ROO: [savagely] Hasn’t even opened the box—hard to get it through it was a present. One time she’d have been onto it like lightnin’, now she couldn’t give a hoot—we’re bloody mad. You know that? All of us. No more of a wake-up than poor Emma is—

He strides to the stairs to yell upwards.

Nancy?!

BARNEY starts a move for the French windows.

No. You stay here. I’m fed up. This place for the last few days has been like the City Morgue.

NANCY appears on the stairs, carrying a book.

Now you two listen to me. We got somethin’ special goin’ here, and the only reason in the world to ditch it is for somethin’ better. People think they’re bein’ strangled and they got to get away, okay. But don’t let no-one make the claim and then just sit around, waitin’ on some nod or other.

He snatches the parcel from the table.

Me, I’m goin’ up them stairs, and when I come down I want you two to have sorted yourselves out. Who’s goin’—who’s stayin’— [heading away upstairs] —and no unfinished business.

NANCY and BARNEY are left. NANCY makes her way to the table and sits, placing the open book before her. Clearly any opening move is up to BARNEY. He loiters in to take up a kibitzing position behind her chair.

BARNEY: Fanny by—?

NANCY: —Gaslight. [Smoothing the pages] You interested?

BARNEY: I dunno.

He reaches forward to take up the book, and verify the title on the spine.

Seen it plenty of times by electric light, and once or twice by a hurricane lamp, but I never got around to gas.

NANCY sits, totally unresponsive, and he returns the book to the table.

Wouldn’t crack a smile for sixpence, would you?

NANCY: Try me with a joke that wears a funny hat.

BARNEY: Oh, yes. I’m the villain when it comes to all that, ain’t I? Chasin’ round and makin’ whoopee.

He moves away from the table, broaching the subject dominant in his mind, and one she cannot avoid.

Well, I tell you this—any trouble I got into on the way, I never dodged it with a dirty cop-out. Even if my kids, they were mistakes, the least I felt I owed ’em was a fightin’ chance.

NANCY checks the page number of her open book.

NANCY: A hundred and eighty-two. Used to have a teacher slapped our hands, ever we turned down the corner of a page.

She shuts the book and sets it aside, a deliberate clearing of the decks, and looks towards BARNEY. Aware that he now has her full attention, he asks, midway between bluster and real pain:

BARNEY: Before the war—what you said that you got rid of—it was mine?

NANCY nods. His eyes close and he breathes:

Jesus. [After a moment] Can’t believe you’d go ahead and do that, off your own bat.