An Amateur Corpse

by Simon Brett

  ‘Still we are going away this weekend.’ Again the edge of reproof in his wife’s voice.

  Denis compensated quickly. ‘Oh yes. It’s just one of the penalties of marrying talent, eh?’ Another unmotivated eruption. Mary smiled and he reckoned he could risk a little joke. ‘She’s spent so much time here recently I kept saying why didn’t she move in? After all, we’re only next door.’ This too was apparently very funny.

  Mary graciously allowed him this little indulgence and then felt it was time to draw attention to her magnanimity. ‘Still, this weekend I’m going to make it all up to you, aren’t I?’ She took her husband’s hand and patted it with a coquettishness which Charles found unattractive in a woman in her fifties. ‘First thing in the morning, when all the rest of the naughty Backstagers are sleeping off their hangovers; we’ll be in the new Rover sweeping off down to the cottage for a little delayed weekend. All tomorrow, and all Monday – well, till nine or so when we’ll drive back. Just the two of us. A second honeymoon – or is it a third?’

  ‘Three hundredth,’ said Denis, which was the cue for another explosion of merriment.

  Charles escaped to get more drinks. Soon the wine would cease to taste of anything and his bad temper would begin to dissipate.

  While he queued at sour Reggie’s bar, he looked around at the kindling party. There was music now, music rather younger than the average age of those present. But the pounding beat was infectious.

  As the room filled, he was increasingly aware of the common complaint of amateur dramatic societies – that there are always more women than men. And some of them were rather nice. He felt a little glow of excitement. No one knew him down in Breckton. It was like being given a whole new copybook to blot.

  Some couples were dancing already. Charlotte Mecken was out there, with her arms around Clive Steele. They were moving together sensuously to the slow pounding of the music. But what they were doing was paradoxically not sexy. It had the air of a performance, as if they were still on stage, as if their closeness was for the benefit of the audience, not because it expressed any real mutual attraction.

  The same could be said of the Trigorin, Geoffrey Winter. He was dancing with a pretty young girl, whose paint-spattered jeans suggested she was one of the stage staff. They were not dancing close, but in a jerky slow motion pantomime. Geoffrey moved well, his body flicking in time to the music, like a puppet out of control. But again it was a performance of a body out of control, not genuine abandon. Each movement was carefully timed; it was well-done, but calculated.

  Charles had noticed the same quality in the man’s stage performance. It had been enormously skillful and shown more technique than the rest of the cast put together, but it had been mannered and ultimately artificial, a performance from the head rather than the heart.

  The man was good-looking in an angular way. Very thin, with grey hair and pale eyes. He wore a black shirt, black cord jeans and desert boots. There was something commanding about him, attractive in not just the physical sense of the word.

  As Charles watched he saw the man change partners and start a new dance with another little totty. ‘Enjoying himself, isn’t he?”

  He turned to the owner of the voice which had spoken beside him. A young woman of about thirty. Short mousy hair, wide green eyes. Attractive. She was following Charles’s gaze towards the dancing Trigorin. ‘My husband.’

  She said it wryly. Not bitterly or critically, but just as if it were a fact that ought to be established.

  ‘Ah. I’m Charles Paris.’

  ‘Thought, you must be.’ Charles felt the’ inevitable actor’s excitement that she was going to say she recognized him from the television. But no. ‘You’re the only person down here I didn’t recognize. And I knew you’d be in tonight because you’re doing the crit on Tuesday, so, by a process of elimination . . .’

  ‘I’m Vee Winter, by the way. Though I act here under my maiden name, Vee le Carpentier. I always think if people see in programmes that the leads are played by people with the same surname, they get to think the Backstagers are awfully cliquey.’ Before Charles had time to take in this statement, she went on, ‘Have you met Geoffrey?’

  ‘No, just seen him on stage. He’s very talented.’ Charles didn’t volunteer whether he thought the talent was being appropriately used.

  ‘Yes, he’s talented.’ She changed the subject abruptly.

  ‘Since you’re coming down to do this thing on Tuesday, why not have a meal with us beforehand?’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ said Charles, wondering if he ought to check whether Hugo and Charlotte were expecting him.

  Vee took it as assent. ‘About half-past seven. The Critics’ Circle isn’t till eight-thirty. I’ll give you our phone number in case you have problems.’

  ‘Fine.’ Charles made a note of the number. Then he added, because he was beginning to understand suburban timetables, ‘Seven-thirty then. After the children are asleep.’

  ‘We don’t have any children,’ said Vee Winter.

  Sour Reggie dispensed Charles’s order for drinks as if the country were threatened by imminent drought. Vee helped carry the glasses back to the group.

  She seemed to know them all. She made some insincere compliment to Mary Hobbs about her Arkadina.

  ‘Oh, that’s sweet of you to say so, darling. Actually. The voice dropped with the subtlety of a double declutch on a worn gear-box. ‘I still think you would have made a better Nina, but, you know, Shad gets these ideas. . . .

  The circle had enlarged in Charles’s absence to include an elderly man with a white goatee beard. And Hugo’s mood had shifted into something more expansive. ‘Charles, I don’t think you’ve met Robert Chubb. Bob, this is Charles Paris. Bob’s the founder of the whole set-up. Started the Backstagers back in. . . . ooh . . .’

  ‘Nineteen hundred and mind-your-own-business,’ supplied Robert Chubb jovially. ‘First productions in the Church Hall, mind you. Come some way since then. Started the fund for this complex in 1960 . . . and ten years later it was all finished.’ He gestured to the rehearsal room and theatre.

  It was an impressive achievement. Charles bit back his cynical views on the subject of amateur theatre and said so.

  Robert Chubb seemed to have been waiting for this cue to launch into the next instalment of his monologue. ‘Well, I thought, I and a few like-minded cronies, that there should be some decent theatre in Breckton. I mean, it’s so easy for people in the suburbs to completely lose sight of culture.

  ‘So we damned well worked to set up something good – not just your average amateur dramatic society, performing your Agatha Christies and your frothy West End comedies, but a society with high professional standards, which kept in touch with what was happening in the theatre at large. And that’s how the Backstagers started.’

  Charles felt he was being addressed like a television interviewer who had actually asked for this potted history. And his interviewee continued. ‘And now it’s grown like this. Enormous membership,. great waiting list of people from all over South London keen to join in the fun. Lots of Press coverage – particularly for our World Premieres Festival.

  ‘It just keeps getting bigger. Now we run our own fort-nightly newsletter to keep people informed of what we’re up to – called Backchat, don’t know if you’ve seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then of course this bar’s called the Back Room.’

  ‘I see, everything’s Back-something-or-other?’

  ‘Yes, Rather nice, isn’t it?’

  Charles’s mind began seething with new permutations of Back-, most of them obscene. It was perhaps as well that Hugo spoke before he launched into any of them. ‘We must get Charles down here to do a production, eh, Bob?’

  It was Charles’s turn to be self-deprecating. ‘Oh, come on, Hugo, I’m a professional actor. Much as I’d like to do it, I’m likely to be off touring or something at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘Nonsense. This voice-over c
ampaign’s really going to take off. You’ll be stuck in London with more work than you can cope with.’

  ‘When that happens –’ Charles joked, ‘and I won’t believe it until it does – I’ll be prepared to do a production for the Backstagers.’ That seemed to get him safely off the hook.

  But a new voice joined the circle and qualified his remark. ‘If,’ of course, you do a successful One-Act Productions Audition and your choice of play is ‘approved by the Directorial Selection Sub-Committee.’ Charles was not surprised to find that the voice came from sour Reggie, the walking rule-book.

  ‘Oh, Charles has had rather a lot of experience as a director.’ It was Hugo coming to his rescue. Charles didn’t’ want rescuing. He thought doing a production for the Breckton Backstagers was a consummation devoutly to be avoided. The atmosphere was getting claustrophobic.

  But Hugo’s defence was quite impassioned. Again Charles was conscious of the other man’s need for him. He was being paraded for the benefit of Hugo’s local crowd. In a strange way, it seemed to tie in with Charlotte’s behaviour, as if Hugo’s ignoring his wife was justified by the fact that he had a genuine professional actor to show off.

  Charles was being used and he didn’t like it, but Hugo continued with his sales campaign. ‘Charles is, a bit of a playwright too. You should get him to write something for the World Premieres Festival.’

  Charles made some suitably modest response, but Robert Chubb seized on the cue. ‘Oh really, if you’ve got something that hasn’t been performed tucked away in a cupboard, do let us see it. We’re getting the next Festival sorted out at the moment and one of our expected scripts has just fallen through, so we’d be very interested.’

  Charles was tempted. There was in fact an unperformed play sitting in a drawer in his room in Hereford Road. He’d written it after his one successful play, The Ratepayer. A light comedy, called How’s Your Father? It would be quite gratifying to have it done under any circumstances.

  But the patronizing tone in which Robert Chubb continued changed his mind. ‘It could do you a lot of good,

  Charles. Lots of plays we’ve premiered here have gone on to do awfully well. It’s a real chance for an unknown playwright. I don’t know if you know George Walsh’s Doomwomb?’

  Charles shook his head. Robert Chubb smiled indulgently at his ignorance. ‘That started here.’

  ‘Really?’ Suddenly he wanted to scream, wanted to do something appalling, be very rude to someone, break something, get the hell away from all these pretentious idiots.

  Rescue came from an unexpected source. He felt an arm round his waist and a female body pressed close to his. ‘Dance with me.’

  It was Vee Winter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHE WAS A strange woman. She clung to him tightly and he could feel the nervous excitement coursing through her body. In other circumstances, he would have interpreted this as a sexual message and responded in kind, but that somehow didn’t seem appropriate. The excitement had nothing to do with him.

  He was being used for some purpose of her own. Certainly she was working to give the appearance of a sexual encounter, but it was for the benefit of the rest of the room, not for her partner.

  Charles wondered at first if it was a ploy to make her husband jealous. Geoffrey was across the room, dancing with circumscribed abandon in front of yet another little dolly and Vee was very aware of his presence. But her behaviour did not seem designed to antagonize him; instead Charles received an inexplicable impression of complicity between husband and wife, as if their performances were co-ordinated parts of an overall plan and would later be laughed over when they were alone together.

  This annoyed him. Again he was being used as a counter in a game he didn’t understand. The heavy beat of a rock number changed to a soupy ballad and Vee snuggled closer, pressing the contours of her body tightly against his. He realized with surprise that he didn’t find this arousing. Vee Winter was an attractive woman, but he didn’t fancy her. this gave him a perverse sense of righteousness, as if confirming that his randiness was not absolutely indiscriminate.

  He commented rather coldly on her forwardness, ‘is this to give food for scandal to the gossip columnist of Backbite?’

  ‘Backbite?’

  ‘Your fortnightly magazine.

  ‘That’s called Backchat.’ She corrected him without humour. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t have a gossip columnist.’

  Charles unwisely chose to continue in facetious vein. ‘So there’s no one to chronicle the backslidings of the Backstagers bopping to Burt Bacharach and their bacchanalian orgies?’

  ‘No.’ Vee’s reply was absolutely straight. Charles wouldn’t have minded if she had said it as a put-down (his attempt at humour had been pretty feeble), but for her not to notice even that the attempt had been made, that he found galling.

  ‘Do you act much here?’

  She laughed with incredulity at his question, rather as if someone had asked the Queen if she had any jewelery. ‘Oh I have done a few things, yes.’

  ‘But not The Seagull?’

  ‘No.’ She stiffened slightly. ‘I really’ felt I needed a rest. Also I’ve played so many leads in the past year, I didn’t want it to look as if Geoff and I were monopolizing the entire society. Ought to give some of the newer members a chance. And then Shad, who directed, had this strange notion that Nina ought to have red hair. He’s a rather quirky director, if you know what I mean.’

  Through the excuses, Charles knew exactly what she meant.

  He took the end of a record as an opportunity to end their clinch. He looked over at the group round Hugo and couldn’t face it yet. He needed just to get out of the place for a moment. The sweet wine was making him feel sick. Pausing only to pick up someone’s full glass off a table, he left the rehearsal room.

  The change was as welcome as he had anticipated. In spite of the summery days of that fall, October was nearing its end and the evenings were chilly. The slap of cold air was refreshing. He leaned against the inside of the porch and breathed deeply.

  Then he heard the voices. Charlotte Mecken and Clive Steele. Arguing in fierce whispers. First Charlotte’s voice, the veneer of drama school thinned by emotion to reveal its Northern Irish origin. ‘I’m sorry, Clive, you’ve got it completely wrong. I never knew you were thinking that.’

  ‘Whit was I meant to think, after all those rehearsals, when you suddenly got all emotional and confided in me when I drove you home?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have broken down. I just . . . it was all too much . . .’

  ‘Well, I made the perfectly natural assumption that –’

  ‘It may have seemed perfectly natural to you, but –’

  ‘It bloody well did. Look, if it’s your husband you’re worried about, forget it. It’s bloody obscene you being married to him anyway. Reminds me of all those jokes about young girls on their wedding nights feeling old age creeping all over them –’

  ‘Clive. stop it. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. So completely the wrong end. It’s all much more complicated than you can begin to imagine. Look, I’m sorry if you’ve been hurt, but I can assure you –’

  ‘Oh, stuff that! All right, you’ve made your point. I see what’s been happening now. There is a word for women who lead men on you know.’

  ‘Clive, if I’d had any idea of what was going through you mind –’

  ‘Oh shut up. I’m going.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will. I’m not like Konstantin – I’m not going to go off and shoot myself because some tart’s let me down. If I were to do anything, I can assure you it would be something a lot more practical. Goodbye!’

  Charles heard a few brisk footsteps across the gravel, a car door open and slam, then a powerful sports car engine starting and tires screeching off down the road.

  He assumed Charlotte was still there. He gave her two minutes, then, not being an actor for nothing, did his impression of
someone coming noisily out of the rehearsal room.

  He was aware of her perfume before he saw her. It was very expensive, very distinctive. Whatever Hugo’s relationship with his wife, he didn’t stint her expenses. Her clothes were also of the best. She was a trendy fashion plate amidst the pervading dowdiness of the Backstagers.

  She was leaning against the bonnet of a Volvo in the car park and didn’t look as if she had moved for some time. Her face was infinitely miserable.

  ‘Hello, Charlotte. What’s up?’

  ‘I don’t know. Last night blues,’ she lied. ‘You should understand about that.’

  ‘Yes. What I usually do is get wildly pissed. Then I don’t notice. And the next morning I feel so bad physically that I forget about any emotional upset.’

  ‘Hmm. I’m rather off alcohol at the moment.’

  Silence. She looked sensational in the bluish light shed from the rehearsal room. The pain of her expression increased rather than diminished her beauty. The face framed in red hair looked pale and peaky in the thin light. Very young, very vulnerable, a child being brave.

  Charles found being with her a relief. She seemed more like a real person than the lot in the rehearsal room. He felt protective towards her. And that made him feel better. He didn’t like the boorish bloody-mindedness which the massed Backstagers kindled in him.

  ‘You know, your Nina was very good.’

  ‘Thank you. What are you going to say – I ought to take it up professionally?’

  ‘That’s what you were trained for.’

  ‘Yes. A bit pathetic, isn’t it really – fully trained actress mucking about with amateur’ dramatics.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure, if you pass your Juvenile Lead Audition and are approved by the Big Parts Selection Sub-Committee, you’ll get some very juicy roles here.’

  Charlotte laughed. ‘You seem to have caught on to the atmosphere of the place very quickly. God, what a load of creeps they all seem when you think of them objectively. All with their oversize egos and silly stage names – all those abbreviations and hyphens and extra middle names – it makes me sick when I think about it. I make a point of using their proper names just to annoy them.’