Pretending to be somebody else gave Stanley a curious feeling of privacy in himself. The inner thoughts and processings of his character, visible only as he chose to make them visible, across his face and in the lie of his hands and through the curve of his posture, enclosed his own thoughts like an atmosphere, parceling the real Stanley up beneath a double-layered film, the inner and the outer Joe Pitt. He felt snug, as if tightly curled within a nut, safe in the knowledge that nobody could truly see him beneath the double fog of his disguise.

“Hello,” said a small voice, and suddenly there was the girl from the wings, the music-lesson girl, coming toward him with her saxophone case slung over her shoulder like a quiver. She grinned, the first properly uncensored grin he had seen on her face, and said, “Are you following me?”

“If I was following you, wouldn’t I be walking behind you?” Stanley said.

“I meant stalking.” The girl was still grinning, now flicking her gaze up and down Stanley’s overcoat, which was a little too large for him, the sleeves hanging over his fingertips as if he was a child dressing up in the clothes of his father.

“Oh. I’m doing an acting exercise for drama school,” Stanley said without thinking. As soon as he’d said it, he awaited a sinking feeling in his stomach: he’d failed the exercise; someone would surely have seen and noted it. “If you tell anyone that you are doing an exercise, or describe the Institute or your profession in any way,” the Head of Acting had said, “it goes without saying that you will automatically fail.”

“I have to stay in character all morning,” Stanley said, rushing on. “Those are the rules.” The sinking feeling didn’t come. He felt curiously lighter, standing here in the park with this pretty upturned girl, and he flapped his oversized coat around him and laughed.

“Do you want to get a coffee later?” he asked. “When I’m done being Joe Pitt.”

“Okay,” Isolde said shyly. “Who’s Joe Pitt?”

“Well, he dresses like this,” Stanley said. “And beyond that, I couldn’t really say.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of being him then,” Isolde said.

“I guess not.”

Stanley located the feeling of lightness: he felt real, more real than he had felt in months.

“How do I know you’re not acting now?” Isolde said, which was almost a cliché but he forgave her because of his feeling of lightness and because of how pretty she looked, with her pink ears and her woollen coat and her mittens clapped together against the cold.

“How do I know that you’re not?” Stanley said.

Isolde smiled and made a funny gesture, turning out her hands and lifting herself up onto her tiptoes to show that her whole body didn’t know. Stanley felt a rush of happiness surge over him like a tide.

“I guess that’s a risk we’re going to have to take, then,” he said.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Head of Improvisation approaching.

“I have to go and finish my walk now,” he said. “But I’ll wait for you under the ginkgo tree.”

“I finish at five,” Isolde said.

“I know,” Stanley said. “I’ve been watching.”

July

“You have to follow through with the action to the very end,” the Head of Movement called out crossly. His tired hand was smoothing the hair on his crown, over and over. “Right now it’s obvious that you both know the scene is about to end, and you relax before the lights go down. It’s only a split-second thing, but it matters. You have to give the illusion that the scene is going to keep going on, behind the curtain. You have to follow through with the action to the very end. Again.”

Stanley and the girl again assumed their position, Stanley standing with his palm cupped against the girl’s cheek and his index finger slipped inside the tight little bud of her ear. They said their lines again, and tried not to loosen or slacken their bodies as the scene came to its invisible end.

“It is what I want. This is what I want,” was Stanley’s last line, and he gave her jaw a tight little shake with the clutch of his hand, for emphasis. The girl looked up at him. The scene ended.

Stanley’s face was close to hers and her cheek was in his hand. He followed the action through: he leaned down and kissed her like he meant it.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” the Head of Movement exploded, and the two of them jumped hastily apart. “When did I say kiss her? I said, Follow through with the action to the very end.”

“I thought that was what you meant,” Stanley said, with hot embarrassment, looking out past the lights. The girl wiped her mouth and looked at the floor.

“We are not going to have the curtain come down on the two of you pashing like a couple of kids!” the Head of Movement shouted. “Think about the scene, man!”

The Head of Movement did not usually yell. He was generally less vicious than the Head of Acting, less inclined to shame or fracture his students, less given to little bursts of irritation or cold contempt. But today he was scratchy, surly and tight chested as if short of breath, and as he glared up at the pair of them from his seat in the stalls he was smothered by a vast glove of anger and blame.

“What is it?” he said. “Just leaped at the opportunity, I suppose? What?”

The boy had a wounded look. He had been expecting congratulations, probably, praise for his physical commitment to the scene, his willingness to put personal considerations aside in the name of his art; he had been shamed, moreover, and shamed in front of a girl. The Head of Movement might well have destroyed all possibility of a relationship between the pair by this public shaming that caused them to flush and leap apart. The tutor knew it, and didn’t care. He was suddenly immensely irritated at them both, the boy with his fair lashes and vulnerable pout, the girl with her practiced look of nervous naïveté, worn thin.

“I just thought that’s what you meant,” Stanley said again. “Sorry.”

The Head of Movement did not speak for a moment. They were looking at him with faint pity now, he thought, as any teenager looks at an adult they believe to be utterly incapable of lust. They were looking at him as if they believed their awkward dry fumble against the fold of the curtain had somehow made him jealous; as if their collision had made him yearn for some lost youthful spontaneity of touch, and his outburst had only marked his dissatisfaction, his recognition of his own immeasurable loss. The Head of Movement felt disgusted. He wanted to turn his head and spit on the floor. He wanted to mount the seven steps to the stage and tear them from their cocoon of self-absorption and conceit. He wanted to shout and make them see that he was not jealous, that he could not be jealous of any pathetic hot-light kiss between two ill-made brats, and if anything what he felt was a profound nausea at what he had been forced to watch.

“Again,” said the Head of Movement sourly, and threw himself back into his chair.

September

Stanley was waiting for Isolde under the ginkgo tree when she emerged from her lesson, trotting down the sunken stone steps and across the courtyard to embrace him and kiss him briefly on the mouth.

“Look at you, you little gypsy,” Stanley said as he stepped back. “All your bags and everything.”

“Fridays are horrible,” Isolde said. “Sax and PE and art all in the same afternoon.”

“Gypsy girl.”

Isolde exhaled and flapped her arms and then grinned at Stanley, a broad, honest grin that lit her up completely. It was the same unashamed openness that had lured Mr. Saladin to Victoria, only it was transplanted here on to her sister, the same smile on a different face. Stanley leaned forward and kissed her on the nose.

“So when am I going to hear you play?” he said.