Corporate Bodies [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE One of the reasons why I became an actor, Charles Paris reflected wryly as he swung the wheel of the forklift truck, was to avoid tedious jobs like this. To avoid any job in fact with a predictability about it, any job for which you had to turn up at the same predictable hour every day, in which you had to climb a predictable career structure, in anticipation of a predictable retirement age and a predictable pension. Actually, when he came to think about it, he wouldn't have minded the predictable pension. Or the predictable salary, come to that. He'd survived more than thirty years of the actor's fluctuating fortunes - long periods of'signing on' enlivened by occasional bouts of work - but it was a kind of insecurity into which he'd never quite relaxed. As he got older, he did fantasise increasingly, with a slight wistfulness, about the idea of a regular income. This shaming thought was not one that he'd have mentioned to a fellow-actor, but it was there, lurking. Maybe if he'd had a regular job, he conjectured, with regular hours, a regular salary and regular promotion, his Ufe might have had more shape. Maybe his marriage might even have stayed together. Though it was difficult to envisage Frances in the role of a corporate wife. Everything might have been better, though. It was hard to be sure. On the other hand, it was extremely easy to be sure that any employment of that kind would have driven him mad with boredom. Charles Paris was an actor, like it or not. Even when, as in some years, his earnings were too low to qualify for taxation; even when, as in slightly better years, the taxman had the nerve to hound him for a