Enter The Prologue

1

Enter The Prologue

    “NO!” roared Mac. “STOP!”

    Everybody obediently stopped. In fact some of the fairies—Vicki Austin chief amongst them, she was a ringleader if ever there was one, and if she and her sister hadn’t been so damn pretty, Mac would never have had them in the thing—sat down and started eating junk food produced from the pockets of their jeans.

    “I said TRIP LIGHTLY!” roared Mac. “TRIP—LIGHTLY!”

    Everybody looked bored. They had been tripping lightly.

    “And you lot,” said Mac evilly to the rustics: “SHUT UP! And stop playing with those fucking bladders— GIVE me that!” He snatched a silver bladder out of a rustic’s hairy paw. The rustics, or non-speaking male chorus, were mostly engineering students and had been chosen for their shambling hideousness and general air of rustic thickness, and now Mac was duly reaping the rewards of this decision. He knew it, but this didn’t help. As for the bladders—well, they were going to look bloody good when the lights were on and everybody was made up and in costume. But in the meantime they were more trouble than they were fucking well worth, and come to think of it, they’d been that Vicki kid’s idea, too! He stopped glaring generally and gave her a specific glare but Vicki didn’t notice and merely continued munching on an apricot-nougat muesli bar.

    “Right, now LISTEN!” roared Mac. “This over here is your entrance! SEE?” The fairies looked bored, they knew that. “You come in tripping lightly. TRIPPING LIGHTLY, not like a herd of elephants! And the next fairy I see wearing bloody jandals is out of the fucking show! Geddit? Out of the fucking show!”

    One or two fairies obligingly removed their rubber flip-flops, looking bored.

    “And don’t come in in flaming ROWS, it’s not the Folies Bloody Bergère!” roared Mac.

    “Last time he told us not to come in in a bunch like a mob of sheep,” said the fairy sitting on the stage next to Vicki.

    “Yeah,” agreed Vicki without interest. “Wanna bit?”

    “Ta,” said the other fairy, accepting a bit of apricot-nougat muesli bar.

    “Right!” decided Mac. “Now when I say ‘now’, you all come in.”

    “Tripping ligh’ly,” muttered the fairy sharing Vicki’s muesli bar through the muesli bar.

    “Yesh,” agreed Vicki sourly.

    “Now— GET UP!” roared Mac.

    The fairies struggled reluctantly to their feet.

    “Now—hang on, where’s that fat fairy?” he said.

    There was a bit of shuffling and shoving. Finally a fat male fairy was pushed to the front.

    “I know you can’t trip lightly, dear,” said Mac to him in an acid voice: “but when I say ‘trip lightly’, just try not to pound. Geddit?”

    “Righto,” said the fat fairy obligingly.

    “Right. Now, places, everybody!” cried Mac optimistically. “PLACES!” he bellowed. “Get into FORMATION!” he screamed.

    The fairies shuffled and bumped a bit.

    “When are we gonna get off this stupid stage and do it in the real place?” grumbled the fairy who’d shared Vicki’s muesli bar.

    “Dunno,” replied Vicki.

    “Where is it that we’re gonna do it, anyway?” asked the fairy in a puzzled voice.

    “Um—dunno,” replied Vicki.

    “Right—now!” decided Mac. “NOW!” he shouted.

    The fairies tripped on. Lightly. Well, as lightly as they could, considering that most of them were in jeans, they’d already tripped on fifty times this morning, and the temperature was pushing twenty-five, with a humidity reading of eighty-two percent, and if anyone thought that was fun, they’d never got themselves involved in a University Drama Club midsummer production of guess what, the Dream, in a streaming northern New Zealand summer.

    “This is vile,” noted Jill Davis of the French Department in a dry, detached voice from the main door of the hall.

    It was all right for Jill: she wasn’t in the horrible thing, and she was due to go on holiday down the South Island in two days’ time, far, far away from humid hell-holes where idiots that couldn’t stand up to their H.O.D.s had let themselves be conned into agreeing to help out with the stupid annual outdoor Shakespeare production.

    “Yes,” agreed Georgy Harris of the English Department sourly.

    “Come down to the Franz Josef with me and Gretchen!” suggested Jill with a laugh in her voice. “Sun, ice—bit of snow, maybe—”

    “Push off, Jill,” said Georgy in a hard voice.

    “We thought we might do a bit of rock-scrambling—Gretchen knows a bloke from the German Department down in Dunedin, he—”

    “I’ll—kill—you,” said Georgy through her teeth.

    “Well, come to lunch, for God’s sake,” said Jill, desisting.

    “I can’t, Mac might want me to—um—hold the book, or something,” said Georgy glumly.

    “Isn’t he capable of holding his own book?” replied Jill blankly.

    “No, you clot!” she hissed. “Prompt!”

    “Eh? Oh! Well, they’re not reading lines, they’re doing this galumphing stuff,” pointed out Jill.

    Georgy gulped. “Mm. But he’s supposed to be rehearsing the—um, I forget: one of those boring scenes with those idiot lovers, I forget which pair, in about”—she looked at her watch—“half an hour ago,” she discovered.

    “The whole thing’s boring, if you ask me. Almost as boring as Mac’s lectures on it, from all I’ve heard.”

    “Ssh!” hissed Georgy, scowling at her and glancing frantically up the hall. However, it was all right, Mac was still sweating and screaming at his fairies.

    “Well, isn’t it?”

    “Um—well, I did once see a production on TV that was quite good,” said Georgy in a weak voice. “I think it had Helen Mirren in it. –I think,” she added dubiously. “Or was that that thing with Whatsisname?”

    “Probably,” said Jill, sounding extremely bored.

    “That tall one, that thinks he’s funny. He was quite good, though. But he gives me the creeps.”

    “Illuminating, Harris,” noted Jill, leaning heavily on the door jamb.

    “John Something. Wasn’t he in that Cambridge Circus thing you were telling me about?” said Georgy, who was a New Zealander, in a rather small voice to Jill, who was English and had done a degree at Cambridge.

    “Oh! Good grief! Him!”

    “Mm.”

    “We are talking about Measure For Measure, aren’t we?” said Jill with a laugh in her voice.

    “I think so,” replied Georgy uncertainly. “The lady was called Isabella, I do remember that.”

    “No-one would ever think Eng. Lit. was your subject, Harris,” noted Jill kindly.

    “It isn’t: Anglo-Saxon is. –And Shakespeare certainly isn’t!” Georgy added with spirit.

    Mac flung an impatient look over his shoulder at the noise by the door, and she cringed.

    “Why do you let him bully you like this?” asked Jill on a resigned note.

    “Because he’s a bully, and I’m a doormat, I suppose. –I go all sick inside, Jill,” she said miserably.

    Jill sighed. “Well, I hope you’re not deluding yourself you’ll get tenure out of this little lot: because if it’s a choice between you and that blonde Angela bint he’s been up in his spare time for the last few years—”

    “I know. Don’t be horrid,” said Georgy in a stifled voice.

    “Gretchen’s right,” she said heavily: “you do need to come to Assertiveness Training.”

    “I’ve tried,” said Georgy sadly. “I can hear it all in my head—you know; and I—I admit the—the justice of everything they say: only when it’s a real person, I just can’t do it!”

    “No,” agreed Jill resignedly. “Well, I’d better go, Gretchen’s keeping a leathery filled-roll warm for me in the S.C.R., might as well make use of the bloody place while it’s still open. I’ll be seeing ya. And if you change your mind about the South Island in the next two days, you know where we live.”

    “Thanks. Only I can’t. I’ve promised,” said Georgy sadly.

    Jill sighed, and departed.

    Georgy went on hovering in the doorway, waiting for Mac to bellow at her to come and hold the book, or show fairies how to trip, or take silver bladders on sticks off huge engineering students who terrified her. None of them, in fact, would have laid a finger on her: for one thing, in spite of the carefully cultivated macho hoonish surfaces they were nice boys from decent homes, for another thing she was quite little and shy, and for another thing, she was A Lecturer.

    The rehearsal wound on its weary way. Fairies tripped—or galumphed, depending on whether you were behind or before the footlights that might have been there if they’d been going to do the actual production in the hall. Mac sweated and shouted. The two pairs of lovers and the Puck understudy, perched on uncomfortable wooden benches against one wall, got up a desultory game of poker. The rustics fought amongst themselves—at least, the usual sort of shuffling, bumping, and general body contact of male of engineering students only halfway through their degrees looked like that to the timid Georgy from her position by the door. The Oberon understudy sulked and looked endlessly at his watch. The Titania understudy alternately sulked and glared at Mac. –Pointlessly: she would never have got the part even if he hadn’t had some beastly Pommy female (the understudy’s expression) coming out to play it, another blonder and much more buxom female student would have. But that student, on being told she’d have to be the understudy but could do a couple of the matinées for schoolkids, had slapped Mac’s face for him and walked off the stage and out of his life. In fact she’d gone straight down to the Registry, so incensed was she, and told them that she knew she’d pre-enrolled for English Honours next year but she’d changed her mind, she wanted to do French Honours instead. At the Registry they’d told her in shocked tones that she couldn’t change her course here, this was the Registry! And that she’d have to wait until Enrolment Week and change it then. Which she fully intended to do.

    After quite some considerable time Mac got the chorus of fairies off the stage and sent them to lunch. Georgy watched them go enviously. He gave the chorus of rustics a brief stretch of coming on rustically, tore his hair, and sent them to lunch. Georgy watched them go enviously. Then he started rehearsing two of the lovers, looked round angrily, and bellowed: “Georgy! Get up here!”

    Georgy came up meekly and sat down to prompt on the prompt side. She had more to say, really, than the actual lovers: there being two of them and neither of them being able to remember half their lines.

    “Get OFF, get OFF, get OFF!” screamed Mac finally. “No—wait: you,” he said evilly to the male lover: “get back there.”

    The boy got, looking cowed.

    “Georgy! called Mac. “GEORGY!” he bellowed furiously. “—Oy: cummere!” He grabbed the female lover as she was about to sneak off to lunch.

    Georgy’s face appeared cautiously at the prompt side. “What?”

    “Get out there and show this moron how to read this part,” ordered Mac.

    “Um—righto,” said Georgy. “Where shall I start?”

    “At—the—beginning,” said Mac in an evil voice.

    “Oh—righto. Um—‘Fair love, you faint with wandr’ing in the wood—’”

    “NO!” bellowed Mac. “You’re the WOMAN!”

    “Am I?” said Georgy in astonishment.

    “YES!” bellowed Mac. “Give her the line, you cretin! –YOU! Give her the LINE!”

    “Oh. Um—blow, where am I?” fumbled the male lover.

    “‘Fair love,’” prompted Georgy kindly.

    “Oh—yeah. –Hang on, can I look at your script, Georgy?’’

    “JEE-SUS!” bellowed Mac, tearing his hair with both hands. He had to hurl his script to the floor in order to do this, but he managed that all right, too.

    The lover gave Georgy the line. Georgy replied obediently in the voice of Hermia: “‘Be it so, Lysander: find you out a bed. For I upon this bank will rest my head.’”

    They played the little scene through. Hermia came over as a young woman of great good sense, considerable sense of humour, and much tenderness. Very much in love with a young man who was not the weedy specimen in the jeans torn artfully at the knees who stood awkwardly before Georgy on the stage of the University Hall, but a rather more splendid young man altogether.

    “See?” said Mac nastily to the unfortunate female lover. “She’s in love with him—geddit? In—love. She doesn’t look at him as if he’s a piece of wood, or a turd, or a stone, she’s in LOVE with him, DAMN IT!”

    “I can’t do it!” wailed the female lover, suddenly bursting into floods of tears.

    Mac immediately changed tack. “Of course you can, my lovely,” he purred, putting his arm round the heaving shoulders. “Oy—you lot: clear off: go to lunch: back by two-fifteen!” he bellowed at the rest of them.

    They shot off before he could change his mind.

    “Now, then,” he purred, leading his sobbing victim away, “come on, you tell old Mac all about it!”

    “It’s—too—hard!” she sobbed.

    “Not for a bright little thing like you,” cooed Mac, as they vanished in the general direction of the garden. Or possibly the casting-couch in Mac’s office, thought Georgy, who had no illusions either about her boss, even if she couldn’t stand up to him, or about the sexual willingness, indeed over-eagerness, of many of the female students, even though she'd never been like that herself as a student.

    “Um—whadd’ll we do?” croaked the unfortunate Lysander.

    “Go to lunch; I am,” replied Georgy, walking off the stage.

    Lysander hesitated, then he belted after her. “Um—Georgy?” he panted.

    “Yeah?”

    “Um—could you help me with my lines?” he panted, going very pink.

    It didn’t dawn on Georgy that this was not merely pinkness as of shy student to lecturer, or as of shy rotten actor to assistant producer. –She’d be down as that in the programme, but a better name was Dogsbody, as all who’d ever been associated with any of Mac’s productions over the last twenty-five years were well aware.

    “Yeah, righto. Only I’m starving, shall we go over to the Caff?” she replied.

    “Um—it’s closed!” he gulped. “I mean, they’re only selling Mars Bars and Fanta and stuff!”

    “Ugh. Um—well, come on, let’s go down that coffee bar down the road, it’s not too bad. I think I’ve got some cash,” she added, feeling in her jeans pocket.

    “I have!” gasped Lysander, retrieving his satchel and stumbling back to her side, pinker than ever.

    “Good. Well, I’ll pay you back if I haven’t got enough,” replied Georgy blithely.

    “Righto!” he gasped.

    They went out.

    Silence fell in the big, hot, dusty hall.

    After a while an engineering student who was of sufficient eminence to do actual lighting came in, looked round in a puzzled way at finding nobody, and went out again.

    The hall dozed on in the hot afternoon.

    It was only the nineteenth of December, and those who had realized that the University Drama Club’s summer productions never started until the first week of Term (that was, the first week in March) might perhaps have felt some confusion at Mac’s evident state of sweaty desperation. That was, if they hadn’t also known that all his student actors (who’d only stayed on after exams finished in early November to audition and rehearse) would vanish to their far-flung homes as of tomorrow, or thereabouts, and rehearsals would cease totally until well into January, when they would straggle back. In order to rehearse and take up their holiday jobs, which were designed to help them feed themselves throughout the coming academic year, and which incidentally would prevent quite a large proportion of them from turning up to rehearsals when they were supposed to. By which time Mac’s choruses of fairies and rustics would have forgotten all their moves, and the so-called actors would have forgotten all their lines. With any luck, however, the electricians, led by Professor Michaels of the Engineering Department, who was a fanatic—some merely said a madman—would not have forgotten their lighting sequences. Or Bill Michaels’s computer wouldn’t have.

    There was an outdoor Shakespeare production every year, and Mac went through these hassles every year, but somehow he went on doing it. Glutton for punishment, his colleagues had decided. Most of them usually went, though. There wasn’t much entertainment on offer in New Zealand, so they took what they could get. On one or two years out of the last twenty-five the Drama Club’s production had actually formed the dramatic and intellectual highlight of the year. Everyone remembered the Hamlet, that was years and years ago—whatever had become of that boy? Mac had been furious, so it was said, because the boy had bleached his hair the day before the first night, and it made him look as if he was copying Laurence Olivier in the film, which he wasn’t supposed to be doing; but it had made the “To be or not to be” scene out in the cloisters in the dark with the spotlight awfully effective.

    Some years, however, the production was frankly awful. Jill Davis of the French Department claimed to have actually slept through Twelfth Night, but everyone knew that was apocryphal: those wooden benches they always put up in the quad were too ruddy uncomfortable to sleep on for five minutes, let alone for an interminable Twelfth Night. The cognoscenti brought cushions, but the benches were still agony.

    This year’s production had Mac even more frazzled than usual, because he had three Big Stars coming out from England for it. Well, one big star, one minor light in the firmament, and one excellent character actor of whom most of New Zealand (amongst whom were not numbered, however, Jill Davis and Georgy Harris) had never heard.

    The big star hadn’t been a big star for all that long, as far as the New Zealand film-going public was concerned. He’d only recently played the leading rôle in that action movie, hadn’t he been good, wasn’t he sexy? He could act, too. With that new actress—you know. She had one of those foreign names, but she was good, too.

    New Zealand didn’t know that the big star despised himself for having accepted that stupid rôle in that shoot-em-down, blow-’em-up piece of sexist nonsense, despised the money he’d made from it, despised his own enjoyment of the adulation he’d received on account of it, and had refused point-blank to do the sequel. In spite of being offered enough money to support him in idleness for the rest of his life. Nor would New Zealand have understood if it had known.

    The only reason that the big star was going to act in Mac’s piddling little Drama Club production—in piddling little New Zealand—was that he was Mac’s nephew, and his parents, who were both New Zealanders but had lived in England for years, had now settled up the Hibiscus Coast at rather charming and rather up-market Kowhai Bay for Christopher Black’s well-earned retirement. And the star wasn’t very good at standing up to hectoring uncles—Mac, on his mother’s side—or charming, cajoling uncles with a twinkle in the azure eyes he shared with them—Maurice Black, on his father’s side. Or to a teasing mother with a gurgle in her voice, who’d said long-distance: “Darling, I know poor Mac’s frightful, but he’s due to retire in a couple of years, and it’d be the highlight of his career! Truly!” Or to a frighteningly clever physicist father, who disapproved of his chosen career but who’d said: “Look, do it, Adam, for Christ’s sake, or your mother’ll never let me hear the last of it.” Long-distance.

    So Adam Black, who called himself Adam McIntyre because at the time he’d incensed his father by chucking in his degree to go into a grimy little repertory company the name “Adam Black” had sounded too much like a pop star, had given in. Since he was coming out for a holiday, anyway.

    Thousands of hopeful Antipodean entrepreneurs had immediately seized on him with predatory claws and tried to get him to act in their productions. These ranged from a slick professional “Lay Mizz” that Adam wouldn’t have crossed the street to see, not to mention the fact that he couldn’t sing, in Melbourne, to a modern-dress Lear in Christchurch (their University Drama Club), where Adam, regardless of the fact that he was not yet forty, could have had the leading rôle. Adam referred them all firmly to his agent, Clem Smith, who was a tower of strength in his life and the only reason he had stayed relatively sane through the awful years of his struggles to get on his feet in the theatre; his struggles not to be absorbed into the R.S.C.; his struggles not to get typecast as something that wasn’t his type at all on British television; his struggles to fend off predatory and rapacious females once he did get established; his struggles to hold his marriage together once he did get established and his wife found he still had to be away from home a lot for the sake of his career; his messy divorce—she’d gone off in a blaze of publicity with his best friend, also an actor, so Adam couldn’t follow the “away from home” bit at all and came to the bitter conclusion he was a rotten husband, a rotten lover, and a weak person all round; his struggles not to get trapped in the Hollywood thing; and, most recently, his struggles not to get engaged to one, Livia Wentworth—not actually all that hard, she was good in bed but he couldn’t stand her personality.

    Clem turned down all the Australasian offers but one. A decent rôle in an interesting play with a respectable little company in Sydney. Did Adam want it? Before he answered that, did he want to know what it would do to his tax position? Adam didn’t. But he did think the rôle sounded interesting, so he agreed to do it. For two weeks. So long as it was after the bloody Dream, he couldn’t face it with Uncle Mac’s bloody spangled tights hanging over his head.

    Clem had choked, agreed it was after, and got an iron-clad contract for two weeks for him. Not to say a booking in a quiet Sydney hotel. Adam often thought that if only Clem had been a woman, instead of a thin, ugly, energetic man in his mid-forties, he’d have married him years ago.

    On the nineteenth of December, late afternoon, London time, Clem turned from his contemplation of the rain streaming down the sitting-room window of Adam’s flat, and said nastily: “Looking forward to your trip to the Antipodes?”

    Adam glared at him, and sneezed convulsively.

    Joel Thring, who was the character actor who was going to do Puck, immediately said: “See! He’ll never be able to go on tonight!”

    Adam blew his nose and glared at him.

    “I’ll get on to them,” said Clem, strolling over to the phone.

    Adam said thickly: “Well, at least it won’t be bloody brass-monkey weather out there!”

    “No: according to your own report, dear boy,” chirped Joel, perching on the arm of a large chair and looking at him with his clever, ugly, gnome-like head on one side, “it’ll be stinking humid.”

    Adam sneezed again. “Probably,” he said balefully.

    Joel preened himself. “Those of us who were born in semi-tropical Bognor Regis will be able to take it.”

    Clem looked up briefly from his phone call, and smiled. Adam glared over his paper handkerchief.

    “Where was La Livia born?” added Joel airily.

    “Look, it wasn’t my idea!” said Adam angrily.

    “Save the voice, dear,” recommended Joel. “—No, one gathers it was hers, but why did you agree?”

    “She was here when my uncle dropped in,” said Adam irritably. He sneezed again, and muttered: “Christ.”

    “Lemon juice with whisky is indicated,” said Joel to Clem as he hung up.

    “Yes. –Bob’s telling young Tony he’s got to go on,” he said to Adam. Adam shrugged.

    “The poor audience!” said Joel with a shudder.

    “He knows the lines,” said Adam.

    “Oh, certainly he knows the lines, dear boy,” agreed Joel an acid note.

    “He’s quite pretty, the ladies in the audience won’t be disappointed,” said Clem briefly. “Have you got any lemons?”

    “Kidched,” said Adam thickly. “God!” he gasped as he sneezed again.

    “That was the most unkindest cut of all,” murmured Joel as Clem’s thin back disappeared.

    “Oh, Clem’s got no opinion of my so-called talent,” murmured Adam. He gasped, but failed to sneeze.

    “Dear boy! No opinion of your lady audiences’ appreciation of your talent, certainly!” protested Joel.

    “Drop it,” said Adam tiredly.

     Joel eyed him a trifle warily. “Well, to return to our muttons, Adam o’ mine, why are we having La Livia inflicted on us for the duration of this Anty-podean tour?”

    “It isn’t a—blast—tour!” gasped Adam, sneezing again. “I told you: the bitch was here! And my uncle—”

    “Tut! Uncle me no uncles!” protested Joel.

    “You’ve been busting to work that one off on me, haven’t you, Joel?” said Adam kindly.

    Joel winked. “True, oh king. No, but why did you agree?”

    “I didn’t! I never got a word in edgeways! The bitch heaved the tits at Uncle Maurie and he was off and running! –Dirty old dog,” he added sourly.

    “I thought this Anty-podean uncle was called Mac,” said Joel in confusion.

    “He is—the one that’s producing it. This was Uncle Maurie, he’s a retired history professor, he was over on some damned historians’ jamboree, and he came round and— Well, anyway, I’d more or less agreed to do Oberon, Ma had already rung me. But Livia turned up and— Well, Uncle Maurie’s a ladies’ man from back—mind you, he must be a hundred and two, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped him. And you know Livia, she can scent ’em.”

    “Scent what?” asked Clem, coming back with a steaming jug and three glasses on a tray.

    “Thank God!” muttered Adam. “Uh—bloody stupid males that she can wind round her little finger; what else?”

    “You ought to know,” said his agent mildly.

    “I do, I was just saying,” said Adam tiredly. “She—well, seduced, there’s no other word for it—she seduced Uncle Maurie into agreeing to persuade Uncle Mac to let her do Titania.”—Joel swallowed involuntarily.—“And old Maurie did speak to Mac, but of course there was no persuading about it, the whole of New Zealand seems to have seen her in that bloody soapie she did last year. Mac leapt at her.”

    Joel accepted a hot toddy gingerly—even though Clem had thoughtfully wrapped a paper napkin round it. “Thanks. –Well, a nude Sloane-Ranger Titania with a lisp’ll be something different, all right.”

    “Will the locals even notice, though?” asked Clem.

    Adam set his glass down hurriedly and sneezed again. “No!” he gasped. He blew his nose hard. “Besides, they’ll be disappointed if she doesn’t do the Sloane Ranger and the lisp, it’s what they’ll all be waiting for, after that ruddy soap.”

    They both smiled; but then Joel said uncertainly: “In the Bard?”

    Adam shrugged.

    “Look, why in God’s name did he agree to do it, if that’s how he feels about it?” said Joel to Clem with some heat.

    “Don’t ask me, I only get in on the act if there’s cash money involved.”

    “Liar!” gasped Adam through another sneeze.

    “Well, he did consult me,” said Clem with a little smile. “I told him it’d be frightfully good for the image—charity-wise and intelligent-sensitive-intellectual-wise—and he threw my own biro at me.”

    Joel grinned. The resemblance to a malicious hobgoblin or possibly gargoyle noticeably increased. Although he was nothing like Mac’s original conception of Puck, Mac was going to be thrilled with him.

    “All is explai’d,” said Adam thickly. He sipped toddy cautiously. “I can’t taste any whisky in this,” he grumbled.

    “That is because you have a cold,” said Joel very slowly and clearly.

    “Did you put any in it?” Adam asked Clem, ignoring Joel.

    “Yes. –How did you get in on the act?” he said to Joel.

    “I was going out there anyway: joining up with that foul tour of old Piggy-Whiskers’s in late March—surprized you didn’t see me and him being interviewed by dear Michael about it only the other day.”

    Clem objected: “But Piggy-Whiskers is only going to Australia, isn’t he?”

    “Isn’t that the same?” said Joel confusedly to Adam.

    Adam threw a cushion at him which he caught neatly, one-handed. “It was old Aunty Emmy, actually,” said Joel, setting the cushion neatly on the seat of the chair on whose arm he was perching.

    “Very clear,” sighed Clem.

    “The one in Bognor Regis, Clem, haven’t you been listening?” asked Adam with a grin. Before he could finish the grin he was overtaken by another sneeze. “Hell! Sorry!” he gasped. He extracted yet another tissue from the huge box on the little table at his left.

    Clem looked at him. Adam just blew his nose. He looked at Joel. Joel’s gargoyle face was quite blank as he sipped toddy slowly. Clem sighed.

    Adam sipped his toddy, glanced at Clem and said with a smile in his voice: “This aunt is also the aunt—or possibly the great-aunt, but I don’t think it matters—of some female cousin—or possibly second cousin, or first cousin once removed, but I don’t think it matters—of Joel’s.”

    “God,” muttered Clem.

    “No—hang on: all will become blindingly clear when I tell you that this cousinish person lives in New Zealand. Very near Mother and Dad, I think, from the address.”

    “Cow-something Bay,” contributed Joel.

    “Kowhai Bay,” corrected Adam impatiently. “Well, there you are!” he said brightly to Clem.

    “I hope that ruddy cold chokes you,” replied Clem, draining his glass and standing up.

    “Mercy, Adam: mercy even for Pooh-Bah!” squeaked Joel.

    Adam smiled a little. “Well, coincidentally, at about the time Joel’s Aunty Emmy in Bognor was getting Australia and New Zealand hopelessly confused, I was having my arm twisted to do Uncle Mac’s bloody Oberon. I happened to mention it to Joel and he confessed to a norful repressed desire to play Puck.” He raised his  eyebrows. “Et voilà!”

    “Don’t do that,” said Clem, wincing. “I suppose he might as well play Puck to your Oberon, you’ve got that sort of relationship anyway, haven’t you?” He went over to the door. “I’ve got to go: some of us have work to do. If you’ve got any sense, Adam—I know you haven’t, don’t bother to tell me—you’ll stay home, preferably in bed, until you’ve got rid of that cold, and let bloody Bob Andrews go hang.”

    He went out on this minatory note.

    “Have we?” said Joel, rolling his eyes in horror.

    Adam blew his nose. “I didn’t think so. How many things have we done together, anyway?”

    They knit their brows.

    “There was that foul time in rep,” offered Joel.

    “Yes, well, rep in Manchester does create a bond... Was that the time I had to play Edgar with a strained knee and you were—um, I forget.”

    “The Fool, you fool!” choked Joel.

    “Oh, yes, I remember,” said Adam in a strange voice.

    “That was in me fey faerie phase,” noted Joel in fey faerie tones.

    “Don’t,” warned Adam.

    “We did that radio thing,” recalled Joel.

    “Ugh!”

    “Quite.”

    “Um—that revival of The Admirable Crichton!” choked Adam.

    “God, were you in that? You must have been about fifteen!”

    Adam sneezed. “Damn, I thought I’d stopped this blasted sneezing for a moment, there. Um—no,” he said, blowing his nose: “About twenty-two, I think.”

    “Christ,” said Joel in awe.

    “There was that thing with Piggy-Whiskers,” said Adam with a laugh in his voice. “Unforgettable, actually!”

    Joel shut his eyes.

    Adam said, in a very creditable imitation of Piggy-Whiskers’s fruity voice, considering he had a foul cold—though on second thoughts, thought Joel, maybe that was helping: “Prr-ray do not attempt to upstage Me, little man: you will come a foul crr-ropper, I assure you.”

    “I never realized the sod meant it literally,” said Joel, rubbing his right knee and wincing in remembered agony.

    “Mm. That was before he did that bloody telly series as that bloody vicar—irascible but loveable, as if—and got all famous and people started offering him Anty-podean tours, too,” marvelled Adam. “What in God’s name is he going to be like now?”

    “Unbearable. But I have an iron-clad contract, and accident insurance,” replied Joel on a grim note.

    “Good!” choked Adam.

    “Anyway, I don’t know that I give a damn if he upstages me all over the Anty-podes,” added Joel thoughtfully.

    “No.” Adam drained his toddy. “That was about it. Apart from this thing.”

    “Mm.” Joel looked at his watch and made a face. “I’d better go, that make-up’s a sod. And little Tony may need to hold me hand and sob his little heart out because it’s his Big Chance!”

    “You should be so lucky. See ya. –And if he falls flat on his face, I don’t wanna know.”

    Joel went over to the door but paused with his hand on the doorknob and said naughtily: “And if he’s a raving success, do you want to know, dear?”

    Adam just sneezed madly and waved him away.

    Joel went out whistling. Danny Boy. He probably thought it was a New Zealand folksong.

    Adam smiled a little at this thought. Then he thought of Livia Wentworth inflicting herself on him out there and giving embarrassing interviews about the two of them to all the local media, who would all be embarrassingly naive enough to believe her...

    Oh, God.