Dear Lupin by Charlie Mortimer

Author:Charlie Mortimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

ACT TWO

As lights fade we hear the 1970s theme to Grandstand.

Sound of Peter O’Sullevan’s memorable commentary on the 1977 Grand National.

Lights up.

The scene is as we left it at the end of Act One. LUPIN is sitting propped up on pillows on the chaise longue. He is reading one of ROGER’s letters.

ROGER is centre-stage, dressed exactly as before, except that in place of trousers he’s wearing a pair of animal-print bathing trunks.

ROGER. Dear Lupin. Thank you for your birthday gift, which I’m wearing as I write this. A pair of leopard-skin bathing trunks is just what I feel I’ve always needed to make life complete. Sadly I’ve not been able to wear them out of doors, though I might pass them on to Mr Randall, our gardener; I realise he’s in his early seventies but at least he may find them useful when weeding the pond. (Begins to put on his own trousers.)

LUPIN. It’s 1977. James Callaghan’s Prime Minister, a gallon of petrol costs seventy-seven pence, the most popular TV programme is Are You Being Served, and I’m in hospital awaiting a liver biopsy, due to years of alcohol and hard drugs which has caused partial liver failure. My dear mother, often known in the house as ‘The Bureau of Misinformation’, is desperately worried, and following the biopsy calls a distant cousin who’s a doctor for advice: ‘I’m most frightfully worried about my son Charles,’ she says, ‘They’ve just done an autopsy on him.’

ROGER (continuing to dress). I hope you’re settling down to the routine of thermometers, enemas, bedpans, other people’s awful noises and so forth. Don’t let the doctors bully you. They are apt to be conceited and dictatorial and don’t like it all that much if you confer on them the status of garage hands.

LUPIN. Dad speaks from bitter personal experience as his own GP is Berkshire’s answer to Sir Launcelot Spratt, and owns a house which he calls, without apparent irony, Bedside Manor.

ROGER. I’m still alive but not offensively so. In fact I look like something dug up for exhumation, whereas Nidnod just looks wizened. I thought you might like to know that a woman from Newbury strangled her husband with his dressing-gown cord last week, and three people were roasted to death in a car accident in Theale.

He looks at LUPIN in kindly fashion.

Do try to keep your spirits up.

Continuing to dress.

You may like to know I’ve been asked to write a series of articles on horse racing to be published in Arabic in the Lebanon; that is, if we can ever agree terms. I’ve come to the conclusion I hate publishers. I dislike them in fact, almost as much as naval officers. I once caught crabs off a naval officer’s wife called Myrtle, who had bright-red hair and a hint of BO – and when I say ‘hint’, I’m giving her the best of the argument.

By now ROGER is dressed.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I finish with The Sunday Times tomorrow.

LUPIN leaps off of bed, retrieves his day clothes from the bedside cabinet and begins to dress enthusiastically.

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