On the train up to Leeds that Sunday afternoon Charles cursed his lack of detective instinct. He had been present at what was probably a crime and just when his mind should be flashing up an instant recall of every detail of the scene it was providing only vague memories and woolly impressions. Perhaps it was Oliver Goldsmith’s fault. By delaying Sir Charles Marlow’s entry until the fifth act, he had ensured that Charles Paris had had at least two pints too many at the Saturday lunch time, so that the ideal computer printout of facts and details was replaced by a child’s picture in Fuzzy Felt.
He couldn’t even remember exactly who had been there. Christopher Milton, certainly, and Dickie Peck and the driver. And David Meldrum and Gwyneth were somewhere around, though he couldn’t remember whether they were on stage or in the auditorium at the time of the accident. Mark Spelthorne had been there, of course, and Spike and some of the King’s Theatre stage staff… And then who else? Two or three male dancers — Charles didn’t know their names, but he’d recognise them again — and the two girl dancers. Then one or two of the supporting actors and actresses. Charles screwed up his eyes and tried to see the scene again. Lizzie Dark certainly, she’d been there, and Michael Peyton, and some others. The edges of the picture were cloudy.
‘Damn!’ he snapped, and opened his eyes to find that the word had attracted the gaze of a large Bradford-bound Pakistani family. Embarrassed, he closed his eyes and tried to concentrate again. A little chill of anxiety about seeing Ruth kept getting in the way.
Well, the identity parade of suspects wasn’t very impressive, because it was incomplete. But, assuming a crime had been committed, it must have a motive and that might give a clue to the criminal.
The first question — was Mark Spelthorne the intended victim or was it just chance that caught him? Christopher Milton was not far behind and it was possible that the criminal was after him, but misjudged his timing in the dark. Or it could have been meant for any one of the people on stage. Or just a random blow for whoever happened to he there. The last would tie in with Gerald’s original view that someone was trying to wreck the show and didn’t mind how. If it was a personal vendetta against Christopher Milton, then why had the perpetrator bothered to make his first attacks on the pianist and Everard Austick? Why not go straight to his quarry? And why not use a more selective method than a tumbling pile of flats? If, on the other hand, Mark Spelthorne was the intended victim…
Oh dear. He knew it wasn’t getting him anywhere. Any of the people on stage at the time of the accident could have unwound the rope from the cleat. Equally, any of them could have been the intended victim. And since he couldn’t remember exactly who had been there, the possibilities were infinite. Add the difficulty of tying the motivation for that crime in with the other two and the problem was insoluble, or at least insoluble to a forty-eight-year-old actor who had spent too long in the bar at King’s Cross and who was having serious misgivings about going to stay with a woman with whom he had had a brief and not wholly glorious affair seven years previously.
He looked out of the window at the matt flatness of the Midlands. He closed his eyes, but sleep and even relaxation kept their distance. A new question formed in his mind — Did the 15.10 train from King’s Cross to Leeds have a bar? He set out to investigate.
Ruth was disagreeable. As soon as he saw her again he remembered. Not disagreeable in the sense of being unattractive; her trim body with its sharp little breasts and well-defined calf muscles remained as good as ever; she was disagreeable in the sense that she disagreed with everything one said. Charles never had known whether it was a genuine defence from a reasoned feminist standpoint or sheer bloody-mindedness. But it came back to him as soon as she spoke. Her voice was marinated in cynicism. Charles felt a great swoop of despair, as if all his worst opinions of himself were suddenly ratified, as if the thoughts that infected him in his lowest moods had suddenly been classified as gospel. He saw himself as an Everard Austick, an alcoholic whose failure in his chosen profession was only matched by his failure as a human being.
It wasn’t that cynicism struck no chord. He himself tended to attribute the worst motives to everyone and was distrustful of optimists. But like all practitioners of an art, he liked to feel that his version of it was a definitive one. His cynicism could still be unexpectedly erased by the sight of a child or the shock of a sudden kindness or a moment of desire, while Ruth’s blanket coverage seemed to debase the currency of cynicism.
It wasn’t that she’d had a particularly bad life. True, its emotional path had been a bit rocky. In her twenties she had had a series of affairs which never stood a chance of going the distance (Charles would have put himself in that category) and eventually at the age of thirty married a central heating systems salesman five years her senior. The marriage lasted three years until he went off with a croupier and they got a divorce. The fatalism with which Ruth accepted this reverse suggested that she had never had much faith in the marriage and had been undermining it for some time.
‘So you came.’ She spoke with that exactness of enunciation which is more revealing than an accent.
‘Yes, I said I would.’
‘Oh yes.’ The disbelief in her tone instantly put the clock beck seven years. ‘And how are you, Mr Charles Paris?’
‘Fine, fine.’
‘Good. And your lady wife?’
‘I don’t know. Well, when I last saw her. It’s a few months back now. I believe she has a boy friend, someone from the school where she teaches.’
‘Good for her. Not going to wait forever on your filing system, is she? Can I get you a cup of tea or a drink or something? Or should I show you up to your room in true landlady fashion?’ She leant against the kitchen table in a way that could have been meant to be provocative. It was always difficult to know with Ruth. But seeing her, Charles remembered how much he had fancied her. That was really all there ever had been to the relationship. If there were nothing to life except bed, they’d still have been together. He felt a warm trickle of desire in spite of all the gloom which she had generated inside him.
He overcompensated by the heartiness of his reply. ‘A cup of tea would be really… grand.’ Her flash of suspicion made him wish he had chosen another word. He’d forgotten how sensitive she was to anything that could be construed as criticism of her Yorkshireness.
She made the tea and Charles kept up a relentless flow of banter to stop himself from making a pass at her. ‘How are things in Headingley then?’
‘They don’t change. I’ve lived here thirty-four years and lost hope that they ever will.’
‘Still in the same job?’
‘Oh yes. I think Perkis and Levy, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, would cease to function without my secretarial assistance.’
‘Enjoy it?’
She spread open her hands in a gesture which showed up the pointlessness of the question.
‘And socially?’
‘Socially life here is okay if you’re a teenybopper going down the discos or an elegant blue-rinse who likes bridge and golf. I’m neither.’
‘No.’ The little gusts of interest which had been propelling the conversation along died down to silence. Charles was morbidly aware of the outline of Ruth’s nipples through the cotton of her patterned blouse.
She broke the silence. ‘This show you’re doing, is it the one at the Palace?’
‘Yes.’
‘With Christopher Milton in it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s good,’ she said with more enthusiasm than usual. What’s he like?’
The classic question, as asked by every member of the public about every star. And virtually unanswerable. No reply can possibly satisfy the questioner, who usually has only thought as far as the question. Charles tried. ‘Well, he’s…’ And then realised he could not even answer to his own satisfaction. ‘I don’t know.’
He was glad of the seven o’clock call at the Palace Theatre, as it temporarily took off the pressure of Ruth’s presence.
After David Meldrum’s tentative notes on the Saturday run-through (interrupted by less tentative ones from Christopher Milton), Charles sorted out a later call with the stage management and set off to investigate the adjacent pub.
It was small and dingy, one of the few old buildings which had survived the extensive modernization of Leeds city centre. A few regulars sat around in despairing huddles while a younger group played silent, grim darts. Charles ordered a large Bell’s, which they didn’t have, and got a large Haig. As he turned to find a space on one of the railway waiting-room benches, he recognised a figure in a blue donkey jacket hunched against the bar. ‘Hello, Kevin.’
The bleary eyes showed that the writer had been there since opening time. Charles received an indifferent drunken greeting.
‘Not a bad theatre, is it?’
‘Not a bad theatre? Huh. Are you telling me about the Palace Theatre? That’s good. I’ve been seeing shows at the Palace since I was six. Pantomimes, all sorts. I was brought up here. Meanwood. Went to the grammar school. We were always brought on outings to the Palace, when there was anything cultural on, touring companies, all that. Always came to the Palace. It was my ambition, when I was in my teens, to have something of mine done, performed at the Palace. That and losing my virginity.’
‘And now I assume you’ve managed both.’
‘One happened, near as dammit, in the back row of the Cottage Road Cinema.’ He let out an abrupt, dirty laugh. Then his face darkened. ‘But the other…’
‘The other you achieve tomorrow. First night.’
Kevin looked him straight in the eyes for a moment before he spoke. ‘Oh yes. Tomorrow. First night. But first night of what? Do you think I’ll feel any pride in that?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be a good show. It’s inevitable that everyone’s a bit jumpy just before it starts.’ Charles had not decided yet what he really thought of the show, but he thought reassurance was required.
As it turned out, he was wrong. ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean that what’ll go on at that theatre tomorrow will have nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh, I know it’s changed a bit from the original production, but that’s inevitable when — ’
‘Changed a bit — huh! There’s almost nothing in that show that I put there.’
‘I’m sure a lot of it’s still quite close to the original.’
‘Balls. I should never have agreed. If I’d known what a total cock-up they were going to make of it… okay, they wanted to get in somebody else to do the music… all right, maybe Joe Coatley’s music wasn’t that commercial, but I thought at least they’d leave my text alone. I felt bad about dropping Joe at the time, but now I bloody envy him. I’d give anything to be out of it.’
Deliberately crude, Charles mentioned the money.
‘Oh yes, there’ll be plenty of money. Run forever, a show like this, or at least until his Lordship gets bored with it. You know, I used to think I’d do anything for money — that was when I hadn’t got any — thought I’d write anything, pornography, all sorts. I did, I wrote a real hard-core porn book — filth, all about whips and Alsatians, real muck. I got a hundred pounds for that, but I tell you, I’m more proud of that than I will be when this load of shit’s running in the West End and bringing me in my so many per cent a week.’ He was in full flow, spurred on by the drink. ‘Look, I’m a writer, a writer. If I didn’t want to be a writer, I’d be some other bloody thing, an accountant, a clerk in the Town Hall, I don’t care what. But that’s not what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a writer. And why does someone want to be a writer?’
Charles had his own views on the subject, but didn’t volunteer them. Anyway, Kevin’s question turned out to be rhetorical. ‘I’ll tell you why someone wants to be a writer. Because what he writes is his own, it may be rubbish, but it’s his own rubbish. No one can take that away from him. He wrote it.’ He seemed to realise he was becoming almost incoherently repetitive and paused to collect his thoughts before continuing. He swayed slightly.
‘And that is why I don’t like my work being destroyed by some jumped-up idiot of an actor, who couldn’t even write his own name.’
Charles found himself (not for the first time) taking up a position of boring middle-aged reasonableness. ‘Kevin, one has to face it that there are some things which work on the page that don’t work in performance.’
‘I accept that. Good God, I’ve worked on plays before. I’m used to doing rewrites and changing things and cutting things down, but in the past it’s always been a matter of discussing it, not just some prima donna ballsing up whole scenes so that he gets all the lines.’
Charles smarted at the remembrance of his own suffering from Christopher Milton on a line-hunt, but continued his defence. ‘Look, I know he’s got an unfortunate manner, but he does have a real genius for the theatre. He knows what’s going to work and what — ’
‘He knows what’s going to work for him, yes, but he doesn’t give a bugger about the rest of the show. He’s already made nonsense of the plot by cutting down the Young Marlow scenes to nothing. The show’ll be a great shapeless mess.’
‘The audience will love it.’
‘Audience, huh. What the hell do they know? The audience that comes to this show will be so force-fed with television they won’t notice what it’s about. They’ll spend all their time waiting for the commercials. They’d come and see him if he was peeling potatoes on stage. They’d come and see anything that they saw on their screen. A jug of water, as featured on the Nine O’Clock News, that’s what they’d come to see.’
He paused for breath. Charles took the opportunity to buy more drinks, hoping to break the monologue. But when he’d handed Kevin a large whisky, raised his own and said ‘Cheers’, it was instantly resumed. ‘There’s a lot of good stuff in that show which has just been dumped. Dumped and replaced by corny rubbish. I know. I’m not saying I’m the greatest writer there ever was, but I know when I’ve written a good line, and I don’t write them so that some idiot can just come along and…’ He lost his thread and when he came back his voice was cold with concentration. ‘If he takes anything else out of this show, I’ll kill the bastard. I’ve warned him, I’ve warned him that I can get nasty, and I will. Do you know, last Friday he was even saying he didn’t know whether Liberty Hall was a good number or not. Liberty Hall, I mean that’s the best number in the show. It’s the only one they kept from the original. They had to, they’d never get a better number than that, would they? Go on, you say what you think of it. Of that song.’
Charles, who hated being button-holed for opinions, murmured something about it being a very good number.
‘Too right it is. A bloody good number. I tell you, if he tries to get rid of that song, I will kill him.’
Kevin became more violent and unintelligible as the drink seeped in and Charles was relieved when it was time for him to return to the theatre.
As he travelled back to Headingley in the 33 bus, he thought about Kevin. Most of it he put down to the drink, but it was another example of the violent reactions Christopher Milton inspired. Kevin had plenty of motive for wishing ill to the show, if he was really as disgusted with it as he claimed. And he had said something about having warned Christopher Milton, which could be a reference to the previous crimes. And, Charles suddenly remembered, the writer had been onstage at the King’s Theatre when the flats fell. A new thought came into his mind. Suppose the first two accidents were genuine and the campaign of persecution only began with the falling flats. And suppose the object of the persecution was not the show, but just Christopher Milton. Someone hated the star so much that he wanted to kill him.
Back at the semi in Headingley Ruth had gone to bed, but her door was ajar and the light on. Charles knocked softly and went in.
She looked up without surprise. ‘So you’ve finished.’ Her voice could imbue the simplest sentence with criticism.
‘Yes.’ He sat heavily on the bed.
‘Drunk, I suppose.’
‘Moderately.’
‘You’re a wreck, Charles.’ She said it hard, without affection. Then she reached forward and touched his hand. The scent of talcum powder rose to his nostrils. He looked at her. And then he kissed her.
She responded, as he knew she would. As he had known when he had first heard he was going to Leeds. From that moment a guilty fascination had led him to this. His unwillingness, his positive knowledge that it was idiotic to restart the affair, was swamped by animal urgency. His right hand scrabbled roughly at her nightdress, pulling it up.
‘I know what you want.’ Even as her hands reached down hungrily to fight with the clasp of his trousers, she made it sound like an accusation.