by Simon Brett
He continued and Mark joined in the BBC-griping vigorously, finding comparable instances in Further Education. Rather too vigorously, Charles thought. The hurried explanation hadn’t fooled him. He had witnessed their meeting in the club and knew Andrea hadn’t mentioned her football recording in Mark’s hearing. Perhaps there were other ways he could find out about it, schedules he could consult, but it seemed strange that he should show that amount of interest. Alternatively, he might have spoken to Andrea at some other point during the day. Though, if she had only arrived at Heathrow at lunchtime and gone straight to a music session at Maida Vale . . . Either way, it confirmed the impression that Mark had known the girl rather better than he implied.
Nick Monckton was leaving. ‘Starting rehearsal at half-past nine in the morning.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s a sit. com. called Dad’s the Word.’
‘Fun?’
‘Well, some of it’s sort of all right.’ He didn’t sound very convinced. ‘I mean, we suffer from doing lunchtime recordings, you know, just get an audience of old biddies, and the scripts are . . . well, not that great . . . But it’s okay.’
‘You make it sound terrific,’ Charles observed.
‘Usual BBC tat,’ said Mark automatically. ‘Whatever happened to radio comedy?’
‘It is getting better, actually.’ Nick looked quite earnest. ‘There are a lot of young producers and a better atmosphere for getting new ideas away, Mark. Really.’
‘Not like the old days.’
‘I’m going to go before someone mentions Tony Hancock.’ Nick Monckton stood up. ‘Thanks very much for the drink, Mark. No doubt see you around. And, Charles, nice to have met you. We’ll meet again on this sub-committee, anyway, or somewhere else . . .’
‘Maybe.’
‘I mean, you’re an actor and I’m a producer.’ He didn’t sound very convinced about the second part of the definition. ‘Do you do comedy?’
The question came as something of a shock. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I mean, I have done. Even did a job last year as feed to the late, great Lenny Barber. I mean, I’m an actor. Most of us do most things. Or say we can and only reveal we can’t after the contract’s been signed.’
‘Oh well, maybe I’ll be in touch.’ It was spoken casually, but its intended showbiz condescension was weakened by furious blushing.
‘My God, how old is he?’ Charles asked after the young man had gone.
‘About eleven, I should think. No, I suppose he’s twenty-four, something like that. A product of Light Ent.’s conviction that everyone who sang comic songs for the Cambridge Footlights or did an impression of the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Oxford equivalent must be God’s gift to the entertainment business.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s probably as good a way of recruiting as any other. There have been successes.’
‘Hmm. Do you know him well?’
‘No, hadn’t met him before tonight. That’s the trouble with the BBC – people in different departments never meet each other, never listen to each other’s programmes. It’s awful, a series of little islands with no ferries between them. No one can talk about anything but their own department. I mean, in FE . . . I’ve never met such a single-minded lot.’ Mark was talking for the sake of talking, fencing really. They both knew there were more important topics, but Mark seemed unwilling to move the conversation above this level. Charles decided that that was his friend’s privilege; if Mark wasn’t going to bring it up, then he wouldn’t.
The producer continued, ‘Yes, if Smoothie Christie’s little plans lead to nothing more – and I shouldn’t think they would – he has at least introduced a few of the different islanders to each other. Can I top that up?’
Charles handed over his glass and decided that the conversation wasn’t going to change gear. He would just have one more quick drink and then go. He felt exhausted.
But just as he reached this decision, the gear change came. Not smoothly and silently with benefit of synchromesh, but with an awful crunch. A glass dropped loudly on to the drinks tray and Mark’s back started to shake convulsively as the sobs broke through.
Charles led him gently to a chair and finished pouring the drinks. He waited till the crying subsided before proffering one. Mark took a savage gulp, as if to bludgeon himself into composure. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Andrea?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I feel responsible. I just . . . I didn’t think I’d feel like this.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘I’ve got to. I mean, I won’t be able to talk about it, when . . . I’ve got to talk about it now.’
‘Okay.’ Charles sat down and took a long swallow, but Mark didn’t initiate anything. So Charles fed gently, ‘I take it you had had an affair . . .?’
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘No. There seemed to be some tension between you when you met, but it’s only from seeing the state you are in now that I make that assumption.’
‘Well, yes, you’re right. The fact is that Vinnie is fine, you know, we get on pretty well, but I’ve always felt kind of claustrophobic, that I was only half alive, that bits of me, parts of my character, were just starved and cramped in a marriage situation and –’
‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me. I know exactly what you mean.’
‘Yes, well of course you’ve been through it.’
‘Just tell me what you want to tell me. I’m not going to judge you. My own eyes are fuller of beams than a mock-Tudor pub, so I can’t even see your motes.’
Mark smiled lightly. He was calmer; he just needed confession and Charles was sufficiently uninvolved with him to take the role of priest. ‘Right, okay, I’ll tell you a bit to expiate some of my guilt. I’ll try not to bore you with details.
‘It happened in the usual way. I’m sure there is a standard way that all extramarital affairs start, but perhaps we are more prone to temptation in this business. You know, working late, that kind of thing. I had some crisis on, because I’d done a programme which contained critical references to Tony Crosland, you know, the late Foreign Secretary. Then he died suddenly and HFE(R) – that’s my boss – he said it should come out. I argued, because I felt that the criticism was valid, regardless of whether the bloke was alive or dead, but, you know, we are the BBC, decorum must be maintained.
‘Anyway, the result of all this was that a rush editing job was called for and there weren’t any SMs around from our usual lot, so Andrea was booked to do it. She worked bloody hard and so I took her out for a drink afterwards. Well, the drink led to another drink back at her place and that led to . . . I don’t need to fill in the details. I know I’m making it all sound shabby and calculated, but it wasn’t. At the time it was . . . you know, some things just work.’
‘Yes. Crosland died over a year ago, so I take it the affair went on for some time.’
‘Yes, it did. Look, I loved her for God’s sake!’ This outburst had a staged quality to it, which Charles couldn’t help observing. As if Mark needed the melodrama of the situation. As if an ex-mistress’s suicide gave him some kind of perverse cachet. The impression was reinforced when he went on. ‘I can’t get that Swinburne out of my mind:
The small slain body, the flower-like face,
Can I remember if thou forget?’
‘From Itylus. I think you’re taking it rather out of context.’
‘I know. It’s just the words. They keep repeating in my mind. That, and “sweet red splendid kissing mouth”. They seem to be part of the confusion I feel. I mean, to think that she’s dead, that she’s lying there in some morgue and that that body I used to touch –’
Charles cut across the self-indulgence in this morbid detail with some savagery. ‘But I gather your affair was already over.’
‘That doesn’t mean I don’t feel anything.’
‘No, of course not, but it must lessen the impact. The shock is still there, but i
t’s not as if she was going to be part of the rest of your life.’
‘I don’t know.’ Mark was aggrieved, unwilling that Charles should diminish his grand amour. ‘We had broken up, but I still loved her. It was she who broke it off.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Not if you don’t want to tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you.’ Mark’s haste betrayed his unwillingness to let the subject drop. Charles had noticed in other friends an obsessive desire to talk about their infidelities. Partly he knew it was because he was uninvolved, because he was a handy confidant, slow with judgment, quick with reassurance. But he also often felt that confession was part of the attraction of affairs, that their secrecy was claustrophobic and such relationships only took on three dimensions when their enormity was confided to a third party. In a childlike way, there was no fun in a truancy that no one knew about. Anyway, Mark seemed more than willing to talk.
‘She wanted it to end, because she couldn’t see any future for us. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, there was no one else, it’s just that she reckoned the relationship couldn’t progress. I argued with her. I mean, as I say, I loved her. God knows, I loved her.’ The repetition sounded melodramatic and false. ‘But she felt we’d be better off apart. She saw herself getting older, no chance of our ever getting married or anything. She felt it was hopeless to continue.’
‘Why couldn’t you get married if you loved her?’
‘I couldn’t do that to the children.’
A pattern was emerging, a cliché of an affair. ‘What did Vinnie say about it?’
Mark seemed genuinely surprised at the question. ‘Oh God, she didn’t know.’
‘You never discussed it?’
‘No, she wouldn’t have understood. And it would have been dreadfully upsetting for the children if we started to have rows and things.’
‘Of course. And did Andrea know that Vinnie didn’t know?’
Mark was evasively casual. ‘I’m not sure. I suppose she did. We never discussed it.’
‘I see.’ And he did see. It was such a familiar scenario that he couldn’t help seeing. Of course Mark hadn’t told his wife. Why should he? He was sitting pretty, with her money and no doubt some of her affection. Probably a darned sight more of her affection than he ever admitted to Andrea. Yes, a nice domestic little marriage.
Meanwhile, with his mistress, another nice little set-up. Clandestine visits to her flat, maybe the occasional daring trip to a restaurant where he was unlikely to meet anyone, good sex, constant complaints that they couldn’t meet more often, and the uncluttered relief of driving away from her at the hour when his studio booking or ideas meeting or other specious excuse ran out.
Charles could fill in all the details. He could also see why Andrea had eventually stopped and tried to back out of the cul-de-sac. No doubt they had discussed marriage, no doubt Mark had at times said he’d leave his wife, no doubt he’d said he’d talk to her. But every time something had happened, some crisis with the children maybe – yes, that was always an unanswerable excuse – and somehow the confrontation hadn’t happened. Of course the relationship couldn’t progress. One of the partners had no desire for it to progress; he was doing very nicely with it static.
What he saw so clearly made Charles cross. He would have liked to challenge Mark with the facts . . . but perhaps this wasn’t the moment. Mark was obviously genuinely upset by what had happened. Charles was upset too, upset because he could see his friend already processing the memory, sweetening the pain, packaging it into a story that in a few months he would confess over a drink, about the girl he had had who had killed herself because of their star-crossed love. It was all too predictable and cruel.
Mark had now moved into a phase of crucified nobility. ‘The worst thing is,’ he said, ‘the inability to grieve properly. That’s why I’m going on to you about it, I can talk to you, pour out my feelings. Whereas tomorrow morning I have to sit at breakfast with Vinnie and the kids, spoon Weetabix into the little one and keep up cheerful chat about what’s on the front page of the Guardian. Whereas inside I’ll be . . . Oh God. I won’t really be able to grieve till next Monday when Vinnie takes the kids off for a week at her mother’s. Next Monday – Jesus, just to keep it from Vinnie till then. Since she never even knew I knew the girl, she would never understand why I was so cut up about her death.’
‘Shock would be a legitimate emotion, surely, after you’d been on the premises when her body was discovered.’
‘I suppose so. But I wouldn’t trust myself. I don’t know, if I just mentioned her name, I might . . . Oh God.’ He was near to tears again, but this threatened outburst didn’t seem quite so spontaneous. Maybe, Charles reflected cynically, the first lot had been manufactured too. ‘Then why don’t you tell Vinnie?’ he asked gratuitously, just to hear the shocked reaction.
‘Tell her? What, you mean tell her all about Andrea and . . .’
‘Why not? She can’t possibly worry about the affair’s continuance. Most women love the opportunity to prove how understanding they are of their men’s weaknesses. It gives them an untouchable moral ascendancy.’ He was surprised at his own cynicism. It was a reaction to Mark. The whole revelation of his selfish affair, juxtaposed with the recent image of the dead girl, filled Charles with anger.
But Mark had gone white as a sheet even at the mention of the idea. ‘Good God, no. You don’t know Vinnie, you don’t know what it would be like. I mean, it’d be the end of . . .’ He gestured ineffectually. ‘. . . Everything.’ Somehow his gesture seemed only to encompass the prosperity of his surroundings.
Irritation pushed Charles on to another barb. ‘You might as well tell her. It’s going to be fairly difficult to keep it from her when the police come round to interview you.’
That winded Mark like a punch in the stomach. ‘Police,’ he gasped. ‘What do you mean – police?’
‘Andrea’s was a suspicious death. I would think it unlikely they’d just let it pass without talking to the people nearest to her.’
‘But I wasn’t nearest to her. I mean, as far as anyone knew.’
‘Oh, come on. In the BBC? There is no way you could keep an affair a secret in a place like that.’
‘Well, okay, maybe one or two people knew, but not anyone who . . .’
‘Look, I believe Andrea shared a flat with Steve Kennett. She’ll be the first person they interview about her state of mind. You’re not going to tell me Steve didn’t know what was going on.’
Mark spoke slowly, planning, calculating. ‘No, no, she knew. I wonder . . . Oh God, this could ruin everything. I mean, to have kept it a secret this long and for Vinnie to find out just at the moment when there was nothing actually to worry about.’
‘You don’t regard Andrea’s death as anything to worry about?’ He couldn’t resist it.
‘I didn’t mean that.’ Mark wasn’t really listening; he was still working things out. ‘I know. If the police come and see me at work, Vinnie need never know. That’s it. They’re more likely to interview me at work, aren’t they? I mean, because that’s where it happened?’
Charles felt very tired. Why not give him that comfort? ‘Yes, yes, Mark, I’m sure they’ll interview you at work.’
The shock of the girl’s death had passed and he now felt the exhaustion of reaction and the depression of waste. She needn’t have died. If she hadn’t got mixed up with a selfish shit like Mark, she needn’t have . . . Oh, what was the point? She was dead. ‘I must go. Thank you for the drink.’
‘And thank you for letting me go on like that. I’m sorry, but I had to. You see, I did love her.’ Yes, maybe after all, in his way he did. ‘I suppose I’ll survive without her. It won’t be easy.’
Charles bit back an unsuitable rejoinder to this maudlin play-acting. But worse was to come. ‘It’s Swinburne again,’ Mark went on. ‘“I shall never be friends again with roses.” That sums up the sort of emptiness I feel a
t the moment.’ Already the loss had become fictionalised, drained of blood and embalmed in the mausoleum of Mark’s memory.
‘My feelings would be summed up in a different passage.’ And Charles recited, not without irony:
‘I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow and reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.’
Mark nodded lugubriously. ‘Yes, Charles, yes.’ Irony was wasted on him.
There was a note by the payphone when Charles got back to the house in Hereford Road where he had a bedsitter. He recognised the scrawl of one of the Swedes. All the other bedsitters in the house seemed to be occupied by Swedish girls. But not Swedes of lissom thighs and sauna baths and aftershave commercials; these were more like the vegetables.
The timed light on the landing went out as he took up the paper, and he fumbled for the switch. The note was full of the usual Swedish misspellings, but its message was clear.
FRANCIS RING. URJENT. RING WENEVER YOU COME BACK.
Oh God, no. Not Juliet. His first instinct was for his daughter. Maybe it was having seen Andrea dead that evening, Andrea, who must have been about the same age as Juliet. Suddenly he felt again that awful panic, like when she was a tiny baby and he had woken in the morning with a terrible rush of fear and torn into her bedroom to see that she was still breathing.
He was almost praying as he dialled the familiar number in Muswell Hill. The phone was picked up on the first ring. ‘Yes?’ Her voice was tight almost to breaking.
‘Frances.’
‘Oh, it’s you.’ A degree of relief. ‘I thought it was America.’
‘America? Why, what’s happened?’
‘It’s Mummy. She’s had a heart attack. Rob rang about seven this evening. He was practically beside himself.’ Charles breathed again with a guilty feeling of relief. He was fond of Frances’s mother, but at least she was of a generation where illness might be expected. Not like Juliet. He was surprised by the power of his feeling for his daughter. It was a feeling that he had never had much success in expressing in her company. Still, nice to know it was there.
