Sicken and So Die Read Free

home to at the end of the day.
    One unexpected side-effect of this domesticity was that Charles was drinking less. The automatic loose-end recourse to the pub at the end of rehearsals seemed less imperative, and the too-many nightcaps of Bell’s to deaden the end of the day were no longer necessary. He and Frances would share a bottle of wine over dinner, but often that was the sum total of his day’s intake. For Charles Paris, that made quite a change.
    His new circumstances generally made quite a change.
    It was early days, mind. Less than two weeks they’d been cohabiting, and neither of them wanted to threaten the fragility of what was happening by talking about it.
    Promising, though. Somehow, Charles felt confident that the thoughts going through Frances’s mind matched his own. It still wasn’t too late for them to make something of their lives together.
    Yes, Charles Paris reflected, as the train sped towards Great Wensham and the
Twelfth Night
photocall, things are actually going rather well.

Chapter Two
    THE FORMAL Elizabethan gardens of Chailey Ferrars could have been designed as a setting for
Twelfth Night.
Their geometric patterns offered a choice of avenues down which Malvolio could walk. Their statuary, low walls and neatly clipped box trees offered manifold hiding places from which Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Fabian could observe the steward picking up the letter from ‘The Fortunate Unhappy’ and falling for Maria’s trick to make him believe his mistress Olivia loved him.
    The Asphodel production of the play was not to be performed in the formal gardens, however. They were far too precious, far too carefully maintained, to be overrun by actors and picnic-toting members of the public. The acting area for
Twelfth Night
was further away from the house, in a walled field at one end of which a natural amphitheatrical shape had been enhanced by the construction of a grass-covered mound and the planting of a semicircle of trees around it. For performances a wooden stage was erected on the mound and the backstage area cordoned off with hessian screens.
    It was the Chailey Ferrars Trustees who imposed conditions on which parts of the estate could be used. They were a body of men and women of prelapsarian conservatism, who saw it as their God-given mission to resist every proposed change to the house or gardens. They would really have liked the public excluded totally from the premises, but had been grudgingly forced to accept the financial necessity of paying visitors.
    At first the Trustees had resisted the overtures of the Great Wensham Festival Society to stage plays at Chailey Ferrars. But by the third year, having seen how much other businesses had benefited from the new custom attracted by the festival, they had agreed to very limited access to the grounds for two public performances of
Much Ado About Nothing
. Again, grudgingly, they had had to concede that the experiment had not led to wholesale vandalism of their precious property, and that, as well as being an artistic success, it had indeed proved rather profitable to the Trust.
    From then on the Chailey Ferrars Shakespeare had become a regular feature – in fact, the main focus – of the Great Wensham Festival, though the Trustees never allowed its continuance to be taken for granted. Each year the Festival Director, Julian Roxborough-Smith – or, in the event, his administrator, Moira Handley – had to go through an elaborate square dance of application and supplication until the Trustees – with an ever-increasing number of cautions and provisos – agreed to let the Chailey Ferrars grounds be used for yet another Shakespearean production.
    It was a measure of Moira Handley’s skilful management of the Trustees that, though there would never be any possibility of the play being staged in the formal gardens, she had elicited permission for the
Twelfth Night
photocall to be held