‘I understand.’

‘Of course you do. You love the theatre as I love it: you know the paradox of this profession. To play life. ah, Tallulah, to play life… what a curious thing it is. Sometimes I wonder, you know, how long I can keep up the illusion.’

‘It’s a wonderful performance,’ she said.

‘Do you think so? Do you really think so?’ He was encouraged by her favourable review. It was so gaffing, to have to pretend all the time; to fake the flesh, the breath, the look of life. Grateful for Tallulah’s opinion, he reached for her.

‘Would you like to die, Tallulah?’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Scarcely at all.’ ‘It would make me very happy.’

‘And so it should.’

His mouth covered her mouth, and she was dead in less than a minute, conceding happily to his inquiring tongue. He laid her out on the threadbare couch and locked the door of the Green Room with her own key. She’d cool easily in the chill of the room, and be up and about again by the time the audience arrived.

At six-fifteen Diane Duvall got out of a taxi at the front of the Elysium. It was well dark, a windy November night, but she felt fine; nothing could depress tonight. Not the dark, not the cold.

Unseen, she made her way past the posters that bore her face and name, and through the empty auditorium to her dressing-room. There, smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes, she found the object of her affection.

‘Terry.’

She posed in the doorway for a moment, letting the fact of her reappearance sink in. He went quite white at the sight of her, so she pouted a little. It wasn’t easy to pout. There was a stiffness in the muscles of her face but she carried off the effect to her satisfaction.

Galloway was lost for words. Diane looked ill, no two ways about it, and if she’d left the hospital to take up her part in the Dress Rehearsal he was going to have to convince her otherwise. She was wearing no make-up, and her ash-blonde hair needed a wash.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, as she closed the door behind her.

‘Unfinished business,’ she said.

‘Listen.. . I’ve got something to tell you. .

God, this was going to be messy. ‘We’ve found a replacement, in the show.’ She looked at him blankly. He hurried on, tripping over his own words, ‘We thought you were out of commission, I mean, not permanently, but, you know, for the opening at least...‘ ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. His jaw dropped a little. ‘Don’t worry?’ “What’s it to me?’

‘You said you came back to finish —, He stopped. She was unbuttoning the top of her dress.

She’s not serious, he thought, she can’t be serious. Sex? Now?

‘I’ve done a lot of thinking in the last few hours,’ she said as she shimmied the crumpled dress over her hips, let it fall, and stepped out of it. She was wearing a white bra, which she tried, unsuccessfully, to unhook. ‘I’ve decided I don’t care about the theatre. Help me, will you?’

She turned round and presented her back to him. Automatically he unhooked the bra, not really analysing whether he wanted this or not. It seemed to be a fait accompli. She’d come back to finish what they’d been interrupted doing, simple as that. And despite the bizarre noises she was making in the back of her throat, and the glassy look in her eyes, she was still an attractive woman. She turned again, and Galloway stared at the fullness of her breasts, paler than he’d remembered them, but lovely. His trousers were becoming uncomfortably tight, and her performance was only worsening his situation, the way she was grinding her hips like the rawest of Soho strippers, running her hands between her legs.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’ve made up my mind. All I really want...‘

She put her hands, so recently at her groin, on his face. They were icy cold.

‘All I really want is you. I can’t have sex and the stage

There comes a time in everyone’s life when decisions have to be made.’ She licked her lips. There was no film of moisture left on her mouth when her tongue had passed over it.

‘The accident made me think, made me analyse what it is I really care about. And frankly —‘ She was unbuckling his belt. ‘— I don’t give a shit —‘

Now the zip.

‘— about this, or any other fucking play.’

His trousers fell down.

‘— I’ll show you what I care about.’

She reached into his briefs, and clasped him. Her cold hand somehow made the touch sexier. He laughed, closing his eyes as she pulled his briefs down to the middle of his thigh and knelt at his feet.

She was as expert as ever, her throat open like a drain. Her mouth was somewhat drier than usual, her tongue scouring him, but the sensations drove him wild. It was so good, he scarcely noticed the ease with which she devoured him, taking him deeper than she’d ever managed previously, using every trick she knew to goad him higher and higher. Slow and deep, then picking up speed until he almost came, then slowing again until the need passed. He was completely at her mercy.

He opened his eyes to watch her at work. She was skewering herself upon him, face in rapture.

‘God,’ he gasped, ‘that is so good. Oh yes, oh yes.’

Her face didn’t even flicker in response to his words, she just continued to work at him soundlessly. She wasn’t making her usual noises, the small grunts of satisfaction, the heavy breathing through the nose. She just ate his flesh in absolute silence.

He held his breath a moment, while an idea was born in his belly. The bobbing head bobbed on, eyes closed, lips clamped around his member, utterly engrossed. Half a minute passed; a minute; a minute and a half. And now his belly was full of terrors. She wasn’t breathing. She was giving this matchless blow-job because she wasn’t stopping, even for a moment, to inhale or exhale.

Calloway felt his body go rigid, while his erection wilted in her throat. She didn’t falter in her labour; the relentless pumping continued at his groin even as his mind formed the unthinkable thought:

She’s dead.

She has me in her mouth, in her cold mouth, and she’s dead. That’s why she’d come back, got up off her mortuary slab and come back. She was eager to finish what she’d started, no longer caring about the play, or her usurper. It was this act she valued, this act alone. She’d chosen to perform it for eternity.

Galloway could do nothing with the realization but stare down like a damn fool while this corpse gave him head.

Then it seemed she sensed his horror. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. How could he ever have mistaken that dead stare for life? Gently, she withdrew his shrunken manhood from between her lips.

‘What is it?’ she asked, her fluting voice still affecting life.

‘You... you’re not... breathing.’

Her face fell. She let him go.

‘Oh darling,’ she said, letting all pretence to life dis-appear, ‘I’m not so good at playing the part, am I?’

Her voice was a ghost’s voice: thin, forlorn. Her skin, which he had thought so flatteringly pale was, on second view, a waxen white.

‘You are dead?’ he said.

‘I’m afraid so. Two hours ago: in my sleep. But I had to come, Terry; so much unfinished business. I made my choice. You should be flattered. You are flattered, aren’t you?’

She stood up and reached into her handbag, which she’d left beside the mirror. Galloway looked at the door, trying to make his limbs work, but they were inert. Besides, he had his trousers round his ankles. Two steps and he’d fall flat on his face.

She turned back on him, with something silver and sharp in her hand. Try as he might, he couldn’t get a focus on it. But whatever it was, she meant it for him.

Since the building of the new Crematorium in 1934, one humiliation had come after another for the cemetery. The tombs had been raided for lead coffin-linings, the stones overturned and smashed; it was fouled by dogs and graffiti. Very few mourners now came to tend the graves. The generations had dwindled, and the small number of people who might still have had a loved one buried there were too infirm to risk the throttled walkways, or too tender to bear looking at such vandalism. It had not always been so. There were illustrious and influential families interred behind the marble faзades of the Victorian mausoleums. Founder fathers, local indus-trialists and dignitaries, any and all who had done the town proud by their efforts. The body of the actress Constantia Lichfield had been buried here (‘Until the Day Break and the Shadows Flee Away’), though her grave was almost unique in the attention some secret admirer still paid to it.