An Amateur Corpse Read Free

rehearsals, we only got away one weekend since August.’
    â€˜Still we are going away this weekend.’ Again the edge of reproof in his wife’s voice.
    Denis compensated quickly. ‘Oh yes. It’s just one of the penalties of marrying talent, eh?’ Another unmotivated eruption. Mary smiled and he reckoned he could risk a little joke. ‘She’s spent so much time here recently I kept saying why didn’t she move in? After all, we’re only next door.’ This too was apparently very funny.
    Mary graciously allowed him this little indulgence and then felt it was time to draw attention to her magnanimity. ‘Still, this weekend I’m going to make it all up to you, aren’t I?’ She took her husband’s hand and patted it with a coquettishness which Charles found unattractive in a woman in her fifties. ‘First thing in the morning, when all the rest of the naughty Backstagers are sleeping off their hangovers; we’ll be in the new Rover sweeping off down to the cottage for a little delayed weekend. All tomorrow, and all Monday – well, till nine or so when we’ll drive back. Just the two of us. A second honeymoon – or is it a third?’
    â€˜Three hundredth,’ said Denis, which was the cue for another explosion of merriment.
    Charles escaped to get more drinks. Soon the wine would cease to taste of anything and his bad temper would begin to dissipate.
    While he queued at sour Reggie’s bar, he looked around at the kindling party. There was music now, music rather younger than the average age of those present. But the pounding beat was infectious.
    As the room filled, he was increasingly aware of the common complaint of amateur dramatic societies – that there are always more women than men. And some of them were rather nice. He felt a little glow of excitement. No one knew him down in Breckton. It was like being given a whole new copybook to blot.
    Some couples were dancing already. Charlotte Mecken was out there, with her arms around Clive Steele. They were moving together sensuously to the slow pounding of the music. But what they were doing was paradoxically not sexy. It had the air of a performance, as if they were still on stage, as if their closeness was for the benefit of the audience, not because it expressed any real mutual attraction.
    The same could be said of the Trigorin, Geoffrey Winter. He was dancing with a pretty young girl, whose paint-spattered jeans suggested she was one of the stage staff. They were not dancing close, but in a jerky slow motion pantomime. Geoffrey moved well, his body flicking in time to the music, like a puppet out of control. But again it was a performance of a body out of control, not genuine abandon. Each movement was carefully timed; it was well-done, but calculated.
    Charles had noticed the same quality in the man’s stage performance. It had been enormously skillful and shown more technique than the rest of the cast put together, but it had been mannered and ultimately artificial, a performance from the head rather than the heart.
    The man was good-looking in an angular way. Very thin, with grey hair and pale eyes. He wore a black shirt, black cord jeans and desert boots. There was something commanding about him, attractive in not just the physical sense of the word.
    As Charles watched he saw the man change partners and start a new dance with another little totty. ‘Enjoying himself, isn’t he?”
    He turned to the owner of the voice which had spoken beside him. A young woman of about thirty. Short mousy hair, wide green eyes. Attractive. She was following Charles’s gaze towards the dancing Trigorin. ‘My husband.’
    She said it wryly. Not bitterly or critically, but just as if it were a fact that ought to be established.
    â€˜Ah. I’m Charles Paris.’
    â€˜Thought, you must be.’ Charles felt the’ inevitable actor’s excitement that she was