In their houses and flats, all within a ten-mile radius of Pardoner’s Place, the guests for Mary Bellamy’s birthday party made ready to present themselves. Timon (Timmy) Gantry, the famous director, made few preparations for such festivities. He stooped from his inordinate height to the cracked glass on his bathroom wall in order to brush his hair, which he kept so short that the gesture was redundant. He had changed into a suit which he was in the habit of calling his ‘decent blue’ and as a concession to Miss Bellamy, wore a waistcoat instead of a plum-coloured pullover. He looked rather like a retired policeman whose enthusiasm had never dwindled. He sang a snatch from Rigoletto, an opera he had recently directed and remembered how much he disliked cocktail parties.

‘Bell-a-mé-a, you’re a bell of a bóre,’ he sang, improvising to the tune of Bella Filia. And it was true, he reflected. Mary was becoming more and more of a tiresome girl. It would probably be necessary to quarrel with her before her new play went on. She was beginning to jib at the physical demands made upon her by his production methods: he liked to keep his cast moving rather briskly through complicated, almost fugal patterns and Mary was not as sound in the wind as she used to be. Nor in the temper, he reflected. He rather thought that this play would be his last production for her.

‘For she’s not my, not my cuppa tea at all,’ he sang.

This led him to think of her influence on other people, particularly on Richard Dakers. ‘She’s a seccuba,’ he chanted.’ ‘She’s an o-ogress. She devours young men alive. Nasty Mary!’ He was delighted that Richard showed signs of breaking loose with his venture into serious dramatic writing. He had read Husbandry in Heaven to Gantry while it was still in manuscript. Gantry always made up his mind at once about a play and he did so about this one.

‘If you go on writing slip-slop for Mary when you’ve got this sort of stuff under your thatch,’ he had said, ‘you deserve to drown in it. Parts of this thing are bloody awful and must come out. Other parts need a rewrite. Fix them and I’m ready to produce the piece.’

Richard had fixed them.

Gantry shoved his birthday present for Miss Bellamy into his pocket. It was a bit of pinchbeck he’d picked up for five bob on a street stall. He bought his presents in an inverse ratio to the monetary situation of the recipients and Miss Bellamy was rich.

As he strode along in the direction of Knightsbridge he thought with increasing enthusiasm about Husbandry in Heaven and of what he would do with it if he could persuade The Management to take it.

‘The actors,’ he promised himself, ‘shall skip like young rams.’