Situation Tragedy

by Simon Brett

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I always try to be unpredictable. I mean, take you, Charles. By no means obvious sit com casting. I mean, so many casting directors, looking at the part of the golf club barman, would go for some old comedian, some actor who’s famous and well-loved for a part in another sit com, but whoever booked What’ll The Neighbours . . . said, no, let’s not go for the obvious, let’s think laterally and go for someone who . . . who . . .’ Her sentence lost momentum. ‘And they booked you,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘Mmm.’ Charles suppressed a grin.

  But Tilly Lake was only subdued for a moment. ‘So, anyway, with this part of the Colonel’s friend, I think we should aim high. Not a Toby Root, but why not a Trevor Howard?’

  ‘Just any old Trevor Howard?’ asked Charles.

  But she appeared not to hear him. ‘Why not an Olivier?’

  ‘The simple answer is, because he’d never do it.’

  ‘Ah, but, Charles, you don’t know that. You never know until you ask. Perhaps he’s never taken a guest role in a sit com because he’s never been asked. I mean, we’d be able to sort out a special fee. Anyway, Scott and I think we should send him a script.’

  ‘Certainly – what,’ agreed the Director gnomically.

  ‘Incidentally, Charles . . .’ Tilly Lake purred with sudden intimacy, ‘your agent hasn’t sent your contract back yet.’

  ‘Ah, no.’

  ‘I hope that doesn’t mean there are any problems.’

  ‘Problems? Good Lord, no. That’s just the way he works.’

  ‘Ah.’

  At that moment Aurelia Howarth wafted up to the group, nursing the vile Cocky in her arms, and followed by George Birkitt. ‘Scottie darling,’ she cooed, ‘have you any idea what time we’ll be finishing today? I promised I’d ring Barton and tell him when to come round with the car.’

  ‘Oh, Dob . . .’ Tilly Lake cooed in turn. ‘Don’t bother Barton. The PA’ll order a car for you.’

  ‘Or I could give you a lift,’ suggested Scott. ‘If you don’t mind the Mini. You’re more or less on my way and I wanted to have a chat about –’

  ‘No, no, Barton’ll pick me up. He always does. He loves driving the Bentley. So what time, Scottie darling?’

  ‘Let me think. I would like to have a quick word with you about something before you go, so, if we reckon to read the scripts in about . . .’

  As Scott tried to estimate the shape of the afternoon, Charles sidled up to George Birkitt. ‘Does she really mean that the old boy still drives?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘God, what a terrifying thought. I’m glad I haven’t got a car. I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace if I thought I might meet the old loony careering around in a Bentley.’

  ‘Oh, I dare say he’s safe enough. It’s only his mind that’s gone.’

  ‘That’s quite enough. I like to think that most people driving cars have got minds.’

  ‘Hmm’ George seemed distracted. ‘What do you think of the scripts?’

  ‘They seem remarkably like the pilot.’

  ‘I wonder. I think there are things that’ll have to be changed,’ George Birkitt said ominously. ‘And I’m rather annoyed with the Wardrobe girl.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Well, as you know, I’m the last person to make a fuss about something that isn’t important, but I just asked her if she could guarantee that I’d have the same dresser right through the series. It’s only a small thing, but it does make a big difference. I mean, when you’re concentrating on a performance, you don’t want to be thinking about costume changes and things. You want to be sure that all that side is in the hands of a regular dresser you can trust. Don’t you find that?’

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ agreed Charles Paris, whose eminence in his chosen profession had never merited the attentions of a personal dresser, regular or irregular.

  He was pleasantly sedated with wine for the afternoon’s readings, but felt a great glow of righteousness from the fact that he did not actually go to sleep. What was more, he didn’t miss any of his cues. In both of the remaining scripts, he delivered his fourteen lines impeccably (impeccably, that is, in the character of Reg, the golf club barman, a character chiefly humorous for his drink problem). He felt very professional.

  Round about four o’clock they finished the last script. Rod Tisdale appeared unmoved by the rendering of his oeuvre. Only once during the day had he spoken. That was at the end of the fourth script, when he had said. ‘Peter, I think there should be a change to that line on page 17 of Part Two.’

  ‘Which one, Rod?’

  ‘The Vicar’s line. Where he says, “It got stuck in my cupboard”.’

  ‘Yes, got it, Rod. What should it be?’

  ‘Can we change it to “It got stuck in my drawers”?’

  ‘Yes, sure, Rod.’

  ‘Silly of me, I should have thought of it earlier. Cupboard not funny. drawers funny – old rule of comedy.’

  ‘Okay, have you all got that change?’

  After all the scripts had been read, Peter Lipscombe said again that he thought it was all very exciting and Scott Newton said he thought it was all very exciting too and everyone could go, except for those who were taking part in the filming, whom Wardrobe and Make-up wanted to see. Charles Paris needed no second bidding and made off.

  ‘Charles, Charles!’ He was almost out of the building before Mort Verdon caught up with him. The tall Stage Manager had come flapping down some side stairs in pursuit and was breathless. For the read-through he had selected a pale biscuit boiler suit and changed the diamond stud in his ear for a plain gold one.

  ‘Charles, dear, have to give you your calls for the filming. And Wardrobe wants a word. You’re a naughty boy to go off like that.’

  Charles felt his hand lifted and a mock slap administered.

  ‘But I didn’t think I was in any of the filming. I thought I just stayed behind my bar.’

  ‘No, Charles . . . You must read your script, dear. At the end of Episode Four it said quite clearly “Film. Golf Club Exterior. Reg the barman chases Colonel Strutter off the premises and into his house as the captions roll”.’

  ‘So there are no words?’

  ‘No. Just ad lib shouting.’

  ‘Oh well, that explains why I didn’t notice it. I only read the speeches.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Mort Verdon made a Dame aux Camelias gesture against his forehead and then said, but not vindictively, ‘I can see we’re going to have trouble with you.’

  A revolutionary thought struck Charles. ‘Does this mean I’ll be seen below the waist?’

  ‘Of course.

  ‘But barmen are never seen below the waist. Primary rule of television.’

  ‘First time for everything, dear. Now you come back like a good boy and have those lovely ladies in Wardrobe measure your inside leg for some trousers. I dare say you’ll enjoy that.’

  ‘These trousers’d do.’

  Mort Verdon narrowed his eyes. ‘That I doubt.’

  ‘They were a nice pair of trousers ten years ago.’

  ‘I was a very beautiful young man ten years ago, but it doesn’t make the crows’ tootsies any less prominent now.’

  ‘I’d better come back then.’

  ‘Yes, boofle, that would be best.’

  They were alone in the lift, so Charles hazarded a detective probe. ‘Pity about Sadie, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Terrible.’ As far as it was possible to judge through the drawl, Mort Verdon sounded as if he meant it. ‘I’ll miss her.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes, she was so much fun.’

  ‘Fun!’

  ‘Yes, dear. Wicked sense of humour.’

  ‘That I can believe.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know her manner was brusque and all that, but underneath she had a . . .’

  He paused, gesticulating for the right word.

  ‘You aren’t going to say “heart of gold”, are you?’r />
  ‘Nooo,’ he replied, lengthening the vowel into a long swoop. ‘No, dear Sadie had a lot of qualities, but I don’t think a heart of gold was among them. But she could be very funny sometimes.’

  The lift stopped and they walked towards the conference room. Charles persisted with his questioning. ‘Had she got a husband around?’

  ‘No, dear, not exactly around. There had been a husband at some point, but I think she left it in South Africa when she came over here.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Don’t know exactly, boofle. Must be ten years, I should think, because she was a pretty senior PA here. And of course they don’t – or didn’t then – have the telly in South Africa, so she must have done all her training here.’

  ‘Ah.’ Soon they would be back with the hordes of Strutters. Charles had to be quick. ‘Did Sadie have a particular boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh, lots on and off. Most more off than on.’ Mort screwed up his face in self-parody and said limply, ‘Men can be bastards’. Then he dropped back to his customary level of exaggeration. ‘She had just finished something that had been going on for . . . ooh, six months, I think.’

  ‘Who was the lucky fellow?’

  Mort Verdon looked at Charles with mock severity. ‘Now there’s no need to be ironical, boofle. I doubt if you’d know the guy. anyway. He did a series here about six months ago.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Walter Proud,’ said Mort Verdon as he swept back into the conference room.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE MORNING AFTER the Strutters read-through, Charles’s eyes opened with their customary reluctance and closed again with their customary promptness, hoping to recapture the dwindling oblivion of sleep.

  But it was no good. He was awake. After a few moments of tight-eyed pretence, he let them open again.

  He supposed he should be grateful that he slept as well as he did. A lot of his contemporaries complained of long watches through the night and assumed sleeping pills to be a regular part of their diet for the rest of their days.

  Charles felt a perverse righteousness from the fact that he hardly ever took sleeping pills. Such a solitary activity. His own solution to the sleep problem, alcohol, was at least taken socially. Usually. Taking sleeping pills was never social. Except in the case of a suicide pact. And that was hardly convivial.

  Of course alcohol had its disadvantages, but it was so long since he hadn’t woken up with a furred tongue and tender head that he hardly noticed them.

  He looked round his bedsitter, trying to delay thinking about things he didn’t want to think about. The room had changed little during the seventeen years of his occupancy. He had moved into Hereford Road within a year of walking out on Frances and, except for periods of working out of town or the occasional good fortune of finding a lady willing to share her bed, he had been there ever since.

  The fixtures and fittings of the room were unaltered. Still the same low upholstered chair and asymmetrical wooden one, both painted grey by some earlier occupant. The same low table, masked by magazines and papers. The fact that these now covered the portable typewriter expressed well the likelihood of Charles ever getting down to serious writing again. His own contributions to the decor, yellow candlewick on the single bed and a different plastic curtain suspended to hide the sink and gas-ring, had now been there for over ten years, and reached a kind of dull middle age that made them impossible to distinguish from the rest.

  Contemplation of the room didn’t cheer him.

  Perhaps he should get up.

  He gave this unwelcome thought a minute or two to settle in his mind.

  Charles always envied people who could spring gazelle-like from bed and bound straight up the gradient of the day. He awoke always to the North Face of the morning, and usually held long internal discussions about whether or not to call the whole expedition off, before achieving the precarious base camp of a cup of coffee, from which he could at least contemplate the arduous climb ahead.

  So it was on this occasion. When he had made the coffee, he animated it with a slug of Bell’s whisky. This was a practice which in principle he deplored, but increasingly he found his principles would waver in the face of life’s practicalities.

  With the coffee in his hand, he could delay thinking no longer.

  There were two things he didn’t want to think about. The first was his wife. The school of which Frances was headmistress would soon be breaking up for Easter and he really felt he should get in touch to find out whether she was going away for the holiday. In spite of their estrangement, he liked to know her movements and, though they met comparatively rarely, he could still miss her when he knew her to be away. Also, he wanted to see her.

  Still, thinking of Frances did raise all kinds of emotional questions whose answers he wished to continue to evade, so he focused his mind on the less personally challenging subject of Sadie Wainwright’s death.

  Though he had satisfactorily accepted the common verdict of death by accident or perhaps, following the Ernie Franklyn Junior thesis, death by suicide, there was still one jarring element he couldn’t reason away.

  It was what he alone had heard in the Production Control cubicle on the day of The Strutters recording. Sadie Wainwright saying, You couldn’t kill me. You haven’t got it in you.’

  If only he had heard just a few seconds more, so that he could identify whom she had been addressing. The words, out of context, sounded ominous, but it was quite possible that they were just another example of showbusiness hyperbole.

  He wished he knew a bit more about television studios and their sound systems. He knew that a variety of people could talk back into the Production Control box. Certainly the Sound and Vision Controllers on either side could. So could the four cameramen . . . and of course the Floor Managers with their little walkie-talkies. Then he was sure he’d heard PAs talking to people or places with technical names like VTR and Telecine. And there was always sound from the studio microphones on their booms.

  In fact, Sadie could have been speaking from almost anywhere in the immediate studio area. That didn’t give him any clues as to who she was with. Maybe it could be investigated, but two months had passed and, apart from the dauntingly technical nature of the enquiry, Charles thought it unlikely that anyone was going to remember exactly which microphone might have been left open to catch Sadie’s words.

  But he did now have another line of enquiry. It was one he was reluctant to pursue, because it involved a friend. But he could no longer pretend that he knew nothing of the dead girl’s private life. And he had got Walter Proud’s phone number.

  He decided that they perhaps should meet for a drink.

  Walter was very apologetic that they had to meet in a pub. ‘I’d have said come round to my place, but really, I’ve hardly got a place for anyone to come to now.’

  ‘Well, never mind. I’m always happy with a pub.’

  But it still seemed to worry Walter. ‘Thing is, I’ve moved from that service flat in Kensington. I’d have invited you round there, but the place I’m in now . . . well, it’s really just a bedsitter.’

  The emphasis he put on the last word amused Charles. ‘Oh, come on, that’s not the end of the world. I live in a bedsitter, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I mean, it’s all right for someone like you, but for someone with . . .’ Walter Proud realised he was on the brink of being insulting and stopped. Charles, who wouldn’t have been offended anyway, wondered what the next word would have been. Standards? He certainly had standards, but on the whole they didn’t concern material possessions.

  Walter tried to cover up. ‘What I mean is, the last few years have been a series of shocks for me. Angela and I had been married for eighteen years, you know, and we’d been in that house in Datchet for twelve. So when we split up, it was quite an upheaval. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I wanted the divorce, no question, but it was . . . an upheaval. And then leaving the BBC so soon after,
and I’d done . . . what? . . . fifteen years with the Corporation . . . well, it all made sense at the time, and it was the right thing to do, careerwise, but . . . er . . .’

  He seemed unable to resolve the sentence.

  ‘Do you see Angela at all now?’

  ‘No.’ Walter Proud sounded very hurt. ‘No, she won’t see me. I see the girls occasionally, but . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Charles formally, giving Walter the opportunity to move on to another subject.

  But the producer was unwilling to do so. ‘What makes it worse is that she’s ill.’

  ‘Angela?’

  ‘Yes. She had a growth, apparently, on her breast, about a year ago and had a . . . what do they call it . . . mastectomy. But apparently it didn’t get rid of it all. It’s spreading.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I only hear this from the girls, you know. I keep offering to go and see Angela, but they say, no, she doesn’t want to see me and . . . I don’t know, it makes me feel terrible.’

  ‘Let me get you another drink.’ Charles tried another way of breaking the flow, but when he returned with a large gin and tonic and a pint of bitter for himself (still irrigating the brain, move back on to the scotch later), Walter continued.

  ‘You break up a marriage because it doesn’t work and because you want to get around a bit, see a few more other women, have a bit of life for God’s sake, before you’re too old, and then you come up against something like this. And you realise perhaps you are too old, that you’re now in the generation to whom illnesses happen, and you should have just stuck together, because there really isn’t any time.’

  Charles felt a cold pang of depression. Walter’s situation was too close to his own for comfort. Suppose something happened to Frances. Suppose she became ill or, worse, was suddenly killed in an accident, and he was nowhere around . . . He must ring her.

  Walter’s tale of woe wasn’t making it easy for him to get round to the real purpose of their meeting. It was bad enough suspecting a friend of murder, but to interrogate a friend in this sort of state was really kicking a man when he was down.