see his tea tray perfectly clearly under the bed drape. He always sat in the same chair. He had noticed however that the girls who had once seemed more or less his own contemporaries now got younger and younger every year and that he himself had almost got to thinking of them indulgently as pretty young things. He did occasionally ask them out for a drink or for dinner but now they always seemed shy and nervous whereas ten years ago everything would have gone bouncingly. He had no idea that his young pupils regarded his sombre good looks with respectful and romantic eyes: to them he was an elderly, but attractive figure, and it was a great treat to be sent as a pupil to him.
Out early one morning doing his marketing, which he did himself and on foot, for the sake of his liver (Ezra was something of a valetudinarian and took his health seriously), he met a young man with whom he had a party acquaintance.
“Hello, Ezra dear,” said the young man. “Don’t pad behind me so in your crêpe soles.”
“You nervous? Believe in this creeper?”
“Oh my, yes.”
“Someone follows, you don’t know it, and then suddenly there he is.”
“Have you been followed?”
“Oh no, not me.”
“Who then?”
“Not sure. I’ve just heard about it.” The young man looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. “Everyone’s talking about it. It must be true.”
There were no details, but a sort of group conviction.
“This person watches,” said the young man.
Ezra raised his eyebrows and walked on thoughtfully.
At the delicatessen in the market the queue was standing peacefully reading and in one case apparently writing a book. Ezra took his place behind a large man whom he had certainly seen in the Bodleian working upon Bracton’s ‘De Legibus Antiquis’. Peeping, Ezra could see that his present study was the Newgate Calendar, which was roughly in keeping. But after a bit Ezra could see that he was really engaged in trying to make acquaintance with the tall girl in front, something of which he seemed to have small chance as she appeared at the moment to be interested only in Mrs. H’s liver garlic sausage and the Manchester Guardian.
“Would you mind stepping off my foot?” she said sweetly, turning round. But after this Ezra saw to his amusement that they went away amicably together. You could never tell. Ezra nodded in approval. Over the years a grandfatherly attitude had grown up in him, a feeling that love and marriage were not for him. It had been unconscious, he had hardly noticed it, he thought, until lately, when it had taken a beating. It had been a peaceful state to be in, he recalled wryly.
As he thoughtfully pinched the lettuce for his dinner and eyed the rye bread to see if it was stale, the subject came up again. Mrs. Hofmanstall leaned over the sauerkraut and breathed her fears and garlic at him in the same breath.
“Of course it may not be true, Mr. Barton, I do not say it is, but my customers tell me.” Mrs. Hofmanstall’s customers told her everything; there was certainly every opportunity to as shopping there was a slow business. There was time for life friendships to be built up.
“Have you been followed?”
Mrs. Hofmanstall drew herself up. “Me? No. Naturalich not.” She lowered her voice again. “All we hear is not right. It is not always follows. Sometimes he is there before.”
Ezra said seriously: “You know there’s a fallacy there somewhere, Mrs. H. But I get the feeling you describe. Nasty.”
He gathered up his shopping and went on.
He continued his walk, through Market Street, down Cornmarket, under the trees of St. Giles, casting a longing but declining look at The Playhouse beside whose doors he could see three of the people who amused him most and whom he most wished to impress. He squared his shoulders and assumed the stern look of a warrior king. One of the things Ezra did most was to act and they were casting for Henry IV, Part Two. He was longing to be the young Prince Hal. He realised however that he was most likely to get the part of the sick Henry IV. These were the parts he always got, he had been the King in Hamlet more often (he reckoned) than any man living. It was beginning to affect his character; you couldn’t be called lecherous so often without beginning to feel it.
He cleared his throat and began to recite the great lines from Henry IV,
Oh sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?
going through the catalogue of the sick king’s symptoms and ending:
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Yes, he could see himself in the part. He could see Lamia Beauregard tossing her golden locks at the producer and he remembered how good, in a dreadful sort of way, she had been as Hamlet’s mother. But then to be good in a dreadful sort of way was just what was demanded of Hamlet’s mother. No doubt Lamia, an improbable but suitable name now he came to think of it, remembering Keats’ girl who was metamorphosed into a snake, was not at all worried about anyone following her. Probably she expected that someone would be following her, just as she expected (and certainly would get what she expected) that she would soon go to London and throw her lustre upon such totally unknown stars as Dorothy Tutin.
He could see that Lamia was beckoning and after wondering whether it would look undignified or not to turn round and go, curiosity took him. After all he could walk down St. John Street to pay the call which he intended to pay before lunch and the thought of which was making a little warm fire of pleasure burn in his mind.
“We are talking about doing Ibsen,” said Lamia at once.
“Well, I think I’m more of a Shakespeare man.”
“There are other actors.”
“Shakespeare’s always safe,” said the producer. “You can do him very badly indeed, and frankly we mostly do, and still get away with it.”
“How are you getting on with Henry IV, Part Two?”
“Very nicely. We’ve got a lovely Harry,” said the producer with enthusiasm, “just the right mixture of bounder and cad. No Henry IV yet though,” and he looked thoughtfully at Ezra who sighed. Old dying Henry was just made for him.
“What about King Lear?” he suggested, remembering that there were great parts for dying old men.
“No part for me in it,” said Lamia sternly. She knew her limitations, which included Cordelia.
“There are other actresses,” he reminded her. “And other parts; what about Goneril and Regan?”
“Oh, that old bitch.”
“I always think, Goneril and Regan, yes and Cordelia, too, are just the other faces of one personality,” said the producer. “That’s how I’d do it. All of them with the same face, only different. A triple split personality.”
“And then you might have them all looking exactly like Lear,” said Ezra entering into the spirit of the thing. “Which, when you come to think about it, is really most likely.”
“I’m
