Killer Dolphin

TWO Mr. Greenslade

“I know that,” Peregrine said. “You don’t need to keep on at it, Jer. I know there’s always been a Bardic racket and that since the quatro-centenary it’s probably been stepped up. I know about the tarting-up of old portraits with dome foreheads and the fake signatures and ‘stol’n and surreptitious copies’ and phoney ‘discovered’ documents and all that carry-on. I know the overwhelming odds are against this glove being anything but a fake. I merely ask you to accept that with the things lying there in front of me, I was knocked all of a heap.”

“Not only by them, I understand. You were half-drowned, half-drunk, dressed up in a millionaire’s clobber and not knowing whether the owner was making a queer pass at you or not.”

“I’m almost certain, not.”

“His behaviour, on your own account, seems to have been, to say the least of it, strange.”

“Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer.”

“Well, you’re the judge,” said Jeremy Jones. He bent over his work-table and made a delicate slit down a piece of thin cardboard. He was building a set to scale for a theatre-club production of Venice Observed. After a moment he laid aside his razor-blade and looked up at Peregrine. “Could you make a drawing of it?” he said.

“I can try.”

Peregrine tried. He remembered the glove very clearly indeed and produced a reasonable sketch.

“It looks O.K.,” Jeremy said. “Late sixteenth century. Elaborate in the right way. Tabbed. Embroidered. Tapering to the wrist. And the leather?”

“Oh, fine as fine. Yellow and soft and wrinkled and old, old, old.”

“It may be an Elizabethan or Jacobean glove but the letter could be a forgery.”

“But why? Nobody’s tried to cash in on it.”

“You don’t know. You don’t know anything. Who was this chum Conducis bought it from?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And who was M.E. whose dear grandma insisted it had belonged to the Poet?”

“Why ask me? You might remember that the great-great-grandmother was left it by a Mrs. J. Hart. And that Joan Hart—”

“Née Shakespeare, was left wearing-apparel by her brother. Yes. The sort of corroborative details any good faker would cook up. But, of course, the whole thing should be tackled by experts.”

“I told you: I said so. I said wouldn’t he take it to the V. and A., and he gave me one of his weird looks; furtive, scared, blank—I don’t know how you’d describe them—and shut up like a clam.”

“Suspicious in itself.” Jeremy grinned at his friend and then said: “ ‘I would I had been there.’ ”

“Well, at that, ‘it would have much amazed you.’ ”

“ ‘Very like. Very like.’ What do we know about Conducis?”

“I can’t remember with any accuracy,” Peregrine said. “He’s an all-time-high for money, isn’t he? There was a piece in one of the Sunday supplements some time back. About how he loathes publicity and does a Garbo and leaves Mr. Gulbenkian wondering what it was that passed him. And how he doesn’t join in any of the joy and is thought to be a fabulous anonymous philanthropist. A Russian mum, I think it said, and an Anglo-Rumanian papa.”

“Where does he get his pelf?”

“I don’t remember. Isn’t it always oil? ‘Mystery Midas’ it was headed and there was a photograph of him looking livid and trying to dodge the camera on the steps of his Bank and a story about how the photographer made his kill. I read it at the dentist’s.”

“Unmarried?”

“I think so.”

“How did you part company?”

“He just walked out of the room. Then his man came in and said the car was waiting to bring me home. He gave me back my revolting, stinking pocket-book and said my clothes had gone to the cleaner and were thought to be beyond salvation. I said something about Mr. Conducis and the man said Mr. Conducis was taking a call from New York and would ‘quite understand.’ Upon which hint, off I slunk. I’d better write a sort of bread-and-butter, hadn’t I?”

“I expect so. And he owns The Dolphin and is going to pull it down and put up, one supposes, another waffle-iron on the South Bank?”

“He’s ‘turning over the idea’ in his mind.”

“May it choke him,” said Jeremy Jones.

“Jer,” Peregrine said. “You must go and look at it. It’ll slay you. Wrought iron. Cherubs. Caryatids. A wonderful sort of pot-pourri of early and mid-Vic and designed by an angel. Oh God, God, when I think of what could be done with it.”

“And this ghastly old Croesus—”

“I know. I know.”

And they stared at each other with the companionable indignation and despair of two young men whose unfulfilled enthusiasms coincide.

They had been at the same drama school together and had both decided that they were inclined by temperament, interest and ability to production rather than performance in the theatre. Jeremy finally settled for design and Peregrine for direction. They had worked together and apart in weekly and fortnightly repertory and had progressed to more distinguished provincial theatres and thence, precariously, to London. Each was now tolerably well known as a coming man and both were occasionally subjected to nerve-racking longeurs of unemployment. At the present juncture Peregrine had just brought to an auspicious opening the current production at The Unicorn and had seen his own first play through a trial run out of London. Jeremy was contemplating a decor for a masque which he would submit to an international competition for theatrical design.

He had recently bought a partnership in a small shop in Walton Street where they sold what he described as “very superior tatt. Jacobean purses, stomachers and the odd codpiece.” He was a fanatic on authenticity and had begun to acquire a reputation as an expert.

Jeremy and Peregrine had spent most of what they had saved on leasing and furnishing their studio flat and had got closer than was comfortable to a financial crisis. Jeremy had recently become separated from a blonde lady of uncertain temper: a disentanglement that was rather a relief to Peregrine, who had been obliged to adjust to her unpredictable descents upon their flat.

Peregrine himself had brought to uneventful dissolution an affair with an actress who had luckily discovered in herself the same degree of boredom that he, for his part, had hesitated to disclose. They had broken up with the minimum of ill-feeling on either part and he was, at the moment, heart-free and glad of it.

Peregrine was dark, tall and rather mischievous in appearance. Jeremy was of medium stature, reddish in complexion and fairly truculent. Behind a prim demeanour he concealed an amorous inclination. They were of the same age: twenty-seven. Their flat occupied the top story of a converted warehouse on Thames-side east of Blackfriars. It was from their studio window, about a week ago, that Peregrine, idly, exploring the South Bank through a pair of field-glasses, had spotted the stage-house of The Dolphin, recognized it for what it was and hunted it down. He now walked over to the window.

“I can just see it,” he said. “There it is. I spent the most hideous half hour of my life, so far, inside that theatre. I ought to hate the sight of it but, by God, I yearn after it as I’ve never yearned after anything ever before. You know, if Conducis does pull it down I honestly don’t believe I’ll be able to stay here and see it happen.”

“Shall we wait upon him and crash down on our knees before him crying, ‘Oh, sir, please sir, spare The Dolphin, pray do, sir’?”

“I can tell you exactly what the reaction would be. He’d back away as if we smelt and say in that deadpan voice of his that he knew nothing of such matters.”

“I wonder what it would cost.”

“To restore it? Hundreds of thousands no doubt,” Peregrine said gloomily. “I wonder if National Theatre has so much as thought of it. Or somebody. Isn’t there a society that preserves Ancient Monuments?”

“Yes. But ‘I know nothing of such matters,’ ” mocked Jeremy. He turned back to his model. With a degree of regret to which wild horses wouldn’t have persuaded him to confess, Peregrine began packing Mr. Conducis’s suit. It was a dark charcoal tweed and had been made by a princely tailor. He had washed and ironed the socks, undergarments and shirt that he had worn for about forty minutes and had taken a box that Jeremy was hoarding to make up the parcel.

“I’ll get a messenger to deliver it,” he said.

“Why on earth?”

“I don’t know. Too bloody shy to go myself.”

“You’d only have to hand it over to the gilded lackey.”

“I’d feel an ass.”

“You’re mad,” said Jeremy briefly.

“I don’t want to go back there. It was all so rum. Rather wonderful, of course, but in a way rather sinister. Like some wish-fulfillment novel.”

“The wide-eyed young dramatist and the kindly recluse.”

“I don’t think Conducis is kindly but I will allow and must admit I was wide-eyed over the glove. You know what?”

“What?”

“It’s given me an idea.”

“Has it, now? Idea for what?”

“A play. I don’t want to discuss it”

“One must never discuss too soon, of course,” Jeremy agreed. “That way abortion lies.”

“You have your points.”

In the silence that followed they both heard the metallic clap of the letter box downstairs.

“Post,” said Jeremy.

“Won’t be anything for us.”

“Bills.”

“I don’t count them. I daren’t,” said Peregrine.

“There might be a letter from Mr. Conducis offering to adopt you.”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

“Do go and see,” Jeremy said. “I find you rather oppressive when you’re clucky. The run downstairs will do you good.”

Peregrine wandered twice round the room and absently out at the door. He went slowly down their decrepit staircase and fished in their letter box. There were three bills (two, he saw, for himself), a circular and a typed letter.

“Peregrine Jay, Esq. By Hand”

For some reason that he could not have defined, he didn’t open the letter. He went out-of-doors and walked along their uneventful street until he came to a gap through which one could look across the river to Southwark. He remembered afterwards that his bitch-muse as he liked to call her was winding her claws in his hair. He stared unseeing at a warehouse that from here partly obscured The Dolphin: Phipps Bros., perhaps, where the man with the oilcan—Jobbins—worked. A wind off the river whipped his hair back. Somewhere downstream a hooting set up. Why, he wondered idly, do river-craft set up gaggles of hooting all at once? His right hand was in his jacket pocket and his fingers played with the letter.

With an odd sensation of taking some prodigious step he suddenly pulled it out of his pocket and opened it.

Five minutes later Jeremy heard their front door slam and Peregrine come plunging up the stairs. He arrived, white-faced and apparently without the power of speech.

“What now, for pity’s sake,” Jeremy asked. “Has Conducis tried to kidnap you?”

Peregrine thrust a sheet of letter paper into his hand.

“Go on,” he said. “Bloody read it, will you. Go on.” Jeremy read.

“Not true,” Jeremy said, looking over the tops of his spectacles.

“True. Apparently. As far as it goes.”

Jeremy read it again. “Well,” he said, “at least he doesn’t want you to approach him. We’ve done him wrong, there.”

“He doesn’t want to set eyes on me, thank God.”

“Were you passionately eloquent, my poor Peregrine?”

“It looks as if I must have been, doesn’t it? I was plastered, of course.”

“I have a notion,” Jeremy said with inconsequence, “that he was once wrecked at sea.”

“Who?”

“Conducis, you dolt. Who but? In his yacht.”

“Was his yacht called Kalliope?”

“I rather think so. I’m sure it went down.”

“Perhaps my predicament reminded him of the experience.”

“You know,” Jeremy said, “I can’t really imagine why we’re making such a thing of this. After all, what’s happened? You look at a derelict theatre. You fall into a fetid well from which you are extricated by the owner who is a multi-millionaire. You urge in your simple way the graces and excellence of the theatre. He wonders if before he pulls it down, it might just be worth getting another opinion. He turns you over to one of his myrmidons. Where’s the need for all the agitation?”

“I wonder if I should like M. Smythiman if I met him and if I shall take against S. Greenslade at first sight. Or he against me, of course.”

“What the hell does that matter? You place far too much importance upon personal relationships. Look at the fatuous way you go on about your women. And then suspecting poor Mr. Conducis of improper intentions when he never wants to look upon your like again!”

“Do you suggest that I accept his gorgeous apparel?” Peregrine asked on an incredulous note.

“Certainly, I do. It would be rude and ungenerous and rather vulgar to return it with a po-faced note. The old boy wants to give you his brand new clobber because you mucked up your own in his dirty great well. You should take it and not slap him back as if he’d tried to tip you.”

“If you had seen him you would not call him an old boy. He is the uncosiest human being I have ever encountered.”

“Be that as it may, you’d better posh yourself up and wait upon S. Greenslade on the stroke of eleven-thirty.”

Peregrine said, after a pause, “I shall do so, of course. He says nothing about the letter and glove, you observe.”

“Nothing.”

“I shall urge S. Greenslade to get it vetted at the V. and A.”

“You jolly well do.”

“Yes, I will. Well, Jer, as you say, why make a thing? If by some wild, rapturous falling-out of chance, I could do anything to save the life of The Dolphin, I would count myself amply rewarded. But it will, of course, only be a rum little interlude and in the meantime, here’s the latest batch of bills.”

“At least,” Jeremy said, “There won’t be a new one from your tailors for some time to come.”

Mr. S. Greenslade was bald, pale, well-dressed and unremarkable. His office was quietly sumptuous and he was reached through a hinterland of equally conservative but impressive approaches. He now sat, with a file under his hand, a distinguished painting behind him, and before him, Peregrine, summoning all the techniques of the theatre in order to achieve relaxation.

“Mr. Jay,” Mr. Greenslade said, “you appreciate, of course, the fact that your meeting yesterday with Mr. Conducis has led to this appointment.”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“Quite. I have here a digest, as it were, of a—shall I say a suggestion you made to Mr. Conducis as he recollects it. Here it is.”

Mr. Greenslade put on his spectacles and read from the paper before him.

“Mr. Jay proposed that The Dolphin Theatre should be restored to its former condition and that a company should be established there performing Shakespeare and other plays of a high cultural quality. Mr. Jay suggested that The Dolphin is a building of some cultural worth and that, historically speaking, it is of considerable interest.”

Mr. Greenslade looked up at Peregrine. “That was, in fact, your suggestion?”

“Yes. Yes. It was. Except that I hate the word culture.”

“Mr. Jay, I don’t know if you are at all informed about Mr. Conducis’s interests.”

“I—no—I only know he’s—he’s—”

“Extremely wealthy and something of a recluse?” Mr. Greenslade suggested with a slight, practiced smile.

“Yes.”

“Yes.” Mr. Greenslade removed his spectacles and placed them delicately in the centre of his writing pad.

Peregrine thought he must be going to make some profound revelation about his principal. Instead he merely said “Quite” again and after a dignified silence asked Peregrine if he would be good enough to tell him something about himself. His schooling, for example, and later career. He was extremely calm in making this request.

Peregrine said he had been born and educated in New Zealand, had come to England on a drama bursary and had remained there.

“I am aware, of course, of your success in the theatrical field,” said Mr. Greenslade and Peregrine supposed that he had been making some kind of confidential inquiries.

“Mr. Jay,” said Mr. Greenslade, “I am instructed to make you an offer. It is, you may think, a little precipitant: Mr. Conducis is a man of quick decisions. It is this. Mr. Conducis is prepared to consider the rehabilitation of the theatre, subject, of course, to favourable opinions from an architect and from building authorities and to the granting of necessary permits. He will finance this undertaking. On one condition.” Mr. Greenslade paused.

“On one condition?” Peregrine repeated in a voice that cracked like an adolescent’s.

“Exactly. It is this. That you yourself will undertake the working management of The Dolphin. Mr. Conducis offers you, upon terms to be arrived at, the post of organizing the running of the theatre, planning its artistic policy, engaging the company and directing the productions. You would be given a free hand to do this within certain limits ot expenditure which would be set down in this contract I shall be glad to hear what your reactions are to this, at its present stage, necessarily tentative proposal.”

Peregrine suppressed a frightening inclination towards giving himself over to manic laughter. He looked for a moment into Mr. Greenslade’s shrewd and well-insulated face and he said: “It would be ridiculous of me to pretend that I am anything but astonished and delighted.”

“Are you?” Mr. Greenslade rejoined. “Good. In that case I shall proceed with the preliminary investigations. I, by the way, am the solicitor for a number of Mr. Conducis’s interests. If and when it comes to drawing up contracts I presume I should negotiate with your agents?”

“Yes. They are—”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Greenslade. “Messrs. Slade and Oppinger, I believe?”

“Yes,” said Peregrine, wondering if at any stage of his tipsy rhapsody he had mentioned them to Mr. Conducis and rather concluding that he hadn’t.

“There is one other matter.” Mr. Greenslade opened a drawer in his desk and with an uncanny re-enacting of his principal’s gestures on the previous morning, withdrew from it the small Victorian writing-desk. “You are already familiar with the contents, I understand, and expressed some anxiety about their authenticity.”

“I said I wished they could be shown to an expert.”

“Quite. Mr. Conducis has taken your point, Mr. Jay, and wonders if you yourself would be so obliging as to act for him in this respect.”

Peregrine, in a kind of trance, said: “Are the glove and documents insured?”

“They are covered by a general policy, but they have not been specifically insured since their value is unknown.”

“I feel the responsibility would be—”

“I appreciate your hesitation and I may say I put the point to Mr. Conducis. He still wishes me to ask you to undertake this mission.”

There was a short silence.

“Sir,” said Peregrine, “why is Mr. Conducis doing all this? Why is he giving me at least the chance of undertaking such fantastically responsible jobs? What possible motive can he have? I hope,” Peregrine continued with a forthrightness that became him very well, “that I’m not such an ass as to suppose I can have made an impression in the least degree commensurable with the proposals you’ve put before me and I—I—” He felt himself reddening and ran out of words.

Mr. Greenslade had watched him, he thought with renewed attention. He now lifted his spectacles with both hands, held them poised daintily over his blotter and said, apparently to them: “A reasonable query.”

“Well—I hope so.”

“And one which I am unable to answer.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I will,” said Mr. Greenslade, evenly, “be frank with you, Mr. Jay. I am at a loss to know why Mr. Conducis is taking this action. If, however, I have interpreted your misgivings correctly I can assure you they are misplaced.” Suddenly, almost dramatically, Mr. Greenslade became human, good-tempered and coarse. “He’s not that way inclined,” he said and laid down his spectacles.

“I’m extremely glad to hear it.”

“You will undertake the commission?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Splendid.”

The expert folded his hands and leaned back in his chair.

“Well,” he said, “I think we may say with certainty this is a glove of late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century workmanship. It has, at some time, been exposed to salt-water but not extensively. One might surmise that it was protected. The little desk is very much stained. Upon the letters H.S. inside the gauntlet I am unable to give an authoritative opinion but could, of course, obtain one. As for these two really rather startling documents: they can be examined and submitted to a number of tests—Infra-red, spectrography and so on—not in my province, you know. If they’ve been concocted it will certainly be discovered.”

“Would you tell me how I can get the full treatment for them?”

“Oh, I think we could arrange that, you know. But we would want written permission from the owner, full insurance and so on. You’ve told me nothing, so far, of the history, have you?”

“No,” Peregrine said. “But I will. With this proviso, if you don’t mind: the owner, or rather his solicitor on his behalf, has given me permission to disclose his name to you on your undertaking to keep it to yourself until you have come to a conclusion about these things. He has a—an almost morbid dread of publicity which you’ll understand, I think, when you learn who he is.”

The expert looked very steadily at Peregrine. After a considerable silence he said: “Very well. I am prepared to treat the matter confidentially as far as your principal’s name is concerned.”

“He is Mr. Vassily Conducis.”

“Good God.”

“Quite,” said Peregrine, doing a Greenslade. “I shall now tell you as much as is known of the history. Here goes.”

And he did in considerable detail.

The expert listened in a startled manner.

“Really, very odd,” he said when Peregrine had finished.

“I assure you I’m not making it up.”

“No, no. I’m sure. I’ve heard of Conducis, of course. Who hasn’t? You do realize what a—what a really flabbergasting thing this would be if it turned out to be genuine?”

“I can think of nothing else. I mean: there they lie—a child’s glove and a letter asking one to suppose that on a summer’s morning in the year 1596 a master-craftsman of Stratford made a pair of gloves and gave them to his grandson, who wore them for a day and then—”

“Grief filled the room up of an absent child?”

“Yes. And a long time afterwards—twenty years—the father made his will—I wonder he didn’t chuck in a ghastly pun—Will’s Will—don’t you? And he left his apparel to his sister Joan Hart. And for her information wrote that note there. I mean—his hand moved across that bit of paper. If it’s genuine. And then two centuries go by and somebody called M.E. puts the glove and paper in a Victorian desk with the information that her great-great-grandmother had them from J. Hart and her grandmother insisted they were the Poet’s. It could have been Joan Hart. She died in 1664.”

“I shouldn’t build on it,” the expert said dryly.

“Of course not!”

“Has Mr. Conducis said anything about their value? I mean—even if there’s only a remote chance they will be worth—well, I can’t begin to say what their monetary value might be, but I know what we’d feel about it, here.”

Peregrine and the expert eyed each other for a moment or two. “I suppose,” Peregrine said, “he’s thought of that, but I must say he’s behaved pretty casually over it.”

“Well, we shan’t,” said the expert. “I’ll give you your receipt and ask you to stay and see things safely stowed.”

He stopped for a moment over the little dead, wrinkled glove. “If it were true!” he murmured.

“I know, I know,” Peregrine cried. “It’s frightening to think what would happen. The avid attention, the passionate greed for possession.”

“There’s been murder done for less,” said the expert lightly.

Five weeks later Peregrine, looking rather white about the gills and brownish under the eyes, wrote the last word of his play and underneath it: Curtain. That night he read it to Jeremy, who thought well of it.

There had been no word from Mr. Greenslade. The stage-house of The Dolphin could still be seen on Bank-side. Jeremy had asked at the estate agents for permission to view and had been told that the theatre was no longer in their hands and they believed had been withdrawn from the market Their manner was stuffy.

From time to time the two young men talked about The Dolphin, but a veil of unreality seemed to have fallen between Peregrine and his strange interlude: so much so that he sometimes almost felt as if he had invented it.

In an interim report on the glove and documents, the museum had said that preliminary tests had given no evidence of spurious inks or paper and so far nothing inconsistent with their supposed antiquity had been discovered. An expert on the handwriting of ancient documents, at present in America, would be consulted on his return. If his report was favourable, Peregrine gathered, a conference of authorises would be called.

“Well,” Jeremy said, “they haven’t laughed it out of court, evidently.”

“Evidently.”

“You’ll send the report to the man Greenslade?”

“Yes, of course.”

Jeremy put his freckled hand on Peregrine’s manuscript.

“What about opening at The Dolphin this time next year with The Glove, a new play by Peregrine Jay?”

“Gatcha!”

“Well—why not? For the hell of it,” Jeremy said, “let’s do a shadow casting. Come on.”

“I have.”

“Give us a look.”

Peregrine produced a battered sheet of paper covered in his irregular handwriting.

“Listen,” he said. “I know what would be said. That it’s been done before. Clemence Dane for one. And more than that: it’d be a standing target for wonderful cracks of synthetic Bardery. The very sight of the cast. Ann Hathaway and all that lot. You know? It’d be held to stink. Sunk before it started.”

“I for one don’t find any derry-down tart in the dialogue.”

“Yes: but to cast ‘Shakespeare.’ What gall!”

“He did that sort of thing. You might as well say: ‘Oo-er! To cast Henry VIII!’ Come on: who would you cast for Shakespeare?”

“It sticks out a mile, doesn’t it?”

“Elizabethan Angry, really isn’t he? Lonely. Chancy. Tricky. Bright as the sun. A Pegasus in the Hathaway stable? Enormously over-sexed and looking like the Grafton portrait. In which I entirely believe.”

“And I. All right. Who looks and plays like that?”

“Oh God!” Jeremy said, reading the casting list.

“Yes,” Peregrine rejoined. “What I said. It sticks out a mile.”

“Marcus Knight. My God.”

“Of course. He is the Grafton portrait, and as for fire! Think of his Hotspur. And Harry Five. And Mercutio. And, by heaven, his Hamlet. Remember the Peer Gynt?”

“What’s his age?”

“Whatever it is he doesn’t show it. He can look like a stripling.”

“He’d cost the earth.”

“This is only mock-up, anyway.”

“Has he ever been known to get through a production without creating a procession of dirty big rows?”

“Never.”

“Custom-built to wreck the morale of any given company?”

“That’s Marco.”

“Remember the occasion when he broke off and told latecomers after the interval to sit down or get the hell out of it?”

“Vividly.”

“And when the rest of the cast threw in their parts as one man?”

“I directed the fiasco.”

“He’s said to be more than usually explosive just now on account of no knighthood last batch.”

“He is, I understand, apoplectic, under that heading.”

“Well,” said Jeremy, “it’s your play. I see you’ve settled for rolling the lovely boy and the seduced fair friend and ‘Mr. W.H.’ all up in one character.”

“So I have.”

“How you dared!” Jeremy muttered.

“There have been madder notions over the centuries.”

“True enough. It adds up to a damn good part. How do you see him?”

“Very blond. Very male. Very impertinent.”

“W. Hartly Grove?”

“Might be. Type casting.”

“Isn’t he held to be a bad citizen?”

“Bit of a nuisance.”

“What about your Dark Lady? The Rosaline? Destiny Meade, I see you’ve got here.”

“I rather thought Destiny. She’s cement from the eyes up but she gives a great impression of smoldering depths and really inexhaustible sex. She can produce what’s called for in any department as long as it’s put to her in basic English and very, very slowly. And she lives, by the way, with Marco.”

“That might or might not be handy. And Ann H?”

“Oh, any sound, unsympathetic actress with good attack,” Peregrine said.

“Like Gertie Bracey?”

“Yes.”

“Joan Hart’s a nice bit. I tell you who’d be good as Joan. Emily Dunne. You know? She’s been helping in our shop. You liked her in that T.V. show. She did some very nice Celias and Nerissas and Hermias at Stratford. Prick her down on your list.”

“I shall. See, with a blot I damn her.”

“The others seem to present no difficulty, but the spirit sinks at an infant phenomenon.”

“He dies before the end of Act I.”

“Not a moment too soon. I am greatly perturbed by the vision of some stunted teen-ager acting its pants off!”

“It’ll be called Gary, of course.”

“Or Trevor.”

“Never mind.”

“Would you give me the designing of the show?”

“Don’t be a bloody ass.”

“It’d be fun,” Jeremy said, grinning at him. “Face it: it would be fun.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t happen. I have an instinct and I know it won’t. None of it: the glove, the theatre, the play. It’s all a sort of miasma. It won’t happen.”

Their post box slapped.

“There you are. Fate knocking at the door,” said Jeremy.

“I don’t even wonder if it might be, now,” Peregrine said. “However, out of sheer kindness I’ll get the letters.”

He went downstairs, collected the mail and found nothing for himself. He climbed up again slowly. As he opened the door, he said: “As I foretold you. No joy. All over. Like an insubstantial pageant faded. The mail is as dull as ditchwater and all for you. Oh, sorry!”

Jeremy was talking on the telephone.

He said, “Here he is, now. Would you wait a second?”

He held out the receiver with one hand over the mouthpiece.

“Mr. Greenslade,” he said, “wishes to speak to you. Ducky—this is it.”