“Get your bloody game on,” someone shouted.

They watched with contempt and satisfaction as the King of Spades found his mark, drew himself up and took a breath. The stiff waxy breastplate of his costume had come untied on one shoulder and so hung at an odd angle across his chest. He had forgotten his gloves and his sword, but it was too late now.

The onstage students sighed and retraced their steps to give the boy his cue again. They said, “But look at it from another point of view. She lost her virginity, and in good time, before it began to cling unfashionably like a visible night-rag. She snared an older man. She achieved celebrity. And now she has a secret which everyone craves to know: a sexual secret, the best kind of secret, a vortex of a secret that tugs and tugs away at her edges so she’s never quite there. Oh, don’t pity Victoria. Pity poor lonely Mr. Saladin, who has tasted the bright ripe fruit of youth and purity, and now nothing else will do.”

There was a kettle-drum clash from the orchestra pit, on the beat. Its effect on the King of Spades was dramatic. He crumpled, as if he had been clubbed between the shoulder blades, and all in an instant he became crippled and fragile and old. As he began to speak and the lesser characters reformed like children around his knees, one of the boys in the stalls leaned over to whisper, “He’s still playing it for laughs. It won’t work if he plays it for laughs.”

The King of Spades said, “There was something so very endearing about it, right back in the beginning. The way she played it, out of a textbook, big moon eyes and an open collar, and her skirt hitched up to show her knee. It was so touchingly amateur. It was like a child’s painting, imperfect and discordant and poorly executed and crying out to be celebrated, to be pinned to the wall or the fridge, to be complimented and fawned over and adored.”

He trailed his foot and looked down at the floor and smiled secretly to himself, as if he was remembering something infinitely private. The band in the orchestra pit had struck up a jazzy pulse, drums and double-bass and the throaty murmur of a tenor saxophone.

He said, “In ten years’ time she will be able to look at a man in cold blood and think, We are compatible. She will think, given your generosity of spirit, given your ability to provide me with the emotional shelter I need, given your particular wry and self-deprecating sense of humor, your interest in silent film, given the things you like to cook, and your tendency toward pedantry, and the things you do to pass the time—given all of this, I can conclude that we’re compatible. Over the course of her life she will gradually compile this dreary list of requisites. Year by year she will reduce the yawning gulf of her desire to the smallness of a job vacancy: a janitor, or a sentry, or a drone. The ad will say, Wanted. That’s all.”

The King of Spades shrugged.

“But with me she didn’t have a formula,” he said. “She didn’t know her appetites, didn’t recognize the jumping pulse that leaped and leaped in the scarlet recess of her throat. Every time we touched she was finding out something new—not about me, but about herself, her tides and tolls, her responses, the upturned vase of emptiness she carried around inside her always, like something unfinished or unmade.”

Behind him there were shadow-figures arched and clawing behind mullioned screens. They were silhouettes, crisply lit and dark against the white cloth, and they were all the shapeliest of the first-year students, chosen for their linear form, their profile. They were hand-picked by the others, who squinted until they saw only the positive outline and could judge the massy contour on its own.

The jazz band eased into the main theme now, the recurring motif of the production, and the seething crowd on stage reformed into another shape, another scene. The lights changed and the music changed, and the King of Spades was swallowed by the crowd.

“You missed out a bit,” one of the stage managers said, when the King of Spades at last heard his cue to exit and bowed out, stage right. He was holding a sheaf of papers fixed together with a bulldog clip, and he shook the papers in the King of Spades’ shadowed face. He said, “You missed out that whole section where he says, How can I protect these girls and excite them at the same time?”

September

“Has anything ever gone wrong?” Stanley said. “In the devised production? Like, the pistol was loaded and nobody even knew it was real. Or the flying harness was unclipped, or somebody fell from the fly-floors and slammed into the action in the middle of the stage. Some tragic story that happened almost too long ago to remember.”

“You’re nervous,” Oliver said, as he slid into the seat opposite. He pulled an apple out of his backpack and began tossing it back and forth between his hands.

“There’s just something scary about being let loose,” Stanley said. “Without the tutors watching or anything, just us on our own for months and months. And I just wondered if anything’s ever gone terribly wrong. Like in a Lord of the Flies kind of a way.”

“You’re worried you’re going to be impaled on the spikes of your wimple,” Oliver said, taking a cheerful bite and grinning across at Stanley as he chewed. “Suffocated by that big black dress. Death by habit.”

“So nothing’s ever gone wrong?”

“Well, if not, maybe this year’s the year.” Oliver enjoyed Stanley’s frowning distress for a moment longer, then reached across and slapped him on the arm. “Hey man, you’re awesome in that role. Everyone always says so as soon as you leave the room.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Stanley said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop and sighed.

August

Stanley left the Institute buildings at a brisk trot, hugging a long woollen trench coat around his body. He was wearing a suit and tie, and his shoes were shined brightly black. He took the stairs two by two, broke apart from the rest of the group and set off across the quadrangle with his head inclined and his shoulders slightly bowed, his hands clenched in fists inside the pockets of his coat. He walked swiftly, and soon he had left the rest of the group and was walking down the boulevard alone.

Behind him, a motley clutch of characters from Tennessee Williams, Steven Berkoff, Ionesco and David Hare milled about briefly before settling upon an objective and dispersing likewise. One of the girls had costumed herself in a taffeta dress that was cut above the knee, and she looked uncomfortable and underdressed in the chill of the afternoon. Her bare legs were blood mottled and the fine fur on her arms was standing on end.

Stanley had resolved to circumnavigate the park, detouring to avoid the children’s playground, then looping carefully around the lake and returning to the Institute buildings from the opposite side. He withdrew further into the collar of his shirt and lengthened his stride. He supposed he was probably being followed: the Heads of Acting, Movement, Improvisation and Voice had all left the premises earlier that morning to station themselves around the city quarter.

“You mustn’t leave the bounded area,” the Head of Acting had said again and again, tapping the illuminated area with his forefinger and looking down past the steel arm of the projector at the shifting mass of students straining in their seats. He was dressed in canvas trousers and an open-necked shirt, looking only slightly jauntier than usual but nevertheless infected by the same giddy thrill of disguise as the students, some of whom were almost unrecognizable in their pinned costumes and period hair.

Stanley turned off the boulevard and passed through the blunt-tipped iron gates into the botanical gardens. A suited man passed him on the gravel path and gave him a long look. Stanley almost looked away, but quickly remembered he was Joe Pitt, and looked hard at the man for the longest possible instant, not breaking his gaze until he had passed. He felt an unpleasant flicker of guilt at the deception that did not dissolve when the man rounded the corner of the hothouse and disappeared. Stanley thought he saw out of the corner of his eye the Head of Improvisation sitting on a park bench in a pool of sunlight and holding a newspaper on her lap. He drew his coat tighter around himself and walked on.