thereâs no need to be ironical, boofle. I doubt if youâd know the guy. anyway. He did a series here about six months ago.â
âWhat was his name?â
âWalter Proud,â said Mort Verdon as he swept back into the conference room.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MORNING AFTER the
Strutters
read-through, Charlesâs eyes opened with their customary reluctance and closed again with their customary promptness, hoping to recapture the dwindling oblivion of sleep.
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 hadnât 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 didnât 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 didnât 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 Bellâs whisky. This was a practice which in principle he deplored, but increasingly he found his principles would waver in the face of lifeâs practicalities.
With the coffee in his hand, he could delay thinking no longer.
There were two things he didnât 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 Wainwrightâs death.
Though he had satisfactorily accepted the common verdict of death by accident or perhaps, following the Ernie Franklyn Junior thesis, death by
âWhat was his name?â
âWalter Proud,â said Mort Verdon as he swept back into the conference room.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MORNING AFTER the
Strutters
read-through, Charlesâs eyes opened with their customary reluctance and closed again with their customary promptness, hoping to recapture the dwindling oblivion of sleep.
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 hadnât 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 didnât 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 didnât 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 Bellâs whisky. This was a practice which in principle he deplored, but increasingly he found his principles would waver in the face of lifeâs practicalities.
With the coffee in his hand, he could delay thinking no longer.
There were two things he didnât 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 Wainwrightâs death.
Though he had satisfactorily accepted the common verdict of death by accident or perhaps, following the Ernie Franklyn Junior thesis, death by
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