She stared at his back. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I’ve been going to a psychoanalyst for years. We talk every week. Grover said I wasn’t talking about the right things, that’s what made me so angry with him. We go back to my childhood, and my father and all his wives, I talk and I talk and I talk. But I never talk about this.’

‘Sounds like a fucking awful psychoanalyst,’ said Bud Martin.

He was still turned away from her. Something about the impersonality of his back, turned away from her. She wanted to see his face.

‘Is this how you get your kicks?’ she said.

He turned back to her at once.

‘You misunderstand,’ he answered, quite coldly. ‘This is how I get the performances I want.’

*

The next evening, the fifty-six-year-old actress Juliet Lyall re-did the scene with the young man she’d met in the bar, the young man the lonely older woman had met in the bar; sat with him in his old car parked outside, with the camera crew and the sound crew and the lighting crew all moving into her face for close-ups. The actor, Clint O’Hara, leant over her, kissed her, put his hand on her neck, her neck with its lines and its creases; moved his hand slowly, as scripted, towards her breast. Her eyes, which had closed as he kissed her, opened then, looked at the young face. Clint O’Hara had blue eyes. She stared at the boy for a long time.

And then they heard a kind of sigh, a kind of cry, and, uncertainly, her hand reached up to touch him.

And very slowly, tears slid down Juliet’s face, in close-up.

‘Cut,’ said Bud Martin quietly, at last.

*

As she was changing, back in her caravan, there was a knock at her door. The dresser put a dressing gown around her. Bud Martin put his head around the door.

‘Sorry,’ he said, seeing that she hadn’t yet finished dressing. ‘We’re just moving off to another location.’ And just for a moment he stared at her, and his voice became the other voice.

‘It was good,’ was all he said, and then she heard him go down the steps of the caravan to where his driver was waiting.

30

No no no no no no no.

It wasn’t loud, Molly McKenzie’s voice, it was low and desperate and unbelieving.

No.

Banjo sat hunched on the end of their bed, his saxophone still in his hands. He looked at her with such pain in his eyes that an outside observer may have thought that she was leaving him.

‘Molly. Molly I can’t bear to hurt you like this, I can’t stand it. But darling we’ve always known it couldn’t go on forever.’

‘Why? Why can’t it?’ She knew the answer but waited for him to tell her.