Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett Read Free Book Online Page A

during their absence.
    â€˜I’ve talked to the publishers.’
    â€˜Oh yes?’ Mark sounded Olympian, detached. He was glad to have staff to sort out the minutiae for him, and glad they kept him up to date with their progress.
    â€˜They’re doing a version of a Thesaurus on CD-ROM and, yes, they are accepting tenders for the audio content.’
    â€˜That’s good,’ said Mark smugly, as if all his careful planning was about to come to fruition.
    â€˜I’ve fixed a meeting for Thursday afternoon. You’ll be free, won’t you?’
    â€˜Not sure,’ Mark replied, with the air of a man in whose diary an empty space was an endangered rarity.
    Lisa’s lips pursed. ‘Well, we’d better get on. Find out what new excitements
Dark Promises
has in store. Through you go, Charles. Afraid I’ll have to switch off the air conditioning again.’
    The last session of the recording was the most constructive of the day. Charles Paris was more fluent, he found the rhythms of Madeleine Eglantine’s prose less alien, and a good few pages got safely recorded. Only in the last half-hour, after five-thirty, did his concentration go. Sheer tiredness took over. His voice became croaky, and the fluffs proliferated.
    At ten to six, Lisa Wilson gave up the unequal struggle. ‘OK, let’s call that a wrap. Well done, Charles. Last bit was very good.’
    â€˜Thanks.’ He acknowledged the compliment with a tired grin. But inside him was the lurking fear that the recording wouldn’t have been so good without that mid-afternoon injection of alcohol. Had he really reached the stage when he needed a ‘maintenance dose’?
    As he went through into the cubicle, he ached all over, but it was a better ache than that brought on by the hangover. This was the tiredness of having achieved something.
    â€˜Only about twenty pages behind where we should be,’ said Lisa, with a hint of approbation in her voice. ‘You picked up the pace quite a bit.’
    â€˜Well done,’ Mark agreed. ‘I’d say that deserves a drink.’
    Charles saw the tiny spasm go through Lisa’s face, as she bit back her instinctive response. She had been living with Mark long enough to know that direct confrontation wasn’t the best way of dealing with him.
    â€˜You coming, love?’ her partner asked, a slight tease in his voice, once again daring her to express disapproval.
    â€˜No,’ she replied lightly. ‘Got to do a Sainsbury’s run when I finish in here.’
    â€˜OK. Well, if I’m not home when you get back, we’ll be in the Queen’s Head.’
    â€˜Fine,’ said Lisa Wilson, and only someone who, like Charles Paris, had witnessed her relationship with Mark throughout the day, would have known that what she meant was actually far from ‘fine’.
    â€˜Happy coincidence.’ Charles raised his glass, took a long swig and felt the warm glow of a second large Bell’s irradiate his parched system. ‘I mean, your studio being in Bath and our show opening in Bath.’
    â€˜What is the show? I know you told me, but I can’t remember.’ Mark Lear was also on the whisky, which he was downing as if the world’s supplies were on the verge of exhaustion.
    â€˜Not On Your Wife!’
    â€˜Don’t know it.’
    â€˜Well, you wouldn’t. It’s a new play. By Bill Blunden.’
    â€˜Oh.’ The monosyllable contained all that snobbish resistance the playwright’s work usually inspired in people with university educations. Bill Blunden may have been an audience-pleaser, but he didn’t strike much of a chord among the intelligentsia. When, every now and then, Sunday newspaper reviewers took it into their heads to rehabilitate farce as an acceptable medium of entertainment, they would home in invariably on Feydeau, Pinero or perhaps Ben Travers. Bill Blunden was too ordinary, too