It was a sumptuous interior presided over by a larger-than-life nude efficiently painted in an extreme of realism. Maggie gave it a quick look, sat underneath it and said: ‘There are just one or two things I’d like to get sorted out. They’ve discussed the murder of Duncan before the play opens. That’s clear enough. But always it’s been “if” and “suppose”, never until now, “He’s coming here. It’s now or never.” Agreed?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s only been something to talk about. Never calling for a decision. Or for anything real.’

‘No. And now it does, and he’s face to face with it, he’s appalled.’

‘As she knows he will be. She knows that without her egging him on he’d never do it. So what has she got that will send him into it? Plans. Marvellous plans, yes. But he won’t go beyond talking about plans. Sex. Perry said so the first day. Shakespeare had to be careful about sex because of the boy actor. But we don’t.’

‘We certainly do not,’ he said. He moved behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.

‘Do you realize,’ Maggie said, ‘how short their appearances together are? And how beaten she is after the banquet scene? I think, once she’s rid of those damned thanes and is left with her mumbling, shattered lion of a husband and they go dragging upstairs to the bed they cannot sleep in, she knows that all that’s left for her to do is shut up. The next and last time we see her she’s talking disastrously in her sleep. Really it’s quite a short part, you know.’

‘How far am I affected by her collapse, do you think?’ he asked. ‘Do I notice it? Or by that time am I determined to give myself over to idiotic killing?’

‘I think you are.’ She turned to look at him and something in her manner of doing this made him withdraw his already possessive hand. She stood up and moved away.

‘I think I’ll just ring up the Wig and Piglet for a table,’ he said abruptly.

‘Yes, do.’

When he had done this she said: ‘I’ve been looking at the imagery. There’s an awful lot about clothes being too big and heavy. I see Jeremy’s emphasizing that and I’m glad. Great walloping cloaks that can’t be contained by a belt. Heavy crowns. We have to consciously fill them. You much more than I, of course. I fade out. But the whole picture is nightmarish.’

‘How do you see me, Maggie?’

‘My dear! As a falling star. A magnificent, violently ambitious being, destroyed by his own imagination. It’s a cosmic collapse. Monstrous events attend it. The Heavens themselves are in revolt. Horses eat each other.’