Sutherland walked between the women, glancing behind to make sure Chaplin wasn’t about to bolt, and they walked down the driveway, Sutherland telling a story about a friend of his, a cowboy who worked for DeMille, who had actually fired an arrow at him, piercing his bullhorn, and the women were laughing, making teasing sorts of replies, questioning how on earth someone could fire an arrow with such accuracy. “William Tell himself” was as much as Chaplin heard, their voices and forms consumed by fog long before they reached the front door, wherever it was.

In the winters, people asked him a hundred times a day if the fog wasn’t just like London, and he had finally learned to assent rather than explain that, no, it wasn’t. He had read in a book on neurology that you cannot remember pain, only that something was painful. Likewise, he couldn’t really remember London fog, except that it smelled like onions and fish and soot, and its sheer weight promised that walking through it would crush you.

It was three-thirty in the afternoon, by his watch. The weather on a California beach on a winter afternoon produced fog that was playful. The wind blew it in banks, ghosts chasing one another over the beach, and in between them, shafts of light that made the sands shimmer like piles of gold dust.

There was no one else who felt as he did right now. There was no way to communicate this feeling. He could not pin it down as a key emotion. What arose from it was yearning, the urge to go to Lambeth again, happiness that he was rich now, contentment, restlessness. He hated it when actors complained about their childhoods. The only part of his childhood that he remembered as terrible was hunger. “But isn’t that what America is about,” he said in company, often, “hungry young men who pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Then eat them?” Laughter.

He listened for gulls and buoys and imagined he heard the wail of violin music.

Except: there was violin music.

He walked toward it. The sound of his footsteps was absorbed by the fog. He clutched his jacket tighter. He thought it was a transcription of something bleak by Schumann, a sonata whose weariness reminded him of crows circling endlessly on the wind.

Chaplin spotted a boy standing at the edge of the pavers, by the entrance to the house. He was barefoot, dressed in a toga cinched with a single golden rope, and he wore a wreath that was supposed to be laurel, but was actually sage. His face had been painted white.

He nodded at the boy on his way into the house. He heard the cacophony inside. Owen Moore, Mary’s husband, was greeting guests in the entry-way. Chaplin turned on his heel and then he was outside again.

“Pardon,” Chaplin said to the boy in toga. “Were you hired to play for the party?”