Harry and Frances both stopped eating simultaneously, looked at Emmy Lou.

‘Chinese?’ said Harry. ‘Darling am I drunker than I think I am?’

‘Well, I said I thought that with China opening up to the West there’d probably be a lot of opportunities for actors who could speak the language and that that was probably a very good way of deploying my skills. The woman looked totally confused, she was Spanish, she went away and talked to a colleague for a while about whether I could do Chinese, they said they’d be in touch and I thanked them, pointedly reading the Claimant’s Charter on the way out. Haven’t heard from them since. Do you know they play Beatles songs in the dole office these days, muzak?’

‘Muzak?’

‘Muzak. “Yesterday” with strings.’

‘In the dole office?’

‘In the dole office.’

‘Good heavens.’ Harry sloshed the remaining wine from the second bottle into their glasses. ‘Well things have changed since my day!’

‘How long since you’ve been on the dole Harry?’

‘God.’ He paused to think. ‘Eighteen, nineteen years maybe.’

Emmy Lou sighed deeply. ‘It’s not like before. Acting isn’t a profession that they understand any more. You wouldn’t recognise it Harry. We’re just part of the great mass of unemployed and redundant. Our only advantage I suppose is we’ve always known what it was like to be unemployed. You should see the people in there now, the people who never thought it could happen to them, you should see their –’ Emmy looked down at the table for a moment ‘– you should see their faces.’

‘Em,’ he said firmly, ‘you’ll be out of there soon, probably never to return, once they re-do Lives properly, not that it’s not done properly now, but you know what I mean, in a proper theatre with proper resources.’

‘And I’ll get paid!’ said Emmy Lou, and she smiled and smiled.

Harry told them about filming his Thomas Hardy serial, the long long hours in studios and on location, his beard memorably falling off while a fight was being filmed with horses and dogs and pigs.

‘All because of my beard, the whole huge scene had to be filmed again, dogs in the right place, horses in the right place, one of the pigs bit the script editor who nobody likes, I could feel it coming off but I couldn’t do anything, I was being attacked by vagabonds at the time, my God there was a lot of swearing and the make-up girl was in tears!’

They talked a bit about Michael’s death, they leant their elbows on the wooden table gossiping into the night as they often did, until they saw the Indian waiter yawning by the door.

Frances stopped a taxi in the street, Emmy Lou had missed the last tube, was staying with Harry.