The most famous retirement home for members of the acting profession is Denville Hall in Northwood, Middlesex. Damian Grantchester wasn’t in that one, but it was clear from the way Charles was greeted by the garrulous lady on reception that the home in Dorking also had strong theatrical ties.
‘Yes, we got your message, Mr Paris. Damian will be delighted to see you. He loves talking over old times with his theatre chums. And the weekends can be quite long for him if he has no visitors.’
‘I can’t stay long, I’m afraid. Saturday matinee.’
‘Yes, of course. You’re in the play at the Duke of Kent’s, aren’t you?’ She was clearly well informed about current theatre. ‘I recognized your name when I got the message.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Charles, with the actor’s hunger for validation.
But the receptionist didn’t go on to praise his performances. She just asked, ‘Did you work with Damian?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘Everything’s a long time ago when you get to our age, Mr Paris,’ she said, prompting him to wonder if he did actually look as old as she did. ‘Oh, and I can’t keep on calling you “Mr Paris”. May I call you “Charles”?’
‘Please do.’
‘Damian’s in the conservatory, Charles. You get a lovely view of the garden from there.’
It was a lovely view. The double-glazed conservatory was toasty warm like the rest of the building, insulated from the frosted world outside.
If he hadn’t known who it was, Charles would not have recognized Damian Grantchester. Back in Bridport days, the director had been pencil-thin and sharp-featured, with shoulder-length black hair, a coiled-up spring of nervous energy. He had the kind of body you could never imagine turning to fat.
And yet that is what time had achieved. Damian was not fat on the scale of Gideon, but his flesh did seem to be spilling out from the wicker armchair in which he sat. He was dressed in burgundy elephant-cord trousers, a thick navy-blue cardigan done up with leather toggles, and his signature paisley cravat at the neck. His swollen feet were almost contained in ugly black shoes with Velcro strapping. The hair was still worn long, but now white and very sparse. The shape of his shining cranium was clear through the wisps.
Yet, the longer he spent with him, the more Charles recognized of the old Damian Grantchester. The eyes still flashed with the same fire. The characteristic hand gestures, though now slower, hadn’t changed. And the familiar waspish wit had not lost its sting.
Charles had forgotten how much Damian Grantchester relished gossip. And gossip of a particularly vicious kind. It soon became clear that, although tucked away in a care home in Dorking, Damian kept up with his theatrical contacts. His talk was constantly punctuated with sentences beginning, ‘I was on the phone only yesterday to so-and-so and he told me this amazing rumour about …’ The telephone was clearly his main lifeline. He was of too old a generation to have embraced email.
‘And I got your message, Charles, but I can’t remember who it was who put you in touch with me.’
‘Trevor Race.’
‘Oh yes. Dear Trevor. Always comes to see me when he’s in the country. Came down here for lunch last Sunday. Still in pretty good nick, isn’t he?’
‘Looks very well, yes.’
‘You cannot believe how beautiful Trev was as a young man. Not just attractive – beautiful. He and I had a little flurry of fun way back then. Nothing too serious, though I think that was always what he was looking for. And then, of course, later he met Alan. Did you ever know Alan?’
‘No.’
‘Lovely boy too. But very naughty.’
‘The booze?’
‘Well, the booze was part of it, but there was lots of other stuff. Drugs, certainly.’
‘Trevor told me that Alan never used drugs.’
‘Well, maybe that’s what dear Trev wanted to believe. I think he knew. He must’ve known. Everyone else in the business knew.
‘The other thing, of course, was that Alan was pathologically unfaithful. Always getting inside other people’s trousers. And some pretty unsavoury trousers, too. Rent boys, real riff-raff. Trev was always digging him out of some mess or another, paying off yet another debt Alan had incurred. He tried to keep an eye on Alan by casting him in every movie he made, but the boy usually found someone to be unfaithful with on location. Trev had this fantasy of the two of them settling down as a couple, but that was never going to be Alan’s way.’
Charles reflected that maybe Trevor Race had posthumously beatified his lover. His regret at Alan not having lived long enough for them to be legally married may not have taken into account the personality he had been dealing with.
It was as if Damian Grantchester was reading his thoughts, because he said, ‘Trevor made a very big deal of it when Alan died. Kept going on about how it was the great love of his life, turned this rather shifty character, only one step up from a rent boy, into a plaster saint. If my sources are correct – and they usually are – Trev hasn’t been to bed with anyone else since Alan died. Story goes he’s even rejected the offers of sexual favours from aspiring actors, which is frankly amazing, because those are reckoned to be one of the perks of being a director.’ The old man chuckled in fond recollection. ‘And Trev’s turned that lovely house of his in Finchley to some sort of shrine to Alan. A therapy centre, is it?’
‘Something like that, I believe,’ said Charles, unaccountably unwilling to admit how he and Trevor Race had met.
‘Of course,’ Damian went on, ‘you were quite good-looking back in the Bridport days, Charles. I could have fancied you back then, you know. But men were never your thing, were they?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Oh, Charles.’ The old man sighed. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’
Here was an opportunity to close in on the reason for his visit to Dorking. Charles said, ‘I was thinking back to when I worked for you in Bridport.’
‘Oh, surely, love, you don’t say that. You didn’t work for me. We worked together. At the Imperial we were part of an ensemble, weren’t we?’ His emphasis pointed up the pretentiousness of the word. ‘Or had we got beyond all that ensemble nonsense by then?’
‘Well, we weren’t an ensemble in the sense that we started every morning with an hour of improvisation to home in on our characters.’
‘Too right we weren’t. No time for that sort of farting about. We had shows to put on.’
‘Yes, I was thinking back to your production of Hamlet …’
‘Ah yes. A bit highbrow for the good burghers of Bridport. They always preferred a good old Agatha Christie to your Shakespeare. Thank God Hamlet was an A-level set text that year. Without the school parties we wouldn’t have broken even.’ A glow of nostalgia suffused the old director’s features. ‘And do you remember that lovely boy who played Hamlet?’
‘I don’t remember his name. I remember what he looked like.’
‘So do I! Beautiful blond hair. Natural too, not a bottle job like Larry Olivier in the movie. Looked properly Nordic, as Hamlet should. Richard Frail, that was the boy’s name. I thought he really had potential. His Hamlet was the perfect mix of the introvert and the extrovert. I thought he’d go all the way. Last thing I heard he was selling insurance in Salford. Dame Theatre can be a cruel mistress.’ Damian turned his bright eyes on Charles. ‘And you gave your Rosencrantz, didn’t you, you clever boy?’
‘Or was it Guildenstern?’
‘No, you were definitely Rosencrantz. The Guildenstern was a boy I regard as the luckiest actor in the world. Justin Grover.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Mind you, he wasn’t bad-looking back then. I wouldn’t have kicked either of you out of bed. Even nurtured these daydreams – a threesome with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But I suppose every director of Hamlet has fantasies like that, don’t they?’
Charles didn’t take issue with this arguable assertion. Instead, he said, ‘Going back to Justin …’
‘Yes. Strange who the gods pick out for special treatment, isn’t it? Justin Grover, perfectly adequate actor, a bit too technical for my taste. And with a few rather annoying quirks.’
‘Do you remember the Buddhist chanting?’ asked Charles.
‘Oh, God, yes. What a poseur he was! And probably still is.’
‘I can confirm that.’
‘Are you in touch with the dear boy?’
‘I’m working with him.’
‘Well, heavens to Betsy! In an ensemble?’
‘Justin keeps referring to it as an ensemble, but of course it’s nothing of the sort. Anything Justin’s involved in is basically all about him.’
‘I know the show you’re talking about, read the reviews. The monkfest! A lot of men in habits wanking about at the Duke of Kent’s?’
‘Exactly that, Damian. And there’s another cast member who worked with you at Bridport. Tod Singer.’
‘God, I remember him. The piss artist to end all piss artists.’
‘Now completely dry. A devotee of Alcoholics Anonymous.’
The old man cupped his hands around his face in mock-horror. ‘How ghastly! In a changing world, there are so few certainties one can cling on to. Mind you, Charles, as I recall, you were not an enemy of the bottle. I hope you haven’t joined Tod on that oh-so-dispiriting wagon.’
It wasn’t the moment to chronicle his own journey on the road to abstinence, so Charles just said, ‘I still enjoy a drink.’ Which remained distressingly true.
‘Thank the Lord for that. Strange how the theatre works, though, isn’t it? From the production of Hamlet, I wouldn’t have said any of the cast was going to make it at any major level—’ Charles did not allow himself to be put down by the implied insult – ‘except for that boy Richard Frail. I thought he was destined to go right to the top. Which just goes to show how little I know. Hamlet is now selling insurance in Salford, and Guildenstern – an actor of minimal talent and some rather unwholesome habits – becomes a global superstar. I think anyone entering the theatre should be firmly told that it is not a business in which fairness plays any part at all.’
‘That’s true,’ Charles agreed glumly.
‘All the observations, incidentally, Charles, are in my book.’
‘Which book is this?’
‘I’ve written a memoir. Called Beginners, Please. Lots in it about my time at the Imperial.’
‘Great. Where can I get hold of a copy?’
‘Ah. Sadly, you may have to wait awhile for that. The book is not yet in print. It has done the rounds of the publishing houses, but none of them is interested in the reminiscences of a theatre director of the third rank.’ Charles felt that he ought to perhaps remonstrate, but, then again, Damian Grantchester’s self-assessment was probably accurate. ‘If I were a star – or if I’d slept with enough stars – no doubt the reaction would be different. Beginners, Please would even now be storming the bestsellers’ lists. In my current situation, though, I can’t give myself away with soap.
‘I have a friend who comes to visit me. She works in publishing, and she’s going to see if she can place the book somewhere. But she’s my last hope. If she can’t get a publishing deal, then I’m afraid all my carefully collected dirt will go to the grave with me. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes”, not forgetting “dirt to dirt”.’ The old man sighed. ‘Sorry, I’ve gone all “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”.’
Charles respected a moment of silence, before moving on. ‘You said Justin had … “some rather unwholesome habits”?’
‘Yes. I’m surprised you weren’t aware of them. You two shared a dressing room, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Though I spent as little time there as I could politely get away with.’
‘The Buddhist chanting got on your nerves?’
‘Yes, and a few other irritating habits. When I was offstage – which, if you’re playing Rosencrantz, is most of the evening – I generally hung around the Green Room.’
‘No, you didn’t, Charles. We’ve covered this already. You know full well that you spent all your time offstage inside the knickers of our Gertrude. Didn’t you?’
‘Well …’ The monosyllable contained equal measures of shame and pride. Oh, Damian would know the name of the actress playing Gertrude.
But before Charles had a chance to ask the question, the director went on, ‘By not being in the dressing room, you were probably doing Justin a favour.’
‘Oh?’
‘Allowing him to pursue his little hobby.’
‘Little hobby?’
‘After the Hamlet production finished, there was some maintenance work scheduled for all the Imperial dressing rooms. And in the one you shared with Justin, the workmen found a hole had been drilled through the wall. They called me to have a look. I remember, I was giving the guy who’d written the next show a guided tour of the theatre, and we went though and had a look. The hole had been drilled through into the next dressing room.’
‘I can’t remember who would have been in—’
‘Ophelia.’
‘Very pretty girl, whose name escapes me.’
‘Eve Blanche. Anyway, there was a spy-hole from your dressing room, through which the poor kid could be watched, presumably when she was changing into costume … or doing whatever else she got up to in the privacy of her dressing room. Well, I knew you wouldn’t be responsible for drilling that hole, Charles.’
‘Thank you.’ It was a kind of compliment.
‘You were too busy, up to no good inside Gertrude’s knickers.’ Perhaps not such a compliment, after all.
‘No, it was Justin Grover. I rang him straight after the hole had been found. He denied it, of course. But I followed up with a call to our Ophelia. She said Justin had come on to her and said things about her body which suggested he’d seen her naked. Which, so far as she knew, he hadn’t.
‘There’s no doubt about it, Charles. Justin Grover was a Peeping Tom.’