The Royal Show

by Anton Du Beke

Genres: World War II; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

By Royal invitation, join us to celebrate The Royal Show!

Prodigal son and loyal daughter...

The Forsyth Variety Company has been given the opportunity of a lifetime - to entertain Her Majesty at 1962's Royal Variety Performance.

Keen to rehearse, the company heads to the Seagate Theatre under the tutelage of the company's owner, Ed Forsyth. This is Ed's last hoorah before retiring and he's keen to leave on a high. But his son, Cal, has absconded, leaving his twin sister, Evie, to help manage the company after their mother's death. Hoping to display her best trapeze performance ever, she's also desperate that the entire troupe should succeed. If only her father hadn't brought in another old-timer... Billy Rich has come all the way from Hollywood, invited to be their main star. Billy is full of bluster and ego and his much younger wife, the mysterious Magdalene, doesn't help.

Can this troupe of old-time crooners, dancing girls and magicians possibly pull this off? Especially when they must compete with the 1960's rebellious new bands and revolutionary music? Abandoned by her brother, Evie has no idea if she'll ever be able to wrestle the troupe into a show fit for a queen.

But as the theatrical group heads towards a royal deadline like no other, Cal returns out of the blue to introduce a song that could change the world. Is he here to help, or are his motivations darker? As the company descends into illicit romance, family intrigue and foul crimes, rehearsals begin to unravel. Can they really do this?

Cal thinks he has the answer, if only the troupe can believe in him.

Because the queen's show must go on...

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 416

Sample

The whispers spread through the building: the royal procession has arrived.

It is what they are gathered for, here in the London Palladium. Outside, winter is coming on. Darkness has settled over the city. But, in the Palladium, there is only magic and light. All day the backstage halls have heaved with the comings and goings of dancers and musicians, jugglers and comics, a troop of prancing corgis, master illusionists and comics beyond compare. Guitars ring out; technicians make magic out of flickering lights; projectionists, carpenters, stage-dressers and engineers – all of them are working together, towards this grand ideal: for one night only, to put on a show by royal command.

‘She’s here,’ the dancers gathered around the black-and-white television in the corner of the chorus dressing room all say. ‘She’s really here.’

‘Her Majesty, and all of her guests, up in the royal box …’

To sing, to dance, to conjure illusions for the Queen and her consort – it has been the dream of so many performing lives, and none more so than Ed Forsyth, leader of the feted Forsyth Varieties. Alone among the performers in the Palladium tonight, only handsome, grand Ed Forsyth has played for a king or a queen before. Fifty years ago, he took to the stage for the very first Royal Command Performance, lifting his golden voice to serenade the King. Ever since that day, he has been dreaming of a return. Anticipating the honour of an evening just like this. Picturing how it might feel, to perform for the Queen.

But in none of his imaginings has he been standing here, gazing down upon a body lying on the floor.

The crimson blood pooled around the head.

The lifeless eyes, gazing vacantly upwards, windows to a soul that is no longer there.

His eyes flash around, taking in first the other performers around him – his oldest friend, the master of illusion; the dancer who has brought him here – and then, at last, to the sign on the dressing-room door.

Two simple words, etched in bronze and put there by his own hand.

The name of his beloved son:

CAL FORSYTH

Ed Forsyth looks back down, at the bloodied body on the dressing-room floor.

Her Majesty might be in the royal box tonight, enjoying the rapture of this spectacular show – but, backstage at the London Palladium, a murderer is on the loose.

The Tanner Hop was not a public house of particular note. Its bar was neither big nor small; its back room, where old men hunched over dominoes and pints of Mackeson’s Old Stout, was neither slovenly nor grand; even its landlord – who had worked in the Hop since he was knee-high, rolling the barrels with his father who’d owned the pub before him – was an unremarkable fellow. Whether you were a visitor to the small Seaford town, or one of its long-time inhabitants, there were livelier, more enticing places to frequent on a Saturday night. Right now, a rhythm-and-blues three-piece was playing at the Peggy Sue. The little ballroom by the pier was hosting the final heat in a county competition. Beyond the homely comforts of this back-street boozer, life was a riot of colour and music; lovers were catching each other’s eyes for the very first time; hearts were being variously healed, broken, and then healed all over again.

But for the dark-haired man who occupied the table by the window, nursing his pint of Watney’s Red, the Tanner Hop was the only place to be.

The regulars hadn’t seen him in the Tanner Hop before. He was younger than most who drank here – if he was thirty years old, it was only by a few short days – and he wore his coiled black hair in the way young men sometimes did: as if it hadn’t seen a brush in days, longer than it ought to be, wild and unruly, as if there was something aspirational in looking as if you’d just got out of bed. By the way the wives in the bar kept looking over at him, then whispering among each other, it was clear he was good-looking. But youth was always good-looking to those who had left it behind.

Maria, who had the night off from the chippie down by the pier, remarked on his green eyes and took the chair opposite him. He was polite enough when she started chatting, listened attentively to her talk of King Edwards and her mean-spirited boss, who had, by some strange mercy, bought a travelling burger van and took himself off, sometimes, hawking to lorry drivers in lay-bys. He even offered to stand her a drink at one point – though, to the confusion (and not to say the chagrin) of Maria’s friends, who were watching intently from the corner by the old jukebox, he sent her to the bar to fetch it, with a handful of coins from his pocket.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, the tone of his smooth, bass voice only deepening the pub’s sense that he was an outsider. ‘I’ve got to keep at this window. I can’t move an inch.’

By now, some of the older men were balancing their wives and daughters’ sense of intrigue with an equal sense of resentment and distrust. But if the young man noticed, he did nothing to either deter or provoke it. Until Maria returned from the bar, he kept his gaze on the windows and the seafront street beyond.

‘Here you are then. A tomato juice, just like you asked for.’

Some of the men crowding the dartboard on the other side of the bar started guffawing at the idea of a man with a tomato juice. Maria flushed scarlet – she knew one of those men – and was making her apologies when the young man said, ‘I already drank my fill. There’s no shame in knowing that. See, that lot over there – they only know when they’ve had enough when they’re bunching their fists up and getting into a scrap. Me? I know better.’

As he took the tomato juice from her, his hand closed over hers. It was, thought Maria, the thrill not just of her evening but of the last several months. Well, there was hardly any excitement at all in plaice and chips, mushy peas and a jar of pickled eggs.

‘You know, you still haven’t told me your name.’

The young man stiffened at the question. That only set more tongues wagging. What kind of a man didn’t want to give his name?

‘I’m Cal,’ he told her.

‘Well, Cal, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.’ She ­scattered his coins back on the table. ‘And that tomato juice is on me. I’m not like that lot over there,’ she said, leaning in conspira­torially. ‘That’s my uncle and the boys from the Conservative club. They couldn’t possibly imagine a girl having a bit of,’ she raised her voice dramatically, ‘FUN AROUND HERE.’

‘Keep it down in that corner,’ came a voice from behind the bar. ‘There’s money riding on this dartboard.’

‘Cal, tell me,’ said Maria, certain now that they had reached some common ground. ‘Why are you staring out of that window? What’s going on out there, when there’s a perfectly lovely young woman, right here, who’s trying to get your attention?’

Cal was about to answer when suddenly a flash of colour split apart the darkness. He leapt out of his seat, draining the tomato juice in one fluid motion.

‘It’s the best seat in town,’ he said, reaching up and fumbling with the window clasp. ‘That’s the main road out of town. The Newhaven road. The last of the ferries came in two hours ago, over the sea from Dieppe.’

‘What – what are you talking about?’

The clasp clicked in Cal’s hand. The window opened up. A gust of rain whipped within, soaking the net curtains, upsetting the newspaper in the hands of the man at the neighbouring table, setting up exclamations of shock and frustration from everyone around. ‘Close that up!’ the barman was shouting, wiping his hands on a rag as he came around the bar, ready to remonstrate with Cal. ‘Here, you. Are you listening to me? It’s nigh on winter out there. I’ll not have—’

Half a dozen voices might have been cursing his name, but Cal didn’t seem to hear any of it. He was craning his head out of the open window, watching the Newhaven road.

Maria saw what he had been waiting for.

A bright red double-decker bus was cutting its course through the night. Shining in scarlet, more vivid yet than the ones that plied London’s roads, it came past them in great arcs of rainwater, followed by a fleet of black taxicabs, a blue-and-white Volkswagen microbus – and a canary-yellow Ford Anglia, which Maria noticed seemed to catch Cal quite by surprise. Regardless, it was on the double-decker leading the procession – a Union Jack proudly flying from its upper storey – that Cal’s eyes were fixed when the barman’s meaty hand yanked him back inside.

‘What do you think you’re doing, you crazy sod?’ the barman snapped, and wrestled with the latch to close the window. ‘I’ve a mind to get you a mop – it’s rained all over my bar.’

Maria watched Cal as he seemed to cogitate on this for a moment. Then, clearly deciding that the barman was probably due some sort of restitution, he scattered the coins meant for the tomato juice on the tabletop and inclined his head, as if doffing an invisible cap. ‘I’m grateful,’ he said, then, snatching a brown leather jacket from where it had been slung across the back of a chair, bounded for the door.

He was already there when he remembered her. She sat at the rainswept table, feeling quite as discombobulated as the rest of the bar. He tugged an imaginary cap towards her too.

‘I owe you that drink,’ he said, and, when he smiled, all of the bewilderment she’d been feeling somehow melted away.

But Maria did not get to say another word to Cal, for he was already gone.

Rain. She’d quite forgotten the sight, the sound, the smell of English rain. For two months, and, in spite of the time of year, it had been balmy evenings and scorching afternoons, the scents of olive groves and oranges, seventy-five degrees even in the shade. And now … this. Evie knew that some of the Company were thrilled to be back in these familiar surrounds – and, of course, there was always a certain nostalgia that came with the return from a Continental tour – but, really, this wasn’t the welcome she’d been hoping for.

This rain, it was like an omen.

The ferry ride had been one of those interminable ones, the sea hardly fit for a crossing – though of course the authorities at the terminal wouldn’t dream of cancelling. Evie understood that; the Company of which she was an integral part – the Company to which she had been born, and in which she had worked for all the twenty-nine years of her life – had never cancelled a show in all the decades of its existence, except in those war-torn days when the provincial theatres were closed behind the blackout curtains, or the playhouses of London buried beneath bombs. But, at least, when a variety show wasn’t quite timed to perfection, it didn’t end up with a riot of seasickness, a troupe of dancers all looking green around the gills, two performing dogs barking in wild panic in the hold, and Evie’s sixty-six-year-old father, Ed – a man almost as seasoned in travel as he was in variety theatre – declaring he’d never go to sea again.

It was to her father that Evie went now.

The double-decker bus in which she was riding was one of the old AEC Regents. Decommissioned in 1945, having served its tour of duty ferrying shoppers, day-trippers, city clerks and engineers – all the wild gamut of London life – around the war-torn city, in its retirement it had taken the Forsyth Varieties around the English counties, across the channel into France and along the sun-kissed coast of the Mediterranean: to Paris and Naples, Rome and Milan; to Monaco and Antibes, Valencia and Seville. Well, there was romance, of a sort, in the wartime buses – and, even in Europe, when people saw that flash of bright scarlet, some frisson of excitement moved in them; it had seemed churlish to change that. But inside, where the folk of London once sat with their shopping, everything was different. The seats of the lower deck remained – though spaced out more widely now, allowing corners where members of the Company might gather, play cards and drink tea together as they travelled – but the upper storey had been stripped bare. Where banks of seats once sat, now there were two private chambers: one, behind black curtains, a nook for sleeping the long journeys away, and the other, to which Evie now picked her way, an office of utilitarian but cramped design. She knocked on its door now.

‘Come in,’ came the voice from the other side.

Evie opened the door.

There sat her father, Ed. A tall, broad man, he had started to shrink in the last few years – though whether that was his body reacting to the slow encroachment of age, or the after-effects of grief, Evie had never been sure. The only thing she was certain of was that her father had not been the same in the years since her mother had died. It was only his single-minded devotion to the Company that bore his name that had carried him through. A consummate performer – compère, comic, singer – he had given his life to the Forsyth Varieties, just as his father and grandfather, the darlings of the music halls, had before him. And if in these latter years he was not often to be seen in the heart of the stage – for how difficult was it to recapture the joys you once shared with your lover, when you walked out to meet the spotlight alone? – that had only made him more fastidious in plotting the Forsyth fortunes behind the scenes: each commission hunted down assiduously, each tour planned to perfection, each blitz of publicity masterminded from this little desk at which he now sat. He was, Evie was heartened to see, wearing the same brown woollen suit that he always wore when he was taking care of business. ‘Evie, my sweet,’ he had often declared, ‘a man should take his work no less seriously, even if it is behind closed doors. Only half of a theatre’s work is done in front of a crowd.’ Even so, he looked grateful for the opportunity to set down his papers. He had taken to wearing spectacles – unheard of, in an earlier time – and he lifted them from the bridge of his nose.

Evie did not share many of her father’s looks – the crowd used to say that she had the look of her grandfather about her, tall and statuesque, a presence that could fill a stage – but, in their green eyes, they were startlingly alike. Ed’s had faded with the years, but they still glittered when Evie looked at him. It could be like looking into a mirror – a mirror, perhaps, that foretold the future.

‘We’re here, Dad. We came into Seaford just a few moments ago. The theatre can’t be far.’

Ed stacked up his papers, straightened his lapels, and got to his feet. ‘About time as well. By my reckoning we’re two hours behind schedule, thanks to that blasted crossing.’ There was a little mirror hanging over the cramped desk at which he’d been sitting. He stretched open each eye in front of it and dabbed at his lips with a corner of a handkerchief. ‘Well, Evie,’ he said, and took her by the hand. ‘Tonight’s the night. The beginning.’

She grinned. She always loved it when her father spoke like this: with hope for the future, with the frisson of excitement for victories yet to come. ‘It’s been fifty years,’ he said, still considering himself in the mirror. ‘I don’t suppose, even at twenty-nine, you can imagine what it’s like to have fifty years of memories stored up here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Fifty years of performances. All of those hundreds of thousands who’ve watched us. Who’ve watched me. All of the thousands of opening numbers. The thousands of curtain calls and bows. But there’s none that sticks in my mind like that summer’s day. July, nineteen twelve. By God, I was sixteen years old. Sixteen years old, Evie, and to sing before the King.’

Of course, it wasn’t the first time Evie had heard this story. Indeed, it was one of the founding myths upon which her father’s life had been built and the older he got, the more it seemed part of the legend of the Forsyth Varieties itself. Ed Forsyth, headstrong and with the voice of an angel, had been part of the contingent from the Company invited to take to the stage at the Palace Theatre. By Royal Command, the papers had said, the finest, most talented entertainers in the Empire will come together to celebrate the coronation of King George V. And there had been Ed Forsyth, singing among them.

‘They tell you not to look in the monarch’s eye, of course,’ Ed said, harking back to the occasion once again. ‘But I was just a slip of a lad. I hardly knew about temptation. So I did. I looked up, and saw the good Queen Mary gazing back down. Her eyes were glittering for me. I’d never felt such purpose. I’d never felt such pride.’

There was no measure by which the inaugural Royal Command Performance hadn’t been a success. The funds it raised for the Variety Artistes’ Benevolent Fund was only the start of it. Its true success had been the start of a movement. The celebration of variety theatre. The benediction granted to dancers, singers, comedians, acrobats and other, wilder entertainers; the blessing of a king. From that moment on – and though he was about to be dragged into a war that would churn up the Continent, and keep him away from the stage for years to come – Ed Forsyth knew where he was meant to be: at the centre of the stage, singing, by royal command.

And now, half a century later, the Company he had inherited from his father – the Company that, one day soon, he would need to pass on for stewardship to the next generation – was to return. In two short weeks, The Royal Variety Performance, as it had become called, was summoning them home.

Beneath Evie and Ed, the double-decker suddenly slowed. ‘We’re here.’ Evie reached across her father’s desk to peel back the curtain blind and look out on the rain-streaked night. Through its shapeless blur, she saw the hulk of the small theatre waiting. Few lights lit up its windows, for this particular theatre rarely hosted performances out of season, but she could see the rest of the Company flotilla already arraying itself around the doors. The old taxicabs were disgorging the dancers, the musicians, the acrobatic crew, while the blue-and-white microbus hunted down its own parking spot.

‘Dad,’ she said with a grin, ‘it’s time.’

But when she looked around, she saw that her father – always silent on his feet, a talent drilled into him by his mother, whose lightness of touch in the ballrooms had been something of legend – had already gone. Well, she thought, at least he was energised. There’d been a time when he’d been like that every hour of the day; to see it, even fleetingly, reminded her what a force of nature her parents had been.

Evie locked up the office and picked her way through the now static double-decker, down the stairs to where the rest of the passengers were stirring. She saw Ed talking to the bus driver – Hugo used to be a talented mimic and had on various occasions performed with his ventriloquist act among the Forsyths, though now preferred setting up the rigging, marshalling logistics and generally bossing his younger crew about – before striding out into the pouring rain. Slinging bags over their shoulders, brandishing umbrellas and raincoats – and generally murmuring that rain over the seaside was, at least, better than rain over the Channel – the rest of the Company began to follow.

Evie was about to follow when she felt a presence on her shoulder. There, waiting quietly in her wake, stood Max. Of all the dancers who Evie marshalled for the Company, Max had absorbed the sunshine of the Mediterranean coast the most. His mop of blonde hair was almost white and, against the bronze of his skin, it made him look as if he was already wearing stage makeup. A dancer of rare talent, Max was one of the newest additions to the Forsyth Varieties, and indeed was just returning from his very first Continental tour.

Having first made certain they were alone on the bus, Evie took his hand.

It had been a few nights since she’d lain in his arms. It wasn’t that romance was outlawed among the members of the Company – if that were the tradition, Evie herself would never have existed, for it was backstage after one of their defining pre-war performances that her parents had first fallen in love – but something in Evie disliked the idea of being watched, being seen, being known, before she truly understood this herself. Max was six years her junior, and – especially in these latter years, as her father took more of a backseat with the Company – directly in her employ. Companies like this might have been breeding grounds for romance, but they were also breeding grounds for professional jealousies, mistrusts and more. Secrecy, for now, was the better option.

Of course, when she looked into his golden eyes, part of her wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Part of her wanted to kiss him right now. She stepped a little nearer, closing the gap between them. He reached up, stroked her hair – as dark as his was light, she had often thought, like each was the photographic negative of the other. There was beauty in that image. A songwriter might have taken it and crafted some ballad that echoed through time.

‘We’d better go,’ Evie said, though it was taking all her strength to tear herself away. She’d had to rely on that inner strength so much in recent years; she’d found a steel, an endurance, she hadn’t known she was capable of. But the best dancers were made of stern stuff, her mother had always told her. I’ve seen you hang one-handed from the trapeze, Evie, dear. Don’t tell me there’s anything you can’t do. ‘There’s so much work to do. All of the kit to be unloaded. The lodgings to attend. It’s already past nine o’clock. If we’re in bed before midnight, it will be a miracle.’

‘I’d like to be in bed before midnight,’ said Max, with the barest hint of a smile.

They lingered over that thought for a heartbeat. Then Evie, still stroking his hand, said, ‘Come on, my father will be gathering everyone. He’s been up there ever since the ferry, and don’t tell me he’s been going through the profits and payslips. No, he’s been preparing some great homecoming speech. I just know it.’

She was about to walk away when Max tightened his hold on her hand. ‘But perhaps that means he’s got an announcement. Perhaps that means he’s making the announcement.’ He paused, but when Evie did not immediately reply, he pushed on. ‘His retirement, Evie. What if he’s about to announce his retirement? And his successor? The next lead of the Forsyth Varieties.’

Evie was still. To say it was to jinx it. To speak about it was, in some way, to will it into being – which had only, in the past, left her with a feeling of treachery, Evie herself the betrayer to the father who’d raised her. And yet – hadn’t her father raised the subject, on more than one occasion? Of how hard it was to keep going, with his wife no longer at his side? He’d assumed the mantle of the Forsyth Varieties from his own father when he’d been only a little bit older than Evie. The year she’d been born, her grandfather going off to the coast to live out his days – and Ed Forsyth, becoming the spearhead of the Company that bore his name.

‘It’s been written in the stars since you were born,’ said Max, his eyes eager and expectant.

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ Evie ventured.

But was it? For a fleeting moment, she allowed herself to dream. Her father was growing older. He was slowing down. If he wasn’t quite the ghost he’d become in the months after her mother had passed away, he had not yet reclaimed his stature as the head of the Company. The dancers, musicians, acrobats, singers and comics – they loved him, but did they look to him for leadership any longer?

It had to happen sooner or later. And all of the old fears she’d grown up with – not one of the variety theatres she’d encountered over the years had been run by a woman – seemed suddenly obsolete. This was the sixties, by God. Anything a man could do, so could a woman. The world was seeing that, at last. She’d grown up in the Company. She’d lived and breathed it every year of her life. Even in those girlhood days, when the country had been at war and the Forsyths temporarily disbanded, she’d spent her summers performing. Her evenings, her holidays, her weekends. And in the last years, since her mother … Well, Evie was practically running the Company anyway, wasn’t she? She’d won her father’s respect in that. If there was anyone who could lead the Forsyth Varieties into a new era, surely it was her?

‘It’s yours, Evie. He’s making that announcement tonight. I’m sure of it. Fifty years since he stepped on stage for the King. At the end of the month, he’ll do it again. Mark my words: he’s bookending his career. He’s going out in the way it began. By royal command.’

Their fingers untwined and, together, they picked their way to the doors of the bus. Outside, in the rain-lashed car park in front of the Seagate Theatre – that tumbledown old place where all their preparations would be made – the rest of the Company were bringing packs and travelling trunks out of their vehicles.

‘Do you know,’ she ventured. ‘I’ve been so swept up in getting back to Blighty that, until this moment, I haven’t thought about how it might feel. To soar through the air on the trapeze, and be looked upon by the Queen. Dad used to talk about the wonder of it. To be just a slip of a lad, singing for his supper – and then, suddenly, to be singing for royalty.’ She found she wanted to take Max’s hand again – and perhaps she might have risked it, for the doors to the Seagate Theatre were opening up and the Company was flocking inside, leaving so few of them to see her. But caution was the better part of valour; there would be time enough for that later tonight, whether her father made a dramatic announcement or not.

‘At least I’ve got one thing going in my favour,’ Evie laughed as they hurried together across the broken asphalt.

‘What’s that?’

‘Well,’ she said with a grin, ‘I’m the only true Forsyth left. There’s only me here!’

But, as they rushed to follow the rest of the Company into the theatre’s inviting doors, neither saw the shadowy figure who watched them from the halo of one of the streetlights further down the road.

They just rushed, oblivious, into the shelter of the theatre.

But they would find out soon enough.

Some moments before Evie and Max had emerged from the double-decker, Ed Forsyth hammered at its side stage door and cried out to be admitted within. If he could not project his voice like he’d been able to do in the prime of his years, there was still something dramatic about its quality. Yes, there was something suitably dramatic about a thundery night and the neglected little theatre at which his Company had arrived.

‘Ed,’ came the gruff voice as it drew back. ‘You always did know how to make an entrance. Where in hell have you been, old chap?’

The rotund, curmudgeonly figure standing in the doorway was none other than John Lauder, the Forsyth Varieties’ resident mystic, mesmerist and shadowgrapher. At least John was dressed for a night like this, covering his not-inconsiderable girth with a chunky knit cardigan. The cap on his head, which hid greying curls, was not the sort he wore on stage – when he cut a much more debonair figure

‘John, I have need of you, old friend. The hour is almost nigh.’

The theatre’s dusty interior might have looked neglected and disused to some, but there was little Ed liked more than an off-season theatre. Somehow, the emptiness of it just pulsed with promise. To Ed, it smelt like home. He’d performed here once or twice across the years – if he remembered correctly, this had been the first stage he’d invited Evie out onto, back when she had just learned the unicycle and was keen to perform alongside her mother in the old acrobatic routines. To spend the next weeks here, lost in rehearsals and new routines, pulling together the show that would crown this year’s Royal Variety Performance, was the sort of thing of which every entertainer dreamed. A whole theatre, a playground in which the Company could create. He’d been anticipating it every bit as much as he was anticipating stepping out into the Palladium.

‘How was Monaco?’ John asked, as he led Ed into the theatre’s galleried auditorium, with its vacant stage like a blank canvas waiting for the Forsyths to do their thing.

‘Much as you’d remember, John. They turned out for us, of course. How long has it been? Ten years? Twelve? The air’s different out there, John. It fills you up. And Evie was just spectacular. The stage at the Fort Antoine – the rigging, and the lights! You can’t perform in the open air here in Blighty. England has its joys, but it isn’t like singing and dancing in the balmy Mediterranean air, midnight on the approach, and the life still buzzing around you.’ He stopped; perhaps he was getting carried away. ‘It’s a younger man’s city, John – but it was a shame you weren’t there with me. I should have enjoyed your company, if it’s to be the last time.’

John mumbled something incoherent. Then he said, ‘You know my thoughts on that, Ed. I’m just glad you made it home in one piece. My dreams foretold otherwise.’

Ed smiled. ‘Let’s leave prophecy for the stage, John. Here I am. What