Star Trap

by Simon Brett

  ‘No, it only slows that down too.’ Her mind did not accommodate the idea of failure. ‘But I’ve been doing quite a lot of background research on it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, I went to see the old lady who ran his stage school, that sort of thing.’ A firm reminder to Charles that that was his next priority. He started to make leaving noises, but did not escape without the final rap over the knuckles. ‘I’m very disappointed in you, Charles. I was relying on you. Now I’ll have to try my own more direct methods.’

  Maybe it was the meeting with Suzanne that decided Charles to present himself at the Ellen da Costa Stage School in the guise of a journalist, or maybe it was just the obvious rôle to take when seeking information. Some inner warning mechanism told him not to go as Charles Paris.

  There were some good old-clothes shops near the station in Brighton and he had kitted himself out well. The suit was cheaply cut, but looked newish, and the tie was a touch of psychedelic bravado, too young for its wearer and too old to be fashionable. His hair was greyed and Brylcreemed back like raked grass. A pair of pebble glasses changed the shape of his face and made seeing almost impossible. He stained two fingers of his right hand yellow and bought a packet of cigarettes. He didn’t shave and rubbed a little Leichner No. 16 on to darken his jowl. Then an unfamiliar after-shave to cover the grease-paint smell.

  He studied the effect in the mirror and thought he looked sufficiently anonymous. The face that looked back at him was like a child’s Potato Man, random features stuck on to a vegetable. He adopted a slightly hunched stance, as if shrinking from the cold. It looked all right.

  ‘Now just a name and a voice. He fabricated Frederick Austick from the names of the first two victims of the accidents, then decided it was too obvious and amended it to Alfred Bostock. Despite temptations to go fancy or double-barrelled, he stuck at that. He tried a few words in his Moby Dick voice (‘Allegorically inconsistent’ – Coventry Evening Telegraph), but was more satisfied with the one he’d used as Bernard in Everything in the Garden (‘Authentic suburban twang’ – Surrey Comet).

  He didn’t really know who he was disguising himself from – the rest of the Lumpkin! company were rehearsing on the Wednesday morning – but as usual he felt more able to cope with a difficult task in character.

  The Ellen da Costa Stage School had closed some years before, but its principal still lived in the building (and still kept her hand in by giving elocution lessons to the young people of Brighton who had impediments or social aspirations). The school was a tall Victorian private house off one of the sea-front squares. Its owner’s reduced circumstances were indicated by the cluster of tenants’ doorbells attached with varying degrees of permanency to the old front door frame. Charles pressed the one whose plastic window showed a copperplate ‘Ellen da Costa’ cut from a visiting card.

  She answered promptly, a long gaunt lady in black, whose flowing dress and shawl combined with a tangle of hanging beads to make her look like a bentwood hat stand. Her hair was swept back in flamenco dancer style, as if to justify her Spanish surname, but the white line at the roots gave the lie to its sleek blackness. The skin of her face was drawn tight over her cheekbones, as if, like the hair, its tension was maintained by the system of asymmetrical combs at the back of the head. She was made up with skill, but a skill which belonged to an earlier age and survives now only in opera.

  But she had style and must once have been a beautiful woman. Though probably seventy, she behaved with the assurance of a woman who has no doubt of her sexual magnetism. There was no coquetry, but a grace and dignity, heightened by her theatrical manner.

  ‘Good morning,’ she enunciated with the attention to each vowel and consonant which she had instilled into generations of young hopefuls.

  ‘Hello, I’m Alfred Bostock.’ He slipped easily into his Everything in the Garden twang. ‘I’m a journalist. I’m researching an article on Christopher Milton and I’m here because I’ve heard that you had so much to do with shaping his early career.’

  She laughed a clear, tinkling laugh, only shown to be staged by the over-dramatic intake of breath which followed it. ‘Ah, dear Christopher. Everyone wants to know about him.’

  ‘Other members of the Press, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, dear boy. There was the cub from the local rag, then a charming American girl, and now you.’

  ‘Yes, I hope you don’t mind going over the ground again.’

  ‘Mind? But, mon cher, I am always delighted to speak about my little ones. And when it is the one, the one of all others who had the je ne sais quoi, the unknowable something that is stardom, why should I refuse? We who serve genius must do our duty. Do come in.’

  Charles, who was beginning to find her language a bit excessive, followed her up a couple of staircases to a dark sitting-room. It needn’t have been as dark as it was, but much of the window was obscured by an Art Deco glass fire-screen with a colourful design of a butterfly. The splashes of pale green, blue and red which the sun cast over the floor and furniture gave an ecclesiastical flavour to the room and this was intensified by the rows of photographs in ornate metal frames on the walls. They looked like images of saints and youthful miracle-workers, with their slicked hair and unearthly smiles. They were presumably the ‘little ones’, the pupils who had taken their theatrical orders under Miss da Costa’s guidance and gone on to work in the field.

  Two untimely candles added to the stuffy atmosphere of Italian Catholicism which the room generated. Every surface was crowded with souvenirs, more tiny framed photographs, dolls, masks, gloves, programmes, massed untidily like offerings before a shrine.

  The votaress sank dramatically into a small velvet chair and lay back so that the candle-light played gently over her fine profile. It reminded Charles of Spotlight photographs of ten years before, when every actor and actress was captured in a fuzzy light which picked out their bones in a murk of deepening shadows. (Nowadays actors tend to be photographed as if they’ve just come off a building site or are about to start life sentences for rape.) ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you want to ask me about Christopher.’

  She didn’t ask for any credentials, which was a relief, because Charles hadn’t thought through the details of what Alfred Bostock was meant to be researching.

  ‘Yes, I’m after a bit of background, you know, what was he like as a child?’ Charles mentally practised his Alfred Bostock voice by repeating ‘Ford Cortina’, ‘double glazing’ and ‘ceiling tiles’ to himself.

  ‘Christopher came to me when he was ten.’ Ellen da Costa settled down to her recitation from Lives of the Saints. ‘Just a scrap of a boy, but with that same appealing charm and, of course, the talent. Even then, when he was unformed, the talent was there. Quite exceptional. His parents had died, in a car crash, I think, and it was an aunt who brought him to me. Very self-possessed he was.’

  ‘When was this that he first came to you?’

  Ellen da Costa gave him a look for talking in prayers, but she answered his question, revealing that she had not been in on the shedding of four years considered necessary to the star’s career.

  She then continued at some length describing the evolution of the embryo talent under the ideal laboratory conditions of her school. Charles was beginning to feel sated with superlatives when she offered to illustrate her lecture with a collection of press cuttings pasted into large blue ledgers.

  They weren’t very revealing. One or two good notices for the young Christopher Milton, but nothing which suggested a performer set to take the world by storm. Charles mentioned this to Ellen da Costa in suitably reverential tones.

  ‘Ah well, the press has never been notorious for its recognition of true quality, particularly in the theatre. I once knew an actor . . .’ the pause was deliberately left long to summon up images of years of wild passion. ‘. . . a very great actor, who was nearly crucified by the critics. It was a martyrdom, a true martyrdom, very triste. Pardon my speaking so of your chosen occupa
tion –’ for a moment Charles couldn’t think what she was talking about – ‘but in my experience the press has never, in this country anyway, had the delicatesse to understand the workings of genius.’

  Charles did not attempt to defend his assumed calling, but murmured something suitable. ‘Also,’ she continued, her finely modulated voice drawing out the final ‘o’ almost to breaking point, ‘perhaps Christopher was not fully realised at first. The potential was there, massive potential. Of course, with my experience I could see that, I was sympathique to it, but it was slow to blossom. At first there were others who appeared more talented than he, certainly who attracted more public notice, more press reaction, more work.’

  ‘They worked while they were here?’

  She at once became guarded, as if this were a patch of coals over which she had been hauled before. ‘Most stage schools also act as agencies for child performers and a lot of our pupils do a great deal of work, subject of course to the legal restrictions of only working forty days in the year and with adequate breaks. All the children are chaperoned and –’

  But Charles was not writing a muck-raking article on the exploitation of child actors, so he tactfully cut her short, and asked if she would show him some of the early photographs of Christopher Milton.

  She obliged readily. ‘Here are some from 1952.’ They looked very dated. Styles of period stage costume change quite as much as current fashion and the starched ruffs and heavy Elizabethan garments the children wore had the same distant unreal quality as Victorian pornography. ‘This is from a production of Much Ado my students did. Christopher was playing Claudio.’

  Charles took the photograph she proffered. Christopher Milton’s face was instantly recognisable, even under a jewelled and feathered hat. All twenty-three years had done was to cut the creases deeper into his skin.

  But it was the other two children who intrigued Charles. They were beautiful. Their grace in the heavy costumes made them look like figures from an Elizabethan painting and showed up Christopher Milton as very twentieth century, almost gauche in doublet and hose. The girl had a perfect heart-shaped face and long-lashed eyes whose grave stare, even from the old photograph, was strongly sensual. She appeared to be looking at the boy, who returned her gaze with the same kind of intensity. He had the epicene grace which some adolescent boys capture before they coarsen into adults. The face was almost baby-like in its frame of long blond curls. The eyes were deep-set and powerful.

  ‘Claudio,’ Charles repeated after a long pause. ‘That’s not the best part in the play. Presumably this young man played Benedict?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was he good?’

  ‘Yes, he was very good. He did a lot of film work in his teens. Gareth Warden, do you remember the name?’

  ‘It rings a bell.’ Yes, Julian Paddon had mentioned it and, now he saw the photograph, Charles realised that Gareth Warden had been in the film he’d caught the tail-end of on Jim Waldeman’s television. That seemed so long ago it was like a memory from a previous incarnation. ‘And the girl?’

  ‘Prudence Carr. She was a clever little actress, so clever.’

  ‘And she played Beatrice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any idea what happened to her? Or to Gareth Warden, come to that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Bostock. The theatre brings its share of heartbreaks to everyone who is involved in it.’ She gave a long sigh, which was a good demonstration of the breath control so vital for elocution and which was also meant to imply a lifetime of theatrical heartbreaks. ‘Neither of them did much so far as I know. Dear Garry had the misfortune of early success. It’s so difficult for them to make the transition from playing child parts to adult ones. As you see, he was a beautiful boy. Perhaps he lost his looks as he got older. Perhaps he decided the theatre was not the career he wanted. Je no sais pas. He hasn’t kept in touch at all.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘The same story. I haven’t seen her since she left my care. Maybe she didn’t go into the theatre.’

  ‘She should have done. With looks like that. And if she could act as well as you say.’

  ‘Ah, she was magic. But things change. Fate takes a hand. Maybe she settled down and got married. How many promising careers have been cut short by matrimony. And how many only started by the failure of matrimony,’ she added mysteriously with a suffering gaze out of the window to some distant memory. ‘But c’est la vie. Some rise and some fall. Of those three, all the same age, all so talented, one was chosen, one who was more talented, one who had the real magic of stardom, and that was dear Christopher. He triumphed and left his rivals standing.’

  With recent knowledge of Christopher Milton’s methods of leaving his rivals standing, Charles wondered if there was some story from the past which might show a parallel. ‘Presumably, Miss da Costa, with three students who were so talented in the same area, there must have been moments of jealousy between them?’ he probed.

  ‘Ah, the young are always jealous. They are so afraid, they feel that if they are not the absolute best in the world, then they are the absolute worst. Only with time can they understand that most are destined to be fairly good or fairly bad, that the world is made up of mediocrity and that only a chosen few, like dear Christopher, will be the best.’

  Charles tried to move her from generalisations to the specific. ‘You mean they were jealous of each other?’

  ‘But of course. They would not be normal if they weren’t.’

  ‘And was that jealousy ever expressed in violence?’

  ‘Violence?’ Her eyes widened and again she stiffened as if he were trying to find scandal. ‘Of course not I kept a respectable school, Mr Bostock. Nowadays, if one can believe the newspapers, violence in the classroom is commonplace. I did not allow it in my school.’

  ‘No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.’ Charles covered his retreat clumsily, realising that he wasn’t going to get any answers to that question. But then it struck him that a bit of well-placed journalistic boorishness might be productive. ‘Of course, Miss da Costa, another thing we keep reading about in the newspapers is sex in the classroom.’

  ‘Sex.’ She gave the word Lady Bracknell delivery.

  ‘Yes, I mean, a group of young adolescents together, it’s inevitable that they’re going to form relationships. I was wondering, I mean, say these three youngsters, was there also some kind of emotional attachment between them?’ He was glad he had come in disguise. Charles Paris could sever have managed this crudeness of approach.

  The question touched a nerve which had apparently been exposed before. ‘Mr Bostock, I don’t think there is any need to go over this ground again. The investigation by the local education authority in 1963 revealed that I was quite blameless in that matter.’

  Intriguing though it was, Miss da Costa’s dark secret had no relevance to his current enquiries, so Charles tried to retrieve some of the ground he had lost. ‘I’m sorry, I think you misunderstand me. I’m not talking about 1963. As you know, I’m interested only in Christopher Milton. What I meant by my question was, was there maybe some early schoolboy romance we could mention? You know, the women readers go for all that stuff. “My first romance.” It was a perfectly innocent enquiry.’

  It worked. ‘Oh, I see.’ She sat back. ‘I’m sorry, but I have had cause in my life to be somewhat wary of the press. When one has figured in the private life of the great . . .’ Again she left the hint of her wildly romantic past dangling to be snapped up by anyone interested. Charles wasn’t, so she continued after a pause. ‘Well, of course, when you are speaking of young people, of beautiful young people, yes, l’amour cannot be far away. Oh, I’m sure at one time or another, all three of them were in love with each other. All such sensitive creatures. Yes, I have seen the two boys wildly, madly in love. I have seen them both look at Prudence in a way . . . in a way one can recognise if one has seen it directed at oneself. Then one understands. Ah, I sometimes wonder if one ha
s loved at all if one has not heard a lover’s voice reciting Swinburne soft in one’s ear. Don’t you?’

  He thought that Charles Paris, and Alfred Bostock’s answers to that question might well be identical, so he tried to get the conversation back on the subject and avoid the Ellen da Costa Anthology of Love Poetry. ‘Hmm,’ he offered, in a way that he hoped dismissed Swinburne. ‘I was wondering, do you know if either of the affairs with Prudence continued after they left the school?’

  ‘Mr Bostock, I do not like your word “affair”; it implies impropriety at my school.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You’re misunderstanding me again. I just meant, you know, the . . . friendships.’

  ‘That, Mr Bostock, I’m afraid I don’t know. For the first year after they left, I heard a little of them – well, that was inevitable. I act as agent for all my pupils for their first year out of school.’

  ‘You mean you put them under exclusive contract?’

  ‘I prefer to think that I protect them from some of the sharks and exploiters in the agency business. But after the year, I heard nothing of Garry or Prudence. Of course, I heard a great deal about Christopher. Everywhere these days, one hears about Christopher. Did you see this in the local paper?’ She opened one of the blue ledgers and pointed to the cutting from the previous day’s edition. It was already neatly glued in. Charles found the promptness of its filing sad. It opened a little window on to the great emptiness of the old lady’s life. He told her that he had seen the article and rose to leave.

  Now she seemed anxious to detain him. ‘Did you notice, he said in the interview that he’d try to come and see me while the show’s down here?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I believe that the company are doing a great deal of rehearsal at the moment.’

  ‘Oh yes, I fully understand.’ She reclined elegantly in her chair, the High Priestess of the Cult, prepared to wait forever for her Mystic Experience.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHARLES RANG JULIAN Paddon from a phone-booth on the front. ‘Hello, how’s the family?’