He waved a hand in the gloom, shook his head.

‘It’s just that I can think better with a cigarette … when I am able to think at all. What I don’t understand,’ she said, fitting one into an ivory holder, ‘is why the hell you were not wearing the masks? I mean, shouldn’t you?’

He clenched a fist. ‘We did, all morning. Until the last ten minutes when I told him that he would not be wearing his mask during “shooting”, so I wanted to see his eyes, to see the excitement, the passion. So, we both took them off. Catastrophe!’

‘But aren’t there little rubber tips, button things, on the end of the foils’

‘There are. Always.’

‘But not on yours?’

He covered his eyes with both hands, shook his head hopelessly; when he spoke his voice was muffled by his sleeves. ‘I don’t know what happened. I don’t know. It was not fixed, perhaps? Suddenly this terrible cry. He fell to his knees, his hands to his face. The blood. Ayeee!’

‘Bert, I’m so sorry, I’m so terribly sorry. It must have been ghastly for you.’

‘Spettrale! Oh Dio! And we start shooting in eight weeks … what to do? What to do?’

‘Can’t we postpone, for a little? Go back a week or two, shoot some of the stuff which doesn’t concern him … crowd work?’

Nando Belluno shook his head slowly, from side to side as rhythmically as a metronome. ‘Impossible. Impossible. Schönbrunn is already booked, the Hofburg rooms, the gardens, it is the tourist season … we have to be there on the days agreed. Absolutely. It is very tight. No, impossible to postpone.’