THE STRANGLING ON THE STAGE
A Fethering Mystery
Simon Brett
To
Michael Green
(Author of The Art of Coarse Acting),
with admiration
ONE
‘And the trouble is,’ said Storm Lavelle, ‘it’s just total murder.’
‘What is?’ asked Jude.
‘My life. Everything.’
Storm Lavelle was stretched out on the treatment table in the front room of Woodside Cottage in the seaside village of Fethering. It was February, cold outside, but snug with the open fire in Jude’s front room. The scent of aromatic candles on the mantelpiece mingled with the smell of burning wood.
Storm had in theory come for a healing session, though Jude knew by experience she was basically there to unload the latest aggravations of her life. Which was fair enough. Jude also knew that listening was frequently as effective as any other form of healing.
The irony was that Storm Lavelle also practised as a healer, and she was the ultimate example of where the ‘healer, heal thyself’ principle broke down. Though very good with her clients, impressing them with her calm and stability, Storm was actually as mad as several container-loads of frogs. Her volatile personality ensured that she skittered from one alternative therapeutic cure-all to another. It was remarkable that she’d stuck with the healing, though it was now only as a practitioner rather than a patient. Storm had long since decided that healing was inadequate to her own needs, and embarked on courses of reflexology, kinesiology, homeopathy, naturopathy and any other ‘ologies’ or ‘opathies’ that came to her attention.
She had also dabbled in a wide range of leisure activities. Many of these were fitness-related. Within the previous couple of years Storm had, to Jude’s knowledge, tried Aerobics, Aqua Aerobics, Padel Tennis, Pilates and Zumba. She had also taken up macramé, bird watching and bridge, and joined a choir.
None of this worried Jude or stood in the way of the two women’s friendship. Her attitude to her fellow human beings reflected a line that had once been quoted to her, the view of someone called Joe Ancis that ‘the only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well’. And beneath all Storm’s traumas and dramas, Jude could recognize an honest, caring person whose only fault – if indeed it was a fault – was to get both too deeply and too shallowly involved with everything.
This applied particularly to Storm Lavelle’s love life. As with alternative therapies, she also skittered from relationship to relationship. And in each one she made the same error, believing wholeheartedly that at last, after all of her past failures, she had found the perfect man on whom to lavish all of her affection. Invariably the men, frightened by the intensity of this passion, soon wanted to disengage. And Storm’s heart would be broken once again.
It wasn’t that she was unattractive, far from it. She was in her forties, some ten years younger than Jude, but unlike her friend, didn’t carry a spare ounce of weight anywhere. This was partly due to the cocktail of diets and health fads that she followed, but the traumas of her frequent break-ups also played their part. She had innocent, pained blue eyes and was a natural blonde, though that original colour was very rarely in evidence. Storm was as fickle with new hairstyles as she was with everything else in her life.
That day her hair was cropped short and coloured a striking aubergine. She was dressed in black leggings and a sloppy yellow T-shirt. The precision of her make-up made her look almost like a geisha girl.
Jude sometimes wondered where her friend’s name had come from. Surely no parents would actually christen a child ‘Storm’? She wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that in her younger years Storm had tried out as many names as she had other elements in her life. But she’d stayed with Storm Lavelle for the duration of their friendship.
Jude was giving her a basic relaxing massage, while the more important therapy of Storm unburdening herself continued. Storm would sometimes do a massage for Jude, so in these sessions no money ever changed hands. And whichever one was client or healer, it was still Storm who did most of the talking.
‘I told you I’d split up with Paul, didn’t I?’
‘You didn’t actually, but I’d kind of pieced it together from your manner.’
‘What is it with men? One moment they’re all over you like a rash, then suddenly they go all cold and start mumbling about “needing their own space”.’
‘Yes.’ Jude paused, then decided to say it anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d raised the point. ‘You don’t think, do you, Storm, that it might be because you always go at relationships so full-on, you know, with all guns blazing? Maybe if you started a bit more casually …?’
‘I can’t be casual about love. I have to follow my heart. I knew when I met Paul that he was absolutely the one for me. And he said the same – he said he’d never met anyone like me.’
Jude reckoned that was probably true, but she didn’t voice the thought.
‘So how can someone be madly in love with you, saying he’s having the best sex with you he’s ever had, and then within a couple of weeks say he “needs his own space”?’
‘If women knew the answer to that question, Storm, the relationship between the sexes might be considerably easier.’
‘Yes. Do you think men are just differently wired from women?’
‘If I did, I wouldn’t be the first to have expressed that opinion. But I think there are more similarities than differences between the genders. Everyone, male or female, is afraid of having their personality swamped by another person.’
‘And are you saying that’s what I do, Jude? Swamp people’s personalities?’
‘I’m just saying that if you took a more gradual, a slower approach into relationships …’
‘But I’m not a gradual person, I’m not a slow person. I have to obey my instincts.’
‘Even if those instincts keep pushing you in the wrong direction?’
‘What do you mean – “pushing me in the wrong direction”?’
‘Well, look, Paul isn’t the first man with whom your relationship has ended in much the same way.’
‘How can you say that, Jude?’
‘From simple observation. Do you want me to name names? Carl, George, Nick, Harry—’
‘Those relationships were nothing like what I had with Paul. I knew from the start that Paul was the real thing.’
‘I heard you say the same when you first met Carl … and George … and Nick … and—’
‘No, I’m sure I never said that with them.’
It wasn’t worth arguing the point, though Jude’s recollections of Storm’s announcement of each new man in her life were extremely accurate.
‘Anyway,’ Storm announced, as she had so many times before, ‘I’m giving up men.’
‘In favour of what?’
‘Other things. I’ve wasted so much of my life agonizing over them, it’s time I got on with the things that really interest me.’
‘And what might they be?’ asked Jude, wondering what new fad was about to be revealed.
‘Acting,’ Storm replied. ‘I’m really going to concentrate on my acting.’
Now this was not as foolish an answer as Jude had been expecting. Storm Lavelle was actually rather good at acting. Perhaps the wide variety in her own emotional life had enabled her to see inside the characters of others. Or, then again, like many with a shaky sense of their own identity, maybe she found a security in playing a role, in being a different person.
Jude had been dragged along as support to a selection of West Sussex’s church halls where her friend had been appearing with one or other of the local amateur dramatic societies. And though a few of the productions had been a bit ropey, Storm Lavelle had always shone in the not very glittering company. Acting was also a fad that she had stuck with. Whatever else was going on in her life, she was usually involved in rehearsal for some play or other. Jude, whose earlier career as a model had led to a year or two of acting, recognized genuine talent and was sure that her friend had it. Whether Storm also had the temperament and tenacity to pursue the theatre as a full-time career Jude was less certain.