‘Not a bit of it,’ said Gaunt cheerfully. ‘I’ve been off my native diet long enough to have developed an inordinate appetite for it. But I must say I fail to see your point about the acts. Since we must abridge…’

Barbara looked out of the dining-room door, saw Questing still there, and hesitated. Without pausing in his argument, Gaunt put out his hand, inviting her to join them. She sat beside Dikon on the step. ‘This will be good for you, my child,’ said Gaunt in parenthesis, and she glowed ardently. ‘What on earth has happened to her?’ Dikon wondered. ‘That’s the same dress, better than the others because it’s simpler, but the same. She’s brushed her hair back since we came in, and that’s an improvement, of course, but what’s happened to her? I haven’t heard a hoot from the girl for days, and she’s stopped pulling faces.’ Gaunt had begun to talk about the more difficult plays, of Troilus and Cressida, of Henry VI and finally of Measure for Measure. Falls, still beating his irritating tattoo, followed him eagerly.

‘Of course he was an agnostic,’ he cried—‘the most famous of the soliloquies proves it. If further proof is needed this play provides it.’

‘You mean Claudio? I played him once as a very young actor. Yes, that speech! It’s death without flattery, isn’t it? It strikes cold.

‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where: To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot…’

Gaunt’s voice flattened out to a horrid monotone and his audience stirred uneasily. Mrs Claire came to one of the windows and listened with a doubtful smile. Falls’s pipe dropped from his hand and he leant forward. The door of Dr Ackrington’s room opened and he stood there, attentive. ‘Do go on,’ said Mr Falls. The icy sentences went forward.

‘To be imprison’d in the viewless winds…’

Mr Questing, always polite, tiptoed across the verandah, and retrieved the pipe. Falls seemed not to hear him. Questing stood with the pipe in his hand, his head on one side, and an expression of proprietary admiration on his face.

‘…to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling.’

A shadow fell across the pumice. Smith, unshaven and looking very much the worse for wear, appeared from the direction of the cabin, followed by Simon. They stopped dead. Smith passed a shaky hand across his face and pulled at his under lip. Simon, after a disgusted stare at Gaunt, watched Questing.

Gaunt drew to the close of the short and terrifying speech. Dikon reflected that perhaps he was the only living actor who could get away with Shakespeare at high noon on the verandah of a thermal spa. That he had not embarrassed his listeners but had made some of them coldly uneasy was very apparent. He had forced them to think of death.