The businessmen sat very straight, braced, their fingers on the switches of their phones, ready to power up. Something fell in the galley; someone laughed, grimly. As they touched down, the child had her face in the bag again.

5

Above certain words and in the margins, Alec made notes with the fine point of his pencil. Slowly, under the light of the storm lantern (this least stormy of nights), he was learning the music of the new piece, and how to sing, in a head quieted at last of all other thoughts, the approximate, imitative song of the translation.

He had never met László Lázár, and knew what he looked like only from a photograph he had cut out of the Sunday Telegraph magazine which showed a delicately built man with cropped grey hair and large eyes, the pupils unusually prominent and dark. It was winter, and Lázár had been posed beside the boating pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a place Alec had often visited on solitary walks during his year abroad at the Cité Universitaire. But what gave the picture its particular character was the package Lázár was carrying, hugged against his grey overcoat. A book perhaps, or something from a local patisserie, a cake for Sunday, but it lent him a vaguely conspiratorial air, like a nineteenth-century anarchist on his way to plant a bomb in the foyer of a reactionary newspaper office. That, together with the somewhat silly caption ‘As a young man Lázár knew how to handle a tommy-gun’, had helped confirm in Alec’s mind the idea of the playwright as a romantic figure with a mysterious and violent past, owner of the kind of history he himself would never have.