‘You’d better come,’ she said. ‘The doctor’s just been. Michael’s gone into a coma. The doctor says he thinks he’s only got a few hours to live.’

*

Before dawn the next morning Michael Rawlings, ex-dancer, lately under-manager in linens, died of complications with pneumonia. Died of a breakdown of his immune system through the HIV virus’s attacks. Died of Aids. He was thirty-eight years old.

Harry had cancelled all his appointments, rung Frances and Pauline and his agent briefly, jumped back in a taxi. The heavy rain made the traffic slow and bad-tempered. After talking to the doctor he rang Michael’s home in Macclesfield. His mother, after some conversation with a man’s voice in the background, said she wouldn’t be able to come to London until next morning. But long before she finally arrived the undertaker had taken the body, and Michael’s friends, who had shared the caring of him over the last few months, had arranged the funeral.

Harry rang Michael’s home again at about seven thirty in the morning.

‘It’s got nowt to do with me,’ said Michael’s father. ‘I don’t want to know anything about it. She’s already left.’ And he hung up. Harry grieved for his friend and the cruel illness that made parents reject their children, all that extra pain for so many of the men who were suffering in this way; he went, not having been to bed, for his fitting with the by now frantic costume designer, went back to the flat to meet Michael’s mother who asked him to find her a clean hotel, took her to something appropriate in a taxi, fell into bed at last and lay awake for a long, long time.

*

After the funeral the next morning, at the read-through for the Thomas Hardy series, everyone laughed at Harry’s rendering of his character. After the reading the actors and the producer and the executive producer and the assistant producer and the two accountants and the director and the casting director and the designer and the production manager and the first assistant and the second assistant and the third assistant and the production assistants and the floor managers and the runners and the make-up artists and the wardrobe assistants and the script editors (the camera crew would only join them when they started filming) had a buffet meal. Harry declined the wine, accepted the rebukes of the make-up department, even your bald patch is sunburnt Harry and we start filming on Monday it’s very naughty of you, shook hands with a score of actors who were to be in the series, kissed the four actresses, saw Michael’s pale, pale face with the sores eating into it, where’s Fiona we need to get the binoculars for the birds, Michael’s last words to him.

The producer shook him by the hand, said how glad he was to have Harry on board.