by Simon Brett
‘Do you think you’ll do more here?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. What’s the alternative? I can’t see Hugo being keen on my having a real acting career. Anyway, I’ve lost all the few contacts I ever had in the theatre. Just a housewife with dreams, I suppose.’
‘I’m sure you could make it in the real theatre.’
‘“You should go on the stage,’ says Arkadina. ‘Yes, that is my one dream,’ replies Nina. ‘But it’ll never come true.”’
‘Could do.’
But Charlotte’s temporary serenity was broken by some memory. ‘No, it’ll never – oh, everything’s such a mess. God knows what’s in store for me anyway.’
‘Anything you can talk about?’
She hesitated for a moment, on the verge of sharing her burden. But decided against it. ‘No. Thanks for the offer, but I’m rather against shoulders to cry on at the moment. It’s my own mess and I must sort it out somehow.’ She moved resolutely away from the Volvo.
‘Are you coming back in, Charlotte?’
‘No, I can’t face that lot right now. I’m just going to . . . don’t know . . . have a bit of a walk, try to clear my head or . . . I don’t know, Charles. Tell Hugo I’ll be back later. You’re staying with us tonight, aren’t you?’
‘If that’s okay.’
‘Sure. I’ll see you in the morning.’ She walked off into the night, pulling her long Aran cardigan round her against the cold.
Hugo had been hard at the Spanish red when Charles got back into the. rehearsal room. But the mood that was settling in was one of catatonic gloom rather than manic violence.
They both continued to drink, resolutely and more or less silently. The party was livening up, with more and more couples clinched on the dance-floor. There were still plenty of spare women, but Charles had lost interest. The intensity of Vee Winter and Charlotte’s troubled words had changed his mood. He and Hugo drank as they might have done thirty years earlier at an Oxford party where all the women had been bagged before they arrived.
It was about three when they left. Charles murmured something about Charlotte making her own way home, but Hugo didn’t react. He drove them back to his house with the punctilious concentration of the very drunk.
As the Alfa-Romeo saloon crunched to a halt on the gravel in front of the house, he said determinedly. ‘Come in and have a nightcap.’
Charles didn’t want to. He was tired and drunk and he had a potentially difficult day ahead of him. Also he had a premonition that Hugo wanted to confide in him. Ignobly, he didn’t feel up to it.
But Hugo took his silence for assent and they went into the sitting room. Charles stood with his back to the empty fireplace, trying to think of a good line to get him quickly up to bed, while Hugo went over to the drinks cupboard. ‘What’s it to be?’
He opened the door to reveal a neat parade of whisky bottles. There were up to a dozen brands. Hugo always rationalized the size of the display on the grounds that everyone has a favourite Scotch, but it was really just the potential alcoholic’s insurance policy.
Charles missed the opportunity to refuse and weakly chose a Glenmorangie malt. Hugo poured a generous two inches into a tumbler and helped himself to a Johnnie Walker Black Label.
Then they just stood facing each other and drank. Hugo kept the Johnnie Walker bottle dangling in his free hand. The silence became oppressive. Charles downed his drink in a few long swallows and opened his mouth for thank you and goodnight.
Hugo spoke first. ‘Charles,’ he said in a voice of uneven pitch, ‘I think I’m cracking up,’
‘What do you mean?’”
‘Cracking up, going round the bend, losing control.’ The last two words came out in a fascinated whisper.
‘Oh come on, you’re pissed.’
‘That’s part of it. I drink too much and I just don’t notice it. It doesn’t make me drunk, it doesn’t calm me down, I just feel the same thing – I’m . . . losing control.’
‘Control of what? What do you think you are going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Something terrible. I’m going to say something awful, hit somebody or. . . . All the constraints I’ve built up over the years, they’re just breaking down . . .’ He mouthed incoherently.
‘Oh come on. You’ve just had too much to drink. It’s nothing.’
‘Don’t tell me it’s nothing!’ Hugo suddenly screamed. As he did so, he hurled the whisky bottle at the stone mantelpiece to the right of Charles. It shattered. Glass fell into the fireplace and spirit dripped down on to it.
Charles thought the outburst contained more than a dash of histrionics. If his friend wasn’t going to believe him, then Hugo was damned well going to give a demonstration of his lack of control. ‘Like that, you mean?’ asked Charles. ‘Out of control like that?’
Hugo looked at him defiantly, then sheepishly, then with a hint of a smile, seeing that his bluff had been called. He sank exhausted into a chair. ‘No, not like that. That was just for effect. I mean worse than that. 1 get to a flashpoint and I feel I’m going to lash out – I don’t know, to kill someone.’
Charles looked straight at him and Hugo looked away, again slightly sheepish, admitting that the homicidal threat was also for effect.
‘Who are you going to kill?’ Charles teased. ‘Charlotte?’ Hugo was instantly serious. ‘No, not Charlotte. I wouldn’t touch Charlotte. Whatever she did, I wouldn’t touch her.’
‘Then who?’
Hugo looked at Charles vaguely, distantly, as if piecing together something that had only just occurred to him. Then he said slowly, as if he didn’t believe it, ‘Friends of Charlotte’.
Charles took a risk and laughed. Hugo looked at him suspiciously for a moment and then laughed too. Soon after they went to bed.
Charles didn’t think too much about what Hugo had said. Obviously his friend was under pressure and all wasn’t well with his marriage, but most of the trouble was the drink. Anyway, Charles had domestic problems of his own to worry about. His last thought, before he dropped into the alcohol-anaesthetized sleep which was becoming too much of a habit, was the next day he had to see his wife for the first time in five months. At the christening of their twin grandsons. Grandsons, for God’s sake.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CHRISTENING WENT okay, he supposed. Difficult to say, really. It was a long time since he had been tu one with, which to compare it. The twins were healthy five-month-old boys and they were successfully received into the Church of England in Pangbourne in Berkshire, which was where Charles’s daughter Juliet and her husband Miles (who was apparently carving a successful career for himself in insurance) lived. The boys were named Damian and Julian, which would not have been their grandfather’s choice. So everything went as it should have done. But it was not an easy day for Charles. Being with Frances and behaving as if they were still conventional man and wife had been strange. In some ways seductively appealing. His mind was still full of the bourgeois morality of Breckton and he found himself wondering whether it could have worked, he and Frances as a couple, growing old together, building a family, having Juliet and the kids over for Sunday lunch and so on. But deep down he knew that he’d followed the only course open to him when he’d left Frances in 1961. He still loved her, still often would rather spend time with her than anyone else, but he never wanted to get back into the claustrophobia of always being there, always being answerable.
In a way, his leaving her had been as romantic as Hugo’s leaving of Alice. But, unlike Hugo, Charles hadn’t thought it was all possible, that a new woman could make it all all right again. He had left so as to keep some illusions. He didn’t want just to sink into a middle age of disappointed bickering. Nor did he want to feel guilty if he had affairs with other women.
Of course, it hadn’t worked. Guilt had remained in some form in all his affairs and much of the time he had been just lonely. But his single state gave him a kind of perverse integrity.
The situation had be
en complicated when it transpired that Frances had developed some sort of boyfriend. Charles never knew how serious the relationship was. The only thing he did know was that, illogically, it made him jealous.
And so, even more illogically, did seeing Frances so wrapped up in the twins. He felt excluded, as he had when she had been pregnant with Juliet.
That was the trouble. Whenever he saw Frances, unwelcome emotional confusion crowded into his mind. When he didn’t see her, he could exist quite happily from moment to moment, without thinking all the time that feelings had to be defined and formalized.
At the christening he hardly saw her. It was a public occasion, there were other people there, he had no real chance to ask her the sort of questions he wanted to. Or felt he ought to.
He went through it all in the train on the way back to London. He must ring Frances – soon. They must meet and talk, really talk.
The day had increased the unease which the atmosphere between Hugo and Charlotte had fomented in him.
He tried to think if there was anything comforting that had emerged. Only the fact that his son-in-law Miles, Mr. Prudent, king of the insurance world, with a policy for every hazard, had not insured against twins.
The Monday recording session was for a series of radio commercials, which was much less hairy than the voice-to-picture session which had preceded it. All Charles had to do was to read some copy in the same voice that he had used in the television commercials.
Not very hard work. And well spread out. Even this simple job was to be done in two sessions: half of the commercials were to be recorded the following Tuesday morning.
The whole voice-over business still puzzled him. Giving a couple of dozen readings of a banal endorsement for some product which no self-respecting housewife should be without didn’t fit into his definition of acting.
Still, the money was good, potentially very good. And it was different. And so long as one didn’t take it too seriously, it was better than sitting at home waiting for the telephone to ring.
It had started out of the blue some two months before with a bewildered call from his agent, Maurice Skellern. Someone from Mills Brown Mazzini had been enquiring about Charles Paris’s availability for voice-over work. That had led to a series of in-house voice tests in a tatty studio at the advertising agency.
Presumably (though no one ever actually told him so) these had been successful because within a week he had been summoned to a session of voice-to-picture tests. These had been more elaborate, in a swish professional dubbing theatre, and attended by an enormous gallery of advertising people, all of whom, it seemed, had the right to give him notes on his performance.
Again (though nobody actually said so) he must have been successful, because soon after he was summoned to put his voice to three television commercials, which were apparently on test transmission in the Tyne-Tees area.
It was Hugo Mecken he had to thank for this new development in his acting career. It seemed that Hugo had secured the account for a new bedtime drink which was being launched by a huge Dutch-owned drugs company. The drink was to be called Bland and the campaign had been agreed on some months before. It was to be led by a cartoon character called Mr. Bland who wore a top-hat and tails. In the launching series of animated television commercials he was to visit a tribe of little fuzzy red creatures called the Wideawakes. When presented with cups of Bland on a silver salver by Mr. Bland, they gradually turned pale blue and fell asleep. Over their snoring, Mr. Bland intoned the words, ‘Bland soothes away the day.’
The voice of Mr. Bland, which, if the campaign took off as it was hoped, would be a very lucrative assignment, had gone to Christopher Milton, a well-known stage and television actor (who, apart from his current success in the musical Lumpkin! at the King’s Theatre, was said by Hugo recently to have signed a contract for £25,000 to do an in-vision commercial for instant coffee).
All this had been agreed with the Brand Manager for Bland, the animation voice-track was recorded and the animation work was started. From which point all should have gone well until the launching of the product.
But during the interval between the agreement of the campaign and the completion of the three test commercials the Brand Manager for Bland had been appointed European Marketing Manager for the huge Dutch-owned drugs company. His successor on Bland, a Mr. Farrow, saw the commercials and, as a matter of principle, didn’t like them. Because of the proximity of the launch date and because of the enormous cost of the animation, he couldn’t afford to make radical changes in the campaign. So he homed in on the voice.
It was totally wrong, he cried. Far too patronizing, too light, it didn’t treat the product seriously enough, suggested that the whole sales campaign was a bit of a joke. Hugo and his associates held back their view that little fuzzy red figures called Wideawakes were not going to look very serious however funereal the voice that addressed them and said yes, of course he was right and they had rather suspected this might be a problem from the start and they’d go straight off and find another voice.
By coincidence, on the very evening of the meeting at which this decision had been made, Charles Paris was appearing in a television play. It was one of the few jobs he had had in a very lean year and he was playing an avuncular Victorian solicitor. His voice was somewhat deeper than usual because he had had a cold at the time of the recording.
Whether it was this odd voice quality or the fact that he had worn tailcoat and top-hat that made him seem to Hugo to be the ideal Mr. Bland, Charles never knew. Secretly he thought it was partly that Hugo knew that he would be easy to work with and that the Creative Director desperately needed to come up with something new. It was evident that Hugo, in a business that thrives on ideas, was beginning to run out of them.
He could feel the pressure from the inventive minds of younger copywriters and the task of finding the new voice for Mr. Bland was a competitive issue in the agency. There were other members of the staff with other candidates and the results of the voice-to-picture tests could well cause some realignment in the creative hierarchy of Mills Brown Mazzini.
So when the new Bland Brand Manager, Mr. Farrow, chose Charles Paris from the test, Hugo was over the moon. It was then that he had started the showing off and parading of his new discovery which had so annoyed Charles at the Backstagers’ party.
(For Charles the success was not without irony, because it involved getting one up on Christopher Milton, whose path he had crossed during the accident-haunted rehearsals for the musical Lumpkin!)
Charles was now familiar with the small commercial recording studio where he was to work. Through the glossy foyer with its low glass desks and low oatmeal couches, downstairs to the tiny Studio Two.
God knows what the building had been before conversion. A private house maybe, with the studio as a larder. The conversion had consisted mainly of sticking cork tiles on every available surface. In spite of the expensive recording hardware, the whole operation looked unfinished and temporary, as if all the cork could be stripped off and the studio equipment dismantled in half an hour so that the real owner would never know what his premises had been used for during his absence.
Hugo and Farrow were already sitting in the control cubicle. Hugo looked tired and nervous.
They started recording. The copy was so similar to the television version that any notes on performance given in those sessions were still applicable, but Farrow was determined to give them all again. Like all Brand Managers (indeed it is an essential qualification for the job), he was without artistic judgement.
Charles had now done enough of these sessions to know how to behave. Just take it, do as you’re told even if it’s wrong, don’t comment, don’t suggest, above all don’t try to put any of yourself into it. The agency and, indirectly, the client had hired his voice as a piece of machinery, and it was their right to use it as they thought fit, even if the owner of the machinery knew it wasn’t being used in the best way. At worst, there was the comfort th
at the session was only booked for an hour and he was being paid for it. Thirty-five quid basic, with possible repeats.
So, with his voice lowered an octave to recapture the coldy quality of his Victorian solicitor, Charles gave every possible reading of the lines. He hit each word in turn to satisfy Farrow. BLAND soothes away the day. Bland SOOTHES away the day. Bland soothes AWAY the day. Bland . . . It did seem a rather pointless exercise for a grown man.
Within half an hour all possible inflections of the lines had been recorded and Charles went from the studio into the control cubicle Farrow was still not happy. After some deliberation, he pronounced, ‘I think it may not be the actor’s fault this time.’ Charles found that charming. ‘No, I think it’s the copy that’s wrong.’
Hugo’s voice was extremely reasonable as he replied. ‘But you have already passed the copy as suitable for the television commercials, and I thought the idea was to keep the two the same.’
‘If so, the idea was wrong,’ said Farrow accusingly.
‘Well, it was your bloody idea,’ Hugo suddenly snapped.
Farrow looked at him in amazement, as if he must have misheard. In times when there was so much competition for big accounts, no member of an agency would dare to disagree with a client. After a pause, he continued as though Hugo had not spoken. ‘I’m afraid you advised us wrongly on that. The radio campaign must be entirely rethought. I can see it’s easy for you to use the same copy but I’m not the sort of man to take short cuts. I care about this product arid I’m looking for a campaign that’s going to be both effective from the sales point of view and also artistically satisfying.’
This was too much for Hugo. ‘Christ, now I’ve heard it all. Artistically satisfying – what the hell do you know what’s artistically satisfying? I’ve listened to enough crap from you and all the other jumped-up little commercial travellers who try to tell me how to do my job. Stick to what you’re good at – peddling pap to the masses – and leave me to get on with what I’m good at – making advertising.’
