‘Yes, it is. You see your darling child being processed, being filtered through the personalities of the actors and turning into something different on the way. And you’ve got to accept all that because a great many of the changes are for the good. I get the oddest sort of feeling sometimes, that, as producer, I’ve stepped outside myself as playwright. I begin to wonder if I ever knew what the play is about.’

‘I can imagine.’

They walked on in companionship: two thinking ants moving eastwards against the evening out-swarm from the City. When they reached Blackfriars it had already grown quiet there and the little street where Jeremy and Peregrine lived was quite deserted. They climbed up to the studio and sat in the window drinking dry martinis and trying to see The Dolphin on the far side of the river.

‘We haven’t talked about the letter and the glove,’ Emily said. ‘Why, I wonder, when it’s such a tremendous thing. You must have felt like a high-pressure cooker with it all bottled up inside you.’

‘Well, there was Jeremy to explode to. And of course the expert.’

‘How strange it is,’ Emily said. She knelt on the window-seat with her arms folded on the ledge and her chin on her arms. Her heartshaped face looked very young. Peregrine knew that he must find out about her: about how she thought and what she liked and disliked and where she came from and whether she was or had been in love and if so what she did about it. ‘How strange,’ she repeated. ‘To think of John Shakespeare over in Henley Street making them for his grandson. Would he make them himself or did he have a foreman-glover?’

‘He made them himself. The note says “mayde by my father”.’

‘Is the writing all crabbed and squiggly like his signatures?’

‘Yes. But not exactly like any of them. People’s writing isn’t always like their signatures. The handwriting experts have all found what they call “definitive” points of agreement.’

‘What will happen to them, Perry? Will he sell to the highest bidder or will he have any ideas about keeping them here? Oh,’ Emily cried, ‘they should be kept here.’

‘I tried to say as much but he shut up like a springtrap.’

‘Jeremy,’ Emily said, ‘will probably go stark ravers if they’re sold out of the country.’

‘Jeremy?’

‘Yes. He’s got a manic thing about the draining away of national treasures, hasn’t he? I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised, would you, if it had turned out to be Jeremy who stole the Goya “Wellington”. Simply to keep it in England, you know.’

Emily chuckled indulgently and Peregrine thought he detected the proprietary air of romance and was greatly put out. Emily went on and on about Jeremy Jones and his shop and his treasures and how moved and disturbed he was by the new resolution. ‘Don’t you feel he is perfectly capable,’ she said, ‘of bearding Mr Conducis in his den and telling him he mustn’t let them go?’