Death Of A Hollow Man

Dramatis Personae

In his room over the Blackbird bookshop Nicholas lay on the floor doing his Cicely Berry voice exercises. He did them night and morning without fail, however late he was getting up or getting in. He had reached the lip and tongue movements, and rat-a-tat sounds filled the room. Fortunately the neighbors on both sides (Browns, the funeral parlor, and a butcher’s) were past caring about noise.

Nicholas had been born nineteen years ago and brought up in a village midway between Causton and Slough. At school he had been regarded as just above average. Moderately good at games, moderately good at lessons, and, as he was also blessed with an amiable disposition, moderately good at making friends. He had been in the upper sixth and thinking vaguely of some sort of future in a bank or on the management side of industry when something happened that forever changed his life.

One of the texts for his English “A” level was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Or, as he had since learned to call it, simply The Dream.) A performance of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was booked to take place in the vast gymnasium of Nicholas’s comprehensive school. Within two days of the announcement, the performance was sold out. Several of the sixth form went, Nicholas more for the novelty of the thing than anything else. He was intrigued by the site the company had chosen for their performance. He had always believed that theaters, like cinemas, had a stage at one end, curtains, and rows of seats, and was curious as to how the RSC was going to cope in the gym, which had none of these.

When he arrived, there seemed to be hundreds of people milling about, and the place was transformed. There were rostrums and flights of steps, trestle tables, artificial green grass, and a metal tree with golden apples on it. Scattered about the floor were huge cushions made of carpet material. Five musicians were sitting on the vaulting horse.

Overhead was an elaborate grid of metal with dozens of lights attached. Two of the gym ropes had been released, and swung gently to and fro. Then Nicholas noticed, at the other end of the hall on a dais, a stocky man in evening clothes with a broad red ribbon across his breast pinned with a jeweled star and medals. He was chatting to a woman in a dark green bustled dress wearing diamonds in her ears and a tiny crown. Suddenly he held out his arm, she rested her gloved hand on his wrist, and they stepped down from the platform. The lights blazed white and hard, and the play began.

Immediately Nicholas was enthralled. The vigor and attack and intense proximity of the actors took his breath away. The brilliant costumes, their colors blurred by the quickness of the players’ movement and dance, dazzled him. He was caught up in the sweep and power of emotions that defied analysis. And they changed so quickly. He no sooner felt the most intense sympathy for Helena than he was compelled to laugh at her incoherent rage. The mechanicals, good for a snigger in his English class, moved him almost to tears as he saw how passionately, how urgently, they longed for their play to be performed. The scenes between Titania and Bottom were so sensual he felt his face burn.

He had to move lots of times. Red ropes were set up at one point and, standing just behind them, he was a part of Theseus’s court. Then he got bundled onto the dais to watch Bottom carried shoulder high by a shouting, cheering mob to his nuptials. The ass’s head turned, and the yellow eyes glared at him as the man went by braying and raising one brawny arm in unmistakable sexual salute. And in the midst of this seemingly unstoppable splendid flux of dance and movement and energy and rhythm were remarkable points of stillness. Oberon and Titania, each spinning casually on a climbing rope, silk robes fluttering, swinging nearer and nearer to each other, exchanging glances of passionate hatred, unexpectedly stopped and shared a chaste ironic kiss. Pyramus’s grief at Thisbe’s death expressed simply but with such pain that all the court and audience too became universally silent.

And then the wedding feast. After a great fanfare the court and servants threw plastic glasses into the audience, then ran around with flagons to fill them. Everyone toasted Theseus and Hippolyta. Balloons and streamers descended from the grid. Faery and human danced together, and the hall became a great swirling mass of color and light and melodious sounds. Nicholas climbed a flight of steps and stood watching, his throat closed and dry with excitement; then, as if on the stroke of midnight, all movement ceased, and Nicholas realized that Puck was standing next to him. So close their arms were touching. The actor spoke: “ ‘If we shadows have offended ..’ ”

Then Nicholas realized that it was coming to an end. That the whole glorious golden vision was going to fade away and die … “no more yielding but a dream.” And he thought his heart would break. Puck spoke on. Nicholas studied his profile. He could feel the dynamic tension in the man, see it in the pugnacious tightness of his jaw and the rippling muscles of his throat. He spoke with tremendous force, emitting a small silver spray of saliva as he declaimed the closing lines. And then, on “Give me your hand, if we be friends,” he stretched out his left arm to the audience in a gesture that was all benevolence and, with his right, reached out to Nicholas and seized his hand. For the space of one more line they stood, the actor and the boy whose life would never be the same again. Then it was over.

Nicholas sat down as the applause went on and on. When the company finally dispersed and the audience drifted away, he remained, clutching his glass, in a daze of passionate emotion. Then one of the stagehands took the steps away. Nicholas emptied his glass of the last spot of black currant, then spotted a red streamer and a pink paper rose on the floor. He picked them up and put them carefully in his pocket. The lighting grid was being lowered and he felt in the way, so he took himself off with the deepest reluctance.

Outside in the road were two large vans. Someone was loading the metal tree with golden apples. Several of the actors emerged. They set off down the road and Nicholas followed, knowing that tamely going home was out of the question. The group went into the pub. He hesitated for a while by the door, then slipped in and stood, a rapt observer, just behind the cigarette machine.

The actors stood in a circle a few feet away. They were not dressed stylishly at all. They wore jeans, shabby afghans, sweaters. They were drinking beer; not talking or laughing loudly or showing off, and yet there was something about them… . They were simply different from anyone else there. Marked in some subtle way that Nicholas could not define. He saw Puck, a middle-aged man in an old black leather jacket wearing a peaked denim cap, smoking, waving the smoke away, smiling.

Nicholas watched them with a degree of longing so violent it made his head ache. He wanted desperately to overhear their conversation, and was on the point of edging nearer when the door behind him opened and two teachers came in. Immediately he dodged behind their backs and into the street. Apart from feeling that he could not bear to be exposed so soon to the banalities of everyday conversation, Nicholas felt sure that the enthralling experience through which he had just passed must have marked him physically in some way. And he dreaded what he felt would be clumsy and insensitive questioning.

Fortunately, when he got home, everyone had gone to bed. He looked at himself in the kitchen mirror, surprised and a little disappointed at the modesty of his transformation. His face was pale and his eyes shone, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same.

But he was not the same. He sat down at the table and produced the glass, the flower, the streamer, and his free cast list. He smoothed the paper out and ran down the column of actors. Puck had been played by Roy Smith. Nicholas drew a careful ring around the name, washed and dried his glass carefully, put the rose and the paper and the streamer inside, then went to his room. He lay on his bed reliving every moment of the evening till daylight broke. The next day he went to the library, asked if there was a local drama group, and was given details of the Latimer. He went to the theater that same evening, told them he wanted to be an actor, and was immediately co-opted to help with the props for French Without Tears.

Nicholas quickly discovered that there was theater and theater, and adapted philosophically. He had a lot (everything) to learn and had to start somewhere. He was sorry that none of the CADS, with the exception of Deidre, had been to see The Dream, but sensed very quickly that to attempt to describe it, let alone mention its effect on him, would be a mistake. So he made and borrowed props and ran about and made himself so useful that he was co-opted permanently. For the next play, Once in a Lifetime, he went on the book. He made a mess of prompting at first, bringing down on himself Esslyn’s scorn and Harold’s weary disdain, but he took the play home and read it over and over, absorbing the quick-fire rhythms, getting to sense the pauses, making himself familiar with exits and entrances, and became much better. He helped build the set for Teahouse of the August Moon, and Tim taught him basic lighting, letting him share the box and patting his bottom absentmindedly from time to time. He did the sound effects and music for The Snow Queen, and in The Crucible, he got a speaking part.

Nicholas learned his few lines quickly, and was always the first actor at rehearsals and the last to leave. He bought a cheap tape recorder and worked on an American accent, ignoring the amused glances between certain members of the cast. He made up an entire history for his character and listened and reacted with intense concentration to everything that went on around him onstage. Long before the first night he could think of nothing else. When it arrived and he was incompetently putting on too much makeup in the packed dressing room, he realized he had forgotten his lines. Frantically he sought a script, wrote them down on a piece of paper, and tucked it into the waistband of his homespun trousers. Waiting in the wings, he was overcome with a wave of nausea and was sick in the firebucket.

As he stepped onto the stage, terror struck him with hurricane force. Rows of faces swam into his line of vision. He looked once and looked away. He spoke his first line. The lights burned down, but he felt cold with exhilaration and excitement as, one after the other, the rest of his lines sprang to the forefront of his mind when needed and he experienced for the first time that strange dual grip that an actor must always keep on reality. Part of him believed in the Proctors’ kitchen in Salem with its iron pots and pans and crude furnishings and frightened people, and part of him was aware that a stool was in the wrong place and that John Proctor was still masking his wife and Mary Warren had forgotten her cap. Afterward in the clubroom he experienced a warm, close camaraderie (“Give me your hands, if we be friends”) that seemed fleetingly to surmount any actual likes and dislikes within the group.

In the pantomime he played the back legs of a horse, and then was offered the part of Danny in Night Must Fall.

Rehearsals started six weeks before his “A” levels, and he knew he had failed the lot. The endless grumblings that had been going on at home for months about all the time he was spending at the Latimer erupted into a blazing row, and he walked out. Almost immediately Avery offered him the tiny room over the Blackbird bookshop. It was rent-free in exchange for dusting the shop every morning and cleaning Avery’s house once a week.

He had lived there now for nearly a year and subsisted, sometimes superbly (on Avery’s leftovers), but mainly on baked beans purloined from the supermarket where he worked. Nearly all his wages went on voice and movement classes—he had discovered an excellent teacher in Slough—and on theater tickets. Once a month he hitched up to London to see a show, determined to keep his batteries recharged by frequent injections of what he thought of as “the real thing.” (It was after an exhilarating performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Barbican that he had chosen Ford’s Epicurean speech for his Central audition.)

He still didn’t know if he was any good. Brenda Leggat, first cousin to the Smys, reviewed the CADS productions in the local rag, and her perceptions were about as original as her prose. Every comedy was sparkling, every tragedy wrenched the heart. Performances, if not to the manner born, were all we have come to expect from this actor/ actress/soubrette/ingenue/cocktail cabinet. And Nicholas soon understood the group well enough to know that any direct questions regarding his performance would receive anodyne if not gushing reassurances. Plenty was said in the clubroom about absent friends, but it was almost impossible for an actor to get an honest opinion to his face. Everyone except Esslyn and the Everards (and Harold, of course) told Nicholas that he was marvelous. Harold rarely praised (he liked to keep them on their toes), except at first nights, when he behaved like a Broadway impresario, surging about hysterically, kissing everyone, distributing flowers, and even squeezing out a histrionic tear.

Nicholas finished his exercises, did a series of stretches and some more deep breathing, undressed, brushed his teeth, climbed into bed, and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

He dreamed it was the first night of Amadeus, and he stood in the wings dressed all in black with wrinkled tights and a skull under his arm, having learned the part of Hamlet.

Rosa Crawley’s husband was waiting up, having spent the evening in the Cap and Bells with some fellow Rotarians and their polyestered spouses. He always tried to get home before his wife, not only because she hated finding the house empty but because he looked forward to hearing the continuing saga of theatrical folk that started almost the minute she came through the door. She never accompanied him to the pub, of course, and Earnest basked a little in her absence, knowing that his companions were aware that his wife had much more interesting fish to fry. Tonight he was home only minutes before her, and had just made his cocoa when she arrived. Earnest plumped up the sofa cushions, poured a double scotch on the rocks so that his wife could unwind, and sat back with his own drink, his face bright with anticipation.

Rosa sipped her whisky and watched Earnest pushing aside the wrinkled skin of his steaming cocoa a little enviously. Sometimes, especially on a night like this, she quite fancied a cup of cocoa but felt that it was surely (Slippery Elm Food apart) the least sophisticated drink in the entire world. Starting to take it of an evening could well be the first step on the sliding slope to coziness and a public admittance of middle age. Next thing she’d be padding around in a warm dressing gown and wearing thermal underwear. She slipped off her high-heeled shoes and massaged her feet. The shoes lay, vamp down, spiky four-inch heels stabbing the air.

She was a tiny woman, just over five feet tall with a Gypsyish appearance that she nurtured to an extreme degree. The black of her dark hair was regularly intensified, her fine dark eyes ringed with kohl and decorated with a double fringe of false lashes, while her coppery complexion spoke of the wind on the heath and a star to steer by. Her nose was larger than she would have liked, but she capitalized on this by hinting at a rather tragic immigrant Jewish background, a suggestion that would have horrified her grandparents, sturdy Anglo-Saxon farm workers from Lincolnshire. She nourished this vaguely Semitic Romany ancestry by wearing dark clothes with accessories that were so dazzling they seemed to be going off like fireworks rather than making a fashion point.

Looking over at Earnest placidly sipping his nightcap, she wondered anew at the strange fact of their marriage. It had been out of the question, of course, that she remain single after her divorce from Esslyn. Apart from the matter of pride, she couldn’t bear to be alone for more than five minutes. She had assumed that, with her looks and personality, men would come flocking out of the woodwork once word got around that she was available, but this had not been the case. Earnest Crawley, local builder, widower, and comfortable had been the only serious suitor.

He was a sweet man who knew his place, and she accepted him the first time he proposed. He was shy of and a little alarmed by the CADS, and apart from going to Rosa’s first nights and the closing night party, kept well away, perhaps sensing that this would please her best. Occasionally Rosa gave the leading lights in the company lunch, and then Earnest played mine host barricaded behind a trestle table and pouring out the Frascati. They all drank like whales, it seemed to him, and he was glad when it was all over and the hothouse atmosphere damped down to normal again. Now, he asked how it had gone tonight.

“Ach,” Rosa said exhaustedly, resting the back of her hand against her forehead, “quite horrendous. Joyce still hasn’t done a thing about my costume, David Smy is like an elephant loose on the stage, and the Everards—who play the Venticelli—are hopeless.”

Earnest finished his cocoa, picked up his pipe, and tamped it in contented anticipation. He had his own dramas at work, of course. Complaints from the foreman, rows in the hut, occasionally a serious accident. But there was something about the activities at the theater. Rosa relayed them with such panache that they rose far above the ordinary pettinesses of his working day.

“Harold says he’s going to strangle them.” (Rosa always opened her monologues with a flourishing bit of hyperbole.) “One at a time and very slowly, if they don’t pick up their cues.”

“Does he now?” Earnest made his response deliberately noncomittal. Rosa’s attitude to her director was variable. Sometimes her loathing and jeers at his aflectations knew no bounds: At others—usually when Harold had a clash with some supporting actress—he had all her sympathy. Then they were coevals, talent burnished bright, swimming in harness in a sea of mediocrity. This was clearly going to be one of those nights.

“The Venticelli open the show right? Just the two of them … quick fire … nonstop. Like Ros and Gil in that Stoppard play.”

“The Vend … what?”

“Venticelli. Italian for ‘little winds.’ They carry the news around.”

Earnest nodded sagely and waited for further juicy details about the Everards, whoever they might be. The poor buggers had obviously better get their skates on if they wanted to survive the course. But his wife had now moved on to Boris, who, she said, had painted his face up to the hilt and was playing the emperor Joseph as a mad Bavarian hausfrau.

The fact was that Rosa, like almost everyone else in the company, detested the Everards. Her tongue had no sooner alighted on their names than it winced and shrank away, as if tasting some noxious substance. They were well cast in Amadeus, for gossip was what they thrived on. They had been with the company six months, during which time they had dripped venom into more than one ear and mouthed spiteful tittle-tattle into many others. Esslyn alone escaped their rancor. They would slither and slide around him, their unforgiving eyes bright with admiration, like a pair of doting serpents.

“And Boris moves like a camel!” Rosa cried, flinging her hands in the air. “Dragging himself all over the place. He seems to think that being stately is the same thing as being practically immobile.”

Earnest nodded again and did a bit more tamping. And if it occurred to him to think it odd that never in the past two years, during which twelve plays had been produced, had Rosa’s tongue, so sharply dismembering performance after performance, ever once alighted on the name of her first husband, he wisely kept this observation to himself.

“Ruined, ruined!” Avery ran through the carpeted hall, pulling off his cashmere scarf and dropping it as he went. Gloves fell on the Aubusson, his coat on the raspberry satin sofa. Tim strolled along in the wake of all this turbulence, picking up Avery’s things and murmuring “Bad luck for some” when he came to the gloves. He stuffed one into each pocket of the coat and hung it up in the tiny hall next to his own, amused by the contrast between the Tattersall check with its garland of turquoise cashmere and little chestnut fingers sticking beseechingly up in the air, and his own somber dark grey herringbone and navy muffler.

Avery, already wrapped in his tablier and wearing his frog oven mitts, was pulling the le Creuset out of the oven. He put it down on a wooden trivet and eased the lid off a fraction of an inch at a time. While hurrying home, he had made a bargain with the Fates. He would not question Tim about the source and content of the previously mentioned phone calls if they would keep an eye on the daube. Avery, knowing the superhuman restraint that would be necessary to stick to his side of the agreement, had felt an almost magical certainty that the least the other party could do was to honor theirs. But running up the garden path, sure that he smelled a whiff of carbon on the cold night air, his certainties evaporated. And as he ran with quailing anticipation through the sitting room, he became firmly convinced that the bastards had let him down again. And so it proved to be.

“It’s got a crust on!”

“That’s all right.” Tim sauntered into the kitchen and picked up a bottle opener. “Aren’t you supposed to break that and mix it in?”

“That’s a cassoulet. Oh, God …”

“For heaven’s sake, stop wringing your hands. It’s only a stew.”

“A stew! A stew. ”

“At least we won’t be able to say there’s not a crust in the house.”

“That’s all it means to you, isn’t it? A joke.”

“Far from it. I’m extremely hungry. And if you were that worried, you could have come home earlier.”

“And you could have come to the theater earlier.”

“I was doing the Faber order.” Tim smiled and smoothed the irritation from his voice. With Avery in this state, it could be midnight before a morsel crossed his lips. “And the phone calls were from Camelot Antiques about your footstool, and Derek Barfoot rang asking us for Sunday lunch.”

“Oh.” Avery looked sheepish, relieved, grateful, and encouraged. “Thank you.”

“Look. Why don’t we use this spoon with the holes in-”

“No! You’ll never get it all!” Avery stood in front of his casserole like a mother protecting her child from a ravening beast. “I’ve got a better idea.” He produced a box of tissues and lowered half a dozen with slow and exquisite care into the crumbling top layer. “These will absorb all the bits, then I can lift the whole thing off with a fish slice.”

“I thought it was in the topsoil where all the goodness lay,” murmured Tim, going to the larder to get the wine.

The larder was really Avery’s domain, but it had a deep, quarry-tiled recess with a grilled window onto the outside wall that made it beautifully cool and the perfect place for a wine rack. The tiny room was brilliantly lit and crammed with provisions. Walnut and hazelnut and sesame oils. Olives, herbs, and pralines from Provence. Anchovies and provolone; truffles in little jars. Tins of clams and Szechuan peppercorns. Potato flour and many mustards. Prosciutto, water chestnuts, and a ham with a wrinkled, leathery skin the color of licorice hanging from the ceiling next to an odoriferous salami. Tiny Amaretti and snails. Tomato paste and matron paste, cured fish and lumpfish, gull’s eggs and plover’s eggs, and a chili sauce so hot it could blast the stones from a horse’s hoof. Tim moved a crock of peaches in brandy, took a bottle from the rack, and returned to the kitchen.

“What are you opening?”

“The Chateau d’lssan.”

Chewing his full marshmallow lip (the tiny drop of reassurance re: the phone calls having already vanished into a vast lake of more generalized anxiety), Avery watched Tim twist the corkscrew, press down the chrome wings, and, with a soft pop, pull the cork. Avery thought it the second most beautiful sound in the world (following hard on the easing of a zipper), while having a terrible suspicion that for Tim it might be the first. Now, looking at the flat dark silky hairs on the back of his lover’s wrist glinting in the light from the spot lamps, noticing his elegant hands as they tilted the bottle and poured the fragrant wine, Avery’s stomach lurched with a familiar mixture of terror and delight. Tim took off his suit jacket, revealing an olive-green doeskin vest and snowy shirt, the sleeves hitched up by old-fashioned elasticized armbands. Then he lowered his narrow, ascetic nose into the glass and sniffed.

Avery could never understand how anyone who cared so passionately about what he drank was not equally fastidious when it came to what he ate. Tim would consume anything that was what he called “tasty,” and his range was catholic to say the least. Once, stranded for an hour in Rugby station, he had demolished cheeseburger and chips, several squares of white, spongelike bread, a lurid pastry with three circles of traffic-light-colored jam, two Kit-Kats, and a cup of pungent, rust-colored tea with every appearance of satisfaction. And he did not even, Avery had reflected while toying miserably with an orange and a glass of lukewarm Liebfraumilch, have the excuse of a working-class background. (Tim had declined the wine on the grounds that it was not only likely to be the produce of more than one country, but liberally laced with antifreeze to boot.)

So why, Avery sometimes asked himself, as he leafed through his vast collection of cookbooks, did he labor so long and ardently in the kitchen? The answer was immediate and never changing. Avery prepared his wood pigeon à la paysanne, truite à la creme, and Jraises Romanof out of simple gratitude. He would place them before Tim in a spirit of excitable humility, because they were his supreme attainment, the very best his loving heart could offer. In the same manner he ironed Tim’s shirts, chose fresh flowers for his room, planned little treats. Almost unconsciously, when he went shopping, his eye was alert for something, anything, that would make a surprise gift.

He never ceased to marvel at the fact that he and Tim had been together for seven years, especially when he discovered the truth about his friend’s background. Avery had always been homosexual, and had innocently supposed that Tim’s experience had been the same. Then he discovered that Tim’s understanding of his true nature had come painfully and gradually. That he had regarded himself as heterosexual as a teenager, and bisexual for several years after that. (He had even been engaged for eighteen months while in his early twenties.)

The acquisition of this knowledge had thrown Avery into a turmoil of fear. Tim’s assurances and his reminder that this had all happened twelve years ago had done little to calm a temperament that was volatile by nature. Even now, Avery would watch Tim without seeming to, looking furtively for signs that these earlier inclinations were reasserting themselves, just as a showily colored plant occasionally reverts to its more pallid origins.

Avery reasoned thus because he could never, ever, in a trillion zillion years understand what Tim saw in him. For a start there was the physical contrast. Tim was tall and lean with hollow cheeks and a mouth so stern in repose that his sudden smile seemed almost shocking in its sweetness. Avery thought he was like a figure in a Caravaggio painting. Or perhaps (his profile at the moment looked alarmingly austere) a medieval monk. Nicholas had said he thought that Tim, although emotionally lean, was spiritually opulent. This was not what Avery wanted to hear. He didn’t give a fig for spiritual opulence. Give him, he had replied, a nice filet mignon and a fond caress any old day of the week.

Avery knew he cut a ridiculous figure when compared to Tim. He was tubby, and his features, like his personality, were sloppy and spread all over the place. His lips were squashy and overfull, his eyes a washed-out blue and slightly protuberant, with almost colorless lashes, and his nose, just to be different, was neat and small and seemed quite lost in the pale pink expanse of his face. His head was very round, with a fringe of curls, butter yellow and softly fluffy like duckling down. He had always been agonizingly conscious of his baldness, and until he met Tim, had worn a wig. The morning after their first night together he had found it in the wastebasket. It had never been mentioned between them again, and Avery bravely continued to live without it, treating himself and his scalp to a weekly going-over with a sun lamp instead.

Then there was the difference in their dispositions. Tim was nearly always calm, while Avery veered excitedly between elation and despair, touching all the psychological stations of the cross on the way. And he reacted so dramatically to things. This had always seemed to amuse Tim, but once or twice lately Avery had noticed a twitch or two of impatience, a spot of lip-tightening. Now, draining his glass of Bordeaux, he framed in his mind the latest of many small vows. He would learn to take things more calmly. He would think before speaking. Take several deep breaths. Perhaps even count to ten. He turned his attention back to the Le Creuset. All the tissues had sunk without trace. Avery let out a scream that could have been heard halfway down the street.

“Bloody hell!” Tim banged his glass down on the countertop. “What’s the matter now?”

“The Kleenex have sunk to the bottom.”

“Is that all? I thought at the very least you were being castrated.”

“I meant them to soak up all the bits,” sobbed Avery. “Well, now you’ve discovered that they won’t. Knowledge is never wasted. We’ll just give it to Nicholas.”

“You can’t do that—it’s full of tissue.”

“Riley, then.” Riley was the CADS feline mascot. “Riley! There’s half a bottle of Beaune in there.”

“So he’ll think it’s Christmas.”

“Anyway, Riley’s a fish man, not a meat man. What are you doing?”

“Toast.” Tim was slicing bread on the marble pastry slab. Now, he reached across Avery and switched on the grill. Then he refilled both their glasses. “Drink up, sweetheart. And stop flowing all over the furniture.”

“Sorry …” Avery sniffled and snuffled and drank up. “You’re … you’re not angry with me, are you, Tim?”

“No, Avery, I’m not angry with you. I’m just bloody starving to death.”

“Yes. So-”

“Don’t keep saying you’re sorry. Get off your backside and give me a hand. There’s some duck pate left over. And we could finish the mango ice cream.”

“All right.” Still mopping and mowing, Avery crossed to the fridge. “I don’t know why you put up with me.”

“Stop being ingratiating. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Sor—”

“And if I didn’t, who else would?”

This question, so casually posed, seemed to Avery no more than the simple truth. Awash with sorrow, he hung his head and pondered, looking down at his round tummy and chubby little feet. Then he looked up and met Tim’s sudden brilliant smile. O frabjous day! thought Avery, beaming widely in his turn. And then, to make things absolutely perfect and he and Tim equal in carelessness, the toast caught fire.

“We can pretend they’re charcoal biscuits,” said Avery, draining the rest of his wine. Then, quite forgetting the earlier strictures about him being ingratiating: “I wish I were more like you. More calm.”

“Good grief, I don’t. I’d hate to live with someone like me. I’d be bored to death in a week.”

“Would you, Tim?” Magically the dolorous beat of Avery’s heart quickened. “Would you really?”

“A drama a day keeps the doldrums away.”

“Mm.” Avery helped himself to some more wine. “That’s true, I suppose.”

“But we’ve had our ration for tonight. Now, we must get on.”

“Yes, Tim.” Avery bustled happily about finding unsalted butter, celery, the pâté, and a white china bowl of tomatoes. Tim was quite right, of course. Everyone knew about the attraction of opposites. That’s why it all worked so well on the whole. Why they were so happy together. It was just foolishness for him to struggle to destroy the very characteristics that his partner found attractive.

Avery took the hand-operated coffee grinder and put some beans in the little wooden drawer. Tim put more bread under the grill. He refused to use an electric contrivance, believing that the uncontrollably high speed overheated the beans, sent by mail by the Algerian Coffee Company, and impaired their flavor. The fragrance of the beans met and mingled with the succulent scent of the wine, and the very ordinary but always to Avery deeply satisfying smell of fresh toast. He sat down at the scrubbed deal table full of anticipation. This was the time he loved best of all. (Well, nearly.) When there was food and wine and gossip and jokes.

Even if all they had done during the day was sell books and get on with the paper work, there was always at least one customer who was ripe for exaggerated mimicry or grotesquely imaginative suggestions as to how he got his jollies. But of course the nights that sparkled, the nights that offered the most superlative entertainment, were the nights when they had been to the Latimer. Then performances could be put through the mincer, relationships scrutinized and surmises made and opinions mooted as to Harold’s precise degree of sanity (always open to question and anybody’s guess).

But occasionally, if there had been “a drama” in the home, Tim might withdraw a little and affect a lack of interest in the theatrical proceedings. These were anguished times for Avery, who gossiped as easily as he drew breath, and with almost the same urgent necessity. Now, as he slathered butter all over his toast, he looked across at Tim spreading neatly, with a small degree of perturbation. But it was all right. Tim looked across at Avery, and his slatey eyes, which could look so cold, were warm with a sudden flare of malice.

“But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln,” he said, reaching for the celery, “how did you enjoy the play?”

When Joyce Barnaby entered the sitting room, her husband was dozing in front of the fire. He had been drawing a sprig of Hammamelis mollis, and his pencil was still cradled in his hand, although the sketch pad had fallen to the floor. He woke when his wife, standing behind his chair, folded her arms across his chest and gave him a hug. Then she picked up the pad.

“You haven’t finished.”

“I dropped off.”

“Did you eat your lasagne?”

Tom Barnaby gave a noncommittal grunt. When Joyce had come home from the casting evening of Amadeus and told him she was playing cook to Salieri, only the fact that a raging heartburn was running amok in his breast at the time had stopped him laughing aloud. He could never get over the fact that she ate her own cooking if not with relish at least with no evidence of distaste. He wondered sometimes if his genuine expressions of dismay at mealtimes had, over the years, assumed a ritualistic or even a fossilized stamp, and that Joyce had decided they were some sort of running gag. He watched her bend over the sprig of yellow flowers and inhale appreciatively.

“How did it go, my lovely?”

“Like an evening with the Marx Brothers. I’ve never known so many things go wrong. Fortunately Tim arrived in the break with his razor, which cheered Harold up. Until then he’d been grousing all night. Molto disastro, my darlings!”

“What’s the razor for, anyway?”

“You wait and see. If I tell you now, it’ll spoil the first night.”

“Nothing could be spoiled for me that has you in it.” He took her hand. “What’s that big bag for?”

“Wardrobe. Trousers to be let out. Broken zips. Some braid to replace.”

“You do too much.”

“Oh, Tom”—she nudged his feet off a low stool and sat on it herself, holding her other cold hand out to the fire—“don’t say that. You know how I love it.”

He did know. Earlier he had been listening to a tape she had made of the arias sung by Katherina Cavalieri. Joyce had a beautiful voice, a rich, soaring soprano. A little blurred now in the higher register, but still thickly laced with plangent sweetness. The aria “Marten Aller Arten” had moved him to tears.

His wife had been a student at the Guildhall School of Music when they had met and fallen in love. He had been a constable on the beat. When he had first heard her sing at a public performance in her final year, he sat there listening to the marvelous sounds, stunned and afraid. For a long while after that he had been unable to believe that she could really love the ordinary man he knew himself to be. Or that she would ever be safely his.

But they had married, and for four years she had continued to sing, at first giving small, ill-attended recitals, then joining the chorus at the Royal National Opera House. Barnaby, learning fast, had reached the rank of detective sergeant when Cully was bom. Alternately bogged down in the office by administrative work or exhilaratingly abroad hunting an elusive prey, he worked long hours and used his time at home to eat and sleep. And as the months went by, to play with his increasingly delightful baby daughter. The fact that Joyce’s career had virtually come to a halt almost (as he admitted with shame much later) escaped his notice.

Progress in the force had been slow—he had remained a sergeant for many years—and money tight, so when Cully was three, Joyce had got a job understudying in Godspell.

But her husband was frequently on night duty, which meant engaging babysitters, and one or two unsettling experiences left her so full of guilt and anxiety that when she did get to the theater, she was quite unable to concentrate. So, pro tem, she joined the Causton Light Operatic Society to keep her voice supple; then, when that folded, the CADS. Not what she’d been used to, of course, but better than nothing. And she and Tom agreed it was only until Cully was old enough to be left by herself.

But when that time came, Joyce found that the musical world had moved on and was full of bright, gifted, tough, and pushy young singers. And the years of more or less contented domesticity had blunted the knife edge of her ambition. She found she didn’t want to drag herself up to London and stand in a vast dim theater and sing to a faceless trio somewhere out there in the dark. Especially with a crowd of twenty-year-olds watching from the wings sharp as tacks with determination and buoyant with energy and hope. And so, gradually and without any fuss or visible signs of dismay, Joyce relinquished her plans for a musical career.

But her husband never saw her playing with such perceptive truthfulness the modest parts that were her lot, or heard her lovely voice in the Christmas pantomime gloriously leading all the rest, without a terrible pang of sorrow and remorse. The pang had become muted over the years, given their continuing happiness, but now, “Marten Aller Arten” fresh in his ears and the great bag of alterations seen out of the corner of his eye, a sudden shaft of sadness, of pity at the waste, went through him like a knife.

“Tom …” Joyce seized his other hand and stared intently into his face. “Don’t. It doesn’t matter. All that. It doesn’t matter. It’s you and me. And now there’s Cully. Darling … ?” She held his gaze forcefully, lovingly. “All right?”

Barnaby nodded and allowed his face to lighten. What else could he do? Things were as they were. And it was true that now there was Cully.

Their daughter had been obsessed with the theater since the age of four, when she had been taken to her first pantomime. She had been quickly on-stage when the dame had asked for children to watch for the naughty wolf and had had to be forcibly removed, kicking and screaming, when the scene was over. She had performed at her primary school with great aplomb (oak leaf/young rabbit), and had never looked back. Now in her final year reading English at New Hall, her performances in the ADC were formidable to behold.

“I thought you knew all that,” continued Joyce. “Silly old bear.”

Barnaby smiled. “Been a long while since anyone called me that.”

“Do you remember when Cully used to? There was that program she loved on television …” Joyce sang, “ ‘Barnaby the bear’s my name… I forget the rest.”

“Ah, yes. She was a little cracker when she was seven.”

“She’s a little cracker now.” The conversation rested for a moment, then Joyce continued, “A message from Colin.” Barnaby groaned. “Could you paint the fireplace? Please?”

“Joycey—I’m on holiday.” He always demurred when asked to help out with the set, and he always, work permitting, gave a bit of a hand.

“I wouldn’t ask if you weren’t on holiday,” Joyce lied brazenly. “We can all chuck a bit of paint on flats, but this fireplace Colin’s made. It’s so beautiful, Tom—a work of art. We can’t let any old slap-happy Charlie loose on it. And you’re marvelous at that sort of thing.”

“Soft soap and flannel.”

“It’s true. You’re an artist. Do you remember that statue you did? For Round and Round the Garden?”

“Only too well. And the letters to the local press.”

“You could do it Saturday afternoon. Take a flask and some sandwiches.” She paused. “I wouldn’t ask if it were gardening weather.”

‘‘I wouldn’t do it if it were gardening weather.”

‘‘Oh, thank you, Tom.” She rubbed his hand against her cheek. “You are sweet.”

Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby sighed, seeing the last few precious days of his annual vacation filling up with bustling activity. “Try telling them that at the station,” he said.

Harold aimed his Morgan at the space between the gateposts topped with polystyrene lions at seventeen Madingley Close and bombed up to the garage. He encouraged the engine to give a final great, full-throated roar, then switched off and braced himself for the awkward business to follow. Getting in and out of the Morgan was not easy. On the other hand, driving along in it, handling it, being seen in it, was tremendous. Heads were turned as the scarlet hood flashed past, slaking temporarily Harold’s ultimately unquenchable thirst for admiration. The fact that his wife disliked the car added to his pleasure. He withdrew his keys and patted the dashboard appreciatively. One instinctively knew when something was right, mused Harold, having long ago taken this cunning adman’s lie to his heart.

On the leather bucket seat next to him lay a sheaf of posters that Mrs. Winstanley would dish out to fellow members of the Townswomen’s Guild, her flower-arranging class, and the local shops. Apart from racking his brains promotionwise and being interviewed whenever he could create the opportunity, Harold had no truck with publicity. After all, he would tell any jibbers, you didn’t see Trevor Nunn popping in and out of his local newsagent’s with footage on the latest extravaganza. Briefly reflecting on that famous name, Harold swallowed hard on the bile of dissatisfaction. He had long been aware that if it had not been for his careless early marriage and the birth of three numbingly dull children now, thankfully, boring themselves and their consorts to death miles away, he would currently be one of the top directors in the country. If not (Harold had never been one to shirk hard truths) in the world.

All you needed was luck, talent, and the right wife. Harold believed you made your own luck, talent was no problem. He had that, God knew, burgeoning from every pore. But the right wife … ah, there was the rub. Doris was a simple bourgeoise. A philistine. When they were first married (she had been a slim, shy, pretty girl), the children had kept her occupied, and she had had no spare time to take an interest in the Latimer. Later, when the young Winstanleys were growing up and following their own pursuits, her attempts to comment on the productions had been so inept that Harold had forbidden her to come to the theater except on first nights.

He had briefly considered trading her in when Rosa had come on the market, seeing the latter as a far more suitable mate for a producer. (Sometimes he wondered if Doris was really grateful for, or even aware of, the status that his position as the town’s only theatrical impresario conferred.) However, after exposing this fleeting fancy to the cold light of reason, Harold had to admit that it was gravely flawed. Rosa was used to, nay, reveled in, her role as leading lady, and he could not see her deliberately lowering her wattage to show him to best advantage. Whereas Doris, in spite of her peculiar absorptions—pickling eggs, drying flowers, and stuffing innocent knitted creatures with chunks of variegated foam—did have the supreme virtue of dimness. Indeed, Harold was pleasureably aware that when he entered a room, she practically vanished into the woodwork like the moth Melanchra persicariae. And perhaps most important of all, she was not grasping. He had provided modestly for his wife and children, far more modestly, in fact, than he might have done. Over half the profits he made from his business went into his productions, so that whatever snipers might find to criticize in any other direction, they could never say the play was not well dressed.

An amber rectangle of light fell across the windshield. “Harold?”

Harold sighed, gave the mileage dial a final quick polish with his hankie, and called, “Give me a chance.”

He struggled out of the cockpit. This was the cutoff point for him. The moment when he turned away from the full-blooded rumbustious razzle-dazzle rainbow ring of circus and stepped into the shady gray half-formed and quite unreal world of bread.

“Your supper’s getting cold.”

“Dinner, Doris.” Already consumed with irritation, he pushed past her into the kitchen. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“How has he been, Mrs. Higgins?” Deidre entered the kitchen quietly through the back door, and the elderly woman dozing by the fire jumped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“He’s been ever so good,” replied Mrs. Higgins. “Considering.”

Deidre thought the “considering” uncalled for. They both knew that Mr. Tibbs wasn’t always ever so good and why. Deidre glanced at the mantelpiece. Mrs. Higgins’s envelope had gone, and Deidre spied it sticking out of the woman’s grubby apron pocket as she heaved herself to her feet. “Upsadaisy.”

“Is he still asleep?”

“No. Just chatting away to hisself. I made him a lovely plate of soup.”

Deidre spotted the tin in the sink, said, “You’re so kind,” and helped Mrs. Higgins on with her coat. The thankfulness and gratitude in her voice were not feigned. If it were not for Mrs. Higgins, Deidre would have no life at all. No life, that is, apart from home and the Gas Board.

Because where else would she find someone to sit with a befuddled old man for a couple of pounds? Not that the money was ever mentioned. The first time Mrs. Higgins came, Deidre had offered, only to be told, “Don’t you worry dear, I’d only be sitting next door on me tod watching the goggle box.” But the coins Deidre had left under the teapot disappeared, and so, always since then, had the manila envelope.

When Mrs. Higgins had gone, Deidre locked and bolted the door, put some milk for her Horlicks on a very low heat, and climbed the stairs. Her father was sitting up ramrod straight in crisp pajamas under a large, dimmish print of “The Light of the World.” His gray, still faintly gingery mustache was soaked with tears of joy, and his eyes shone. “He is coming,” he cried as Deidre entered the room. “The Lord is coming.”

“Yes, daddy.” She sat on the bed and took his hand. It was like holding a few slippery bones in a bag of skin. “Would you like another drink?”

“He will take us away. Into the light.”

She knew it was no good trying to settle him. He always slept upright, his back bolted into a perpendicular line against a cumulus of pillows. She patted his arm and kissed his damp cheek. He had been a little bit disturbed for several months now. The first indication that all was not well had occurred when she arrived home from the theater one night after set-building to find him in the street going from house to house, rapping on doors and offering the startled occupants a shovelful of live coals.

Horrified and amazed, she had led him back home, replaced the coals on the kitchen fire, and questioned him gently, trying to find a rational explanation. Of course there had been none. Since then he had frequently been befuddled or confused. (Deidre always used these unemphatic terms, avoiding the terrible official definition. When one of the workers at the center where Mr. Tibbs spent his days had used the word, Deidre had screamed at her in fear and anger.)

He still had lengthy periods of marvelous clarity. There was just no way of knowing when they would arise or for how long they would last. The previous Sunday had been a lovely day. They had gone for a walk in the afternoon, and she had been able to tell him all about Amadeus, exaggerating her role in the production as she always did to make him proud of her. In the evening they had had a glass of port and some lumpy home-made cake, and he had sung songs that he remembered from his childhood. He had been over forty when Deidre was bom, so the songs were very old ones. “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Valencia,” and “Oh, Oh, Antonio.” He had put on his bowler hat and tapped and twirled his stick, shuffling in a sad, transmogrified echo of the routines he had leaped through when, years before, he had so delighted Deidre and her mother. His hair had been reddish gold then, and his mustache had gleamed like a ripe chestnut. They both wept before going to sleep last Sunday.

Deidre crossed to the window to draw the curtains, and stood for a moment looking up at the sky. There was a brilliant moon and a cavalcade of scudding clouds. Gabriel, her guardian angel, lived up there. As well as on the earth walking, bright and shining, just an immortal breath away, keeping a loving eye on the Tibbses’ worldly concerns. When she was a little girl, Deidre would whip around quickly sometimes, as she did in a game of statues, hoping to catch sight of his twelve-foot wings before he put on his invisible cloak. Once, she was convinced she had found the outline of a golden footprint before hearing, over her head, a rushing, beating swoosh of sound, like the passing of a thousand swans.

As well as the archangel, everyone had a star to watch over them. When she had asked her father which was hers, he had said, “It’s always the star that shines the brightest.” They all looked the same tonight, thought Deidre, letting the curtain fall, and rather cold. She remembered the milk and hurried down to the kitchen just too late to stop it boiling over.

She refilled and replaced the pan, then took her script for the next production, Uncle Vanya, from the dresser. It has been dissected and reassembled, interleaved with blank pages, as had all the copies of plays on which she had been assistant stage manager. Deidre worked long and ardently on every one before the first rehearsal. She would read and reread the play, getting to know the characters as well as if she had lived with them. She struggled to realize the subtext and sense the tempo. Her head buzzed with ideas on staging, and she used long rolls of thin cardboard to design her sets. She was as enthralled by Uncle Vanya as she had been by The Cherry Orchard, intoxicated by Checkhov’s particular ability to produce a seemingly natural world full of precisely observed, psychologically real human beings, then reconcile this world with the urgencies of dramatic necessity.

Now, becoming aware that she was hungry, she closed Uncle Vanya and put the book aside. She hardly ever managed to eat on theater evenings, not if she wanted to be on time. She found a bit of salad dressing in the fridge together with a small, hard piece of leftover beef and two slices of beetroot, and while spreading margarine on the stretchy white bread that was all her father’s gums could tackle, she slipped into a frequent and favorite reverie in which she reviewed edited lowlights from the latest rehearsal, rewriting the scenario as she went along.

DEIDRE: I think the Venticelli are far too close to Salieri in the opening scene. They wouldn’t huddle in that intimate way. And they certainly wouldn’t be touching him.

ESSLYN: She’s quite right, Harold. They’ve been getting more and more familiar. I thought if someone didn’t say something soon, I’d have to myself.

HAROLD: Right. Stop nudging the star, you two. And thanks, Deidre. Wish I’d taken you aboard years ago.

OR

HAROLD: Coffee all around, I think, Deidre.

DEIDRE: Do you mind? Assistant directors don’t make coffee.

(genial laughter)

HAROLD: Sorry. We’re so used to you looking after us.

ROSA: We’ve been taking you too much for granted, darling.

ESSLYN: And all the time you’ve been hiding all these dazzling ideas under your little bushel.

Harold: Careful—I’m turning green.

(more genial laughter, kitty gets up to make the coffee.)

OR

HAROLD: (SLUMPED IN A CHAIR IN THE CLUBROOM)

Now the others have gone, I don’t mind telling you, Deidre, I just don’t know what I’d have done without you on this production. Everything you say is so fresh and original, (heavy sigh). I’m getting stale.

DEIDRE: Oh, no, Harold. You mustn’t think—

HAROLD: Hear me out, please. What I’m working around to is our summer production. There’s such a lot of work involved in Uncle Vanya …

DEIDRE: I’ll be happy to help.

HAROLD: No, Deidre, I’ll help. What I’d like—what we’d all like—is for you to direct the play.

Even Deidre’s feverishly yearning soul found this final dialogue a bit hard to credit. As she scraped out the last bit of solid, shiny yellow salad dressing and distributed it patchily on the spongy bread, she reverted to simpler fantasies. Harold crashing his car. Or Harold having a heart attack. The latter was the most likely, she thought, recalling his stout tummy under its popping brocade vest. She surveyed her completed sandwich. The beetroot was falling out. She caught it, stuffed it back in, and took a bite. It wasn’t very good. The milk boiled over again.

“How do you think it went then, Constanze?”

Kitty was sitting by the dressing table. She had peeled off her tights and propped up her milk-white legs on an embroidered footstool. Although she had announced her pregnancy barely three months ago, she was already inclined to hold the small of her back and smile brave, aching smiles. She winced sometimes, too, in the manner of one reacting to tiny blows. Now, she carefully dotted cleansing cream over her face before giving the expected response.

“Well, darling, I thought you were wonderful. It’s coming along brilliantly.”

“Almost there, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, I would. And with so much against you.”

“Absolutely. Christ knows what Nicholas thinks he’s doing. I’m amazed Harold lets him get away with it.”

“I know. Donald and Clive are the only ones who say anything. And then only because they know how you feel.”

“Mm. They’re useful creatures in many respects.” Esslyn had brushed his teeth, put on his midcalf-length pajamas with the judo-style top, and was sitting up in bed tautening his facial muscles. Mouth dropped open, head tilted back, mouth closed, aiming bottom lip at the tip of his nose. He had the jawline of a man of twenty-five, which, on a man of forty-five, couldn’t be bad. He blew out his cheeks and let them collapse slowly. (Nose-to-mouth lines.) Then studied his pretty wife as she finished taking off her makeup.

He always fell slightly in love with the most attractive female member of the cast (they expected it), and in Rookery Nook had got really carried away in the props room with the frisky young ingenue who was now Mrs. Carmichael. She had been playing Poppy Dickie at the time. Unfortunately, when the pregnancy was discovered, he was unmarried, so had felt it incumbent upon him to propose to Kitty. He did this rather ruefully. He had been looking forward to several years of louche living before finding someone to care for him in his old age. But she was a biddable little piece, and he couldn’t deny that this latish fatherhood had upped his status potentwise in the office. And of course it had been the most tremendous sock in the eye for Rosa.

He felt he owed her one for the way she had behaved when he had asked for a divorce. She had screamed and wailed and wept. And bellowed that he had had the best years of her life. Esslyn—reasonably enough, he felt-pointed out that if he hadn’t had them, someone else would have. She could hardly have kept them, pristinely unlived, in a safe-deposit box. Then she had sobbed that she had always wanted children, and now it was too late and it was all his fault. This seemed to Esslyn just plain ridiculous.

They had sometimes discussed starting a family, usually when cast as parents in the current production, but Esslyn always felt it only right to point out that while their stage children would disappear after the final performance, real ones would be around for a whole lot longer. And that although his own life might not be much affected, Rosa’s, since he would definitely not be shelling out for a nanny, would never be quite the same again. He’d thought she’d appreciated the logic of this, but she brought it all up when the question of moving out of White Wings was broached, refusing to budge until she had had some compensation for her “lost babies.” Quite a hefty sum they had cost him, too. He had got his own back, though. When Kitty had become pregnant, he had announced it and their forthcoming nuptials at the end of a rehearsal of Shop at Sly corner. Tenderly holding Kitty’s hand, his eyes on Rosa’s face, Esslyn had more than got his money’s worth.

Of course, by then she had married that boring little builder. To be fair, though, Esslyn admitted to himself, finishing his cheek exercises and starting on some head rolling to reduce the tension in his neck, there were people who thought accountancy just as dreary a job as putting up houses. Perhaps even drearier. Esslyn could not agree. To him, the sorting and winnowing of claim and counterclaim, the reduction of stacks of wild expense-account imaginings to a column of sober, acceptable figures, and the hunting down of obscure wrinkles and loopholes in the law enabling him to reduce his clients’ tax bill was a daily challenge that he would not have felt it too imprecise to call creative.

Esslyn preferred to handle the accounts of individuals. His partner, a specialist in company law, dealt with larger concerns, with the single exception of the charitable trust that supported the Latimer. As an insider with an intimate knowledge of the company’s affairs, Esslyn had automatically taken this on, together with the accounts for Harold’s import-export business, which was a modest one but not without interest. He never charged Harold quite as much as he would a nonacquaintance, and often wondered if his producer-director really appreciated this.

Having come to the end of his reminiscences and rolling his head about, Esslyn returned his attention to Kitty. Becoming aware of his regard, she tossed her highlighted curls in a coquettish gesture, which a less complacent husband might have thought a touch calculated. Then she admired her neck in the mirror. Esslyn admired her neck as well. Not a ring or a blur or a fold in sight. She had a charming little face. Too pointed to be called heartshaped, it obtained more to a neat foxiness that, combined with the narrow tilt of her sparkling eyes, was very appealing. Now, she stood up, smoothing the rosy fabric of her nightdress close against her belly, as yet no rounder than when they had wrestled in the props room, and smiled into the glass.

Esslyn did not smile back, but contented himself with a simple nod. He was very sparing with his smiles, bringing them out only on special occasions. He had long been aware that, while they lit up and transformed his face, they also deepened and reinforced the nose-to-mouth lines somewhat. Now, he called, “Darling,” in a manner that spoke more of instruction than endearment.

Obediently Kitty crossed to the four-poster and stood by his side. Esslyn made a “going up” gesture with his hand, palm held flat, and his wife lifted her nightdress over her head and let it fall, a cool raspberry ripple of satin, into a pool around her feet. Esslyn let his gaze slide over her lean, almost boyish flanks and hips, and small, appley breasts, and his lips tightened with satisfaction. (Rosa had allowed herself to become quite grotesquely fat during the last years of their marriage.) Esslyn tugged at the cord of his pajamas with one hand while patting his wife’s pillow with the other.

“Come along, kitten.”

She felt really nice. Firm and young and strong. She smelled of honeysuckle and the iffy white wine they sold in the clubhouse. She was sweetly compliant rather than saucily active, which, it seemed to Esslyn, was just how things should be. And to round off her character to perfection, she couldn’t act for beans.

This last reflection recalled the rehearsals for Amadeus, and as Esslyn started to move briskly inside his wife, he mulled over his latest role at the Latimer. Quite a challenge (Salieri was never offstage), but he was starting to feel that acting was no longer quite enough. It had been suggested that he might try a spot of directing, and the truth was that Esslyn was rather drawn to this idea. He had once read a biography of Henry Irving, and quite fancied himself in a long dark coat with an astrakhan collar and a tallish hat. He might even grow sideburns—

“How was that for you, darling?”

“How was what? Oh—” He gazed down at Kitty’s face, her lips shinily parted, her eyes closed in soft eclipse. “Sorry. Miles away as per usual. Fine … fine.” He gave her a postcoital peck on the cheek in the manner of one putting the finishing touch to an iced cake and rolled over to his own side of the bed. “Do try and get your lines down for Tuesday, Kitty. At least for the scenes when we’re together. I can’t stand being held up.” Unconsciously he echoed Harold. “I don’t know what you find to do all day.”

“Why”—Kitty got up on one elbow and beamed a shining, blue glance in his direction—“I think of my petti-poos, of course.”

“And I think of you too, puss-wuss,” rejoined Esslyn, really believing at that moment that he did. Then he said, “Don’t forget—by Tuesday,” plumped up his pillows, and, two minutes later, was fast asleep.

The Everards, toadies to the company’s leading man, lived in unspeakable disarray in the crumbling terraced house down by the railway lines.

They were objects of curiosity to the rest of the street, who could not make them out. They did not seem to have jobs (the curtains were still sometimes drawn at midday), and would often not come flitting out with their expandable string shopping bags until well past teatime.

That they had little money seemed obvious. They never gave at the door and could occasionally be seen at five o’clock on market day scavenging behind the stalls with dainty precision, picking over the thrown-out fruits and vegetables. Various subtle and not-so-subtle attempts by the neighbors to get into the house had failed. They had not even managed to set foot on the tacky linoleum in the hall. And the windows were so thickly coated with grime that even when the tattered curtains were pulled aside, the mildewed interior of the house remained a mystery.

The sour patch of ground that passed for a back garden was overgrown with nettles and thistles and tall grass that occasionally swayed and rustled, disturbed by the passing of rodents. On the asphalt beneath the front bay window, their car slumped. This was a fifteen-year-old Volkswagen held together by spot welding and willpower, with a Guinness label where the tax disc should have been. Mrs. Griggs at the corner newsagent’s had reported them to the police over this, and the label had disappeared for a while but was now back again. The Everards, Mrs. Griggs was fond of saying, gave her the creeps. She couldn’t stand Clive’s front teeth, which looked very sharp and protruded slightly, or Donald’s blinking and squinting. She called them Ratty and Moley, although never in their presence.

They were rarely seen apart, and if they were, a certain dimness about the single Everard was noticeable. It was as if only by close physical proximity could the spark be struck that enabled them to shine with their full malevolent wattage. They seemed to feed off each other; wax fat on spiteful prediction and exchange. Nothing gave the brothers more happiness than the intense discomfiture of their fellow men, although they would never have been honest enough to say so. For hypocrisy was their middle name. Nobody could have been more surprised than they when someone took a remark amiss. Or when a plot or a plan resulted in the collapse of frail parties and distress all around. Who would have thought it? they would cry, and would retire to their appalling kitchen to plot and plan some more.

Passers by number 13 Axon Street would stare at the gray windows and mutter and raise their eyebrows. Or tap their foreheads. The question “What are they up to?” was not infrequently posed. Answers ranged pleasurably over a wide spectrum of subversive activities, from the stealthy printing of underground literature to the making of bombs for the IRA. They were all quite wide of the mark. The beam of the Everards’ malice, though powerful, was a narrow one, and if they could make just a little mayhem within the immediate circle of their acquaintances, they were quite content.