Murder in the Title (14 page)

He paused. The initial impetus, the initial excitement of talking to her, had slowed down, and he felt very aware of the false brightness of their conversation. He also felt a sudden access of all the old mixed emotions, with jealousy well to the fore.

‘Are you alone?' he asked suddenly.

‘Yes.' She sounded surprised. ‘Why, shouldn't I be?'

‘Well, I thought your . . . you know, this man . . . this David . . .'

Pretty inept. So much for the cool man-of-the-world sang-froid he had hoped to bring to the situation.

‘No, of course he's not here. You've got the relationship all wrong.'

Absurdly, he felt a gush of hope at her words. Maybe, after all, they were just friends. Or maybe no longer even friends . . .

But her next words soon east him down again. ‘We couldn't live together if we wanted to. David's married. Didn't I mention that?'

It was the familiarity with which she said the name that hurt.

‘No. No. You didn't actually say . . . just that there were complications. So . . . the affair is illicit?'

‘Yes. I suppose so.' She giggled nervously. ‘I need to see you, Charles.'

‘Yes. I . . .' With an effort he held back from over-committing himself. ‘It'd be good to see you too.'

‘When are you through in Rugland Spa?'

‘Not for a month.'

‘Oh, I must see you before that. Now we've actually made contact. I do need to talk to you. There's so much I want to say.'

But she didn't get the chance to say it. At that point the pips went.

And Charles didn't have any more change.

The turn-out for the first Undress Rehearsal of
Shove It
seemed unusually high. Perhaps, Charles reflected, there were no more members of the stage crew there than there would be for any other Dress Rehearsal in an outside rehearsal room, but he did wonder about the motives of some of those present. Certainly he couldn't think of any reason why Leslie Blatt should be there other than prurient interest.

There was about the proceedings an air of unnatural casualness. People joked too loudly to show how relaxed they were. Actors and actresses studied their crosswords and knitting with much greater concentration than they could usually muster. The ones who weren't going to have to take their clothes off seemed guilty and quite as unrelaxed as the rest of the company. (There were actually very few who didn't have to strip. Royston Everett's dramatic method seemed to involve every member of the dramatis personae baring their all at some point.
Time Out
had hailed this as an important symbolic representation of the truism that men are born equal and free but are everywhere in the chains of class, convention and fascism'.)

Charles felt quite as nervous as anyone else. He reckoned it must be worse for the men than the women. Female modesty was a traditionally powerful force, but, on the other hand, they didn't have the one great worry that dominated his mind (and, he wouldn't mind betting, the minds of most of the other male actors in the company).

That worry was extremely basic, and it dated back a long time. It was a worry that had been present in changing-rooms at school, at Army medicals, and when wearing swimming trunks.

It was of course, What happens if I get an erection?

Though it was some years since Charles had worried about getting an erection at an inappropriate time (indeed, a more recent worry had been not getting one at an appropriate time), the anxiety had not diminished in intensity. The sense of shame involved was very primitive. (Presumably Adam's original recourse to the fig-leaf was born of some similar instinct.)

Charles tried to take his mind off psychosomatic stirrings in his underpants by concentrating on Tony Wensleigh. The revelations of the previous day made him see the Artistic Director in a completely different light, and his new disillusioned vision explained many inconsistencies of behaviour.

It explained, first and foremost, Tony's air of manic anxiety. The director was surely the veteran of too many productions to be that worried about the show (it wasn't as if
he
had to take
his
clothes off, after all). Even a play as disastrously chosen as
Shove It
was the sort of thing an experienced director of three-weekly rep ought to be able to take in his stride.

But, if one interpreted his anxiety as that of a man facing total exposure of many years of mishandling theatre funds, of a man prepared to kill to keep his secret quiet, everything became clearer.

The same applied to his general air of abstraction and lack of concentration on the job in hand. There was only one important date on Tony Wensleigh's horizon and that was the moment the following evening when he had to face the Theatre Board and try to prevent his own fall by shooting down his General Manager.

Tony Wensleigh was a desperate man, prepared to do anything to save his position in the Regent Theatre.

In spite of the strained atmosphere of this-is-all-perfectly-normal-nothing-unusual, some concessions had been made to the modesty of the performers. Two sets of screens had been set up either side of the acting area ‘to represent the exits and entrances to the wings' (though tape markings on the floor had been thought sufficient at all previous rehearsals). The effect of this was to give a measure of surprise to each new entrance (as well as a measure of privacy to the shyer members of the cast).

Behind the screens Charles Paris, who had the advantage of making his first entrance with clothes on, chatted with heavy unconcern to a young actor, who had thrown off all his garments immediately on arrival in the rehearsal room.

‘You done, er, this sort of thing before?'

‘Oh yes, did a year in
O, Calcutta
.'

‘Oh.' The new generation of actors had a totally different training from his own, Charles reflected.

‘And of course a good few movies.'

‘Ah. Yes. Of course.' The young man seemed amiable enough. Charles decided he dared to confide his great anxiety. ‘Tell me, when you are doing that sort of work . . .'

‘The movies, you mean?'

‘Yes . . . do you ever have any trouble with . . . erections?'

‘All the time, mate, all the time.'

‘Really?'

‘Oh yes. I've tried everything, nothing has any effect.'

‘Oh dear.'

‘Total disaster. Whatever I do, I can't keep it up.'

Ah, thought Charles,
that
sort of movie.

The opening scene of
Shove It
had been highly praised by the London critics. One of them, more pretentious and deluded than the rest, had found in it ‘parodic echoes of Restoration drama, producing by linguistic inversion a comment on the conventions of theatrical artifice.' What he actually meant was that the scene had been lifted from
The Way of the World
and the language dirtied up in the approved Royston Everett manner.

The broken-down old whore and brothel-keeper, Sylv, like Congreve's Lady Wishfort, is, in the eighteenth-century phrase, ‘at her toilet'. The maid, Foible, is represented in the modern version by the retarded teenage prostitute, Tracey. But, whereas the audience only sees selected sections of Lady Wishfort's preparations to face the world, Sylv enters stark naked and goes through the whole process of dressing and painting.

Her first line is the repetition, five times, of a well-known four-letter word, which one Liverpool critic, intoxicated by the righteousness of the play's social comment, actually had the nerve to compare to King Lear's ‘Never, never, never, never, never'.

In the Rugland Spa production of
Shove It,
the part of Sylv was being played by Kathy Kitson.

There was more than the usual anticipation at an outside Dress Rehearsal as the A.S.M.s called for quiet and the Act One beginners crowded behind the screens. Tony Wensleigh, his large eyes glistening with anxiety, announced, ‘Okay, let's take it from the top. As straight through as we can make it. We'll only stop if there's some really major disaster.'

There was a silence. The acting space between the screens was empty.

Then Kathy Kitson entered.

She was dressed in a beige, silk ruffled negligée.

‘Oh dear,' she said, in her usual beautifully modulated but totally characterless voice. ‘Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear.'

‘Sorry. I've got to stop you there.'

Kathy Kitson turned innocently to the Artistic Director ‘You said you'd only stop for major disasters.'

‘Kathy, this
is
a major disaster. Look, you know you're meant to be making this entrance completely naked . . .'

‘Yes.' She nodded confidently, as if she had given a complete answer to his question.

‘Well, Kathy, I mean I hesitate to state the obvious, but I think it must be clear to everyone here that you are not naked.'

‘Oh, is
that
it?' She spoke chidingly, as if he had picked her up on some minuscule detail of performance.

‘Yes, that is it. Look, I'm sorry, Kathy, but we're beyond the moment for coyness. When you read the script and agreed to play the part, it was made quite clear to you that you would have to take your clothes off. I remember, we had long discussions with your agent about that very matter and got his full assurance of your agreement.'

Kathy Kitson stretched her neck loftily. ‘Tony dear, when you book an experienced actress, you don't only book the actress, you also book the experience and the judgement that that experience brings. And my judgement is that this scene is more effective with me
acting
naked than actually
being
naked.'

‘
Acting
naked?' the director repeated weakly.

‘Yes, darling. I knew you'd agree.' Kathy Kitson moved back towards the screens with an air of triumph. ‘Would you like me to make the entrance again?' she asked with sweet humility.

‘Kathy . . .' Tony Wensleigh spoke with great weariness. ‘That's not all.'

‘Something else, love?'

‘The line you spoke was not the line that Royston Everett wrote.'

The actress conceded that this was indeed the case. ‘But my line does get over the same feeling as his. And so much more tastefully, don't you think?'

The rehearsal did proceed, after a fashion, though Kathy Kitson resolutely continued to wear her negligée. At the moment she was meant to put on her dress, she removed the garment to reveal a delightful silken petticoat.

She also resolutely continued to expurgate Royston Everett's lines.

And Tony Wensleigh, sunk in an apathetic gloom whose cause Charles felt confident he now knew, made no further attempt to stop her.

The rest of the cast who had to strip did so without demur. As garment after garment slipped off, revealing no greater excitement than the odd appendix scar and some surprising evidence of dyed hair, both female and male, Charles felt his main anxiety recede. Human flesh is not aphrodisiac under all circumstances, and in the goose-pimply chill of the Drill Hall, Rugland Spa, it had the opposite effect. Charles found his mind dwelling on butchers' shops rather than sex, and when his own turn came to reveal all, he hardly thought about what he was doing.

The only person who did seem to find the flesh on display exciting was the one person who shouldn't have been there, Leslie Blatt. Given the evidence he had already shown of a Peeping Tom mentality, it was no great surprise, but Charles did find it mildly revolting. The playwright was of a generation to whom permissiveness, if it came at all, had come late, and his reactions were those of a twelve-year-old sniggering over a dirty picture.

Charles felt glad for Nella Lewis's sake that she wasn't in
Shove It
, because she was so obviously the centre of the old man's smutty desires. Laurie Tichbourne wasn't in the play either, so he was not around to protect her from unwanted attentions. On the other hand, Charles reflected, he couldn't actually see Laurie doing anything so positive, even if he had been there.

Nella was prompting, because at this stage of rehearsal the lines were still a little shaky, arid, since no one could ever quite predict what cue they were going to get from Kathy Kitson, there were frequent breakdowns in the dialogue. The A.S.M. sat demurely on a chair behind one of the screens, her eyes fixed on the page, perhaps just in punctilious discharge of her duties or maybe out of modesty in the face of all that naked flesh.

Leslie Blatt hung around behind the same screen, alternately ogling other female members of the cast and passing comments to Nella. As Charles made his naked exit after the police raid on the brothel, he heard the old man breathe in the A.S.M.'s ear, ‘Pretty strong meat, this. Couldn't have written this sort of stuff in my day. Didn't know what I was missing, eh?' He sniggered adolescently. ‘Still, healthier times now. Healthier attitudes people've got. Very healthy, very nice to see all these naked bodies around, eh?' Then he leant forward, pressing himself very close against the back of Nella's chair. ‘Though, of course, there are some one would rather see than others.'

The girl's eyes did not leave the page, nor did any part of her body move except for her right arm. But that moved decisively, and the sharp point of its elbow was unerringly accurate.

‘Mmmf' squeaked Leslie Blatt.

And ‘Good girl,' thought Charles Paris, as the old man moved away from the chair, doubled up with pain.

The police raid ended Act One of
Shove It
. It was a kind of climax and, given Royston Everett's dramatic method, this meant that more people had their clothes off at that point than at any other in the course of the play (except for the end of Act Two). The last words before the interval were spoken by Sylv and were an exact repetition of the five with which she opened the play (a device which had prompted one of the sillier critics to speak of ‘an almost classical demonstration of cyclical unity').