“Yours is the dishonest word. Your emulation, as you call it, sucked the pith out of that poor old ham, and gobbled it up and made it part of yourself. It was a very nasty process.”

“Roly, I idolized him.”

“Yes, and to be idolized by you, as you were then, was a terrible, vampire-like feeding on his personality and his spirit—because his personality as an actor was all there was of his spirit. You were a double, right enough, and such a double as Poe and Dostoyevsky would have understood. When we first met at Sorgenfrei I thought there was something familiar about you, and the minute you began to act I sensed what it was; you were the fetch of Sir John. But I swear it wasn’t until today, as we sat at this table, that I realized you really were Mungo Fetch.”

“Extraordinary! I recognized you the minute I set eyes on you, in spite of the rather Pickwickian guise you have acquired during the past forty years.”

“And you were waiting for a chance to knife me?”

“Knife! Knife! Always these belittling words! Have you no sense of humour, my dear man?”

“Humour is a poisoned dagger in the hands of a man like you. People talk of humour as if it were all jolly, always the lump of sugar in the coffee of life. A man’s humour takes its quality from what a man is, and your humour is like the scratch of a rusty nail.”

“Oh, balls,” said Kinghovn. Ingestree turned on him, very white in the face.

“What the hell do you mean by interfering?” he said.

“I mean what I say. Balls! You people who are so clever with words never allow yourselves or anybody else a moment’s peace. What is this all about? You two knew each other when you were young and you didn’t hit it off. So now we have all this gaudy abuse about vampires and rusty nails from Roly, and Magnus is leading him on to make a fool of himself and cause a fight. I’m enjoying myself. I like this subtext and I want the rest of it. We had just got to where Roly’s Mum was paying a visit to Sir John backstage. I want to know about that. I can see it in my mind’s eye. Colour, angle of camera, quality of light—the whole thing. Get on with it and let’s forget all this subjective stuff; it has no reality except what somebody like me can provide for it, and at the moment I’m not interested in subjective rubbish. I want the story. Enter Roly’s Mum; what next?”

“Since Roly’s Mum is such a hot potato, perhaps Roly had better tell you,” said Eisengrim.

“So I will. My Mum was a very decent body, though at the time I was silly enough to underrate her; as Magnus has made clear I was a little above myself in those days. University does it, you know. It’s such a protected life for a young man, and he so easily loses his frail hold on reality.