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awake, stiff with the terror of it, slowing realizing the meaning of the soft, warm, unfamiliar bed, but baffled still by the sound, fairly distant but oddly loud and distorted. The distortion had been part of the dream. A war-film, first war, playing the young doomed officer about to lead his men over the top. Some of the time he was in the film, on set, and some of it he was in a cinema, watching the screen. The bugle call for the attack came through the cinema loudspeakers, but at the same moment came the understanding that the director had taken advantage of a real war to save money on extras and sets. One of the bullets now beginning to whine on the sound-track was going to kill the young star dead.
    The terror continued as real as the sound. A secret name was no protection in dreams. Andrew lay unable to move until the bugle call ended and the music began. “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” also horridly distorted by the loudspeakers. Soldiers, somewhere out in the dark. Reveille. Yanks—Andrew recognised the tune from having heard it on AFN—you wouldn’t get music like that in a British camp.
    He sighed and slowly relaxed. Terror subsided into the usual, permanent, unspoken dread of call-up, some time next autumn. Adrian would be no protection there, either.
    To push the thought out of his mind he reached into the icy air outside the Lanaircell blankets, pulled his clothes off the chair beside the bed and teased them down either side of his body. Waiting for them to warm through he considered the problem of getting away before Cousin Brown was up and about. He’d need something to eat. It must be three miles to the village, lugging his suitcase, and then God knows how long before a bus came. He didn’t want to argue with Cousin Brown about leaving, though he would if he must. Sometimes you had to hurt people. It was necessary.
    He thought about the end of yesterday evening. He’d come into the Saloon and found the two Cousins huddled either side of a log fire, most of whose heat must have gone up the huge chimney. There was a portrait of the whole family over the mantelpiece, painted in this very room, but that had been summer, about fifty years ago, to judge by the clothes. Now Cousin Blue was playing patience on a sort of tray hitched to the arm of her chair, but Cousin Brown had got out three albums and made Andrew sit beside her on the settee to look through them. Programmes, photographs, newspaper cuttings, all of productions by something called The Mimms Players. Kids at first, dressing up on the garden lawn. Then growing up, and a stone stage, still outdoors, with yew hedges behind it. The obvious plays, Dream , Rivals , As You Like It . Elspeth and May Wragge in the cast list, and sometimes Charles Wragge. A gap for the first war, and then only Elspeth. Big parts for her— Electra , Ghosts , the Scotch play— Ghosts indoors, on a special stage in what Cousin Brown said was the Ballroom. Money spent on scenery, costumes and lighting. And real actors, names Andrew knew, people he’d seen, though they must have been just beginning then. Grander and grander … And then the war, and back to unknowns. Village halls. You couldn’t get an audience out to The Mimms in wartime, Cousin Brown said. Last production Dear Brutus , 1940.
    Andrew had started to look through the albums both bored and wary. Kiddy-plays, amateurs, Bottoms and Starvelings. Soon he’d seen that though The Mimms Players might have begun like that, Cousin Brown had made it into something different. It wasn’t only because she had the money. She was obsessed with the theatre. It was the most important thing in her life. She was, Andrew realized, the first person he’d met who actually understood what he meant when he announced he was going to be an actor, took him seriously, knew that it mattered. When they’d finished looking at the albums they talked about other