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She did not know the answer to that question, which applied, she supposed in passing, to other women besides actresses. She would have liked to ask it, but could think of no way of posing it which would not sound banal or trite.

She had less than five minutes left. She turned back to the actress and looked at her carefully as she continued to speak. Famous though she was, a physical description of her would be necessary for this article, and Lawrence was not easy to describe: beauty never was. She was wearing a very plain, dark dress; the three mirrors behind her on the dressing-table framed her lovely head. The two outer mirrors of this triptych were angled; all three were lit with bare, glowing bulbs, which created a halo, a fizz of light, around her dark, heavy hair, and her pale face and neck. The effect was to suggest that there was more than one woman seated opposite her; as Lawrence moved, or gestured, her other ghostly selves in the mirrors also did.

The length and weight of her hair was apparent only in the mirrors, for she wore it drawn back from her face and gathered in heavy coils at the nape of her neck. Was she beautiful? Yes, she was surely very beautiful, Gini thought, but the grammar of beauty was hard to convey. Did it consist in those dark straight brows, in the etch of the cheek-bones, or did it reside in those astonishing inky blue-black eyes, which could convey on screen, or in the huge spaces of a theatre, the tiniest nuance of emotion, the smallest flicker of thought?

It was perhaps in its mobility that the beauty of this face lay, for Natasha Lawrence’s features were expressive, even when her words were not. She looked wary and tense, also fatigued; whatever else she was afraid, or not afraid of, she was certainly fearful of questions, Gini saw. She glanced at her watch; the actress was already rising to her feet. She had two minutes left.

‘Do you mind having to live with bodyguards?’ Gini said.

The question took the actress by surprise, as she had hoped it would. She covered that surprise quickly.

‘Of course. But—it’s necessary. In my position…’ She gave a small shrug. ‘I’ve lived with them for years now. You get used to it.’

‘I heard—’ Gini began, reaching across to switch off her tape.

‘I’m sure you heard a lot of things.’ The actress gave a slight smile; she began to move towards the door.

‘Is it worse when you’re appearing in a theatre? You must feel more protected on a movie set…’

‘Not really. You feel protected nowhere. Is your tape recorder off? I don’t want to discuss this.’

Gini put the tape recorder in her bag and rose. Quite suddenly, she found she was tired of this; she could not wait for this meeting to be over, to leave the theatre. Interviews were supposed to elicit information, yet this type of interview rarely did; for this failing, rightly or wrongly, she blamed the assumptions and procedures of the interview process, not herself. After an hour’s conversation, she had obtained perhaps three or four remarks which she could weave into her profile of the actress efficiently enough; the resulting article would tell readers something and nothing, she thought.

She looked at the actress, who was about to open the dressing-room door, and for the sake of her rising young editor, tossed in one final question, expecting no reply.

‘Is it true you’re considering moving to the Conrad building?’ she said.

To her astonishment, the actress showed greater animation at this than she had done throughout the interview. She smiled, then laughed.

‘How do these stories start?’ she said. ‘The Conrad? I don’t think they’d welcome me with open arms, do you? No, I’m moving back to California. I’ve bought a house in the hills outside Hollywood. It’s being decorated for me by…’ And she mentioned a fashionable West Coast name; she gave a small sigh. ‘It’s due to be finished this week, so as soon as I finish in
Estella
…’

‘Can I use that?’

‘Yes. It’s no secret I’m going back to California. I’m sorry, but the hour
is
up…’

She held out her hand and took Gini’s briefly in her own. Some polite farewell was expressed; Gini was reminded of the final prearranged conditions of this interview: that a copy of the article should be made available in advance of publication, so that the accuracy of the facts—and
only
the facts, the actress said with another smile—could be checked. Then she found herself outside in the corridor with the door firmly shut.

Gini negotiated the labyrinthine backstage corridors, faint with a residual scent of make-up, hair lacquer, disinfectant and sweat. She came out into the alleyway that led down to the stage door; it was still raining, and Manhattan had not yet emerged from the day’s permanent dusk. She was taking the shuttle back to Washington DC, where her husband Pascal and their baby son awaited her. It was Hallowe’en, and—the interview already receding from her mind—she was anxious to be back. She walked towards Times Square, the bluish exhaust-heavy air pungent with the smells of a city winter, of pretzels and of chestnuts roasting at some corner ahead. She tried to hold on to her interview as she hailed a yellow cab and persuaded its driver, a driver of desperate, demented appearance, who spoke virtually no English, to take her out now, yes now, to the airport.

In the cab, she flicked open her notebook, where, during the course of the interview, she had jotted down a few comments. She closed it again, leaned forward, and began to give the driver instructions as to the best route, instructions which he seemed unable to understand or unwilling to accept. Her mind curled away from the dressing-room and the interview to the journey ahead: a plane, then another taxi, the familiar streets of Georgetown, brick pavements, decorum, and her husband and son waiting for her in her dead father’s house.

It curled back, back like a wave, to her father’s funeral a month before; to the visits to the last of the clinics that had preceded that funeral; to the stations on the way to the end—and the end, inevitable for all men, had been hastened in his case. Two bottles of bourbon a day for twenty years; promise and talent allowed to leach out; none of the scenes of reconciliation which she had believed must surely happen in those final weeks. Her father had lived angrily and died angrily, and now all that remained, in every sense, was to clear up.

She could feel it mounting, block by block, as they drove, some strange female need to dust, scrub, polish, sweep; some need to spring-clean a house that was about to be sold, and clean away the thirty-one years of her accumulated memories. Then she, Pascal and their beautiful son, whom she loved with a painful intensity, would be free to leave. They could leave Washington behind and go in any direction they chose. The whole of America lay before them: east, west, north, south. Should they begin with the clean bracing air of the eastern seaboard, or head for the plantations, the Spanish moss, of an imagined but never visited deep south?

She looked forward to an hour, two hours, with her son when she returned. He was still too young to understand Hallowe’en, but she and Pascal had made a gesture towards the date. The previous evening, they had hollowed out a fat orange globe of a pumpkin. They had given it round eyes, a triangular nose and a wide, smiling, unthreatening mouth. This pumpkin, lit from inside by a candle, would be placed in the window to welcome her home; it would greet the children who came to the door for trick or treat. Thus far, and no further, would she go to acknowledge the date; she wanted to begin giving her son Lucien the childhood she had never had, but she was too recently bereaved—if bereaved was the term—to wish to celebrate more fully the night of the dead.

So the pumpkin would glow, her son would be persuaded eventually that the purpose of lying down in his little red cot was to sleep, then there was the long tranquillity of an evening with her husband to look forward to. They would make their plans for Thanksgiving—her friend Lindsay Drummond would be coming from England to celebrate it with them—and they would make their plans for their American itinerary, for the book Pascal would photograph and she would write. They would sit by the fireside and consult yet more guides, yet more maps.

The journey ahead opened up in her mind and the highways of America beckoned. She had forgotten Natasha Lawrence and all those unanswered questions long before the cab driver, recalcitrant, twitching and fuming with some unspecified rage, was paid off.

The actress, who had intended to answer no questions of any import, forgot the interview even more quickly. She undertook, on average, some two or three interviews each week, more when a theatre opening or movie premiere approached, and she regarded them as a necessary evil. Once they were over she wiped them; five minutes later she had no recollection of the interviewer or of anything either had said. She had learned years before—and she was a woman of great self-discipline—that to worry about interviews encouraged vanity and self-doubt, also, latterly, fear—so she wiped them: click; gone from the screen, gone from the memory bank. On this occasion, the only question which had caused her any disturbance was the question about the Conrad building—and she had dealt with that. Click, and the past hour was gone; she felt reinvigorated at once.

Her life, organized by others, was well-organized. Within five minutes of Gini Hunter’s departure, she was in the back of her dark limousine, with its dimmed windows, being carried north through the darkening streets of New York. Within half an hour, she was back in her apartment at the Carlyle hotel, where she could be with her son for at least two hours before her return to the theatre. Those hours, which nothing was allowed to interrupt, were the only point in her day when she felt that, unwatched, private and secure, she need no longer act, but could simply be herself.

Today, however, she had one small extra anxiety.

‘Has the package come from Tomas?’ she said to Angelica, as she entered the apartment, pulling off her coat.

‘No, but he called. He’s sending it to the theatre by courier; it’ll be there when you go in tonight.’

‘Ah,’ Natasha said, looking at Angelica and taking the pile of letters and packages she held out. She looked down at these in a nervous way; Angelica sighed.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Nothing from
him
. I checked. And no calls either…’

Faint colour rose in Natasha’s cheeks; hope lit in her eyes. She glanced over her shoulder at her son, who had looked up from his book. He knew better than to ask questions, or greet his mother at this point; he bent to the pages of
Treasure Island
again. Angelica lowered her voice.

‘It’s been four months now. Nothing for four months.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s never been silent for this long before.’

‘I know.’

‘Maybe he’s dead.’ Angelica lowered her voice still further. ‘Could be. Hit by a truck, jumped off a bridge, sank a bottle of Temazepam, prowled about too late one night in the wrong place. It happens all the time…’

‘To other people, yes.’

‘I dreamed he died. I told you. I dreamed it just the other night.’

‘Ah, Angelica.’

Angelica placed great faith in her dreams, which were often dark and occasionally malevolent. Natasha Lawrence might have liked to place equal faith in her dreams, but she had learned from experience, and now did not. Angelica’s dreams often inverted or reversed truths, and sometimes—like most dreamers—she allowed her own desires to write her dream scripts. The actress looked at her harsh lined face, at the two wings of grey in her short black hair. In the gentle light of the room, Angelica’s eyes were small, black and glittery as jet. She was of Sicilian descent; she loved and hated with a resolve and implacability the actress often envied; she also claimed to know how to curse. Perhaps, Natasha thought, and her heart lifted, perhaps Angelica’s knotty, intricate curses had finally taken effect. She leaned across and kissed her cheek.

‘What time did Tomas call?’ she said.

‘About an hour ago. He’s sending the book to the theatre, like I said. And something with it—a surprise, he said. Some kind of present. Small. Don’t miss it, he said, it’ll be inside the book…’

‘A present? It’s not my birthday. It’s not our anniversary. Inside the book?’

‘He said it was the best present he could give you…’ Angelica’s face hardened; she did not like, and had never liked, Tomas Court. ‘Whatever
that
means. You’ll understand when you see it, he said.’ She paused, giving the rest of her message with reluctance. ‘He sent his love. Talked to Jonathan for a bit…’

Natasha Lawrence crossed to her son and kissed his forehead.

‘You talked to Daddy, darling? Was he in Montana? Was he at the ranch?’

‘I guess he was; I forgot to ask. He’s bought two new horses: a grey one for you, she’s called Misty, and a little one for me—Diamond. He’s got a white blaze on his nose and four white socks.’

‘Oh, how lovely.’ His mother kissed him again. ‘I expect he was at the ranch then?’

‘Maybe.’ Her son’s small features composed themselves in a frown. ‘I meant to ask, but we got talking about my book.’ He held up the copy of
Treasure Island
. ‘I told him all about Blind Pew and the Black Spot. Blind Pew’s kind of scary. He has this stick, and even though he’s blind, he finds these people out; he tracks them down, and you can hear him coming with his stick, tap, tap, tap…’

His mother straightened up a little hastily and made a small sign to Angelica. ‘I’m sure I remember,’ she said. ‘Blind Pew comes to a nasty end. He gets his just deserts…’

‘That’s what Daddy said.’

‘Shall we have our tea, darling—our Hallowe’en tea?’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I want to do that before Maria arrives to give me my massage, then you could put on this special costume you’ve made and show me—Maria too. Let’s have tea now. Angelica’s found a special Hallowe’en cake…’

The cake was in the shape of a witch; she was mounted on a broomstick, flying over a white-icing moon, through a milky chocolate sky. Jonathan’s excitement at this, and at dressing up in his Hallowe’en costume, touched his mother deeply. She looked at her son, who was small for his age, and who had a small, somewhat melancholy face—an expressive face, a little clown’s face—and his innocence pained her. At seven, carefully protected and nurtured, her son still did not understand how unusual this Hallowe’en was. He would not, like other children, be going out to play trick or treat. His one excursion, watched over by Angelica, would be down the hall to an elderly guest at the Carlyle who had grown fond of him and who was known to be safe. He would return here, have his costume admired by Maria, and then, when his mother left for the theatre, would watch some Disney video with Angelica, while a bodyguard, as always, stayed within reach. Her son was a prisoner of her fame and his father’s fame, and a prisoner of those people, and those forces, that such fame could attract.