“I know that,” Peregrine said. “You don’t need to keep on at it, Jer. I know there’s always been a Bardic racket and that since the quatro-centenary it’s probably been stepped up. I know about the tarting-up of old portraits with dome foreheads and the fake signatures and ‘stol’n and surreptitious copies’ and phoney ‘discovered’ documents and all that carry-on. I know the overwhelming odds are against this glove being anything but a fake. I merely ask you to accept that with the things lying there in front of me, I was knocked all of a heap.”

“Not only by them, I understand. You were half-drowned, half-drunk, dressed up in a millionaire’s clobber and not knowing whether the owner was making a queer pass at you or not.”

“I’m almost certain, not.”

“His behaviour, on your own account, seems to have been, to say the least of it, strange.”

“Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer.”

“Well, you’re the judge,” said Jeremy Jones. He bent over his work-table and made a delicate slit down a piece of thin cardboard. He was building a set to scale for a theatre-club production of Venice Observed. After a moment he laid aside his razor-blade and looked up at Peregrine. “Could you make a drawing of it?” he said.

“I can try.”

Peregrine tried. He remembered the glove very clearly indeed and produced a reasonable sketch.

“It looks O.K.,” Jeremy said. “Late sixteenth century. Elaborate in the right way. Tabbed. Embroidered. Tapering to the wrist. And the leather?”

“Oh, fine as fine. Yellow and soft and wrinkled and old, old, old.”

“It may be an Elizabethan or Jacobean glove but the letter could be a forgery.”

“But why? Nobody’s tried to cash in on it.”

“You don’t know. You don’t know anything. Who was this chum Conducis bought it from?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And who was M.E. whose dear grandma insisted it had belonged to the Poet?”

“Why ask me? You might remember that the great-great-grandmother was left it by a Mrs. J. Hart. And that Joan Hart—”

“Née Shakespeare, was left wearing-apparel by her brother. Yes. The sort of corroborative details any good faker would cook up. But, of course, the whole thing should be tackled by experts.”

“I told you: I said so. I said wouldn’t he take it to the V. and A., and he gave me one of his weird looks; furtive, scared, blank—I don’t know how you’d describe them—and shut up like a clam.”

“Suspicious in itself.” Jeremy grinned at his friend and then said: “ ‘I would I had been there.’ ”

“Well, at that, ‘it would have much amazed you.’ ”

“ ‘Very like. Very like.’ What do we know about Conducis?”

“I can’t remember with any accuracy,” Peregrine said. “He’s an all-time-high for money, isn’t he? There was a piece in one of the Sunday supplements some time back. About how he loathes publicity and does a Garbo and leaves Mr. Gulbenkian wondering what it was that passed him. And how he doesn’t join in any of the joy and is thought to be a fabulous anonymous philanthropist. A Russian mum, I think it said, and an Anglo-Rumanian papa.”

“Where does he get his pelf?”

“I don’t remember. Isn’t it always oil? ‘Mystery Midas’ it was headed and there was a photograph of him looking livid and trying to dodge the camera on the steps of his Bank and a story about how the photographer made his kill. I read it at the dentist’s.”

“Unmarried?”

“I think so.”

“How did you part company?”

“He just walked out of the room. Then his man came in and said the car was waiting to bring me home. He gave me back my revolting, stinking pocket-book and said my clothes had gone to the cleaner and were thought to be beyond salvation. I said something about Mr. Conducis and the man said Mr. Conducis was taking a call from New York and would ‘quite understand.’ Upon which hint, off I slunk. I’d better write a sort of bread-and-butter, hadn’t I?”

“I expect so. And he owns The Dolphin and is going to pull it down and put up, one supposes, another waffle-iron on the South Bank?”

“He’s ‘turning over the idea’ in his mind.”

“May it choke him,” said Jeremy Jones.

“Jer,” Peregrine said. “You must go and look at it. It’ll slay you. Wrought iron. Cherubs. Caryatids. A wonderful sort of pot-pourri of early and mid-Vic and designed by an angel. Oh God, God, when I think of what could be done with it.”

“And this ghastly old Croesus—”

“I know. I know.”

And they stared at each other with the companionable indignation and despair of two young men whose unfulfilled enthusiasms coincide.

They had been at the same drama school together and had both decided that they were inclined by temperament, interest and ability to production rather than performance in the theatre. Jeremy finally settled for design and Peregrine for direction. They had worked together and apart in weekly and fortnightly repertory and had progressed to more distinguished provincial theatres and thence, precariously, to London. Each was now tolerably well known as a coming man and both were occasionally subjected to nerve-racking longeurs of unemployment. At the present juncture Peregrine had just brought to an auspicious opening the current production at The Unicorn and had seen his own first play through a trial run out of London. Jeremy was contemplating a decor for a masque which he would submit to an international competition for theatrical design.

He had recently bought a partnership in a small shop in Walton Street where they sold what he described as “very superior tatt. Jacobean purses, stomachers and the odd codpiece.” He was a fanatic on authenticity and had begun to acquire a reputation as an expert.

Jeremy and Peregrine had spent most of what they had saved on leasing and furnishing their studio flat and had got closer than was comfortable to a financial crisis. Jeremy had recently become separated from a blonde lady of uncertain temper: a disentanglement that was rather a relief to Peregrine, who had been obliged to adjust to her unpredictable descents upon their flat.

Peregrine himself had brought to uneventful dissolution an affair with an actress who had luckily discovered in herself the same degree of boredom that he, for his part, had hesitated to disclose. They had broken up with the minimum of ill-feeling on either part and he was, at the moment, heart-free and glad of it.

Peregrine was dark, tall and rather mischievous in appearance. Jeremy was of medium stature, reddish in complexion and fairly truculent. Behind a prim demeanour he concealed an amorous inclination. They were of the same age: twenty-seven. Their flat occupied the top story of a converted warehouse on Thames-side east of Blackfriars. It was from their studio window, about a week ago, that Peregrine, idly, exploring the South Bank through a pair of field-glasses, had spotted the stage-house of The Dolphin, recognized it for what it was and hunted it down. He now walked over to the window.

“I can just see it,” he said. “There it is. I spent the most hideous half hour of my life, so far, inside that theatre. I ought to hate the sight of it but, by God, I yearn after it as I’ve never yearned after anything ever before. You know, if Conducis does pull it down I honestly don’t believe I’ll be able to stay here and see it happen.”

“Shall we wait upon him and crash down on our knees before him crying, ‘Oh, sir, please sir, spare The Dolphin, pray do, sir’?”

“I can tell you exactly what the reaction would be. He’d back away as if we smelt and say in that deadpan voice of his that he knew nothing of such matters.”

“I wonder what it would cost.”

“To restore it? Hundreds of thousands no doubt,” Peregrine said gloomily. “I wonder if National Theatre has so much as thought of it. Or somebody. Isn’t there a society that preserves Ancient Monuments?”