“Emma Evans, that’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s me,” I said.

“I thought you would have gone by now.”

“I was just going when it happened.”

“Extraordinary. This kind of thing is always happening to me. Fuses, fires, disasters. The last show I was working on a weight fell from the flies and missed me by six inches. It went right through the stage and hit a man in the wardrobe. It just shows you, there’s a providence in the fall of a sparrow. Don’t you believe that?”

“Yes, I do believe it,” I said, whispering in response to his whisper.

“Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ve got a light somewhere,” and he pulled out the lighter with which he had earlier lit my cigarette. By its petrol flame I could once more see his face, somewhat old and blue this time, without the yellow warmth that my match had lent him. He stared at me and I stared back. I noticed that he was carrying a whisky bottle and a cardboard beaker in one hand, holding the bottle militantly by the neck, with the beaker attached by one finger.

“Well, well,” he said, “Emma Evans. How extraordinary. I knew there was somebody at the end of the corridor, but I didn’t think it was going to be you. What did you find of such interest here to keep you so long?”

“I like watching,” I said.

“Do you? You don’t look all that passive to me.”

“Appearances are misleading,” I said.

He did not reply, but continued to stare at me, holding his lighter up towards my face with a mixture of intimacy and stagey distance that I found embarrassing.

“Don’t you think,” I said, trying to shift out of the direct small limelight, “that you ought to go and do something about this fuse of yours? They don’t seem to have built this theatre very well if the lights go the very first time you try to use them.”