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Peregrine ran for it, lickety-split, hell for leather, but Melchior was trapped.
    Now, Melchior had adored his father, worshipped him, even, and took away from the grand catastrophe of his parents’ lives only one little souvenir – the pasteboard crown that Ranulph wore for Lear, the one Estella made. God knows how Melchior smuggled this relic past his aunt.
    It was in his blood, wasn’t it? Every night, during the dour years of rain and porridge, as he lay in his freezing bed under the one plaid rug his aunt permitted him, he’d recite to himself word for word his father’s greatest roles. Macbeth. Hamlet. (Although never Othello, of course.) Aunt Effie’s. Highland clock – you’ve seen it for yourself, the antlered grandfather now resident at 49 Bard Road – struck twelve, then one, then two. He would so move himself with these solitary renditions he would cry himself to sleep. His aunt forbad Melchior point-blank to so much as think of the stage, although she recognised how he had sufficient talent in that direction – that is, rhetoric, etc. – to urge him to give the ministry a go and, when she became insistent, then he took matters into his own hands.
    He wrapped the pasteboard crown up in a change of shirt and underthings, tied all in a handkerchief and said goodbye to Pitlochry for ever. I can see him now, setting out to seek his fortune like Dick Whittington in panto. Miss Effie’s clock sang out five times as he shut the workhouse door behind him. It would have been bitter cold, no stars, still pitch-dark. A cart went past with a load of kale; he got a lift a mile or two. The sun would have been coming up, by then. No friends, no kin except a lost brother half a world away whom he’d never got on with. Mad with pride and ambition and nothing in the world except his dark eyes and gift of gravitas and a toy crown with the gold paint peeling off.
    And so he finally found his way to London, and, in due course, down on his uppers, nay, down on the uppers of his uppers, he arrived at this very house, which was, in those days, a boarding house that catered for theatricals, though not, I should say, theatricals of the well-heeled variety.
    Brixton, before the lights went out over Europe, hub of a wheel of theatres, music halls, Empires, Royalties, what have you. You could tram it all over from Brixton. The streets of tall, narrow houses were stuffed to the brim with stand-up comics; adagio dancers; soubrettes; conjurers; fiddlers; speciality acts with dogs, doves, goats, you name it; dancing dwarves; tenors, sopranos, baritones and basses, both solo artistes and doubled up in any of the permutations of the above as duets, trios etc. And also those who wrung a passion to tatters for a living and therefore considered themselves a cut above.
    In those days, our mother emptied the slops, filled the washstand jugs, raked out the grates, built up the fires, brought up the cans of hot water, scrubbed the back of the occasional gentleman and herself occasionally –
    or perhaps only the one time.
    Chance by name, Chance by nature. We were not planned.
    Melchior slept here. This attic, the cheapest room in the house, cheaper still because he never paid. I picture him in front of a square of mirror, trying on that shabby crown, emoting, listening to the sycamores at the end of the garden thrashing about in the wind and pretending the sound they made was applause. Desperate, ravenous, on the make, tramping round the agents day after day after day, back to the boiled cabbage at Bard Road and the hard, narrow bed. I wonder if he lent his mouth here, his arsehole there, to see if that would do the trick. I suppose my mother must have felt sorry for him. I can imagine her stripping off in the cold room, turning towards the starving boy. How did she do it? Shyly? Nervously? Lewdly?
    Then everything fades to black. I can’t bear to think any further. It hurts too much. You always like to think a bit of love, or at least a