Merely Players

by J M Gregson

  Amy didn’t like that ‘woman’, didn’t like the fact that he never wanted her to accompany him to film premieres, didn’t like the fact that his being out and about meant visiting a succession of other beds.

  The divorce settlement was expensive, but Adam could afford it. It became forbidden ground in interviews; the sooner the public forgot all about it, the better.

  Two years later, Adam Cassidy remarried. The bride, Jane Webster, had been the damsel in distress in one of the most celebrated cases of Alec Dawson, television private detective and modern knight errant. There had been suggestions of their off-screen attachment in their enthusiastic screen clinches. For the millions of admirers of the series, it was a match made in TV heaven. A fair proportion of them chose to forget that their star had ever been married before.

  In one sense, this second marriage proved the match Adam’s fans wanted it to be. Jane Webster had looks and a presence which matched those of her new husband, even though her talent was limited. As the first fine bloom of her looks left her, the parts would certainly have declined. She declared that she was sacrificing her career to provide domestic security for her new husband, that wifedom and motherhood mattered more than stardom for her. She retreated demurely from the cameras as her pregnancy became more apparent.

  Adam Cassidy was now a rich and successful man; the world was at his feet. That was the cliché with which chat show and other television interviewers often used to bring him on, possibly because it was the introduction suggested by his agent. Adam spoke earnestly of his love of the live theatre and the classics, of his desire to ‘return to Shakespeare, the core of all our work’. He judged correctly that not many people would know that he had never played a significant Shakespearean role and that the few who did would not be foolish enough to display that knowledge.

  The Alec Dawson adventures went from strength to strength, Adam explained, (his appearances were usually timed to publicize a new series). That made it difficult to find time for the serious roles he wanted to take on. He was grateful to television, of course, but she was a hard taskmaster. How wise the bard was when he said that all the world was a stage, and all the men and women on it merely players. Adam sighed, shook his head, and moved into the hilarious anecdotes about his co-stars that he had arranged to deliver at this point.

  Each new series and each successful interview was another step in Adam Cassidy’s progress towards becoming that distinctively British phenomenon, ‘a national institution’.

  On the evening after the scene which climaxed in his preventing murder by his timely intervention in the darkened bedroom, Adam drove himself home. He was using the big maroon Mercedes which was one of the three cars he now owned. He could have afforded his own driver, but he preferred to employ one only for special occasions like film premieres. He enjoyed driving; he could still remember the thrill of his first car, a battered Ford Fiesta with a dodgy gearbox. Each time he slid into the comfortable leather driving seat of whichever car he now drove, it was a reminder of those days and how far he had come since then.

  It was well into autumn now, almost the end of October, and he felt the chill in the air, even at six thirty in the evening. There might be the first frost tonight, on the hills around his house and on the greater heights to the north. But German engineering was as efficient as ever; within three minutes, well before he reached the M62, the car was warm. By the time he struck due north up the M66, he was cocooned in that familiar, controlled warmth which made the weather outside irrelevant. The only real danger was of falling asleep at the wheel.

  There wasn’t much danger of that, with an active mind like his. He reviewed the events of the day and decided it had gone well. He had fluffed one line in the morning shooting, but the scene had needed to be re-shot in any case because of an oversight by one of the continuity girls about the levels of the drinks in the glasses. The director had severely rebuked her, whilst no one had said anything to him. That was how life was; the girl had better get used to it.

  Cassidy got on well with his fellow-actors. They were mostly seasoned professionals and highly competent, but they knew facts of thespian life. They were delighted to have a part in a series which was highly successful, whatever the critics might say about it. Adam had been a little in awe of one of the theatrical grandes dames who was playing his eccentric aunt in this series. To find today that she was appearing in pantomime for the first time in thirty years gave him a lift and subtly altered the terms of their relationship. Adam congratulated Margaret on her bravery and energy, of course, but everyone knew that serious actors only accepted pantomime work when the other offers dried up.

  He’d love to do panto himself, he said, when they broke for coffee; it must be great fun. But pressure of work meant that it was a pleasure Adam Cassidy must deny himself this year and for the foreseeable future.

  He lived some forty miles from the studios in Manchester where he did most of his work. His house was just south of the Trough of Bowland, which the Queen had once said was her favourite place in the land. Adam revived that royal quote when he was given the opportunity in interviews, though he was careful to conceal the precise location of his residence. You needed privacy and seclusion once you became a television star. They helped you to preserve your balance, he said.

  Once he left the motorway and struck off over the moors for home, the traffic became thinner. He listened to The Archers on Radio 2. He didn’t hear it every day, but you picked up what was happening easily enough. It was pleasant and undemanding. It added interest when you knew some of the actors, and it added satisfaction when you knew that some of these people who now seemed only modestly successful had been big names when he was struggling as an unknown. As the familiar jaunty signature tune marked the end of the episode, he switched to Radio 4 and heard the critic’s review of the latest Pinter revival at the National Theatre. One of his contemporaries at RADA had a lead, and for a moment Adam was envious. But only for a moment; Adam Cassidy retained through all the adulation showered upon him a core of self-knowledge, which told him that he would never have made a lead at the National. It gave him a small, bitchy satisfaction to hear the critic saying that his friend’s performance was flawed.

  He sped north again on dual carriageway past the old towns of Whalley and Clitheroe, then turned west along lanes for the final part of his journey, where he scarcely saw a car. The house was modern and huge. He and Jane had originally planned to adapt the high Edwardian house in the centre of the spacious site, but eventually the architect had persuaded them to demolish it completely and build the house of their dreams. Or the house of the architect’s dreams, Adam sometimes thought wryly. But they had kept the old name for the house, Broad Oaks, and the original high walls at the boundary of the site.

  He pressed his automatic garage door opener, watched the door rumble slowly upwards, and slid the Mercedes into the huge cave of garage beyond it. If the night was to be as cold as he expected, he didn’t want his vehicle covered with white frost when he came to it in the morning. He’d rung Jane from his mobile an hour ago to say he was on his way. He watched her for a minute through the uncurtained windows of the kitchen when he got out of the car. She still had the blonde hair and large blue eyes which had secured her roles as a youngster. At thirty-seven and after two children, there was an inevitable thickening of the waist and the first signs of ageing in her face; the thought struck him that women with fair complexions aged more quickly or at least more visibly than brunettes. He was five years older than her, and no doubt showing signs of maturity himself. But a lot of men grew more attractive with age; everyone said that.

  Jane had her apron on and was busy with pans when he went into the kitchen. He kissed her lightly on the forehead and stood behind her for a moment with his hands clasped around her waist, allowing the right one to slide down over the soft roundness of her stomach, caressing it for a moment with the fingers a million women would have loved to feel. ‘Domesticity suits you!’ he murmured s
oftly into her ear.

  ‘Domesticity will scald you, and me too, if you aren’t careful,’ she said with a grin. ‘Why don’t you go up and see the children? You might just have time to read them their story, if you go straight up.’

  ‘I don’t think I will. Not tonight, darling. I’ve had a very tiring day.’ He sighed an elaborate fatigue, then added a happy afterthought. ‘And Ingrid won’t want me getting them excited and disturbing their routine.’

  ‘Nannies are employees, not dictators, Adam. And I’m sure she’d be happy to see you reading to them. They don’t see enough of you, you know.’

  ‘One of the crosses of fame, dear. And they’ll be tired themselves, after a full day at school. It wouldn’t do to get them excited at the end of their day.’

  ‘I know you’re busy, but you’ll regret it if they grow up without you. It’s a precious time, this, you know.’

  She was beginning to nag. Adam didn’t like that and he wasn’t used to it. No one nagged him about anything, now that his mother was dead. He sat in his leather chair in the dining room and read his mail until the dinner was ready. He told her a little about his day and his trials whilst they ate, and added some of the theatrical gossip which had passed around during the group whilst they drank coffee and waited for new sets to be mounted. ‘And how was your day?’ he said dutifully when they were on the cheesecake.

  ‘Much as any other,’ she said acidly. She didn’t know whether he didn’t notice her tone or simply chose to ignore it. This house and this life weren’t proving as desirable as she had expected them to be, when she had been making her suggestions about the design of the kitchen and the various en suites and dressing rooms. She hadn’t thought she would miss her fellow actors and the gossip of the theatre and the studios anything like as much as she now did. She had the children, of course, and she was delighted to watch the changes in them as they moved from infancy into childhood. But they limited her; they held back her own development; sometimes she thought she would scream her frustration, after another day of childish language and childish concerns.

  Some of the other mothers she met at the village school said they felt the same: the favourite phrase was that they felt themselves ‘becoming cabbages’. But most of them were country women, born and brought up round here, with families and friends about them. Jane Cassidy (she kept her professional name of Jane Webster in correspondence, but the school had insisted it was better for the children to register her married name there) was a city girl, who found herself at times desperately lonely in her magnificent, isolated home.

  The women at the school gates were aware of her husband, of course; she was treated with a certain awe, and cultivated by those who sought to use her and the children to strike up some sort of friendship with the great man. But even that made her not a person in her own right but an appendage of her more celebrated partner. Fewer and fewer of her acquaintances seemed to remember her as Jane Webster, the actress.

  She’d tried to talk about these things to Adam, but he listened for a few minutes and then switched to his own and greater concerns. It was the way of the actor, of course; egotism came with the profession and sometimes it seemed a necessary tool for success in it. Every theatre actor knew that if he collapsed with a heart attack they would be discussing the recasting of his role before the ambulance reached the hospital. But television stardom was something different: they couldn’t stick a new face into a role overnight and hope for the same success. But Jane felt Adam should at least find the time to listen to her.

  But Adam was Adam. She’d known that when she married him and she shouldn’t expect something different. She lived in luxury on the back of his efforts, with a nanny now giving her the freedom she scarcely knew how to use. She couldn’t expect sympathy or understanding from her husband for what seemed to him her petty problems. He would probably think she was a silly cow, or worse still an ungrateful cow. ‘Jane Webster, you’re pathetic!’ she told herself sternly. She would need to find her own solutions.

  When they went upstairs, Adam went into the two rooms at the end of the landing to look at his sleeping children. Jane, listening to the distant throb of the dishwasher beneath her as she undressed in the bedroom, wondered whether he had gone in there to please himself or to please her.

  She might have been reassured if she had been able to see the change in Adam as he moved towards his children. The stillness of the scene in the first of the rooms, the slow, rhythmic breathing of the tiny figure in the big bed seemed to still also the thoughts and the pulse of the man who had fathered him. Damon was six now, a dynamo who seemed by day to have discovered the secret of perpetual motion. Yet, at this moment, you had to look hard to detect the tiny rise and fall of the blanket which meant that all was well with him. He had the blond curls that were so prominent in the pictures of his mother as a child, and skin ‘as smooth as monumental alabaster’. Adam wondered where that phrase had come from, then realized that it was from Othello. Not really appropriate for the skin of a child, maybe, but it always pleased him when a phrase from the past came to him. He wasn’t sure why.

  He was beset with a sudden fear for the innocence he saw beneath him, for the damage which must surely be done to this tiny figure by the harsh world which awaited him. How could this sleeping cherub possibly become a grown man, with the weapons and the will to resist the hostility which must surely be turned upon him by that aggressive, dog-eat-dog world which awaited him beyond the walls of this luxurious citadel?

  The room next door was identical, save for the pink walls which its imperious four-year-old mistress had demanded. Kate was not as deeply asleep as Damon had been. Her brow wrinkled for a moment as he watched her. The lips, small and delicate as the petals of a flower, mouthed words for a moment, but no sound came from them. Then a smile, tiny, mysterious, confident, settled on the small and perfect mouth. The sigh was as silent as the words had been. Then her breathing settled into a regular, quiet rhythm and you had to be close to her to detect any movement at all. He stooped and set his lips softly as the wings of a moth upon the infant forehead, then caressed with the back of his fingers the face which was so active and demanding when it was animated during the day.

  Adam Cassidy stood for a moment at the door, looking back at his sleeping child, relishing this moment of real life, which seemed at present to be increasingly elusive for him.

  Jane was already in bed when he went into the master bedroom. She lay as still as the child he had just left, but with her eyes steadily upon him. He was suddenly self-conscious, for a reason he could not explain, and turned abruptly into the luxurious bathroom beyond the bed. He had intended to say things to Jane about the children, about the way she cared for them and the way he appreciated it, but the words would not come, even when he slid beneath the duvet beside her five minutes later. He put out the light and stared for a moment at the invisible ceiling. Then he said, ‘I love you, Jane.’ It emerged not as he wanted it, but as if it were somehow a statement which surprised him. He said after another few seconds, ‘But you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘It doesn’t do any harm for you to say it occasionally, does it? Or for me to hear it, for that matter.’ She turned on her side and slid her arms round him, feeling the muscles on his back, moving her hands down from the shoulder blades she knew so well to the bottom of his back and the top of the cleft there.

  Both of them knew that they were going to make love, but there was no need to hurry things on. He held her tightly for a moment, then leaned her back and stroked her breasts, in the foreplay they both knew she enjoyed. Then passion took over and he rejoiced in the sudden urgency of her movements, of her nails digging into his shoulders as he brought her to a climax and she urged him on with the familiar blunt commands.

  Then they relaxed, unclasping their limbs as unhurriedly as they had begun, and lay on their backs with hands entwined as a prelude to sleep. It was good to have the experience, to know what would excite a woman and give her sexual
pleasure. That was his last, consoling thought before he turned on to his side and lost consciousness in the big warm bed.

  Actors are more self-centred than ordinary men. It did not occur to Adam Cassidy that the pleasure they had just enjoyed might also owe something to Jane Webster’s experience in other places.

  THREE

  Eight hours later and twenty miles south of Adam and Jane Cassidy, in a house which would have fitted comfortably into the four-car garage at Broad Oaks, a very different couple were preparing themselves for the challenge of a new day.

  Detective Chief Inspector ‘Percy’ Peach surveyed his breakfast table and Mrs Peach with a satisfaction that his enemies might have called smug. He wasn’t short of enemies among the criminal fraternity of North Lancashire, and he even counted one or two among the police service on the other side of the great divide. He set his hands on the shoulders of his wife’s dressing gown and said with conviction, ‘I’ve decided I like being married.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do,’ said Lucy Peach ‘Not at work, anyway. I’m getting tired of all the stale jokes about having sex on tap.’

  ‘But you know how to turn the tap on full flow,’ he said with a smile, allowing his right hand to run for a moment through her luxuriant chestnut hair.

  ‘Speaking of taps, it was bloody cold in that bathroom of yours this morning!’

  ‘Language, our Lucy!’

  ‘Our Lucy’s language will get a lot worse, if you don’t do something about the heating in there before the winter sets in.’

  ‘You were warm enough last night,’ said Percy dreamily. ‘If I could have plugged in to that, I could have heated the house for a week.’

  ‘If you’re going to comment on my bedroom performance every morning, I shall become inhibited. You’ll be giving marks out of ten next.’