The Strangling on the Stage

by Simon Brett

  And also one with a socking great part for you in it, thought Jude. The idea of Elizaveta Dalrymple using her ‘very good ear’ for accents to tackle Scouse was engagingly incongruous.

  ‘I also still think,’ the grande dame continued, ‘that this time round we should have done Driving Miss Daisy.’

  And who might have played Miss Daisy? Jude asked herself.

  ‘I mean, that’s a play that really tackles serious issues.’

  ‘So does The Devil’s Disciple,’ insisted Neville Prideaux.

  ‘But Driving Miss Daisy’s about racial prejudice – anti-Semitism, colour prejudice.’

  ‘Whereas The Devil’s Disciple is about nothing less than the conflict between Good and Evil. It’s also about honour and honesty and bravery and religion and the entire business of being a human being. Anyway, Elizaveta, the other big argument against doing Driving Miss Daisy is: where on earth are you going to find a black man in Smalting to play the chauffeur?’

  Jude had been aware for a while that Hester Winstone had been trying to attract Neville’s attention, and at this moment she interrupted the argument. Looking at her watch, she said, ‘Sorry, Neville, I’ve got to be going.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, without even looking at her. ‘See you at the next rehearsal.’

  The prompter detached herself from the group. She still looked nervous and unhappy. The next time Jude looked, Hester Winstone was no longer in the pub.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Elizaveta Dalrymple, as if putting an end to the topic, ‘The Devil’s Disciple is the play we’re doing and I’m sure the production will be well up to SADOS’s high standards.’ She vouchsafed a smile to Davina Vere Smith, as if bestowing her blessing on the enterprise. ‘I just wonder, though, how many people in Smalting will want to buy tickets …?’

  ‘… and, you see,’ Gordon Blaine was still going on to Carole, ‘I’ve worked out a rather cunning way of doing the gallows at the end of the play.’

  She looked in desperation around the bar, but saw no prospects of imminent rescue. Jude was still in the middle of the group around the melodramatic old woman with dyed black hair. Ritchie Good, the tall man who had chatted up Jude, was by the pub door in whispered conversation with a red-haired woman who looked as if she was about to leave.

  There was no escape as Gordon continued, ‘It’s important that it looks authentic, but it’s also important that the structure would pass a Health and Safety inspection. And Dick Dudgeon has to have the noose actually around his neck so it looks like he’s really about to be hanged, so what I’m going to do is to have a break in the noose where the two ends are only joined by Velcro and then the—’

  ‘Oh God,’ said a languid approaching voice, ‘is Gordon boring you with his technical wizardry?’

  The words so exactly mirrored Carole Seddon’s thoughts that she couldn’t help smiling at their speaker. Even though it was Ritchie Good.

  ‘Carole was actually very interested in what I was saying,’ said Gordon Blaine defensively.

  ‘Yes, yes, it was fascinating,’ she lied.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got things to get on with.’ And with that huffy farewell, Gordon moved away from them.

  ‘Looked like you needed rescuing,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘And sorry, in all those introductions I didn’t get your name …?’

  ‘Carole.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’ It never occurred to him that she hadn’t taken in his name. ‘So …’ He took Carole’s hand in both of his and said, ‘Where have you been hiding all my life?’

  FOUR

  Having not wanted to go to the Cricketers in the first place, Carole found that an hour and a quarter had passed before she finally managed to extricate Jude and leave the place. Their departure was now quite urgent. In little more than half an hour Carole’s saga of convents and placentas would be starting.

  The St Mary’s Hall car park was in darkness as they came out of the pub, but when they crossed the beam of a sensor an overhead light came on. In spite of the time pressure of her television programme, Carole characteristically said she must put up the back seats of the Renault before they set off. Anything out of place disturbed her, and the car must be returned to its customary configuration. Carole was the kind of woman who had a tendency to clear away her guests’ dinner plates almost before they’d finished eating.

  While she repositioned the back seats Jude stood waiting. It was a mild evening for February, the first that offered some prospect of spring eventually arriving. She looked around the car park. The range of Mercedes, BMWs and Audis suggested that the members of SADOS didn’t have too much to worry about financially.

  Out of the corner of her eye Jude caught sight of a movement behind the windscreen of a BMW quite nearby. Looking closer, she recognized the face of Hester Winstone, the Devil’s Disciple’s prompter.

  And the overhead light caught the shine of tears on the woman’s cheeks.

  Instinctive compassion took Jude towards the car. The closer she got the more sense she had of something being seriously wrong. Hester was slumped a little sideways in the driver’s seat and her eyes were closed. Peacefully closed, as though she were asleep.

  Jude had no hesitation in snatching open the car door. As she did so, the prompter’s arm flopped to the side of her seat.

  And from her wrist bright red blood dripped on to the surface of the car park.

  FIVE

  ‘I still think we should call the police,’ muttered Carole. ‘Or at least send for an ambulance.’

  ‘Hester specifically asked me not to,’ Jude whispered back. They were in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage and the subject of their conversation had just gone upstairs to the loo.

  ‘Yes, but she’s not rational. People who try to kill themselves are by definition not rational.’

  ‘It wasn’t a very serious attempt to kill herself. Those nail scissors couldn’t have done much damage. The cuts are only surface scratches.’

  ‘Maybe they are this time, but people who do that kind of thing are very likely to try again. Someone in authority should be informed.’

  ‘Carole, I’d rather just talk to Hester for a while, find out what her state of mind really is.’

  ‘Not great, if she’s trying to top herself,’ said Carole shortly.

  ‘Please. I’d just like to talk to her.’

  Jude’s words only added to Carole’s sense of pique. ‘I’d just like to talk to her.’ Nothing on the lines of ‘We should talk to her.’ Not for the first time that evening, Carole felt excluded. She’d been stuck at the Cricketers with the world’s most boring man, Gordon Blaine, while Jude went off with a bunch of people who had, by definition, to be more interesting. Then in the car park her neighbour had overruled her about getting someone from SADOS to look after Hester Winstone. It had also been against Carole’s advice that Jude had driven Hester back to Woodside Cottage in the BMW.

  To compound these multiple affronts, the business of doing a temporary bandaging job on the would-be suicide in the car park meant that Carole had missed at least half of her chronicle of wimples and waters breaking.

  ‘Very well,’ she said huffily to Jude. ‘Well, I must go. I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘The children are off at boarding school,’ said Hester Winstone, ‘and my husband’s away at the moment.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Jude.

  ‘He’s on a cricket tour in New Zealand.’ Jude didn’t take much of an interest in the game, but she knew that there seemed to be Test Matches happening somewhere every day right around the world.

  ‘What, watching cricket?’

  ‘No, playing.’

  ‘Really?’ That was a surprise. Assuming that Hester Winstone was in her late forties, then her husband might be expected to be the same age or a little older. And though Jude knew that some men continued to play cricket into their fifties and sixties, she didn’t expect many to be involved in international tours.r />
  Hester seemed to sense her need for explanation. ‘It’s a group of them, a kind of ad hoc team called the Subversives. One of the blokes works in the travel industry and he sets up the tours. They’ve been doing it for years. Some of the players are pushing seventy.’

  ‘How long do the tours last?’

  ‘Oh, never more than a month. Mike will be back next Friday.’

  Hester Winstone seemed remarkably together and businesslike for a woman who had within the last two hours slit her wrists. Jude recognized that she was embarrassed and trying to talk about anything except the reason why she had ended up in Woodside Cottage.

  ‘And have you been involved with SADOS for long?’

  ‘Oh no. Disciple is the first show I’ve done with them. No, I just thought, now I’ve got more time on my hands …’

  ‘Have you done amateur dramatics before?’

  ‘Not really. Well, a certain amount at school, and I started to do a bit at college, but since then … life’s rather taken over … you know, marriage, children …’

  ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Two. Boys, both boarding at Charterhouse. Younger one started in September. Mike was there, so there was never any thought of sending them anywhere else. It’s a very good school for sport.’

  ‘Are your boys keen on cricket too?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Hester replied, a note of weariness in her voice. ‘And football and tennis and squash.’

  ‘What about you? You do a lot of sport?’

  A wrinkling of the lips suggested the answer was no. ‘I play a bit of genteel tennis with some friends, that’s about the limit of my involvement. Unless, of course, you count the hours I have put in making cricket teas, ferrying Mike and the boys to various matches and tournaments, helping to score in pavilions, shrieking encouragement on chilly touchlines.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve served your time.’

  ‘Hm. Maybe.’

  Jude was again struck by the incongruity of this normal – even banal – conversation going on with a woman whose right wrist was dressed with a bandage covering the cuts she had inflicted on herself. They weren’t very deep, but even so they must reflect some profound malaise within Hester Winstone. But maybe she just came from that class of women who’d been trained from birth to avoid talking about life’s unpleasantnesses.

  ‘From what you say,’ Jude began cautiously, ‘you could be suffering from Empty Nest Syndrome.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe in Syndromes,’ said Hester Winstone dismissively. ‘All psychobabble, so far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Jude gently, ‘but, whether it’s a Syndrome or not, things aren’t right with you, are they?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look, you cut your wrist in the car, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I just got over-emotional.’ She dismissed the incident as if it were some minor social lapse, like sneezing before she’d got her handkerchief to her nose.

  ‘But why did you get over-emotional?’

  For a moment Hester Winstone was about to answer, but then she reached for her handbag, saying, ‘I must be getting home. Really appreciate your helping me out.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jude firmly, ‘but I really don’t want you to go home straight away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She sounded affronted now. ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘It’s my business,’ came the calm reply, ‘because I found you in your car, having just cut your wrists. And I don’t really want you to be on your own until I’m sure you’re not about to finish what you started.’

  ‘And what makes you think I’d do that?’

  ‘Because you’ve done it once.’

  ‘Oh, that was an aberration. As I said, I just got over-emotional.’

  ‘Listen, Hester, I don’t have any medical qualifications, but I work as a healer so I do come across a lot of people who’ve got troubles in their lives. And I’d be failing in my duty to my profession – not to mention in my duty as a human being – if I were just to let you go straight home.’

  ‘But I’m fine.’

  ‘Look, just think how I’d feel if I heard on the local news tomorrow that you’d committed suicide.’

  ‘But I’m not about to commit suicide.’

  ‘That’s exactly what someone planning suicide would say.’

  Hester Winstone was suddenly on the verge of tears as she said, ‘Can’t you just leave me alone!’

  ‘No, I really don’t think I can.’ There was a silence, broken only by Hester’s suppressed sobs. ‘Look, if you won’t agree to talk to me, I’ll have no alternative but to call an ambulance.’

  ‘But I don’t need an ambulance. You’ve seen my wrist – it’s only a scratch.’

  ‘The fact remains that it’s a scratch which you inflicted on yourself. If you were to go home, you’d be on your own, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hester admitted grudgingly.

  ‘Well, is there someone who could come and be with you? A family member? A neighbour?’

  ‘No, there’s no one. Anyway, I don’t want people knowing about what’s happened. If Mike ever got wind it, it would be an absolute disaster.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should tell your husband?’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘But surely, if you’re unhappy enough to slit your wrists – even if you didn’t do it very efficiently – then your husband ought to know.’

  ‘No, he mustn’t.’

  ‘So when he comes back next Friday, how are you going to explain the big scar on your wrist?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve worked that out. I’ll say I cut it when I was opening a tin of dog food.’

  ‘And will he believe you?’

  ‘It would never occur to Mike not to believe me.’

  ‘I still think you should tell him what happened.’

  ‘No, Mike’s no good with that sort of stuff. It’d confuse him – and upset him.’

  ‘If he’s the cause of your unhappiness, then perhaps he needs to be upset.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was the cause of it.’

  ‘No. But you haven’t said what else is the cause, so I’m just having to make conjectures based on the very small amount of information you have given me.’

  ‘You have no right to make conjectures about my life. I’m going to go.’

  ‘Hester, I’ll tell you why I have a right to make conjectures about your life. Because I found you in your car having just cut your wrist. That means, whether you like it or not, I have that information. What I do with that information is up to me. A lot of people would have just rung for an ambulance – or even the police – straight away, regardless of whether you wanted them to or not. Carole and I didn’t do that. We brought you back here and tidied you up. And I’m quite happy for no one else to know what happened … so long as you persuade me that you’re not about to do the same thing again.’

  ‘What – you’re blackmailing me into talking to you?’

  ‘I don’t like your choice of word, but if that’s what you want to call it, fine. I just want to feel reassured about your mental state.’ Hester Winstone was silent. ‘Anyway, suppose Carole and I hadn’t come into the car park just then …? Would you have cut your wrists some more? Did you want to be discovered there by someone in SADOS?’

  The slightest of reactions from the woman suggested Jude might have touched a nerve there. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t very in control,’ Hester mumbled, acknowledging for the first time since Carole had left the two women together that there was something wrong.

  ‘Look, I don’t know you,’ said Jude. ‘I know nothing about your life apart from what you’ve told me in the last few minutes, but for someone to cut their wrist – however ineffectively – suggests a very deep unhappiness.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Hester Winstone conceded.

  ‘Whether that’s caused by the state of your marriage, or your boys being aw
ay at boarding school or some recent bereavement or a long-term depressive condition or the menopause, I don’t know. But if you do want to confide in someone, I have the advantages of not knowing your social circle, so nothing you say will go further than these four walls. I also promise not to be judgemental. And enough people have said it to me that I think I can confidently state I’m a good listener. Not to mention an experienced healer. So if you do want to tell me anything … well, the ball’s in your court.’

  Hester twisted her hands together in confusion. ‘It’s tempting.’

  ‘Then why not give into temptation?’

  After a moment the reply came. ‘No, I can’t. Sorry.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jude, ‘shall I tell you what I, as an impartial observer of what I saw happen in the Cricketers, think may have caused the sudden deterioration of your mood?’

  ‘You can try. But we were only in the same group of people for a couple of minutes, so you can’t have seen much.’

  ‘I had been aware of you in the bar before we were actually introduced. I noticed your body language.’

  ‘God, I didn’t know I had any body language.’

  ‘Oh, you did. Hard thing to avoid, body language.’

  ‘And what was mine saying?’

  ‘It was saying you were feeling neglected …’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Or possibly rejected.’

  ‘Really? By whom?’

  ‘Neville Prideaux.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Hester Winstone’s hand shot up to her mouth. ‘Was it that obvious? Does that mean everyone in SADOS knows?’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that. From the impression I got of those I met this evening, they’re all too preoccupied with themselves to notice what’s going on with other people. It was easier for me to observe things as an outsider.’

  ‘So what exactly did you observe? From my body language?’

  ‘You seemed to be trying to engage Neville’s attention. He seemed to be very deliberately avoiding eye contact with you, and constantly moving to other groups in the pub, so that you wouldn’t get a moment alone with him.’