Imogen starts colouring in his eyebrows. ‘But you know, it’s OK to be critical of someone you love.’ She rubs with her thumb, blending the colour. ‘It doesn’t mean you love them less, or that everything about them’s wrong. Open your mouth.’ William feels the velvety lipstick glide on. ‘You soon learn that with a rabble of siblings like mine. See as much of Robert as you want, I say, but show your mum you love her too and aren’t about to turn into a debauched undertaker.’ She’s tickling his cheeks now with a large, whispery brush. ‘Unless that’s what you want.’ She laughs.

‘It’s not,’ he says as quickly as he can, still sounding nonchalant.

She laughs again, collecting brushes and zipping them up in the bulging make-up bag, then holds his chin in one hand and surveys him. ‘You make a gorgeous girl, though it’s more to do with those cheekbones and big blue eyes than anything I’ve done.’

William curses his fair skin as he feels the blood rushing to the surface again, but their talk leaves him feeling grown-up, as if he’s just gone through a rite of passage; discussing not only the difficult bits of his family, but his own sexuality – with Imogen Mussey!

▪ ▪ ▪

An hour later, William is playing Sophia, with whom Martin’s character, Giovanni, is in love. William hasn’t mastered the finer plot points of the play, beyond who he’s supposed to love and who loves him. The rest of it involves him being greeted with, ‘Ciao bella!’ by just about everyone, and having to repeat it sounding as female as possible, which isn’t too hard, as he has a fine contralto voice to call upon. As the curtain, taken from the boys’ bedroom, is yanked up by Edward, William judges it prudent to throw all he’s got into his ‘Ciao bellas’, so from the outset and unrehearsed, he lowers one hip, resting his hand lightly on it, bends his other knee a little and pats his bubbly blonde wig.

Mrs Mussey is tickled right away and, as her throaty chuckle gets louder, she sets off not only the rest of the small audience, but the cast too. By the second act, when the liver/heart is removed from Edward’s character, as soon as anyone delivers the line, ‘Ciao bella!’ in William’s direction, the audience starts laughing in anticipation and the cast is reduced to giggles.

Intoxicated, William stretches out his performance, waiting hand on hip, bent knee, for the mirth to build; then, with a powerful falsetto and an overblown accent, he replies, ‘Ciao bella.’