‘They would guess that we expected something. Even Colly—No, they must fetch their own detestable mail. She must receive her parcel at their hands. I want to see it, though. I can stroll out for my own letters. Good God, a second deluge is descending upon us. Perhaps, after all, Dikon, you had better go for a stroll and casually pick up the mail.’

Dikon looked at the rods of water that now descended with such force that they spurted off the pumice in fans, and asked his employer if he did not think it would seem a little eccentric to stroll in such weather. ‘Besides, sir,’ he pointed out, ‘the mail car cannot possibly arrive for two hours and my stroll would be ridiculously protracted.’

‘You have been against me from the outset,’ Gaunt muttered. ‘Very well, I shall dictate for an hour.’

Dikon followed him indoors, sat down, and produced his shorthand pad. He was dying to ask Simon if he had succeeded in his vigil.

Gaunt walked up and down and began to dictate. ‘The actor,’ he said, ‘is a modest warm-hearted fellow. Being, perhaps, more highly sensitized than his fellow man he is more sensitive…’ Dikon hesitated. ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ Gaunt demanded.

‘Sensitized, sensitive!’

‘Death and damnation!…he is more responsive, then, to the more subtle…’

‘More, sir, and more.’

‘Then delete the second more. How often am I to implore you to make these paltry amendments without disturbing me?…to the subtle nuances, the delicate halftones of emotion. I had always been conscious of this gift, if it is one, in myself.’

‘Do you mind repeating that, sir? The rain makes such a din on the iron roof I can scarcely hear you. I got the subtle nuances.’

‘Am I, then, to compose at the full pitch of my lungs?’

‘I could trot after you with my little pad in my hand.’

‘A preposterous suggestion.’

‘It’s leaving off, now.’

The rain stopped with the abruptness of subtropical downpours, and the ground and roofs of Wai-ata-tapu began to steam. Gaunt became less restive and the dictation proceeded along lines that Dikon, in his new mood of open-eyed criticism, considered all too typical of almost any theatrical autobiography. But perhaps Gaunt would rescue his book by taking a line of defiant egoism. He seemed to be drifting that way. There was a growing flavour of: ‘This is the life story of a damn good actor who isn’t going to spoil it with gestures of false modesty’; a fashionable attitude and no doubt Gaunt had decided to adopt it.