‘Did you my dear? Where?’

‘At Blackheath.’

‘Ah. Blackheath. No my dear I – I didn’t come to England that time, with the circus.’ He didn’t say any more, suddenly seemed closed up, stared out at the garden where the water on the pond lay quite still, like glass. Birds were already coming home to the tall trees and shadows crept up now across the lawn.

‘I think you knew my mother,’ said Pauline, and Harry shot her a warning glance, not so fast, his eyes seemed to say.

‘I expect Roger knew everyone,’ he said, ‘he seems to have known everyone.’

The old man came back to them, pulled his mind back to where he was sitting with his young friends. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth, put it carefully back in his pocket, cleared his throat.

‘We did you know, all seem to know each other when I was young. But of course,’ he added courteously, ‘I expect it’s the same for you.’

‘No,’ said Harry, ‘I don’t think it’s the same now, I think television changed all that, I don’t think we do know everyone any longer. Do you think Pauly?’

‘No,’ said Pauline. ‘I expect we don’t.’

The old man launched into a story about auditioning for a new Noël Coward play, how the word went around that every pretty young man (‘for I myself was pretty then I believe’) – yes, she thought again, my father was beautiful – should present himself at the audition, how they stood in lines outside the stage door and were seen, about one every minute, on stage in front of the footlights, unable to see anything or anybody out in the dark auditorium. But The Great Man was sitting there, shadowed in the dark, choosing. Pauline studied Roger Popham’s face as he spoke, trying to find something of herself in him; she felt disoriented, odd, as if this wasn’t really happening. After some time Harry gently brought the conversation back to the circus.

‘Tell Pauline about the circus,’ he said to Roger, ‘she’s crazy about circuses.’