If any more questions need to be asked, I don't think I want to voice them, certainly not to Bebe. My face may be expressing this, since she has found a cue to stand up. 'Well, I expect I've given you a lot to ponder,' she says, 'and you have your work as well. I guess it's time I left you by yourself.'
I won't be. I'll have the entire Internet with me, only for research, of course, though in fact for distraction. I'm reaching for the mouse, to look busy yet unflustered for at least as long as Bebe is in the room, when she rests a hand on my desk. 'You'll excuse me for saying this,' she says, 'but you've made the place look cheap.' She takes her footsteps that no longer sound at all like Natalie's out of the apartment, and as the door shuts, the computer rediscovers the sound of waves. The chatter of ripples is far too reminiscent of giggling. It might almost be a soundtrack for the blurred reflection of my humourlessly grinning face.
SIXTEEN - OMENS
As I see daylight beyond the escalator, eight stairfuls of children trapped between two women sail past me. Either somebody up above is painting faces or the children are involved in some other kind of play. Perhaps it's for Christmas, though I'm uncertain from their appearance what roles they would be taking: possibly the comedy relief. Have they been told not to risk cracking their makeup, or is it so stiff that it's holding them silent? The parade of unnaturally still white faces seems capable of exploding into bedlam, but Mark distracts me. 'At school,' he says, 'they were asking if you were my dad.'
'They won't have met him, then.'
'I haven't either.' His eyes grow eager as he says 'I don't think I have, anyway. I wouldn't mind if he was you.'
The temptation I experience is worse than irrational, but it costs me an effort to say only 'I wouldn't. I wish I were. Careful, Mark.'
The steps ahead of him are flattening before they crawl down the underside of the escalator. As he twists around to grab the rubber banister, I'm not sure if he murmurs 'You can be.' I'm even less sure how to respond, since I've yet to tell his mother about Bebe's revelation. 'I'll try,' I say not quite under my breath.
Outside the station every lamppost on Euston Road is bandaged with a poster. TWO DOZEN STALLS OF COMEDY COLLECTIBLES AND MUSIC-HALL MEMORABILIA. The posters insist that the venue is called the St Pancreas Theatre, but the real thing is visible on the corner of Gray's Inn Road, across the herds of traffic. Decades of exhaust fumes have turned the wide Victorian façade the colour of a storm. The iron sign above the cracked stained-glass awning has shed its vowels, as if they've joined the one it never had. As we wait on an island that's a plantation of traffic signals I see that the box office in the middle of the marble lobby is boarded up. Next to it a man is seated on a folding chair behind a trestle table. Besides a heap of leaflets and an ink-pad with a stamp the table holds a cash-box, but I assume I just need to say 'Simon Lester.'
The man pinches the collar of his black overcoat shut before he raises his increasingly less moonlike face out of its nest of chins. 'Nobody called that here.'
'I know that,' I say and remember to laugh. 'That's to say yes, there is. He's here.'
'This isn't an audition,' he informs me, apparently on Mark's behalf. 'It's a fair.'
'We know that. Lester's my name. I was told you'd let me in.'
'They must've been having fun with you. Everybody pays. Two quid and one for his nob.'
He drops the coins in the box with three separate clanks. I'm ushering Mark towards the auditorium when the man says 'What's your hurry, Mr Lister?'
'It's Lester,' Mark virtually shouts.
'Come here and I'll give you a grin. You too,' he tells me and inks the stamp. 'Now you can roam all you want.'
While the images he prints on our wrists are perfectly circular, they each have a clown's face. Mark admires his as he hurries to the double doors and holds the left one open for me. The theatre stalls have been removed. At least two dozen tables fill the space that's overlooked by concave boxes and shadowed by the circle. I'm advancing to the first stall when Mark springs into the air and claps his hands. As boards reverberate under him he shouts 'Here's Simon Lester, everybody. Simon Lester.'
'That isn't necessary, Mark.'
I suppose he feels provoked by the doorman, but I have the odd notion that he's playing the jester. 'Don't let us bother you,' I tell the stallholders. 'I'm only another punter.'
Mark is gazing at the stage. 'There's comics up there. Can I see?'
'Just stay in the theatre,' I warn him.
The first stallholder is jewelled and shawled enough for a fortuneteller, and anxious to learn if I'm looking for anything special. 'Thackeray Lane,' I say.
'I'm not from round here.' She raises her voice to enquire 'Does anyone know where Thackeray Lane is for this gentleman?'
'He's here.'
'And over here.'
'He may be here as well.'
'Don't worry, nobody's making fun of you,' I assure her and head for the nearest of the people who responded, a large man so heavyeyed he looks as if he's smiling in his sleep. His table is piled with old newspapers, not much less yellow than papyrus inside their cellophane envelopes. 'Can you show me?' I ask him.
He lifts his mottled hairy hands from his thighs to perform a magician's pass above the newspapers. 'Half the fun's in looking,' he says before reverting to his contented torpor.
Each envelope bears a handwritten label that lists the significant contents. Among the names inscribed in dwarfish tipsy capitals on the seventh label in the first pile is T. LANE. I unpick the tape that seals the envelope and slip out the York newspaper. I have to turn most of the brittle musty pages before learning that a reviewer thought Thackeray Lane's act at the Players Theatre was 'a good 'un'. That doesn't seem worth thirty pounds, nor does the information that he left a Nottingham columnist feeling giddy, or even a Chester writer's view that Lane was 'too odd for his own good or anyone else's'. By now I'm halfway through the contents of the table, and the stallholder is peering at me as if I've wakened him for nothing. 'Are you buying or just reading?' he's roused to wonder.
'I was rather hoping for a bit more substance.'
'Better keep looking, then.'
I can't judge whether this is an invitation or a dismissal. I take it for the first, though my eyes have begun to ache from squinting at the cramped unbalanced letters. D. LENO, C. CHAPLIN, S. LAUREL, L. TICH ... As I try to speed up the process, because I feel oppressively watched, I turn up an item labelled simply T. LANE. It's an old Preston Chronicle. 'That's where I came from,' I remark.
'Long way to come to buy a paper.'
I release a polite titter as I unseal the envelope. A desiccated smell that seems old even for the yellowed pages fills my head while I leaf through them in search of the review. There isn't one, and I'm about to say so when the stallholder comments 'He's in there all right. You missed him.'
As I turn the pages in reverse somebody walks backwards at the edge of my vision. I could imagine I'm rewinding the action, an idea so distracting that I almost overlook the item again. It's a news report that occupies an entire column.
MUSIC-HALL PERFORMER BOUND OVER TO KEEP PEACE. PERFORMANCE MUST BE KEPT WITHIN PROPER BOUNDS.
At Preston Crown Court today, the music-hall comedian Thackeray Lane was judged Not Guilty of incitement to riot outside 'The Harlequin Theatre' on the first of January...
According to the report, at the end of his matinee on New Year's Day in 1913 the comedian either led or followed the audience into the street and continued his routine. When a Mrs Talbot began to imitate him and refused to stop 'contorting her face and herself in a variety of comical manners', her husband called the police. Several other witnesses testified that they felt compelled to mimic the comedian and blamed some form of hysteria. The judge ordered Lane to duplicate the act for him to watch, but once the witnesses confirmed that he was doing so the public gallery had to be cleared because of excessive laughter. The charge of incitement to riot became the subject of a legal argument that concluded Lane was technically innocent because he had uttered no verbal or written communication. The judge was reduced to warning that 'the licence of a theatre does not extend beyond its doors' and to binding Lane over to keep the peace for two years. Long before they ended, the comedian was in Hollywood under his new name.