He overcompensated by the heartiness of his reply. ‘A cup of tea would be really… grand.’ Her flash of suspicion made him wish he had chosen another word. He’d forgotten how sensitive she was to anything that could be construed as criticism of her Yorkshireness.
She made the tea and Charles kept up a relentless flow of banter to stop himself from making a pass at her. ‘How are things in Headingley then?’
‘They don’t change. I’ve lived here thirty-four years and lost hope that they ever will.’
‘Still in the same job?’
‘Oh yes. I think Perkis and Levy, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, would cease to function without my secretarial assistance.’
‘Enjoy it?’
She spread open her hands in a gesture which showed up the pointlessness of the question.
‘And socially?’
‘Socially life here is okay if you’re a teenybopper going down the discos or an elegant blue-rinse who likes bridge and golf. I’m neither.’
‘No.’ The little gusts of interest which had been propelling the conversation along died down to silence. Charles was morbidly aware of the outline of Ruth’s nipples through the cotton of her patterned blouse.
She broke the silence. ‘This show you’re doing, is it the one at the Palace?’
‘Yes.’
‘With Christopher Milton in it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s good,’ she said with more enthusiasm than usual. What’s he like?’
The classic question, as asked by every member of the public about every star. And virtually unanswerable. No reply can possibly satisfy the questioner, who usually has only thought as far as the question. Charles tried. ‘Well, he’s…’ And then realised he could not even answer to his own satisfaction. ‘I don’t know.’
He was glad of the seven o’clock call at the Palace Theatre, as it temporarily took off the pressure of Ruth’s presence.
After David Meldrum’s tentative notes on the Saturday run-through (interrupted by less tentative ones from Christopher Milton), Charles sorted out a later call with the stage management and set off to investigate the adjacent pub.
It was small and dingy, one of the few old buildings which had survived the extensive modernization of Leeds city centre. A few regulars sat around in despairing huddles while a younger group played silent, grim darts. Charles ordered a large Bell’s, which they didn’t have, and got a large Haig. As he turned to find a space on one of the railway waiting-room benches, he recognised a figure in a blue donkey jacket hunched against the bar. ‘Hello, Kevin.’
The bleary eyes showed that the writer had been there since opening time. Charles received an indifferent drunken greeting.
‘Not a bad theatre, is it?’
‘Not a bad theatre? Huh. Are you telling me about the Palace Theatre? That’s good. I’ve been seeing shows at the Palace since I was six. Pantomimes, all sorts. I was brought up here. Meanwood. Went to the grammar school. We were always brought on outings to the Palace, when there was anything cultural on, touring companies, all that. Always came to the Palace. It was my ambition, when I was in my teens, to have something of mine done, performed at the Palace. That and losing my virginity.’
‘And now I assume you’ve managed both.’
‘One happened, near as dammit, in the back row of the Cottage Road Cinema.’ He let out an abrupt, dirty laugh. Then his face darkened. ‘But the other…’
‘The other you achieve tomorrow. First night.’
Kevin looked him straight in the eyes for a moment before he spoke. ‘Oh yes. Tomorrow. First night. But first night of what? Do you think I’ll feel any pride in that?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be a good show. It’s inevitable that everyone’s a bit jumpy just before it starts.’ Charles had not decided yet what he really thought of the show, but he thought reassurance was required.
As it turned out, he was wrong. ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean that what’ll go on at that theatre tomorrow will have nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh, I know it’s changed a bit from the original production, but that’s inevitable when — ’
‘Changed a bit — huh! There’s almost nothing in that show that I put there.’
‘I’m sure a lot of it’s still quite close to the original.’
‘Balls. I should never have agreed. If I’d known what a total cock-up they were going to make of it… okay, they wanted to get in somebody else to do the music… all right, maybe Joe Coatley’s music wasn’t that commercial, but I thought at least they’d leave my text alone. I felt bad about dropping Joe at the time, but now I bloody envy him. I’d give anything to be out of it.’
Deliberately crude, Charles mentioned the money.
‘Oh yes, there’ll be plenty of money. Run forever, a show like this, or at least until his Lordship gets bored with it. You know, I used to think I’d do anything for money — that was when I hadn’t got any — thought I’d write anything, pornography, all sorts. I did, I wrote a real hard-core porn book — filth, all about whips and Alsatians, real muck. I got a hundred pounds for that, but I tell you, I’m more proud of that than I will be when this load of shit’s running in the West End and bringing me in my so many per cent a week.’ He was in full flow, spurred on by the drink. ‘Look, I’m a writer, a writer. If I didn’t want to be a writer, I’d be some other bloody thing, an accountant, a clerk in the Town Hall, I don’t care what. But that’s not what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a writer. And why does someone want to be a writer?’
Charles had his own views on the subject, but didn’t volunteer them. Anyway, Kevin’s question turned out to be rhetorical. ‘I’ll tell you why someone wants to be a writer. Because what he writes is his own, it may be rubbish, but it’s his own rubbish. No one can take that away from him. He wrote it.’ He seemed to realise he was becoming almost incoherently repetitive and paused to collect his thoughts before continuing. He swayed slightly.
‘And that is why I don’t like my work being destroyed by some jumped-up idiot of an actor, who couldn’t even write his own name.’
Charles found himself (not for the first time) taking up a position of boring middle-aged reasonableness. ‘Kevin, one has to face it that there are some things which work on the page that don’t work in performance.’
‘I accept that. Good God, I’ve worked on plays before. I’m used to doing rewrites and changing things and cutting things down, but in the past it’s always been a matter of discussing it, not just some prima donna ballsing up whole scenes so that he gets all the lines.’
Charles smarted at the remembrance of his own suffering from Christopher Milton on a line-hunt, but continued his defence. ‘Look, I know he’s got an unfortunate manner, but he does have a real genius for the theatre. He knows what’s going to work and what — ’
‘He knows what’s going to work for him, yes, but he doesn’t give a bugger about the rest of the show. He’s already made nonsense of the plot by cutting down the Young Marlow scenes to nothing. The show’ll be a great shapeless mess.’
‘The audience will love it.’
‘Audience, huh. What the hell do they know? The audience that comes to this show will be so force-fed with television they won’t notice what it’s about. They’ll spend all their time waiting for the commercials. They’d come and see him if he was peeling potatoes on stage. They’d come and see anything that they saw on their screen. A jug of water, as featured on the Nine O’Clock News, that’s what they’d come to see.’
He paused for breath. Charles took the opportunity to buy more drinks, hoping to break the monologue. But when he’d handed Kevin a large whisky, raised his own and said ‘Cheers’, it was instantly resumed. ‘There’s a lot of good stuff in that show which has just been dumped. Dumped and replaced by corny rubbish. I know. I’m not saying I’m the greatest writer there ever was, but I know when I’ve written a good line, and I don’t write them so that some idiot can just come along and…’ He lost his thread and when he came back his voice was cold with concentration. ‘If he takes anything else out of this show, I’ll kill the bastard. I’ve warned him, I’ve warned him that I can get nasty, and I will. Do you know, last Friday he was even saying he didn’t know whether Liberty Hall was a good number or not. Liberty Hall, I mean that’s the best number in the show. It’s the only one they kept from the original. They had to, they’d never get a better number than that, would they? Go on, you say what you think of it. Of that song.’