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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