And then suddenly, out of nowhere, as it seemed, it came to him that when the young woman spoke the word ‘theatre’, it wasn’t a playhouse she was talking about, but a theatre in a hospital – an operating theatre.

How could he know that? He couldn’t say. Maybe he was more drunk than he realised.

In the old days, the wild old days of his friends John Jameson and Mr Bushmills and Madam Gin and even, in times of desperate need, the odd shot of thin blue methylated spirit – a fellow toper had taught him how to strain it through a crust of bread clamped between his front teeth in order to rid the ethanol of its noxious additives – his fevered brain would come up with the most bizarre, the most amazing fancies.

There had been a particularly bad bout of almost uninterrupted drinking, over the space of a week or more, when he had been convinced he was under the control of a horde of tiny, multi-limbed creatures, a species of humanoid spiders that could speak and reason and issue directives in sharp, unmodulated voices that came to him as a high-pitched whirring, something like the sound of a dentist’s drill, only thinner and more penetrating – or like the music he seemed to be hearing just now. Over days and nights he had stumbled through a phantasmagorical world in which jagged sunlight and luminous rain alternated with long stretches of over arching darkness and tomb-like silence. He had slept, or dozed, in strange beds, on sofas, on floors and in gutters, and for one entire night in a suburban front garden somewhere, imagining himself lashed to the spot by a tracery of silken threads, a groaning and demented Lemuel Gulliver. When he recovered, he had determined never again to find himself in that particular, nightmarish version of Lilliput. Never again.

Evelyn it was who had cut through the tethers and hauled him teetering to his feet. He would not force her, not ever, to repeat that exercise in forbearance, patience and fortitude.

He stood up from the chair at the window and moved towards the bed, then stopped and stood still, stalled in his tracks.

… need me in the theatre – that was what he had overheard the young woman say, not just the one word, but a fragment of a sentence, it came back to him now. You said you didn’t need me in the theatre …

No actor would ever talk of being needed in a theatre, any theatre, anywhere. Only a doctor would say that. He knew a lot of doctors, though none that was female, and none in Spain. There had been one, in Ireland, a friend of his daughter’s. But she couldn’t be the young woman in the café, for she had died.

LONDON

Chapter 8