Sicken and So Die (2 page)

Charles had been married to Frances for twelve years before he finally walked out. He had used all kinds of justifications, about the incompatibility of an actor's lifestyle with the institution of marriage, about the need for them both to develop outside the claustrophobia of cohabitation, but the real motive for his departure had been self-punishment. He'd been having affairs away from home, and he felt guilty about them. Walking out on Frances – and their daughter Juliet – had been a kind of public penance for his misdemeanours.

It had also, he'd hoped at the time, been a bid for freedom. On his own, he would be able to follow up on the emotional hints and half-chances that other women offered. What he'd done was hurtful, but necessary to his fulfilling the imperatives of his own personality. Marriage had been part of his growth, but a part that he had outgrown.

Of course, it hadn't worked out like that. The freedom for which he had given up Frances proved illusory. Yes, he followed up on the other women. He had some good sex and some bad sex, he made some good friends, he even at times imagined himself in love, but all the relationships left him ultimately empty. There was still a void in his life that only Frances could fill.

He'd worried the situation through in his head more times than he cared to count, and almost always came back to the same basic problem. He liked Frances.

That was aside from loving her, which he sometimes did, or from time to time feeling towards her an infuriation which qualified as hatred. But the liking remained constant; that was the invisible chain that held him to her.

For a total split from a lover, there needs to be a two-way pressure. Not just the overwhelming attraction for the new love-object, but also a distaste for the old. Constant comparisons then become inevitable. The new love is not only wonderful, she is also so much more wonderful than the one you are leaving. In fact, when you catalogue the faults, deficiencies and inadequacies of the old love, the only remarkable point is that you stayed with her so long. Why did you put up with someone so unsuitable for all that time?

But such a natural process of fission is rendered inoperable when you still
like
the old love, when you worry about her, think about her, want to discuss things with her. The loving and the hating are relatively easy to cope with; it's the
liking
that makes the whole thing impossible.

And that, Charles had come to realise ruefully, was the state of play in his relationship with his wife. Whatever else there might be happening in his sex-life – and at times there had been quite a bit – he still felt linked to Frances.

Whether she felt the same obligation, he was never quite sure. And even in those moments when he did feel quite sure, he was also aware of how much she resented the encumbrance. At times she seemed very distant from him. At times he knew for certain that she had had other men. But did the fact that none of them had gone the distance mean that Frances's relationships were hobbled by the same restrictions that cramped his own?

Charles Paris knew that he wanted a closer intimacy with his wife, but he could never be certain how much she shared that ambition.

The circumspection of her attitude was not without justification. Charles could not claim to be the most assiduous of men in the protocol of marriage. Even ignoring the fact of his having walked out on his wife – and he could recognise that that was a significant blot on the marital copybook – his behaviour since then would not always have inspired confidence in a potential partner.

He did have a tendency to get distracted. The intention to ring Frances, make contact, fix to meet up, was always there, but when he got involved in a production, when he was away for a while, it was remarkable how the weeks, and even the months, could slip past without his acting on that intention.

There had also been one or two regrettable incidents when he had fixed a rendezvous and been prevented by circumstance – or occasionally drink – from fulfilling his part of the arrangement: the small matter of turning up at the agreed place at the agreed time.

Charles could fully sympathise with Frances's scepticism when he spoke of a closer future between them.

And it wasn't as if she didn't have a full life. Now independent, with her own flat in Highgate, she had risen through the hierarchy of education to become headmistress of a girls' school. She was a caring mother and a solicitous grandmother. What possible incentive could she have to make room in her well-ordered life for a man whose moody personality took over any environment like a wet Labrador?

And yet at the moment she
was
making room in her life for Charles and, at the moment, the experiment seemed to be working.

It was all down to the builders, really. When he left Frances, Charles had moved into a dingy and soulless bedsitter in Hereford Road, ‘Just in the short term, you know, till I find somewhere more suitable', and he was still there. Or at least he would still have been there had not the new landlord of the house embarked on the long-overdue transformation of the bedsitters into ‘studio flats'.

Once the work was completed, the existing tenants would be given first refusal to continue residency at increased rents, but obviously they all had to move out while the builders gutted the property. Charles, remarkably, had moved in with Frances.

It was convenient – particularly since the
Twelfth Night
rehearsals were taking place in a church hall in. Willesden. It was also logical – or it would have been for a couple whose marital history was less chequered.

But the most astonishing thing about the arrangement was that it seemed to be working. They were actually getting on rather well.

Maybe it was age. Maybe they had both matured, and could be more tolerant of each other. Maybe both had learned and been enriched by the traumas of their long separation.

The best part for Charles was that Frances had let him back into her bed. The ease and familiarity of their lovemaking glowed in him through the days like a personal heart-warmer. He didn't feel lonely. It was a long time since he hadn't felt lonely. A long time since he had had someone to go home to at the end of the day.

One unexpected side-effect of this domesticity was that Charles was drinking less. The automatic loose-end recourse to the pub at the end of rehearsals seemed less imperative, and the too-many nightcaps of Bell's to deaden the end of the day were no longer necessary. He and Frances would share a bottle of wine over dinner, but often that was the sum total of his day's intake. For Charles Paris, that made quite a change.

His new circumstances generally made quite a change.

It was early days, mind. Less than two weeks they'd been cohabiting, and neither of them wanted to threaten the fragility of what was happening by talking about it.

Promising, though. Somehow, Charles felt confident that the thoughts going through Frances's mind matched his own. It still wasn't too late for them to make something of their lives together.

Yes, Charles Paris reflected, as the train sped towards Great Wensham and the
Twelfth Night
photocall, things are actually going rather well.

THE FORMAL Elizabethan gardens of Chailey Ferrars could have been designed as a setting for
Twelfth Night.
Their geometric patterns offered a choice of avenues down which Malvolio could walk. Their statuary, low walls and neatly clipped box trees offered manifold hiding places from which Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Fabian could observe the steward picking up the letter from ‘The Fortunate Unhappy' and falling for Maria's trick to make him believe his mistress Olivia loved him.

The Asphodel production of the play was not to be performed in the formal gardens, however. They were far too precious, far too carefully maintained, to be overrun by actors and picnic-toting members of the public. The acting area for
Twelfth Night
was further away from the house, in a walled field at one end of which a natural amphitheatrical shape had been enhanced by the construction of a grass-covered mound and the planting of a semicircle of trees around it. For performances a wooden stage was erected on the mound and the backstage area cordoned off with hessian screens.

It was the Chailey Ferrars Trustees who imposed conditions on which parts of the estate could be used. They were a body of men and women of prelapsarian conservatism, who saw it as their God-given mission to resist every proposed change to the house or gardens. They would really have liked the public excluded totally from the premises, but had been grudgingly forced to accept the financial necessity of paying visitors.

At first the Trustees had resisted the overtures of the Great Wensham Festival Society to stage plays at Chailey Ferrars. But by the third year, having seen how much other businesses had benefited from the new custom attracted by the festival, they had agreed to very limited access to the grounds for two public performances of
Much Ado About Nothing
. Again, grudgingly, they had had to concede that the experiment had not led to wholesale vandalism of their precious property, and that, as well as being an artistic success, it had indeed proved rather profitable to the Trust.

From then on the Chailey Ferrars Shakespeare had become a regular feature – in fact, the main focus – of the Great Wensham Festival, though the Trustees never allowed its continuance to be taken for granted. Each year the Festival Director, Julian Roxborough-Smith – or, in the event, his administrator, Moira Handley – had to go through an elaborate square dance of application and supplication until the Trustees – with an ever-increasing number of cautions and provisos – agreed to let the Chailey Ferrars grounds be used for yet another Shakespearean production.

It was a measure of Moira Handley's skilful management of the Trustees that, though there would never be any possibility of the play being staged in the formal gardens, she had elicited permission for the
Twelfth Night
photocall to be held there.

As an even greater concession, the Trustees had allowed the accompanying press conference to be conducted in the Chailey Ferrars dining hall. The magnitude of this honour was continuously emphasised, though, since Asphodel were being forced to pay well over the odds for the Chailey Ferrars in-house catering services, the Trustees' attitude did seem a little hypocritical.

Still, Charles Paris wasn't that worried. A photocall and a press conference had to mean a few free drinks.

He had been unperturbed by the prospect of a visit to Great Wensham, though many of the other company members had made a big fuss about it. Gavin Scholes objected to losing a day's rehearsal, even though his presence at the press conference was written into the contract between Asphodel and the Great Wensham Festival. His wardrobe mistress resented the demand for costumes to be worn at the photocall; she grumbled that it was only local press, anyway, surely they could be fobbed off with rehearsal stills. But again a fully dressed on-site photocall was written into the contract.

These complaints, however, were as nothing to those raised by the cast. Few of the principals wanted to drag out to Great Wensham for some bloody photocall; they regarded a day without rehearsals as a day off, and at the beginning of several months' intensive work they weren't going to miss out on that.

Russ Lavery was particularly vehement in his refusal when Gavin Scholes tried to cajole him into being part of the outing. Up until that point he had been very meek and unstarry at rehearsal – except for one violent blow-up with the wardrobe mistress who'd wanted to give Viola's and Sebastian's costumes shorter sleeves than Russ Lavery thought appropriate. Needless to say, the star had won; the sleeves were lengthened.

But the press conference prompted another tantrum. Russ's agent had set up a meeting for that day with a Hollywood director who'd got a project he might be interested in. When Gavin rather tentatively pointed out that ‘availability for promotion of the production' was written into Russ's contract, he was nearly blown out of the water.

‘I don't have to make myself available for bloody local hacks!' the star of
Air-Sea Rescue
stormed. ‘My publicist and I spend most of our time
avoiding
publicity, not courting it.'

‘It's not going to be just local coverage,' Gavin asserted. ‘The festival press officer I spoke to said they've invited all the nationals as well.'

‘I don't care if they've invited the Pope, Barbra Streisand and Nelson Mandela,' said Russ Lavery. ‘
I
won't be there.'

So the party who actually did attend the photocall and press conference were the amenable ones who tended not to make a fuss, like Charles Paris and Tottie Roundwood, the actress who was playing Maria; and those who were desperate for publicity in whatever form it came – Vasile Bogdan, who played Fabian, Sally Luther, the production's Viola, and Talya Northcott, whose first professional job this was.

Talya had been cast in the non-speaking role of Olivia's Handmaiden, with the additional responsibility of understudying all three female parts. For someone so new to the profession, just working in the theatre was profoundly exciting. And any newspaper picture of her in costume would be religiously snipped out and scrapbooked by the worshipping ‘Mummy' to whom her conversation frequently reverted.

Vasile Bogdan, a gloweringly handsome dark-haired actor in his twenties, may have had an obscure European name, but spoke without any trace of an accent. He was fiercely ambitious, and his own opinion of his talents manifested itself in a slight contempt for the rest of the company. His
Twelfth Night
casting in the ungrateful role of Fabian was a stage which he considered himself to be passing through only briefly on his way to greater things. An opportunity to get his photograph in a newspaper – any newspaper – was not one that at this phase of his career he would ever pass up.