“The pint of half-and-half had found its way to the four pink gins, and I was having something like a French Revolution in my innards. I was feeling sorry for myself. ‘Why does he hate me so,’ I said, snivelling a bit. ‘I’m doing everything I know to please him.’

“ ‘You’d better have it straight,’ said Holroyd. ‘The resemblance is a bit too good. You look too much like him.’

“ ‘Just what I said when I first set eyes on you,’ said old Frank. ‘My God, I said, what a Double! You might have been spit out of his mouth.’

“ ‘Well, isn’t that what they want?’ I said.

“ ‘You have to look at it reasonable,’ said Holroyd. ‘Put it like this: you’re a famous actor, getting maybe just the tiniest bit past your prime—though still a top-notcher, mind you—and for thirty years everybody’s said how distinguished you are, and what a beautiful expressive face you have, and how Maeterlinck damn near threw up his lunch when you walked on the stage in one of his plays, and said to the papers that you had stolen his soul, you were so good—meaning spiritual, romantic, poetic, and generally gorgeous. You still get lots of fan letters from people who find some kind of ideal in you. You’ve had all the devotion—a bit cracked some of it, but mostly very real and touching—that a great actor inspires in people, most of whom have had some kind of short-change experience in life. So: you want a Double. And when the Double comes—and such a Double that you can’t deny him—he’s a seedy little carnie, with the shifty eyes of a pickpocket and the breath of somebody that eats the cheapest food, and you wouldn’t trust him with sixpenn’orth of copper, and every time you look at him you heave. He looks like everything inside yourself that you’ve choked off and shut out in order to be what you are now. And he looks at you all the time—you do this, you know—as if he knew something about you you didn’t know yourself. Now: fair’s fair. Wouldn’t you want to get rid of him? Yet here’s your wife, who’s stood by you through thick and thin, and held you up when you were ready to sink under debts and bad luck, and whom you love so much everybody can see it, and thinks you’re marvellous because of it, and what does she say? She says this nasty mess of a Double is lucky, and has to be given his chance. You follow me? Try to be objective. I don’t want to say hard things about you, but truth’s truth and must be served. You’re not anybody’s first pick for a Double, but there you are. Sir John’s dead spit, as Frank here says.’

“Very soon I was going to have to leave them. My stomach was heaving. But I was still determined to find out whatever I could to keep my job. I wanted it now more desperately than before. ‘So what do I do?’ I asked.