Chapter 7: The Draft Under the Door

Dorian Frobisher had a laptop, a pot of tea, a lamp that smelled of hot dust, and a ring binder open at the front.

It was late, and the guesthouse room was small and cold.

He wrote at a table by the window with his jumper pulled down over his hands.

He had never written a review before, and he knew exactly what the first line should be.

He typed: Kit Waincroft is magnificent.

He read it back.

It sat on the screen, round and warm and meaningless.

For ten years people had told him he was magnificent.

Directors said it, and costume ladies, and strangers at the stage door.

He had learned to say thank you and to feel nothing, because none of it ever stayed.

He deleted the line and started again.

Draft one ran to four hundred words.

It said that Kit's brother was dazzling, devastating, a revelation, and that the series was lucky to have him.

When Dorian reached the end he felt he had posted a handful of confetti through someone's letterbox.

He deleted all of it.

Draft two he wrote with cold fury.

He said Kit overused his eyebrows, which were thin and did very little.

He said Kit's vowels were dreadful, which they were not, and that Kit walked like a person late for a bus.

He read it through.

He could hear the reply before it came.

Kit would not storm in about the cruelty.

Kit would storm in about the eyebrows, which were perfectly adequate.

The walk was not a bus walk but a corridor walk, and Kit would say so.

The vowels were from Stockport and were fine, and Kit would say that too.

He deleted that, too.

He sat back and looked at the binder.

It lay open at a gold tab.

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