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Simon Brett

A Comedian Dies

CHAPTER ONE

FEED: Did you have a nice holiday?

COMIC: Oh yes, what a week it was. Only rained twice — once for three days, once for four.

Sun ’n’ Funtime at the Winter Gardens, Hunstanton, was, according to the posters that faded on bus-shelter walls and the brochures that were shuffled onto boarding-house coffee tables, ‘A Summer Tonic, Music and Laughter for All the Family’.

The queue that Charles Paris and his wife Frances joined that wet Tuesday afternoon in September looked as though they could do with a tonic. In most cases an oxygen mask would have been more appropriate. Their average age was about seventy-nine and they had the washed-out look of torn bunting clinging to the grille of a drain. These were the dream-realizers, enjoying either a seaside holiday or, in some cases, the life sentence of retirement by the sea.

The Winter Gardens reflected their air of bewildered decay. Maybe once the iron framework had boasted brighter colours than the local council’s chlorine blue paint, which fought a losing battle against the encrustations of salt and the eruptions of rust. Maybe once the white planks which filled in the lower parts of the frame had not been pitted and scratched and aerosoled with lewd invitations. Maybe once the windows had not been mended with flapping strips of polythene and none had rattled, puttyless, like old teeth in shrunken gums. But in 1977 the Winter Gardens was a building which had given up the will to live.

Perversely, Charles felt quite cheerful. The depressing nature of his surroundings seemed, by counterpoint, to enhance his sunny mood.

It was nice being with Frances. That was the main thing. They were together, in another attempt to mend their marriage, which had never been quite the same after Charles walked out sixteen years previously.

Since that time there had been so many attempts to mend it that the marriage, like an old tea-service, was bumpy with rivets. Each attempt started well, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance, but soon degenerated into the old cycle of bickering. After each failure Charles left again, depressed, convinced that an acting career was incompatible with a settled home-life. And each time he drifted into some inferior affair, which gave him even less than the flawed marriage.

But this time it seemed to be working. At least, after three days it was still working. Maybe it was just that they were older, with Charles turned fifty. Maybe it was being in unfamiliar surroundings, in the anonymity and slippery nylon sheets of the Waves Crest Guest House, Hunstanton. Whatever it was, Charles didn’t want to analyze it or talk about it in case it went away.

They bought a programme and found their seats well in advance of the rest of the audience, who were delayed by wheelchairs, crutches and other obstacles such as their feet.

‘Well, what delights have they to offer to our jaded intellects?’ asked Charles as he opened the programme. ‘Hmm. It’s a packed variety show, I see. Bill Peaky in Sun ’n’ Funtime. Since I haven’t heard of the star above the title, I’m not very optimistic that I’ll know any of the others. ’