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stars on his cape. She tried to give him the response he needed, for she could see how proud he was of this costume. She gave the requisite cry of fear when he embarked on a spell, and she shrank back and cried out obligingly when Angelica made her entrance as a burly and convincing witch. But she found she could not concentrate; her mind was running ahead to the theatre and the mysterious present from her husband. Tomas, a man of few words, a man who used words with care, would not promise her the best present he could give her, unless he meant what he said.
    ‘You’re tense,’ Maria said to her a little later, in Natasha’s bedroom, as she began her massage. She scooped some of her herbal oils into her palm and began a slow rhythmic massage of Natasha’s back. The room filled with the smell of lavender and rosemary; Maria, a plain woman, had magical hands—but not tonight.
    ‘Feel that—all that tension,’ she said, her hands easing and pressing at the back of Natasha’s neck. ‘Try to relax it or you won’t sing well tonight. What are you worrying about? You’re worrying about something—I can feel it right here.’
    ‘Nothing. Everything. The Conrad, some interview I did, the performance tonight, Tomas, Jonathan, life, why I’ve been left in peace for four months…I don’t know , Maria.’
    ‘You’re lovely.’ Maria said, with a sigh. Her capable magic hands moved gently down Natasha’s spine. ‘You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Just lie still. You’ve been working too hard. Relax. I can get rid of all your problems—you know that.’
    Her therapy, indeed, was usually effective; it was without effect that night; Natasha Lawrence remained tense when the massage was completed. One and a half hours before curtain-up, she was back in her dressing-room, and there waiting for her, as promised—but Tomas Court always kept his promises—was the package her former husband had sent.
    It was contained inside a padded envelope, then wrapped again in thick brown paper, on which, in Tomas’s cursive script, was the name ‘Helen’. She turned it this way and that, then unsealed the wrappings. Inside, as she had expected, was a copy of a novel, and inside the leaves of the book was her surprise—a tiny clipping from a Montana newspaper, dated earlier that week.
    Her hands began to shake; the print blurred before her eyes. She read the story, which concerned the discovery of a body in the Glacier National Park, three times. Indeed, Tomas could have given her no better present than this. Nevertheless, lighting a match and watching the scrap of newsprint flare, she destroyed her present at once. She crumbled the dust in her fingers, then washed her hands and began the process of making up her Estella face.
    By the time her dresser arrived, she was—as always before a performance—quiet and concentrated. Her dresser, an androgynous young man, hired at her behest, who always dressed her for all her theatre work, was adept at making himself invisible. He helped her into the white organdie of her first-scene dress. For this act of the musical, in which Estella was still a child, no wigs were needed, and Natasha Lawrence preferred to arrange her hair herself. The invisible young man quietly withdrew; he returned only when the half was called, as he always did.
    He paused in the doorway, for the alchemy of the past half-hour never ceased to fascinate him. The dressing-room had been occupied by a woman—now a child, a wilful child, occupied it. He looked at the triplicate reflections of this child in the mirrors; the child applied one last pink stroke of colour to her lips; the tannoy crackled, the humidifier puffed.
    ‘They’ve called the half, Ms Lawrence. Can I fetch you anything?’ he asked, as he always did.
    He knew the answer would be a haughty impatient ‘No’, and he knew it would be made in the imperious English voice of Estella. The invisible young man, a romantic about