‘Hopping? Where? Oh I see. A lady dressed for riding. She’s lame, Master Will. She’s hurt. She can’t put her foot to the ground.’

‘She makes a grace of her ungainliness, Master Hall. There’s a stain across her face. And in her bosom. A raven’s feather in a valley of snow.’

‘Earth. Mire. On her habit, too. She must have fallen.’

‘Often enough, I dare swear.’

‘She’s coming in at the gate.’

‘Will! Where ARE you, WILL!’

‘We’ll have to stop again, I’m afraid,’ Peregrine said. ‘Gertie! Ask her to come on, will you, Charles?’

Charles Random opened the door on the prompt side. ‘Gertie! On dear.’

Gertrude Bracey entered with her jaw set and the light of battle in her eye. Peregrine walked down the centre aisle and put his hands on the rail of the orchestra well.

‘Gertie, love,’ he said, ‘it went back again, didn’t it? It was all honey and sweet reasonableness and it wouldn’t have risen one solitary hackle. She must grate. She must be bossy. Shakespeare’s looking down the lane at that dark pale creature who comes hopping into his life with such deadly seduction. And while he’s quivering, slap bang into this disturbance of – of his whole personality – comes your voice: his wife’s voice, scolding, demanding, possessive, always too loud. It must be like that, Gertie. Don’t you see? You must hurt. You must jangle.’

He waited. She said nothing.

‘I can’t have it any other way,’ Peregrine said.

Nothing.

‘Well. Let’s build in again, shall we? Back to ‘who is this’ please, Marco. You’re off, please, Gertie.’

She walked off.

Marcus Knight cast up his eyes in elaborate resignation, raised his arms and let them flop.

‘Very well, dear boy,’ he said, ‘as often as you like, of course. One grows a little jaded but never mind.’

Marco was not the only one, Peregrine thought, to feel jaded: Gertie was enough to reduce an author-director to despair. She had, after a short tour of the States, become wedded to ‘Method’ acting. This involved endless huddles with whoever would listen to her and a remorseless scavenging through her emotional past for fragments that could start her off on some astonishing association with her performance.

‘It’s like a bargain basement,’ Harry Grove said to Peregrine. ‘The things Gertie digs up and tries on are really too rococo. We get a new look every day.’

It was a slow process and the unplotted pauses she took in which to bring the truth to light were utterly destructive to concerted playing. ‘If she goes on like this,’ Peregrine thought, ‘she’ll tear herself to tatters and leave the audience merely wishing she wouldn’t.’

As for Marcus Knight, the danger signals for a major temperament had already been flown. There was a certain thunderous quietude which Peregrine thought it best to disregard.