A Decent Interval (10 page)

‘Do you really want me to answer that, Charles?'

‘Well, no, I …' He converted his confusion into laughter, as if what she'd said was a very good joke. ‘Anyway,' he continued joshingly, ‘why would I need to be interested in other women when I've got you?'

‘And to what extent do you think you've “got” me, Charles?'

Another question that didn't invite an easy answer. Imbuing his voice with maximum sincerity, he said, ‘I really think we should meet.'

As she had during their previous phone conversation, Frances asked, ‘Why?'

N
ed English's rehearsal plan for the Tuesday afternoon was to walk through the whole play, integrating Sam Newton-Reid into the action. Though the young actor knew the lines, his previous Hamlet had been performed in the small upstairs room of a pub, not on the stage of the Grand Theatre, Marlborough inside his own cranium. He needed to learn the moves that Jared Root and the rest of the cast had been rehearsing for some weeks.

That work would stop in time for the actors to have their Equity-required break before the evening's scheduled Dress Rehearsal. But, accommodating a new Hamlet, that Dress Rehearsal was bound to be a much interrupted affair. With such minimal preparation, there was no way the play could open the next day, as scheduled. So the Wednesday evening would witness a hopefully less disjointed Dress Rehearsal, and the First Night in front of the paying public would be postponed till the Thursday. Given the publicity surrounding Jared Root's accident, no one in the general public would be much surprised by the change of plan.

The new production timetable was communicated to the company by the stage management, who said that Ned English had made the decision to postpone – though Charles was of the view that the director was just passing on the orders he'd been given by Tony Copeland. Even with the extra day, it remained a tight schedule, particularly for the new Hamlet, Sam Newton-Reid.

The company were called to start work at two o'clock on the Tuesday afternoon, so after Tony Copeland's pep talk, Charles Paris reckoned he had time for a couple of pints for the necessary irrigation of his brain. He had worked in Marlborough before and remembered a small pub not far from the theatre where he had filled many an idle hour on his previous visit. He hoped it was still open. So many pubs had given up the unequal struggle and closed during the past few years.

As he snuck out of the Grand Theatre's Stage Door, Charles realized it was the first time on this visit that a break in rehearsals had given him the chance to go out into Marlborough, and he was reminded what a pretty place it was. The archetypal English market town, its very wide High Street was flanked by tall, mostly Georgian buildings in mellow red brick, with the Town Hall at one end and Marlborough College at the other. The school was so much part of the town that there always seemed to be lots of pupils milling about the place. Except on market days, the central strip of the High Street was filled with parked cars.

But it wasn't one of the posh tarted-up tourist pubs on the main drag that Charles Paris was looking for. Relying on a distant memory, he set off into the back streets down towards the River Kennet.

To his relief he found the pub was still there, looking as unprepossessing as ever it had. Charles was pleased about that. He hadn't welcomed the gentrification and gastrification which had been the fate of so many pubs (like those on Marlborough High Street). Charles Paris took the old-fashioned view that fine dining should be done in restaurants and that pubs should stick to their traditional role of supplying alcohol and tasteless bar snacks. Sometimes, when he was with people, he enjoyed a bit of atmosphere in his drinking hole. On his own, the drabber the venue the better. When he drank alone, he needed shabby surroundings to match his mood. He recalled that during his previous stint at the Grand Theatre Marlborough he'd nicknamed the pub The Pessimist's Arms.

From recollection of that time Charles might have expected to see other members of the company in the bar when he entered. But his earlier visit to Marlborough had been a long while ago and times had changed. Now almost no actors would go out for a lunchtime drink on a working day. A distressing number of them didn't even have any alcohol when unwinding at the
end
of a working day. They just all walked round with their eternal bottles of water. And spent any spare time they had in the gym. Unless you were bulking up for some part that involved taking your shirt off, Charles couldn't understand what business it was of an actor ever to step inside a gym.

Fortunately, the pub was almost exactly as he remembered it. A surly, unsmiling barman and a lot of men drinking on their own, uninterested in anyone else in the bar. An unwatched giant screen showed pop videos at a volume that would have prevented conversation anyway.

Also, there was still a little alcove he recalled from his previous visits. A space where he could drink unseen, slowly medicating himself to dissipate his hangover. He took the first welcome swallow from his pint glass, then retrieved a crumpled copy of
The Times
from his pocket and turned to the crossword page.

Charles Paris, like many potential depressives, had a variety of methods for monitoring his mood.
The Times
crossword was one of them. Some days he would get the first clue instantly and fill in the rest of the grid with amazing fluency. Then he knew he felt good. Other days the clues could have been written in a foreign language, and while he scanned their impenetrable logic, he would become increasingly aware of his own inadequacies. The kind of person who couldn't even get a single clue in
The Times
crossword …

This day was a good one. He worked out a couple of answers in the top left of the grid straight away, and pretty soon had that whole quadrant filled. Then he slowed down a bit. He struggled with: ‘Organ in action distributed (9)'. In the secret code known to all experienced solvers, ‘distributed' could well be a signal for an anagram. And ‘in action' did contain nine letters. So what anagrams were there of ‘in action'? Charles wrote the letters out of sequence in a circle (one of the few habits he had learned from his father many years before) and studied them. Then realized that he'd counted wrong. There were only eight letters in ‘in action'. So there was his anagram theory out of the window.

It was just as he had reached this conclusion that there was a lull between pop videos and he heard a male voice from the adjacent alcove saying, ‘You were paid to keep your trap shut.'

The voice was rough London with an undercurrent of fastidiousness. Charles had never heard it before.

The voice that responded, however, was one he had heard, though he couldn't for the life of him remember where. Again male, it had an almost Bristolian burr as it said: ‘Yes, but was I paid
enough
to keep my trap shut?'

The next music video started. Charles strained his ears against the pounding beat and managed to hear the first voice say, ‘You accepted our terms when you agreed to do the job.'

‘Maybe, but it strikes me now that the information I have might be worth rather more.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Well, now the job's done, the stakes are higher.'

‘I don't see that.'

‘Then you're not thinking. Before the job was done, I had no power. I could say you'd asked me to do it. People might believe that, they might not – probably not, actually. But now the job has been done … I could generate some very bad publicity for you.'

‘Not without incriminating yourself, you couldn't.'

‘There are ways. I could also arrange some other accident to screw up your plans.'

‘You're bluffing.'

‘No, I'm not. If I don't get more money, you just wait and see what happens.'

There was silence. Not silence in the pub, obviously, but silence between the two men in the alcove next to Charles's. He strained his hearing even harder not to miss the restart of their conversation.

Finally, the London voice spoke. He did not get louder, but there was a fierce intensity to his words. ‘If you try to blackmail us, you will live to regret it. Accidents, as you have reason to know well, can easily be arranged.'

That was a parting shot. So much so that it was immediately followed by the rattle and crash of the pub door closing. So Charles had no chance of discovering who had been making the threat.

He waited to see if the second man would follow immediately, but there was no sign of movement. Finding that his pint glass had unaccountably become empty, Charles Paris sauntered back to the bar to order a refill. Once there, he turned casually to check out the occupant of the alcove that the man with the London voice had just left.

It was the tall stagehand Bazza, who had been responsible for the logistics of getting the
Hamlet
skull set into the Grand Theatre, Marlborough. Which was interesting.

Bazza hadn't seen him, and Charles quickly rejected the idea of initiating contact with the man. The conversation he'd overheard had been intriguing, but capable of more than one interpretation. It wasn't the moment for Charles Paris to slip into amateur sleuth mode – not right there in The Pessimist's Arms, anyway.

He took his pint back to his own alcove. Where he realized that ‘Organ in action distributed (9)' was definitely not an anagram. The ‘organ' in question was a ‘liver', the ‘action' into which it was to be put was a ‘deed', and so the solution had to be ‘delivered'.

Charles Paris felt a warm glow.

The Tuesday night Dress Rehearsal didn't go on as long as the Tech, but it was still a late night. Charles Paris thought all the hard work had been worth it, though. The performance had inevitably been a stop-start affair, but replacing Jared Root with Sam Newton-Reid had totally transformed their production of
Hamlet
. The promise the boy had shown in that upstairs pub room was not illusory. Sam had genuine talent which could take him a long way in British theatre. He was also clearly intelligent. Charles found it a pleasure to hear Shakespeare's lines spoken by someone who understood their syntax, power and ambiguity.

And Sam's Nordic looks were perfect for the part. His pale wood-shaving eyelashes had been darkened with make-up. He looked wonderfully handsome and tortured, exactly as Hamlet should.

Charles Paris didn't have a dressing room to himself, but he was the last person left in his communal one and just contemplating whether to have a tot from his theatre bottle of Bell's or to wait till he got back to his digs bottle of Bell's, when he saw Sam Newton-Reid pass the doorway, arm-in-arm with Milly Henryson. They made an almost impossibly good-looking couple. Charles felt an atavistic twinge of jealousy at the sight of their youth and beauty. The girl's dark hair contrasted wonderfully with her boyfriend's blond.

‘Well done tonight,' Charles called out.

‘Thanks. It was a bit of a baptism of fire,' the young actor responded.

‘Fancy a quick drink?' Charles didn't make the offer with much conviction. No doubt Sam Newton-Reid was another of the mineral water and gym generation.

But to his surprise the boy eagerly assented and then looked slightly awkwardly at his girlfriend. ‘It's all right,' said Charles. ‘Milly is included in the invitation. Come in. I'm afraid it's only whisky on offer. And no ice, unless someone's got the energy to go down to the Green Room fridge.'

‘Warm whisky'll be fine.' Sam sat down, and Charles could see how much the strain of the day had taken out of him. Milly looked at her boyfriend with a kind of anxious solicitude which made the older actor feel quite jealous. When had a woman last looked at him like that? Charles was reminded of his need for female company. Or yes, sex. Maybe when the play opened, he'd be able to rearrange that drink with Geraldine Romelle …?

‘This is really good of you,' Sam Newton-Reid went on. ‘I've been keeping myself together on the promise of a drink at the end of the day and Milly's just broken the news to me that she hasn't got any booze back at her digs.'

‘Everything today has happened rather quickly,' the girl apologized. ‘I haven't had a moment to get to the shops.'

‘Not your fault.' Sam took her hand. ‘Just saying I was desperate for a drink and didn't look like I was going to get one, and now Charles has turned up like the Fairy Godmother.'

‘Not a part I've actually played,' Charles confessed. ‘Though I have given my Baron Hardup.'

‘Who's he?' asked Milly.

‘Cinderella's father.' He remembered the pantomime in Worthing way back in his career. And he remembered Jacqui, who'd been playing a Villager, White Mouse and Court Lady (for the Finale). They'd had a nice time during the run.

Unfortunately, though, he couldn't forget the review his performance had received in the
Worthing Herald
: ‘Charles Paris's Baron Hardup was particularly hard up for laughs.'

Feeling a little uneasy at being so much older than the young couple, Charles grinned and said, ‘Great that you two get the chance to work together. Have you ever done so before?'

Milly Henryson looked a little piqued. ‘Yes, we did quite a lot of stuff together at uni.' Charles didn't think he'd ever get used to people using the word ‘uni' without irony. ‘And then,' the girl went on, ‘of course, more recently …'

She didn't finish the sentence, and Charles realized the proportions of the gaffe he just had made. The pub room production he had seen with Frances had not just featured Sam Newton-Reid in the title role. ‘That is, Milly,' he mumbled, not making up nearly enough ground, ‘apart from when you played Ophelia in that
Hamlet
I saw.'

‘Well, as I say, we did do some stuff at uni.'

‘Milly was brilliant in
Hedda Gabler
,' said Sam loyally. ‘I played Tesman, but she totally stole the show.'