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Glasgow. But they were high spots. I spent much of my career in drawing-room comedies and whodunits.”
    â€œSheila’s a real culture-vulture, to tell you the truth. It upset her a lot when Guy decided to do that computer stuff at university. Beneath contempt, she thought.”
    Now would have been another good chance to mention Pete Bagshaw. But Caroline let it pass, again.
    â€œShe sounds like a woman after my own heart. Though as far as computers are concerned, I’m not against them. I don’t despise them, I’m just ignorant, and I want to keep my ignorance.”
    â€œSheila feels everything is becoming automated and dumbed down. She shudders when she opens the arts pages of The Times. She’s of a generation that can hardly think of films—or ‘Film,’ as they call it—as an art form at all.”
    â€œNonsense, she’s of my generation. And I do think that’s going a bit far.”
    â€œWell, pop music, then. She sits on cultural bodies and she’s on all the cultural grapevines. She knows when anything significant is coming at the theater long before it actually opens. She’s bound to have heard that Olivia is going to be a sensation in Forza . She’d probably come if it wasn’t—”
    â€œYes, if it wasn’t. Are the grapevines saying Olivia is going to be a sensation? It’s news to me.”
    â€œOh yes. People have commented, wished her well through me. That’s people who know about you and me, of course.”
    â€œWell, that’s wonderful news if it’s true. I’ve always had a feeling in my bones about Olivia’s voice, but of course I’m only an amateur as far as opera is concerned.”
    The topic of Marius’s wife did not come up again, but interval time at the West Yorkshire Playhouse did lead to more discussion of Olivia’s approaching appearance as Leonora. There were various people from the acting trade in the audience—people appearing in or otherwise involved with plays in the West Yorkshire area. The ones who knew Caroline, and even one or two who didn’t, came up and asked what she was doing (“Being a kept woman,” she said to one of them, “and very pleasant it is too”). Several had heard on the local arts network that rehearsals were going sensationally well for Olivia.
    â€œThey say it’s a wonderfully rich voice,” said an elderly actor who had seen every operatic sensation since Callas’s Covent Garden Norma, “and with the bloom still on. Lucky old us.”
    â€œWe hear a lot of it, but we still think it’s pretty magnificent,” said Caroline. “If there’s going to be a lot of advance hype, I hope it doesn’t arouse too high expectations, though.”
    â€œIt’s not hype, darling. It’s informed report passed by word of mouth between people in the know.”
    Going back into the auditorium Caroline got a warm glow of anticipation. She was soon going to be known as the mother of Olivia Fawley. She felt not the slightest twinge of jealousy, no sense of anticlimax. Her career had never aimed at the highest peaks, and her life, now her career was over, was both happier and—oddly—more fulfilled. Part of that fulfillment was the excellent relationship she had with her children.
    That thought brought in its train other thoughts about parents and children. But with Marius’s comforting presence beside her, she put those thoughts away. She would think about Marius and Pete, she would think through the implications of what Pete had let slip, but she would do so when Marius was not there to influence her conclusions. And she would not be so silly as to take the offhand and ambiguous remarks of a post-adolescent young man as gospel truth. Marius deserved better than that from her.
    It was as they were leaving the theater with a sense of two hours pleasantly spent that Caroline saw Lauren Spender and