‘Down? Down? This whole enterprise is doomed: theatre, touring theatre, Cornish-language theatre, Celtic theatre – all doomed. The spivs in London and Wall Street and Frankfurt have lost hundreds of billions pissing into the wind and now I can’t even get my grant. Yes, I am down. Are you surprised? I’m going to set myself alight in a dinghy and float out to sea on the tide. Do you love Wagner?’

‘Wagner? No. I can’t say I do.’

‘Brünnhilde is immolated.’

‘Are you married, Mr MacCleod?’

‘Not at the minute. I have been, three times. Alas, it never quite worked out. But I loved Fleur, my second wife. I shouldn’t have let her go.’

He takes another huge gulp of Scuppered, and looks out to sea through the salt crystals encrusting the windows. Birds are flying by fast and low. The water is lumpy and green.

‘Why hasn’t your grant come through?’

‘I don’t know, they haven’t told me. My lawyers are trying to get to the bottom of it.’

‘Arts Council, is it?’

‘Who told you that? No, we do get a pittance from them, but I have been funded by a charitable trust, until now.’

‘Will Thomas the Tank Engine go ahead?’

‘Yes, Binster’s Pies and Pasties have stepped in to finance the production for one season. Do you think, Melinda, that Johnny Gielgud was sponsored by Fray Bentos?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Do you think he had to preface each performance of Richard III with, “and a thank you to Fray Bentos, our proud sponsors”?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Probably not,’ he says, mimicking her voice, not cruelly but accurately, catching her Cornish vowels.

‘You mentioned Daniel Day-Lewis on the phone.’

‘Yes, I did. He and I have a project. Now I just have to wait while the agents out in Hollywood have their pubes nicely shaped into a Brazilian so that they can read the proposal comfortably without an itching in the depths of their Y-fronts.’

‘Thomas the Tank Engine is booked out in Truro, Mr MacCleod.’

‘Oh, absolutely bloody marvellous, darling, what wonderful news,’ he says in a fluting voice which she assumes is Johnny Gielgud’s.

They laugh. He’s cheering up. He pours himself a whisky. Although the students at Exeter drank a lot, they didn’t do it in this way, which she thinks of as theatrical: a lonely man sitting in a bar, bottle of whisky on the counter, sympathetic barman polishing glasses in the background. Hooker walks in. Heart of gold. Maybe he thinks I am the hooker in this scenario.

‘So what are you going to do? Cornwall needs to know.’

‘I don’t know. I’m finishing my script for Daniel, and then we’ll see what comes of it.’

He is at least fifteen years older than her father. How did he end up here in the lifeboat station, bankrupt and desperate?

‘Mr MacCleod, can you tell me where your funding came from?’