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people, some party, and find her sitting cross-legged before the fire in her tight trousers, chin in hand, gone off by herself into some place where he was now afraid to try and follow. He could not bear it again, putting himself in a position where he might hear the cold, sharp words that showed she had never had an inkling of what he felt, because it was not in her nature to feel it. He would come in late, and she would make them both some tea; and they would sit hand in hand before the fire, his flesh and memories quiet. Dead, he thought. But his heart ached. He had become so used to the heavy load of loneliness in his chest that when, briefly, talking to an old friend, he became the George Talbot who had never known Bobby, and his heart lightened and his oppression went, he would look about him, startled, as if he had lost something. He felt almost lightheaded without the pain of loneliness.
    He asked Bobby if she weren’t bored, with so little to do, month after month after month, while he was so busy. She said no, she was quite happy doing nothing. She wouldn’t like to take up her old work again?
    ‘I wasn’t ever much good, was I?’ she said.
    ‘If you’d enjoy it, dear, I could speak to someone for you.’
    She frowned at the fire but said nothing. Later he suggested it again, and she sparked up with a grin and: ‘Well, I don’t maind if I dew …’
    So he spoke to an old friend, and Bobby returned to the theatre, to a small act in a little intimate revue. She had found somebody,she said, to be the other half of her act. George was very busy with a production of Romeo and Juliet , and did not have time to see her at rehearsal, but he was there on the night The Offbeat Revue opened. He was rather late and stood at the back of the gimcrack little theatre, packed tight with fragile little chairs. Everything was so small that the well-dressed audience looked too big, like over-size people crammed in a box. The tiny stage was left bare, with a few black and white posters stuck here and there, and there was one piano. The pianist was good, a young man with black hair falling limp over his face, playing as if he were bored with the whole thing. But he played very well. George, the man of the theatre, listened to the first number, so as to catch the mood, and thought, Oh Lord, not again. It was one of the songs from the First World War, and he could not stand the flood of easy emotion it aroused. He refused to feel. Then he realized that the emotion was, in any case, blocked; the piano was mocking the song; ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’ was being played like a five-finger exercise; and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and ‘Tipperary’ followed in the same style, as if the piano were bored. People were beginning to chuckle, they had caught the mood. A young blond man with a moustache and wearing the uniform of 1914 came in and sang fragments of the songs, like a corpse singing; and then George understood he was supposed to be one of the dead of that war singing. George felt all his responses blocked, first because he could not allow himself to feel any emotion from that time at all – it was too painful; and then because of the five-finger-exercise style, which contradicted everything, all pain or protest, leaving nothing, an emptiness. The show went on; through the twenties, with bits of popular songs from that time, a number about the General Strike, which reduced the whole thing to the scale of marionettes without passion, and then on to the thirties. George saw it was a sort of potted history, as it were – Noel Coward’s falsely heroic view of his time parodied. But it wasn’t even that. There was no emotion, nothing. George did not know what he was supposed to feel. He looked curiously at the faces of the people around him and saw that the older people looked puzzled, affronted, as if the show were an insult to them. But the youngerpeople were in the mood of the thing. But what mood? It was the