A Decent Interval (3 page)

The driver shrugged. ‘This is where I was told to take you. Pick-up time's seven this evening.' He thrust a card at Charles. ‘If it's going to be very different, call this number.'

And the car was driving off almost before the back door had clicked shut. Abandoned, Charles Paris looked around at the early September morning. Though he'd left Hereford Road in darkness, the dawn had crept up unnoticed during the car-ride and it was now full daylight.

The scene the sun illuminated was a stunning one. Newlands Corner, near Guildford, commands splendid views over the Surrey hills, and is very popular with walkers and dog-owners. From the car park, tough grassland slopes downwards to the level of farmers' fields, beyond which can be seen the misty gentle curves of the North Downs. The terrain justifies its description as a ‘beauty spot'. But that morning the landscape's charms were lost on Charles Paris; he was too preoccupied by his hangover to respond to the delights of nature.

There was no one sitting in the white van's driver or passenger seats, so he moved round the back. Only to discover that the doors were closed. No sign of life. He checked his watch. Five to six. He was actually early for his call … which had not always been the case in Charles Paris's theatrical career. But he would have expected more evidence of a film crew than this single van.

For a moment he felt a
frisson
of something almost like fear. Looking down into the darkly shadowed woodland, he recalled why Newlands Corner had rung a bell when Maurice Skellern had first mentioned the name. It was a significant location in the history of crime fiction, the place where Agatha Christie's car had been abandoned during her famous but still not completely explained disappearance in 1926. Just down the hill from the car park where he stood was the Silent Pool, near which her Morris Cowley was found.

The sun disappeared behind a cloud to add to Charles's feeling of foreboding. And the hangover wasn't helping either. He stepped forward to the back doors of the white van, hand upraised to knock on them.

Then he had another thought and tried the handle. To his surprise it turned and the doors pulled outwards.

Some premonition had suggested to him that he'd find a body inside the van, but in fact he found two.

Both covered in a scrambled tartan rug. And very still.

But only for a moment. Then a head, disturbed by the sound and sunlight, poked up to look blearily at Charles. He saw the face of a girl in her early twenties with tousled dyed red hair. The way she clutched the rug to her neck suggested she didn't have a lot of clothes on.

Woken by her movement, the other body also came to life and peered, squinting, towards the open doors.

‘Ah, Charles Paris,' said Tibor Pincus. Though his English was grammatically perfect, he still kept the thick accent from his native Budapest.

The famed director had not worn well. Most of his hair had gone and what remained was tufted by sleep into what looked like the crest of a battered seabird.

‘Good morning,' said Charles, noticing with longing that amongst the horizontal empty wine bottles on the floor of the van stood upright a half-full litre of Teacher's whisky. Not his favourite brand, but that morning he was in no condition to be picky.

Tibor Pincus looked at his watch. ‘On time, Charles. There has to be a first time for everything, eh? The cameraman is due at seven thirty and we need to have you ready for shooting by then.'

He nodded to the girl who, in one graceful movement, managed to stand up and drape the rug modestly about herself. Dexterously, she gathered up some clothes, including a pair of fluorescently pink knickers, and scuttled past Charles round to the front of the van.

The removal of the rug revealed Tibor Pincus to be lying on a grubby sleeping bag, unzipped and opened out like a kipper. He wore only a pair of checked boxer shorts, over which a pale belly dusted with white hair flopped precariously. He tried to rise to his feet but had to ease himself up against the van's wall.

The director's hand moved painfully up to his head, and Charles found himself mirroring the gesture in sympathy.

‘A few too many last night,' said Tibor Pincus.

‘I know the feeling.'

Instinctively, the director's hand found the neck of the Teacher's bottle. In a single practised movement he unscrewed the top, brought the opening to his lips and took a grateful swig.

Reading something in Charles Paris's eyes, he then proffered the whisky towards the actor.

‘Won't say no. Just a quick hair of the dog.'

Charles's swig was equally grateful.

‘Ah yes, I remember,' said Tibor. ‘Always had a taste for the booze, didn't you, Charles?'

‘Well …' There was nothing more to say, really. It wasn't an observation with which he could argue. ‘But I don't remember you as a drinker, Tibor.'

‘No.' The director sighed, then took another long pull from the Teacher's bottle. ‘You will find many things have changed about me, Charles.'

‘Yes, thinking way back, when we worked together on that telly play in the eighties, there was quite a drinking culture among the cast. And you sat it out with your glass of orange juice. Very virtuous.'

‘Probably less virtuous now, Charles. No, but as director I thought someone should remain in control. Also I loved the work I was doing and I didn't want to risk spoiling it by being less than a hundred per cent all of the time. Whereas with the work I'm doing now … huh, hard to spoil that.'

‘What was the name of that actor, Tibor, who was in that play? You know, biggest piss artist in the theatre …?'

Tibor grinned. ‘Charles Paris?'

‘Ha bloody ha! Oh, what was his name? He had a success in a telly series that was big in the States, and then he went over to live there. Haven't heard much of him since.'

‘You mean Portie,' said Tibor.

‘That's right – Portie. Can't remember his real name, can you?' Charles was finding more names escaped him nowadays.

Tibor Pincus shook his head. He couldn't remember either.

At least they did get bacon sandwiches. The girl, whom Tibor still hadn't introduced – or indeed spoken to since they had both been woken up – proved to be very efficient with a little Campingaz stove. She even had an appropriate supply of ketchup, mustard and – Charles's favourite – HP sauce.

When the two men, Tibor now dressed in denim shirt and jeans, were sitting on camping stools outside the open back door of the van with their sandwiches and mugs of dark brown tea (laced with a little Teacher's), Charles Paris thought it was the moment to ask about the filming project for which he had been summoned to Newlands Corner.

‘Ah,' the director replied. ‘Today, Charles, you are going to reconstruct the Battle of Naseby.'

‘Oh yes? Me and whose army?'

‘Nobody's army. It's just you, Charles.' The director gestured into the back of the van to some cellophane-shielded costumes. ‘You are both the Roundheads and the Cavaliers.'

‘No other actors involved?'

‘No.'

Charles Paris's optimism, normally suppressed by uncompromising reality, did a little flutter like a baby quickening. Even the most cynical of actors retains that flicker of hope, the conviction their careers have yet to peak, that the big break is just around the corner. To be the only actor in a television play directed by the legendary Tibor Pincus, that was the kind of career-defining job that …

It didn't take long for the bubble to be pricked. ‘What we're filming today,' Tibor went on, ‘is filler stuff for one of those historical documentaries.' And he mentioned the name of the presenter Charles had ended up watching in Hereford Road the previous night.

‘The one with big breasts?'

The director nodded. ‘The one with big breasts, yes. She's doing a series on the Civil War. And you, Charles, are going to be all the soldiers on both sides in the Battle of Naseby.'

‘Is this one of these computer-generated things, where I'll be cloned and made to look like thousands of versions of myself?' Though not strong on the details, Charles knew that a lot of work on television films was now done post-production. And that a lot of directors had a lot more fun fiddling with technical effects in the editing suite than they did dealing with the inconvenience of actors. (He also remembered a wistful line he had heard quoted from the writer Alan Plater: ‘When I started in television, “post-production” was going down the pub.')

But Charles Paris was not about to become a component in a sequence of computer generated imagery. ‘No, no,' said Tibor Pincus. ‘There will just be one of you, no technical trickery. I will shoot you in a variety of close-ups – a boot here, a bit of a breastplate there, your gauntleted hand gripping a pike, swords scraping against each other … that kind of thing. Then at the end of the day we'll do lots of shots of you dying.'

‘Right.'

‘Just falling over, throwing your hands up in the air, you know. We'll do that in both Roundhead and Cavalier costumes.' Tibor picked up the ketchup bottle on the camping table between them. ‘We'll use a lot of this.'

Charles nodded. ‘OK, fine.' He looked out from their vantage point over the comforting undulations of the Surrey hills. ‘From my recollection of history,' he said, ‘the Battle of Naseby was fought in open fields in Northamptonshire. Very flat open fields.'

‘So …?'

‘Well, I can't help noticing that, however you might wish to describe this landscape, the one adjective you wouldn't use is “flat”.'

The Hungarian shrugged. ‘Charles, the programme is being made by a production company based in London. They're not going to pay to send a crew out to Northamptonshire. They want a location that's accessible inside a day, with no overnight expenses.'

‘But you still chose to stay overnight.'

‘That was for personal reasons.' Tibor caught the eye of the girl who had just joined them with Charles's costume (he was going to be the New Model Army first, rather than the Royalists). The girl winked back.

Charles Paris was impressed. He hoped he would demonstrate the same physical robustness when he was Tibor Pincus's age. The idea of continuing to live after he had lost the capacity to make love didn't hold much appeal for Charles. And it had been a while, he reminded himself. Maybe it'd never happen again. Maybe he'd already made love to his last woman. Oh dear, another thing to worry about.

The director gestured across the vista in front of him. ‘It doesn't matter where we shoot this stuff. So the Battle of Naseby was fought on flat terrain and here we're on hilly terrain? Makes no difference. Everything's going to be shot in such tight close-up we could be filming it in a branch of Tesco's.'

‘It's funny,' Charles mused, ‘I'd never really thought about how they get the footage for these documentaries. I imagined they'd do it all on the cheap. But it seems that they do have quite high production values.'

‘Where are the high production values?' asked a bewildered Tibor.

‘Well, I mean, getting a director of your stature … It shows they really care what the footage looks like.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘A director like you can't come cheap.'

Tibor Pincus looked at him bleakly. Most of the colour had been washed out of his watery blue eyes. ‘You wouldn't believe how cheap I come these days, Charles.'

‘But surely, someone with your track record …'

‘Who cares about my track record? You have to remember, television is now run by twelve year olds fresh out of Media Studies courses. What do they know about the past? What do they care about the past? Most of the people I used to work with have now retired. And the few who are left are now so high up the management structure they don't even return my calls. It's been decades since anyone would give me a proper job.

‘Do you think I'd be reconstructing the English Civil War with one actor if I had any alternative? Making television by the yard. The shots of you will be intercut with the odd castle ruin, stained glass window, faded document, out-of-focus sparkling water, sunlight through ferns. Visual pap, chewing gum for the eyes.' The director shrugged. ‘But it's work, Charles, and the only work I can get these days.'

‘Ah.' There was a silence, then Charles said, ‘Well, thank you for booking me for today, Tibor.'

‘My pleasure. Why, is this the only work you can get too?'

‘Pretty much.'

At that moment a Range Rover drove up to the van and the cameraman got out. He was a lugubrious soul who did as Tibor Pincus told him, talking minimally, offering no suggestions, just getting on with the job for which he was being paid.

And that was it. The other film-set personnel Charles had been expecting didn't appear. The girl whose name he still hadn't been given – and wasn't volunteered – did everything that the cameraman didn't. She got Charles into his costume, did his make-up and acted as PA to Tibor, making a shot list as he filmed bits of their one actor. She also cooked a very good lunch on the Campingaz stove. Under the disapproving scrutiny of the cameraman, director and actor washed the food down with copious draughts of Teacher's. (The first bottle had been long finished, but Tibor had a crate of them in the back of the van.)

When it came to the point of filming his various deaths at the end of the day, particularly given the gradient of the Newlands Corner hill, Charles Paris didn't have any problem with falling down a lot.

I
t was a night of many vows. As Charles Paris tossed about on his bed at Hereford Road, his body aching – and not just from the bruises he had suffered at Newlands Corner – he swore that he would finally give up the booze. The harm it must be doing to his liver, the harm it had already done to his liver, didn't bear contemplating. Not just the liver, either. The papers were always full of gloomy prognostications about the long-term damage excessive drinking could do. Heart attacks, strokes, throat cancer … ugh.