An Amateur Corpse (6 page)

Once again this suggestion touched some trigger of violence. Hugo shouted, ‘Just keep your bloody mouth shut!' and dashed his glass of Scotch in Charles' face.

Charles was furious. Unaware of the shocked gaze of the remaining Backstagers, he turned on Hugo. ‘You're drunk and disgusting!'

‘Get lost!'

‘You ought to go home. You've had enough.'

‘I'll go home when I bloody choose to. And that won't be before closing time.' Hugo banged his glass down on the bar and then, as if to deny the force of his outburst, asked politely, ‘May I have another Scotch, please?'

As Robert Chubb obliged with the drink, Charles stormed out. In the lobby he found Geoffrey Winter had followed him. Geoffrey offered a blue and white handkerchief to mop up his jacket. ‘Thanks. Is there a phone?'

‘There. Just behind the door.'

Charles got through to Charlotte. ‘Look, I've just left Hugo. He's in the Backstagers' bar. Says he won't be leaving till it closes. He's extremely drunk.'

‘Won't be the first time,' she said dryly. ‘Thanks for the warning.'

Geoffrey Winter was still waiting outside. ‘I'd offer you a lift, but we don't run a car. Still, I can show you a quick way down to the station. There's a footpath.'

‘Thank you.'

‘They walked past a large house next door to the Backstagers. It was neo-Tudor with diamond window panes. No light on. Outside the porch, horrible out of period, a pair of grotesque stone lions stood on guard.

Charles drew in his breath sharply with distaste. Geoffrey followed his glance and chuckled. ‘The Hobbses. Mr. and Mrs Arkadina. Advertising their money. Ostentatious buggers. But, nonetheless, a good source of free drinks.'

Charles laughed, though inwardly he was still seething from the encounter with Hugo.

‘By the way,' said Geoffrey, ‘I gather we see you tomorrow.'

‘Yes, Vee invited me down for a meal. If that's still okay.'

‘Fine. Love to see you. I'll show you the way when we get to the main road.'

They walked across a common where a huge pile of wood and rubbish announced the approach of Bonfire Night.

‘Good God, November already,' observed Geoffrey. ‘Guy Fawkes to be burnt again on Friday. How time flies as you get older.'

‘You think you've got problems,' Charles mourned. ‘It's my fiftieth birthday this week.'

They talked a little on the way to the main road, but most of the time there was silence except for the soft pad of their rubber soles on the pathway. Charles didn't notice the lack of conversation. His mind was still full of hurt after the clash with Hugo.

He didn't really notice saying goodbye to Geoffrey. Or the train journey back to Waterloo. He was still seething, almost sick with rage.

CHAPTER FIVE

CHARLES SPENT AN
unsatisfactory Tuesday mooching round his bedsitter in Hereford Road, Bayswater. It was a depressing room and the fact that he stayed there to do anything but sleep meant he was depressed.

He was still fuming over the scene with Hugo. No longer fuming at the fact that Hugo had hit him, but now angry with himself for having flared up. Hugo was in a really bad state, possibly on the verge of a major breakdown, and, as a friend, Charles should have stood by him, tried to help, not rushed off in a huff after a drunken squabble.

As usual, his dissatisfaction with himself spilled over into other area of his life. Frances. He must sort out what his relationship with Frances was. They must meet. He must ring her.

Early in the afternoon he went down to the pay-phone on the landing, but before he dialled her number, he realized she wouldn't be there. She was a teacher. Tuesday in term-time she'd be at school. He'd ring her about six, before he went down to Breckton.

To shift his mood, he started looking through his old scripts. How's Your Father? He read the first few pages. It really wasn't bad. Light, but fun. A performance by the Backstagers would be better than nothing. Rather sheepishly, he decided to take it with him.

He left without ringing Frances.

Vee Winter opened the door. She had on a P.V.C. apron with a design of an old London omnibus. She looked at him challengingly again, part provocative, part exhibitionist.

‘Sorry I'm a bit early, Vee. The train didn't take as long as I expected.'

‘No, they put on some fast ones during the rush-hour. But don't worry, supper's nearly ready. Geoff's just got in. He's up in the study. Go and join him. He's got some booze up there.'

The house was a small Edwardian semi, but it had been rearranged and decorated with taste and skill. Or rather, someone had started rearranging and decorating it with taste and skill. As he climbed the stairs, Charles noticed that the wall had been stripped and rendered, but not yet repapered. In the same way, someone had begun to sand the paint off the banister. Most of the wood was bare, but obstinate streaks of white paint clung in crevices. The house gave the impression that someone had started to renovate it with enormous vigour and then run out of enthusiasm. Or money.

The soprano wailing of the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde drew him to Geoffrey Winter's study. Here the conversion had very definitely been completed. Presumable the room had been intended originally as a bedroom, but it was now lined with long pine shelves which extended at opposite ends of the room to make a desk and a surface for an impressive selection of hi-fi. The shelves were covered with a cunning disarray of hooks, models, old bottles and earthenware pots. The predominant colour was a pale, pale mustard, which toned in well with the pine. On the wall facing the garden French windows gave out on to a small balcony.

Geoffrey Winter was fiddling with his hi-fi. The Wagner disc was being played on an expensive-looking grey metal turntable. Leads ran from the tuner to a small Japanese cassette radio.

‘Sorry, Charles, just getting this on to cassette. So much handier. It's nearly finished.'

‘This room's really good, Geoffrey.'

‘I like it. One of the advantages of not having children – you have space.'

‘And more money.'

Geoffrey grimaced. ‘Hmm. Depends on the size of your mortgage. And your other bills. And how work's going.'

‘What do you do?'

‘I'm an architect.' Which explained the skill of the decor.

‘Work for yourself?'

‘Yes. Well, that is to say, I work for whoever will pay for my services. So at the moment, yes, I seem to work just for myself. No one's building anything. Can I get you a drink?'

‘Thank you.'

‘It's sherry or sherry, I'm afraid.' And, Charles noticed, not a particularly good sherry. Cypress domestic. Tut, tut, getting spoiled by the ostentatious array of Hugo's drinks cupboard. It would take a distressingly short time to pick up all the little snobberies of materialism.

While Geoffrey poured the drinks, Charles moved over to the shelves to inspect a theatrical model he had noticed when he came in. It was a stage set of uneven levels and effectively placed columns. Plastic figures were grouped on the rostra.

Geoffrey answered the unspoken question as he handed Charles his sherry. ‘Set for The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I'm directing it for the Backstagers in the new year.'

‘You're a meticulous planner.'

‘I think as a director you have to be. In anything to do with the theatre, in fact. You have to have planned every detail.'

‘Yes, 1 could tell that from your Trigorin.'

‘I'm not sure whether that's meant to be a compliment or not, Charles.'

‘Nor am I.'

Geoffrey laughed.

‘No, Geoffrey, what I mean is, you had more stagecraft than the rest of the company put together, but occasionally one or two tricks – like that very slow delivery on key lines, separating the words, giving each equal emphasis – well, I was conscious of the artifice.'

Geoffrey smiled, perhaps with slight restraint. ‘Don't waste it, Charles. Keep it for the Critics' Circle. Professional criticism.'

The record had ended. The stylus worried against the centre groove. Geoffrey seemed suddenly aware of it and, with a look at Charles, he switched off the cassette player. He replaced the disc in its sleeve and marshalled it into a rack.

The conversation clipped. Charles found himself asking about the previous night's television. Dear, oh dear. Slip-pine into commuter habits. ‘Did you get back in time for your ration of rape and murder in 1, Claudius last night?'

‘No. I was back in time but I left Vee to watch it on her own. I did some work on Leontes. Trying to learn the bloody lines.'

‘Shakespearean verse at its most tortured. How do you learn them? Have you any magic method?'

“Fraid not. It's just read through, read through. Time and again.'

‘It's the only way.'

At that moment Vee called from downstairs to say the meal was ready.

There was quite a crowd in the Back Room before the Critics' Circle. And for once they had a topic of conversation other than the theatrical doings of the Breckton Backstagers.

Denis and Mary Hobbs had been burgled. They had come home from their weekend cottage at about midnight the previous night and found the house full of police. A burglar had smashed one of the diamond panes in a downstairs front window, reached through and opened it, gone upstairs and emptied the contents of Mary's jewel box.

That's what's so horrible about it,' she was saying into her fourth consolatory double gin, ‘– the idea of someone in your house, going through your things. It's ghastly.'

‘Were they vandals too? Did they dirty your bedclothes and scrawl obscenities on your walls?' asked sour Reggie hopefully.

‘No, at least we were spared that. Remarkable tidy burglars, closed all the cupboards and doors after them. No fingerprints either, so the CID. boys tell us. But After her proprietory reference to the police force, she warmed to her role as tragic queen. ‘. . . that only seems to make it worse. It was so cold-blooded. And the idea of other people invading our privacy – ooh, it makes me feel cold all over.'

‘Did they get much?' asked Reggie, with morbid interest.

‘Oh yes, there was quite a lot of good stuff in my jewellery box. Not everyday things – I dare say a lot of them I don't wear more than twice a year. But I'd got them out of the bank for this Masonic do of Denis's last Monday and it didn't seem worth putting them back, because next week there's this dinner-dance thing at the Hilton – did I tell you about that?'

The snide expressions on the faces of the surrounding Backstagers suggested that Mary missed no opportunity to give them details of her posh social life. Anyway, the question seemed to be rhetorical. The role was shifting from tragic queen to wonderful person.

‘Oh, I don't care about the stuff as jewellery. I'm not materialistic. But they're presents' Den's given me over the years, birthday, Christmases and so on. That's the trouble-the insurance will cover the value in money terms, but it can never replace what those things mean to me.

‘It serves us bloody right,' said her husband. ‘We've talked enough times about having a burglar alarm put in. But you put it off. You think it'll never happen to you.'

‘Do the police reckon there's a chance of getting the culprits?'

‘I don't know. Never commit themselves, the buggers, do they? But I think it's unlikely. They seem to reckon the best chance was missed when Bob first saw the light.'

‘What light?'

‘Oh, didn't you hear?' You tell them, Bob.'

Robert Chubb took his cue and graciously moved to centre stage. ‘I was the one who discovered the ghastly crime. Proper little Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps I should take it up professionally.

‘I'd been sorting through some stuff in the office last night after I handed the bar over to Reggie and I was walking home past Denis and Mary's at about ten-fifteen, when I saw this light.'

Years of amateur dramatics would not allow him to miss the pregnant pause. ‘The light was just by the broken win(low. It shone on the jagged glass. I thought immediately of burglars and went back to the office to phone the police. Incidentally –' he added in self-justification, in case Denis's last remark might be construed by anyone as a criticism, ‘the boys in blue told me I was absolutely right not to try to tackle the criminal. Said they get as much trouble from members of the public who fancy themselves as heroes as they do from the actual crooks.

‘Anyway, my intervention does not seem to have been completely useless. They reckon the burglar must have seen me and that's what frightened him off. He appears to have scampered away in some disarray.'

‘Yes,' Mary Hobbs chipped in, temperamentally unsuited to listening to anyone for that length of time. ‘He left his torch behind in the window sill. The police are hoping to be able to trace him through that.'

Robert Chubb, piqued at losing his punch-line, changed the subject. Like a child who dictates the rules of the game because it's his ball, he brought them back to his dramatic society. ‘Oh, Charles, about the World Premières Festival, did you bring along that play of yours? The committee would really like to have a look at it. Need a good new play, you know.'

Embarrassed at the fact that he actually had got it with him, Charles handed over the script with some apology about it being very light.

‘Oh, the lighter the better. I'm sure it has the professional touch. And, talking of that, I do hope that in your criticism this evening you will apply professional standards to
The Seagull
. We always do and hope others will. So please don't pull your punches.'

‘All right. I won't.'

As soon as Charles started speaking to the rows of earnest Backstagers in the rehearsal room, it was clear that they did not like being judged by professional standards.