasn’t just an act of sex he wanted; it was the coincidence of two people who really wanted to have sex with each other.

  Slowly he released his hold. ‘I’ll ring, you know, keep you up to date with how things’re going.’

  ‘Mm.’ The disbelief in her monosyllable was not quite overt. ‘Take care, Charles.’

  She leant forward and gave him a soft peck on the cheek. Then her bedroom door opened and closed, and she was gone.

  Charles Paris went through into the sitting room and poured himself a large Bell’s.

  Chapter Thirteen

  HE WOKE IN the spare bed, tired and headachy. The stableyard taste in his mouth suggested he’d passed out before cleaning his teeth the night before. Nausea lurked in the cobwebs at the bottom of his throat. Why did he do it? Convivial drinking with other people was at least fun while it was happening; drinking alone was nothing more nor less than self-punishment.

  There was an empty stillness in the flat. He glanced at his watch. After ten. God knows what time he’d fallen into bed. He didn’t want to move, but his straining bladder insisted.

  Being upright didn’t help the headache. In the bathroom he peed copiously, sluiced his face in water and cleaned his teeth. The mint wasn’t strong enough to swamp the other taste in his mouth.

  The door to Frances’s bedroom was closed. He knew she wasn’t there, but still tapped on it before entering. The room seemed almost clinically neat, the edges of the bedspread regulated into neat parallels.

  The whole place smelt of Frances. A strong whiff of her favourite perfume in the air suggested she might only just have left. Maybe the closing of the flat’s front door was what had woken Charles.

  He sat on the bed, hunched in misery. This time he really had screwed up. Frances had given him a chance, and he’d blown it. What was more, it felt ominously like a last chance. They’d made no plans to meet again.

  He could have stayed there, marooned in self-pity, all day, but he forced himself to stand up. His weight had left a semicircular indentation on the bedspread. He smoothed it out. The bed was once again a rigid rectangle, as if Charles Paris had never been there at all.

  He got dressed and tried to drink some coffee, but gagged on it. Savagely, he took a long swig straight from the Bell’s bottle, recognising as he did it – and almost revelling in – his self-destructive stupidity.

  Then he went to the phone and rang Gavin Scholes.

  When he reached the neat terraced house in Dulwich, Charles was surprised to discover that Gavin had developed a new wife. The former one had walked out after many years in Warminster because, although he only lived a mile from his work, her husband was never home. Gavin was so obsessed with the Pinero Theatre that he gave little sign of having noticed his first wife’s departure.

  The new one was on the verge of walking out too when Charles arrived. Only temporarily, though her tone of voice implied a more permanent separation was not out of the question.

  ‘Sorry to appear inhospitable,’ she said, ‘but I have so few opportunities to get out at the moment that I have to snatch every one that comes along.’

  ‘You mean Gavin’s too ill to be left on his own?’

  ‘No. I mean that Gavin thinks he’s too ill to be left on his own – which, in terms of how much freedom it gives me, comes to the same thing.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He’s in the sitting room – through there. I’m going for a walk in the park. Can you stay for an hour? I won’t be longer than that, I promise. But please don’t leave him till I come back.’

  Through her brusqueness, a genuine anxiety showed. However much she tried to dismiss Gavin’s illness as hypochondria, deep down she was worried about him.

  The director was certainly doing the full invalid performance. Dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown, he sat in an armchair facing french windows which opened on to a punctiliously regimented garden. (That must be the new wife’s doing; Charles couldn’t imagine Gavin Scholes showing an interest in any activity outside the theatre.)

  Beside the patient, Sunday papers lay unopened on a table, which also bore a bottle of Lucozade and a basket of grapes. The attention to detail was maintained, in spite of the summer weather, by a rug over Gavin’s knees. The room even contrived to carry a hint of hospital disinfectant.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ asked Charles.

  It was an incautious – though probably unavoidable – question. Whatever the reality of Gavin Scholes’ illness, he was certainly obsessed by it, and Charles did not escape the blow-by-blow – or perhaps twinge-by-twinge – account of every last bowel movement.

  Gavin finally drew breath long enough for Charles to ask, ‘And what does your doctor reckon it is?’

  The director shrugged. ‘Bloody hopeless, doctors these days. You never catch one committing himself to an actual opinion. It could be this, it could be that, better have some more tests . . . Never get a straight answer out of them.’

  ‘So you’ve had tests, have you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Gavin spoke as a connoisseur of tests. Clearly his health was the one subject which could threaten the exclusivity of his obsession with theatre.

  ‘And have they found anything?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing definite as yet. They can see I’m ill, but none of them has a clue what it is. My GP even had the nerve to suggest the whole thing was psychosomatic.’

  ‘Well, you have always been a bit prone to that sort of thing, haven’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gavin was incensed by Charles casting doubt on the authenticity of his precious symptoms.

  ‘I mean you have suffered from irritable bowel syndrome in the past, you know, when you’ve been stressed or –’

  ‘Irritable bowel syndrome is not a psychosomatic disorder,’ said Gavin, still offended by the suggestion. ‘It’s a genuine illness – and absolutely crippling for those who have it. I’ve been a sufferer for years.’ Then, to compound his martyrdom, he added, ‘Mind you, what I’ve got now is considerably more serious than that.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Time to move the conversation away from Gavin’s cherished symptoms and get on with a bit of investigation.

  ‘There hasn’t at any point been a suggestion that it might have been something you ate?’

  ‘Something I ate?’

  ‘Yes. That caused you to be ill?’

  ‘What, just food poisoning?’ Gavin’s tone dismissed the unworthy idea. ‘No, what I’ve got is much more serious than that. Anyway, if it was food poisoning, I’d have recovered by now.’

  ‘It depends what you’d been poisoned with.’

  ‘And I’m sure some of the tests would have picked it up if that’s all it was.’

  ‘That may not have been what the tests were looking for.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re harping on about this, Charles.’

  ‘I was just thinking . . . The day before you were taken ill, we’d done the photocall and press conference at Chailey Ferrars.’

  ‘Yes. So?’

  ‘Well, I was just wondering whether you might have been poisoned by something you ate from the buffet.’

  ‘Why? Did other people who were there get ill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why should I have done? What am I supposed to have eaten that caused this, anyway?’

  ‘I did
notice you have a mushroom tartlet.’ As he said them, Charles realised how stupid his words sounded.

  ‘Yes, I remember it. Why should that have made me ill?’

  ‘Well, suppose the tart had not been made with mushrooms, but with some form of poisonous fungi . . .’

  Gavin Scholes looked at Charles in blank amazement. ‘Why? Why on earth should it have been?’

  ‘I’ve just been thinking . . . The timing was odd. You get ill, you can’t continue directing Twelfth Night . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ Suddenly Gavin understood what Charles was hinting at. ‘Are you suggesting that I was deliberately poisoned to get me out of the way?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.’

  ‘Well, it’s absolute, total rubbish.’ The invalid was very offended now. An insinuation of foul play was the ultimate insult to his precious symptoms. ‘I am genuinely ill, Charles, not the victim of some crazed poisoner. Honestly, you really mustn’t let your imagination run away with you like this.’

  ‘No. No. Sorry,’ said Charles.

  Asking Gavin Scholes the questions he had come to Dulwich to ask did not prove easy. The director had become highly skilled at finding in any unrelated sentence a cue for further medical reminiscence. If Charles mentioned Sir Toby Belch, Gavin was prompted to details of his wind problem. Talk of the rehearsal room unearthed the coincidence that the laboratory to which his stool sample had been sent was also in Willesden. And even the word ‘production’ was picked up when Gavin said, ‘Goodness, you’ve no idea the production they made of giving me my barium enema.’

  Charles noted that Gavin had developed the true hypochondriac’s possessiveness. Everything was ‘my’. Not just ‘my barium enema’, but also ‘my consultant’, ‘my enterologist’, my proctologist’, and so on. Charles got the feeling Gavin would only be truly happy when he was qualified to talk about ‘my operation’. He began to see why the new wife seized every opportunity to get out of the house and away from the unending litany of medical minutiae.

  What was striking, though, was that Gavin Scholes showed absolutely no interest in how Twelfth Night was going. While he had been in charge, the play had consumed his every waking thought; now it was out of his hands, he might never have had anything to do with the show. He did not even express regret at the illness which had taken him away from the production. Why should he? That illness had provided him with a subject of much more consuming interest than anything the theatre could offer.