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his left hand and methodically working the greasy cream into his face with his right. Round strokes from the chin up, around the eyes and the forehead, so as not to cause wrinkles, then the wiping with tissues tossed carelessly in the direction of the waste bin. Carefully, he examined the face that emerged from beneath the white mask, and took another swig of gin.
    That was one of the few perks still accorded him, the drink sent down from the bar to his dressing room after a performance, even in this miserable pub in Kennington.
    His dressing room, indeed. The thought made him laugh. Once it would have been his dressing room, when he’d played leads, or even second leads. But now he’d been relegated to the Stranger in a profit-share production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, with an appearance only in act two, and insult added to injury, sharing a room with a half-dozen amateurs with even smaller parts. There was perhaps no greater sign of an actor’s career in decline.
    He’d waited for the others to swipe off their makeup and go giggling into the night so that he could have his gin and contemplation in peace. That much dignity, at least, he had left.
    The face that regarded him in the mirror was still handsome enough, the complexion a pale olive, the hair thick and dark except for the smattering of gray at the temples that he covered carefully with dye on a toothbrush. A closer inspection, however, revealed the faint web of broken veins in the nose and cheeks, the slight sagging of jowls, all signs and portents of worse things to come.
    Yes, there was no denying that his career was in decline, but the truth was that his whole life had been a decline, except for one brief spark, and that had turned to ashes quickly enough.
    He was born Hari Pevensey, the given name a sop from his Anglo father to his Indian mother. His father, the youngest son of declining Dorset gentry, had gone out to “Indya” to try his hand at engineering. At that he had failed dismally, but he had managed to bring home the youngest, dowryless daughter of a minor Indian prince whose fortune had not survived India’s independence.
    Nor had the couple’s return to England been a success. What remained of the family had been horrified by the foreign bride who gave herself airs . His father had been found work managing a box factory, his parents and their newborn son installed in a two-up, two-down Victorian semidetached, and Harry suspected that shortly thereafter marital relations cooled to an arctic level that had precluded more children. He could certainly not remember any sign of affection between his parents, both of whom must have felt royally cheated by fate.
    Then, when he was five, Harry’s parents had performed the most dramatic feat of their lives by orphaning him spectacularly, having drunk to excess and crashed their car into a Dorset hedge. Spending the remainder of his formative years passed among aunts and his English grandmother, Harry buried Hari as thoroughly as he could; it was his skill in protective coloration as well as his slightly exotic good looks that had got him into a London art school.
    Those had been the days, he thought with a nostalgic sigh as hewiped the last dabs of white from his chin. In the early seventies, heady with his first flush of success, he’d hobnobbed with rock stars in Chelsea clubs, drunk too much, slept with anyone who took his fancy, and gradually discovered that his looks concealed a talent that was facile at best.
    And now here he was, examining the pouches under his eyes, cultivating a taste for gin he couldn’t afford, and contemplating with great reluctance his return to his once-trendy flat in Fitzrovia.
    There was one small ray of hope in his dismal outlook, however. There might be a payoff from the recent little financial gamble he had let himself be talked into, against his better judgment. But then, what good had his judgment ever done him, and what had he to lose? Besides, there