‘It’s Mr Barnard,’ she told him. ‘Says it can’t wait until the office tomorrow.’

George held back in case she had more, and then said, ‘Right.’ He looked at me. ‘Do excuse me, please. And please keep enjoying your cake. I won’t be a moment.’

He retied his robe and went down the hall.

I heard him say, ‘Charles, this is hardly the time.’ He was making an effort to speak quietly, but the sound carried clearly. ‘I have a visitor. I’m not even wearing shoes.’ There was a pause as Charles said something. George laughed. ‘Pressing grapes for wine.’ A longer pause. ‘Everything’s more expensive. Electricity, advertising, all of it. So, my costs are up and everybody else’s are too, so they’re not coming to the theatre. They’re worried about their jobs. But these things come and go.’

I did my best to tune out. I ate my cake and looked out through the glass at the garden, where nothing was happening. Not a bird, not a creature, not even a breeze to move the bare branches. Even the half-moon looked cold in the twilight sky.

The phone jangled as the receiver went down at the end of the call. I could hear George’s footsteps coming back along the hall. He pulled his robe closed across his chest, sat down and topped up his tea. He glanced at his pile of paperwork, which seemed to be mostly lists, an inventory, then picked it up and dropped it neatly onto the floor next to one of the table legs.

‘You know what theatre’s about?’ he said. ‘Producing theatre? It’s about instincts. It’s about knowing what people are going to love before they know it themselves, before anyone else does. You’re not going to get it right every time, but when you do . . .’ He picked up his tea, both the saucer and the cup, and drank some. ‘I gave Ronnie Corbett his second paying job, when everyone else said he was too short. Ronald Corbett he was then. He was a barman at Danny La Rue’s nightclub. Early fifties that was.’ He took a piece of cake from the tray and set it on his plate. ‘I need to make sure I don’t end up as the Ozymandias of all these Empires.’

I knew the poem. We’d done it at school, in Brisbane, earlier in the year. Pulled it into its tiniest bits and analysed them all.

‘Well, there’s more to you than two vast and trunkless legs of stone,’ I told him. ‘That’s a start.’

‘Oh, you know your Shelley.’ He slapped the table with his hand. ‘Very good. Very good.’

On the last day of term, the Friday before Christmas, we got our Shaw assignments back. ‘A minor essay on a minor play,’ Mr Boland had written at the top of mine. B-minus.

He stopped at my desk while we all looked through the notes he’d made on our work in red and said, quietly, ‘There were one or two reasonable points in there. Perhaps it’s too much to expect an Australian to know which Shaw play to choose.’