Killings on Jubilee Terrace Read Free Page B

permanently. None of you is indispensable. Got it?’
    Oh, they had got it. At heart they hadalways known it. And in fact it was in its way heartening, especially for the younger actors: should that call come from the National, should that Hollywood film materialise, they would not be letting the side down by accepting. The show would go on.
    The show, at present, was a wedding that could have taken place at any time over the past three or four years. Arthur Bradley had come to Jubilee Terrace as a bluff, slightly randy art teacher. Then, with the versatility that characterises soap-opera destinies, he had taken over the corner shop. Maureen Cooke was at the time in the throes of marital difficulties which had viewers ringing and writing in with advice and support. After the divorce it was not long before she took up with Arthur, and soon she was moving in with him, taking her children, and helping to run the shop. By now she also had a baby by him. Whether the Bradleys should have been, or could have been, married in church was a point that did not bother the writers of Jubilee Terrace . They were being married now so that the event could joyfully offset the death of Bert Porter. A registry office do wouldn’t have fitted the bill at all.
    Now Garry Kopps and Shirley Merritt (who played Arthur and Maureen) were standing at the altar feeling rather foolish. This seemed like a very ceremonial form of coitus interruptus.Bill Garrett, holding the ring as if it was a hot potato, looked equally disconcerted, but that was by the sudden appearance of his wife. She was not a good argument for weddings in any of their forms. Reggie Friedman had gone to the back of the church, where a finishing class from the West Yorkshire College of Music and Drama was watching filming. Reggie was eyeing them speculatively. The congregation, meanwhile, was talking in low tones, as congregations will do in real life. The fact of being in church was affecting the actors.
    ‘I think it’ll be an awful shame if he does replace the vicar,’ said Winnie Hey, Lady Wharton, leaning forward to talk to Marjorie Harcourt-Smith in almost inaudible tones. ‘The vicar and Dr Losborne are not exactly characters, but they’re both what you might call touchstones in Jubilee Terrace .’
    ‘A drunken vicar is no sort of touchstone,’ said Marjorie, reasonably. ‘Now I’ve thought it over, I see Reggie’s point. He has no choice. If he filmed him in his present state he’d get protests from Alcohol Concern, and probably from the Church of England high-ups as well.’
    ‘I hate to see the old characters go,’ said Carol Chisholm.
    ‘I hate to see some of them come back,’ said Winnie. ‘Hamish Fawley being a case in point.But not the old dependables who represent the community at large.’
    ‘I suppose a drunken vicar could represent the community,’ said Marjorie thoughtfully. ‘Characters in soaps seem to spend even more time drinking than they do sleeping around.’
    Winnie Hey nodded, taking the point seriously.
    ‘I love this sort of session,’ she said contentedly. ‘When you get paid just for sitting around and being seen, and having hardly any lines.’
    ‘You’ll be getting your share of the action when your Cyril comes back,’ said Carol. Winnie shuddered.
    ‘Don’t mention his Second Coming,’ she said. ‘I did go to the scriptwriters and put it to them that the treatment should be mainly Hamish lying in bed looking pale and interesting, and me sitting by it looking anguished. Even that would have taxed my acting abilities, because a wasting disease is what Hamish has been asking for for years. My God, what a toad that man is! Anyway, they weren’t having any. They said it would be an inadequate representation of the Jubilee Terrace response to the renewed threat of TB.’
    ‘What did they mean by that?’
    ‘I don’t imagine even they knew. But what was clear is that there are going to be a lot of confrontations between him