“Ass! It’s always strangers who turn the tap that lets out the truth. Didn’t you yourself babble out all the secrets of your life to me within a couple of weeks of our first meeting? Magnus is going to tell.”

“But why, now?”

“Because he wants to impress Lind. He’s terribly taken with Lind, and he has his little fancies, like the rest of us. Once he wanted to impress me, but it wasn’t the right time in his life to spill the whole bottle.”

“But Ingestree suggested that Lind might do some telling, too. Are we to have a great mutual soul-scrape?”

“Ingestree is very foxy, behind all that fat and twinkling bonhomie. He knows Lind won’t tell anything. For one thing, it’s not his time; he’s only forty-three. And he is inhibited by his education; it makes people cagey. What he tells us he tells through his films, just as Ingestree suggested that Robert-Houdin revealed himself through his tricks. But Magnus is retired—or almost. Also he is not inhibited by education, which is the great modern destroyer of truth and originality. Magnus knows no history. Have you ever seen him read a book? He really thinks that whatever has happened to him is unique. It is an enviable characteristic.”

“Well, every life is unique.”

“To a point. But there are only a limited number of things a human creature can do.”

“So you think he is going to tell all?”

“Not all. Nobody tells that. Indeed, nobody knows everything about themselves. But I’ll bet you anything you like he tells a great deal.”

I argued no further. Liesl is very shrewd about such things. The morning was spent in arrangements about lighting. A mobile generator from Zürich had to be put in place, and all the lamps connected and hung; the riding-school was a jungle of pipe-scaffolding and cable. Kinghovn fussed over differences which seemed to me imperceptible, and as a script-girl stood in for Eisengrim while the lighting was being completed, he had time to wander about the riding-school, and as lunchtime approached he steered me off into a corner.

“Tell me about subtext,” he said.

“It’s a term modern theatre people are very fond of. It’s what a character thinks and knows, as opposed to what the playwright makes him say. Very psychological.”

“Give me an example.”

“Do you know Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler?”

He didn’t, and it was a foolish question. He didn’t know anything about any literature whatever. I waded in.

“It’s about a beautiful and attractive woman who has married, as a last resort, a man she thinks very dull. They have returned from a honeymoon during which she has become greatly disillusioned with him, but she knows she is already pregnant. In the first act she is talking to her husband’s adoring aunt, trying to be civil as the old woman prattles on about the joys of domesticity and the achievements of her nephew. But all the time she has, in her mind, the knowledge that he is dull, timid, a tiresome lover, that she is going to have a child by him, and that she fears childbirth. That’s the subtext. The awareness of it thickens up the actress’s performance, and emphasizes the irony of the situation.”