‘Oh, lots on and off. Most more off than on.’ Mort screwed up his face in self-parody and said limply, ‘Men can be bastards’. Then he dropped back to his customary level of exaggeration. ‘She had just finished something that had been going on for. . ooh, six months, I think.’
‘Who was the lucky fellow?’
Mort Verdon looked at Charles with mock severity. ‘Now there’s no need to be ironical, boofle. I doubt if you’d know the guy. anyway. He did a series here about six months ago.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Walter Proud,’ said Mort Verdon as he swept back into the conference room.
CHAPTER FOUR
The morning after the
But it was no good. He was awake. After a few moments of tight-eyed pretence, he let them open again.
He supposed he should be grateful that he slept as well as he did. A lot of his contemporaries complained of long watches through the night and assumed sleeping pills to be a regular part of their diet for the rest of their days.
Charles felt a perverse righteousness from the fact that he hardly ever took sleeping pills. Such a solitary activity. His own solution to the sleep problem, alcohol, was at least taken socially. Usually. Taking sleeping pills was never social. Except in the case of a suicide pact. And that was hardly convivial.
Of course alcohol had its disadvantages, but it was so long since he hadn’t woken up with a furred tongue and tender head that he hardly noticed them.
He looked round his bedsitter, trying to delay thinking about things he didn’t want to think about. The room had changed little during the seventeen years of his occupancy. He had moved into Hereford Road within a year of walking out on Frances and, except for periods of working out of town or the occasional good fortune of finding a lady willing to share her bed, he had been there ever since.
The fixtures and fittings of the room were unaltered. Still the same low upholstered chair and asymmetrical wooden one, both painted grey by some earlier occupant. The same low table, masked by magazines and papers. The fact that these now covered the portable typewriter expressed well the likelihood of Charles ever getting down to serious writing again. His own contributions to the decor, yellow candlewick on the single bed and a different plastic curtain suspended to hide the sink and gas-ring, had now been there for over ten years, and reached a kind of dull middle age that made them impossible to distinguish from the rest.
Contemplation of the room didn’t cheer him.
Perhaps he should get up.
He gave this unwelcome thought a minute or two to settle in his mind.
Charles always envied people who could spring gazelle-like from bed and bound straight up the gradient of the day. He awoke always to the North Face of the morning, and usually held long internal discussions about whether or not to call the whole expedition off, before achieving the precarious base camp of a cup of coffee, from which he could at least contemplate the arduous climb ahead.
So it was on this occasion. When he had made the coffee, he animated it with a slug of Bell’s whisky. This was a practice which in principle he deplored, but increasingly he found his principles would waver in the face of life’s practicalities.
With the coffee in his hand, he could delay thinking no longer.
There were two things he didn’t want to think about. The first was his wife. The school of which Frances was headmistress would soon be breaking up for Easter and he really felt he should get in touch to find out whether she was going away for the holiday. In spite of their estrangement, he liked to know her movements and, though they met comparatively rarely, he could still miss her when he knew her to be away. Also, he wanted to see her.
Still, thinking of Frances did raise all kinds of emotional questions whose answers he wished to continue to evade, so he focused his mind on the less personally challenging subject of Sadie Wainwright’s death.
Though he had satisfactorily accepted the common verdict of death by accident or perhaps, following the Ernie Franklyn Junior thesis, death by suicide, there was still one jarring element he couldn’t reason away.
It was what he alone had heard in the Production Control cubicle on the day of
If only he had heard just a few seconds more, so that he could identify whom she had been addressing. The words, out of context, sounded ominous, but it was quite possible that they were just another example of showbusiness hyperbole.
He wished he knew a bit more about television studios and their sound systems. He knew that a variety of people could talk back into the Production Control box. Certainly the Sound and Vision Controllers on either side could. So could the four cameramen. . and of course the Floor Managers with their little walkie-talkies. Then he was sure he’d heard PAs talking to people or places with technical names like VTR and Telecine. And there was always sound from the studio microphones on their booms.
In fact, Sadie could have been speaking from almost anywhere in the immediate studio area. That didn’t give him any clues as to who she was with. Maybe it could be investigated, but two months had passed and, apart from the dauntingly technical nature of the enquiry, Charles thought it unlikely that anyone was going to remember exactly which microphone might have been left open to catch Sadie’s words.
But he did now have another line of enquiry. It was one he was reluctant to pursue, because it involved a friend. But he could no longer pretend that he knew nothing of the dead girl’s private life. And he had got Walter Proud’s phone number.
He decided that they perhaps should meet for a drink.
Walter was very apologetic that they had to meet in a pub. ‘I’d have said come round to my place, but really, I’ve hardly got a place for anyone to come to now.’
‘Well, never mind. I’m always happy with a pub.’
But it still seemed to worry Walter. ‘Thing is, I’ve moved from that service flat in Kensington. I’d have invited you round there, but the place I’m in now. . well, it’s really just a bedsitter.’
The emphasis he put on the last word amused Charles. ‘Oh, come on, that’s not the end of the world. I live in a bedsitter, you know.’
‘Yes, I know. I mean, it’s all right for someone like you, but for someone with. .’ Walter Proud realised he was on the brink of being insulting and stopped. Charles, who wouldn’t have been offended anyway, wondered what the next word would have been. Standards? He certainly had standards, but on the whole they didn’t concern material possessions.
Walter tried to cover up. ‘What I mean is, the last few years have been a series of shocks for me. Angela and I had been married for eighteen years, you know, and we’d been in that house in Datchet for twelve. So when we split up, it was quite an upheaval. I mean, don’t get me wrong — I wanted the divorce, no question, but it was. . an upheaval. And then leaving the BBC so soon after, and I’d done. . what?. . fifteen years with the Corporation. . well, it all made sense at the time, and it was the right thing to do, careerwise, but. . er. .’
He seemed unable to resolve the sentence.
‘Do you see Angela at all now?’
‘No.’ Walter Proud sounded very hurt. ‘No, she won’t see me. I see the girls occasionally, but. .’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Charles formally, giving Walter the opportunity to move on to another subject.
But the producer was unwilling to do so. ‘What makes it worse is that she’s ill.’
‘Angela?’
‘Yes. She had a growth, apparently, on her breast, about a year ago and had a. . what do they call it. . mastectomy. But apparently it didn’t get rid of it all. It’s spreading.’
‘Oh.’
‘I only hear this from the girls, you know. I keep offering to go and see Angela, but they say, no, she doesn’t
