‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s my first time back.’ A group of girls, folders clutched to their bosoms, hurried past outside the Headmaster’s window.
‘You’ll see a fair bit of change,’ he said. One of the changes, of course, was him – younger than me and with an active and fairly compelling sense of having his own agenda. Full co-education in the sixth form was a part of it, which no one but a sexist or a sexual nostalgist could object to. To be back at school twenty-six years after leaving was to plunge into more nostalgia than most well-adjusted adults would admit to, while seeing the scene of my past with a disbelief close to mockery. It was wonderfully disorienting. ‘It’s good of you to say you’ll give a talk.’
‘Oh, not at all,’ I said.
‘I’ve put it down simply as Acting as a Career. There’s been a fair bit of interest.’ I wasn’t sure the Headmaster had ever seen me act. Or that I’d made a career of it. Struggling to Make a Career Out of Acting might have been nearer the mark. ‘The talks are all between four and six, then the BOBs meet for drinks and then supper in Hall after the students have had theirs.’
‘I suppose you have BOGs now, too,’ I said.
‘Indeed we do,’ he said, ‘though not of course at this reunion.’
‘We’re the Sixties leavers.’
‘Not a very high response rate, I’m afraid, among your contemporaries, but I think you’ll see some old friends.’
‘That’s the Sixties for you,’ I said.
As I left his study – new secretary, new decor, fire doors breaking up the once dreaded hallway – I saw Kim Wynans coming towards me, and though he was almost bald and had grown a moustache we were both for a moment offenders on the HM’s list: he seemed to look at me for signs of what to expect, and this was part of the comedy of our meeting, as well as the great change in his appearance. ‘Well, you haven’t changed a bit,’ he said, ‘and I don’t suppose you ever will.’ We agreed we would catch up over drinks – and even drinks had an atmosphere of illegality. I wasn’t sure I could tell him I thought he’d changed for the better – there was something weedy about Wynans as a boy, blond and slight, bullied for being queer, and joining in timidly when I was bullied for other reasons. I left the building, and suddenly shy again, avoided the other BOBs and walked off over the lawns to the Balustrade.
I was caught off-guard by the park – the gang-mower moving briskly over the outfield in a low haze of cut grass, while its smaller cousin puttered intently down the length of the pitch, turned, and came back again. Widely spaced posts marked the ring of the boundary; beyond them rose the dark arboretum-like wall of the Bampton woods. The whole scene was casually graceful, the mowers plying capably up and down in the sunshine just as they had thirty years ago. Anticipation seemed to tighten and shimmer in the rising and receding thrum of their motors – close by, you would have had to raise your voice, but from the Balustrade two hundred yards away you heard a kind of music, the beautiful integrated drone of English competence, and habit.
‘Winny, is that you?’
I glanced sideways, half-prepared to forgive – it was Fascist Harris, with his mocking look just a little abashed by our transformation into middle-aged men. He was fat, fashionless, red-faced, with a gratifying air of having gone wrong, perhaps without knowing it himself, but something bothered him. He smiled narrowly as he came up, didn’t shake my hand but touched my shoulder, and nodded as he gazed at me. The old hatred was there, it was our element, but I saw him enjoying his thin pretence that he’d moved on. ‘We saw you on the telly,’ he said, ‘you were really rather good, Winny.’
‘What did you see me in?’ I said.
‘A crime thing, wasn’t it? You played some inscrutable Oriental, as usual’ – and seeing my reaction, ‘actually you were the best thing in it. I said to Claire, “I know that chappie! We were at school together.” Of course, she didn’t believe me at first.’
‘And what are you doing these days, Fash?’
‘Ha!’ He flinched, then shrugged. ‘Oh, the law, old chap, yup.’
‘And what does Claire do?’
‘She’s a JP, as a matter of fact. I’m a barrister, she’s a JP, you don’t want to mess with us.’
‘Any children?’
‘Three girls, yes. And are you . . .?’ – he shook his head in pretended innocence. I had every reason to be frank with him, but I felt I heard already the things he would say to Claire about me and the straight-faced innuendo he would traffic in tonight, and I said simply but conclusively,
‘No children, no.’
I went along the Top Corridor with a silly feeling of not wanting to be caught, waited for a moment by the warm frosted glass of Mr Hudson’s door, other voices busy inside, and somewhere ahead of me a louder voice, Giles, yes, speaking in a halting but businesslike tone, I supposed to a group of pupils – his talk was on ‘Making Our Own Way: Britain and the EU’. ‘Start again,’ he said, and then more decisively, ‘I advise you to approach the Prime Minister’s office directly, and make clear the urgency of the September, is it? The October deadline—’ Now I was outside the half-open door of Dorm 3, which he must have commandeered for his pep-talk, with his exciting knack for improvisation . . . sunlight on brown lino, white pillow of a tightly made bed under a red rug and for a long dissolving second lovely Barker naked in it until Giles said, ‘Kathy, look up last Monday’s minutes would you and check the date, um . . .’ The floorboard squeaked in memory as I put my head round the door, and there was Giles, perched on a bed, papers spread out beside him, and a small black device held close to his chin like an electric razor. ‘Hullo, Dave,’ he said, ‘exploring?’
‘I thought you were giving your talk, for a moment,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to miss it.’
‘Ha! No, I’m giving my talk in the Library at half-past five.’
‘Damn,’ I said, ‘that’s when I’m giving mine, in the Chapel.’
He stared at me – it was the first time I’d seen him in glasses, and he seemed conscious of them too. ‘I just needed a quiet spot to catch up with departmental business,’ and he gave me the firm little smile which told me I should let him get on with it.
‘That was Andrew Sparks’s bed,’ I said.
He was blank. ‘What?’
‘You slept over by the window. Sparks had the bed you’re sitting on.’
He tutted, turned back to his papers. ‘Your memory, Dave . . .’, and I wondered if his touch of colour implied that he remembered making Sparks strip naked and wank off in front of him, and was worried that I might, in my needling needless way, bring it up. Do married men, fathers, Secretaries of State, remember such things, or are they buried for ever, unreachably? – I’ve never known.
‘And I had that bed in the corner,’ I said, ‘next to Gary Stapleford.’
In the centre of the dormitory was the Slab, two tall chests of drawers back to back, just as they always were. I had a blurred image of scenes enacted on top of the Slab, but again I kept them to myself. Besides, the mood was so changed, the new curtains and lockable bedside cupboards introduced a clean hospital note to the night-time menagerie of thirty years earlier.
I ran into Kim again about five minutes later – we seemed cosy at once, quite unlike our relations when we were boys: it was forgiveness, immediate and mutual, and it bonded us against others we weren’t so ready to forgive. I said, ‘I’ve just found Hadlow in Dorm 3 dictating letters to his secretary on a tape-machine.’ We looked at each other and giggled.
‘Isn’t everyone doing what they wish they’d done all those years ago?’
‘He must have wanted people to hear him,’ I said.
‘Very good of him to be here at all when he’s so busy,’ Kim said. It was charming how little we needed to explain – in our different ways we’d known Giles as a teenager, and now shared unshakable doubts about him as a forty-three-year-old. ‘You were the Hadlow Exhibitioner, weren’t you, I remember. I don’t think Hadlow himself was very pleased about that.’
‘I suppose he was annoyed he didn’t get it himself.’
‘Giving it to a bloody – well, I won’t tell you what he said.’
‘Oh god . . . Anyway,’ I said, ‘what’s your thing that you’re doing?’
I thought he coloured too, very slightly. ‘I haven’t done it yet, perhaps I never will. I don’t know . . .’ with a smile, a flicker of the eyebrows, then he seemed to close again.
When we gathered for drinks before dinner, all of us in black tie now, a number of masters, as well as two mistresses, joined us. ‘Yes, we’ll be rather a shock to you!’ said one of the women, the new Head of Maths.
‘A very happy, and very timely, shock, if I may say so,’ I declared, unexpectedly Jeeves – I nearly added, ‘madam’. I saw that to her we were historic, remote, a maze of stories she was barely going to grasp before we all went home again; it made the one or two prominent careers, like Giles’s, stand out reassuringly. Giles, heavier now, clearly felt he was the most important BOB present, though naturally the other BOBs had a range of feelings on the question. The Tories among us were excited, others humorously intrigued by his presence; in some the spirit of reunion ran up against a loathing that had only intensified since schooldays. The Headmaster was above the fray, but I liked his line: ‘I’ve been looking you up,’ he said: ‘you were never Head Boy.’ ‘No, no,’ said Giles, with a shake of the head, as if he’d already had much more important positions in mind. We milled around there, in the Library, guessing and concealing our shock at who some of the others were. There was an instinct to use nicknames, slight struggle in fact for forenames, and a tone of pretended friendliness in using them that half the time turned out to be quite genuine. We felt open and connected, as people sometimes do at funerals.
‘And whom have we lost?’ said Peter Leatherby. I looked round as if for late arrivals, or counting the squad back after Field Day long ago. ‘There was Tim Franklin, of course, from your year, very sad business.’ ‘Cancer,’ someone said. ‘Only thirty-five, I liked Tim . . .’ ‘Indeed . . .’ said Leatherby, ‘how could one not.’ ‘And Pringle, wasn’t there . . .’ ‘Not Derek?’ ‘No, Piers, his younger brother, you remember.’ ‘I didn’t know him.’ ‘Climbing accident, in Nepal I think it was.’ ‘Oh, really . . . god . . . how awful . . .’
There was a darker tide that had risen through the years since we’d last been together, too dark, it seemed, to be easily mentioned. But someone said, ‘Andrew Cousins, of course,’ with a little wince and indrawn breath.
‘Kissing Cousins,’ said Giles, ‘what on earth happened to him?’
‘Well,’ said Leatherby, but looking at me, ‘it was, I’m afraid it was AIDS, wasn’t it, yes.’
‘He always was—’ said Giles, then thought better of it.
‘What did he do?’ said Charlie Boxwell.
‘He was a male model, wasn’t he?’ Kim said.
‘For a while, I think,’ I said. ‘Then he trained as a dental surgeon.’
‘Oh, did he, yes . . gosh . . .’ and a brief silence fell. Did anyone else here dare to remember how Charlie had fancied Andrew, been really madly in love with him, in the autumn of ’65? Perhaps, under other conditions, someone might have teased him about it.
‘I remember you giving him the slipper, David,’ said Kim, and I had the split-second shock of remembering this was Harris’s name too.
‘Oh, Christ, did I really?’ said Harris, with a flinching look, at his own beastliness, and also, remotely and horribly, as if he might have caught something.
‘You were quite keen on discipline, weren’t you,’ said Kim.
‘We all remember your great speech,’ I said, ‘I have the power – you don’t.’ I felt he could be teased in public, and he smiled very decently.
‘In what way, Winny,’ he said, ‘was I wrong?’
Soon the conversation turned to wives and children, a dull part of the reason I’d never come back before: an odd craven worry, a gay thing really. I said, ‘I’ve been single for a while now, actually,’ as if it was a bracing but rewarding choice. ‘Well, for an actor,’ Charlie said, ‘it must be so much easier, you know, touring a lot, and so on,’ and making excuses for me. Of course I was expecting all the time that someone would say what they’d seen me in, and how good I was, but so far it was only Fascist Harris who had done so. As Charlie was talking my eye found my name on the Honours Board, in slanting gilt capitals, with a quarter of a century of subsequent scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge pushing it further and further back into the past.
At dinner I was seated next to a young black man I’d noticed at the drinks: we shook hands, Brian Mitchell, he taught English – small and serious, with wire-framed glasses and a light Yorkshire accent. I tried to picture having a master like him here in my day, a destabilizing intervention, not quite imaginable now in 1960s terms.
‘I hear you were a Hadlow Exhibitioner,’ he said, peering narrowly at the seafood starter, prawns and bits of something else, a bizarrely fancy presence in a school dining hall.
‘Yes, I was,’ I said, ‘in 1961. They’re still going, I suppose?’
‘Oh, very much so. It’s the fiftieth anniversary next year – we’re hoping as many old Exhibitioners as possible will come back for a reunion.’
‘Well, if I’m free,’ I said, feeling one reunion was probably enough for me.
‘Of course, for an actor it must be hard to say.’
‘Our evenings are rarely our own,’ I said, in a tragic voice, with a sly little smile at him.
‘No, quite,’ he said. No wedding ring, but no covert collusion either, in his voice or glance. ‘Can I ask if you’re about to be in anything?’
I answered a slightly different question. ‘Actually, I’ve just finished shooting a film about the Burma campaign, called Wingate’s War.’
‘Oh, yes?’ he said, a little hesitant – I guessed he was twenty-five, the War in Burma the sort of historical blur it had been to me in my years at Bampton. ‘I’ve never been to Burma.’
‘Well, who has?’ I said. ‘We filmed it in the Philippines.’
‘Oh, really! You mean you’ve never been yourself?’
‘Oh, I expect I will one day,’ I said.
To many white English people this was a barely explicable omission, a great symptomatic avoidance, but Brian Mitchell seemed to understand. ‘Well, I’ve never been to Jamaica,’ he said, with a quick shake of the head. ‘Do you often get a chance to play a Burmese character, though, I wonder?’
‘It was the very first time – it was quite refreshing.’
‘Interesting. So your . . . father is Burmese, I assume?’
‘Was, yes.’ I looked round the hall, all the black-tied forty-somethings at the three long tables they had sat at as boys. One or two of them might still recall elements of stories I had told about my father, and I wondered if just for consistency I should come out with one of them now, the fighter pilot, or perhaps the assassination. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘for all I know he may still be alive. I’ve never met him.’
Brian glanced at me. ‘Oh, I see . . .’
‘It’s all very obscure,’ and I explained a little more about it, since he seemed interested, and in this setting it took on a subtly different interest for me too.
‘I don’t know if you’d ever be willing to come and talk to the Race Relations seminar I run with the Middle Sixth.’
‘Race Relations seminar,’ I said, blinking at the thought. ‘I don’t know, all these things are very personal.’
‘Well, see how you feel. I hear your talk this afternoon went extremely well.’
‘Oh! That’s nice to hear. It wasn’t really a talk, I got them to do an audition.’
‘Enobarbus.’
‘Yes, and “Give me my robe, put on my crown” for the girls.’
‘The kids were very excited – they watched your Midsummer Night’s Dream in General Studies last week.’
‘Oh, they didn’t say.’
‘A bit star-struck, I expect.’
It wasn’t false modesty that made me look down and murmur, ‘Well . . . I don’t know.’
‘Anyone stand out, would you say?’
‘In the end I gave them all the part . . .’
‘I wonder what you made of Georgia, tall, nice-looking girl, blonde hair . . .’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ I said.
‘She’s a very bright kid.’ I heard then in a second his way of being on the kids’ level – sharing their ambitions, not hearing a bad word about them, while being also of course a clever young professional, and no doubt a good teacher.
‘No, she was good,’ I said. And I felt there were other things to say, very personal too, about the multiple sensations stirred up in me by working with these boys and girls in the very chapel where at their age I’d knelt with a beating heart to take Holy Communion, a phase of devotion I had almost completely forgotten; but I wasn’t going to say them to Brian. The truth was I was frightened of children, just a little, and I felt they didn’t take to me. I hadn’t quite reckoned how my standing, as an old boy of the school, made me a fine example to them of what could be achieved. They hadn’t known me as a child themselves.
On the other side I had Keith Bagshaw, who had come in late, hair thick and wild, improvised black tie, with brown shoes. ‘David Win! Hello!’ he said, when I turned to him. He had the inattentive warmth of a nice but almost entirely self-absorbed person. ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’
‘Oh . . .!’ – I looked at him. ‘What are you up to now, Keith?’ I said.
‘I was just telling Charlie Boxwell here . . . I’ve got this organic farm in Wales. Part dairy, mainly arable. We burn the cow-dung to heat the house.’
‘Enterprising.’
‘We aim to be completely self-sufficient by the start of ’94. A lot of people are coming round to it, of course. It’s the way forward!’ And he smiled pleasantly, waiting for another question.
‘But you’re not writing any more?’ I said. In the years after university he’d done a series of unrelated things, all promptly reported in the BOBs’ newsletter: published a sci-fi novel, gone to live in Indonesia for two years, taken a law degree in Edinburgh, then opened a vegan restaurant in Lewes. It seemed the need to do something overrode any long-term idea of what.
‘I’d like to write another book, I’m not sure, probably something quite different . . . you know’ – even here the desire to be busy seemed the main thing. He smiled at me, head on one side, with a hint of pity. ‘And what have you been up to, David,’ he said, ‘this past quarter-century?’ I had to laugh, in humility, of course, but also at him.
It was muggy when we came out onto the lawn and drifted towards the Prefects’ Path and the Balustrade. Night had fallen, and the wingtips of a plane coming in to Brize Norton were pulsing and then hidden in the pinky-grey gloom. Beyond the Balustrade the reach of light from the large sash windows gave a ghostly presence, like a calm sea at night, to the near expanse of the cricket field beyond. Taller trees in the park showed as dim silhouettes against the sky, the wellingtonia high above the rest. The fireworks were going to be set off by the Temple, and there was a random dance of torch-beams against steps and pillars as a young master and two of the prefects made final checks. The boys and girls had massed on the lawn, in a murmuring army. Kim Wynans was leaning beside me on the stone coping. ‘We never had all this in our day,’ he said. ‘No, we didn’t,’ I said, as the first earth-bound fireworks, two Roman candles and a Catherine wheel that stuck before it started to fizz round, announced the start of the display.
Then a pair of rockets, a fraction out of synch, shot upwards into the murk. Nothing happened for a bit, till high above two gold chrysanthemums of light bloomed dazzlingly and seemed for the space of an indrawn breath to die, then flared and scattered in a dozen frazzled comets traced on darkness, leaving a spilling column of pink smoke as a deep boom, with a certain grandeur of delay, reached us and re-echoed from the house beyond. All this in three seconds, perhaps, but a gap in time opened at the wonder of the thing. Rattled birds flew up out of the trees. Kim’s arm was round my shoulders, and I found myself in a mixed-up mood of readiness and near-indifference. ‘So good to see you again, David,’ he said, pulling me closer for a second, and I felt his moustache as much as his lips pressed lightly on my cheek. I smiled pleasantly, at the fireworks and at him, and other figures, the Headmaster, passing in front of us, staggering as he gazed upwards and then blinking round to share the enjoyment with us.
‘I have to ask you,’ Kim murmured.
‘Oh, yes . . .?’ I said.
‘If . . .’ – another rocket went up, a strangely whirly one. ‘Well, I can still see you,’ he said, ‘in the showers – one day after cricket . . .’ I thought back lazily but I couldn’t remember Kim naked at all. It’s true I’d been famous in the changing room, for obvious reasons, which sat oddly, half praise, half slanted blame, with all the other things that were thought and said about me. Kim’s words seemed more a confession than a question – though the question I suppose concerned what was happening next. ‘Then I saw you as Edgar,’ he said, ‘you know . . . It sort of brought it all back,’ and he giggled; I think he was drunker than I was.
‘That was fifteen years ago,’ I said, ‘no, it was more than that. I didn’t know you’d been in.’
‘It was in Exeter, with my aunt. I’m not sure she’d seen a naked man before.’
‘And how did she find the experience?’
‘Wow . . .!’ – the great hushed unison of the children as one very spectacular rocket towered and tumbled high above two lesser ones.
‘All she said was, “Why did he have to be Siamese?”’
It wasn’t at all unpleasant having Kim hit on me, but I felt the whole thing unravelling. And where would we have gone, after all, for the long-deferred fulfilment of his fantasy? I smiled at Keith Bagshaw who was drifting past, ‘Marvellous!’ he said. ‘I know!’ I said, and started slowly after him, eyes upward, but Kim stuck with me a bit longer.
‘Where are you staying tonight?’ he said.
‘Oh, I’m going back to my mother’s,’ I said.
‘Ah, of course – you’re local.’ Two big simple mortars went off, very loud, not exactly enjoyable. ‘Yes, lucky you. I’m staying at the Crown.’
‘Oh, good, yes.’
‘Looks pretty ropey, but there’s nowhere else much round here.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said, and patted him on the shoulder, thinking it cleverer not to say goodbye. I felt I’d got all I was going to get out of this party, and now I must revisit that trapped column of humid and unhappy air, the pupils’ phone booth, and call a taxi to take me home.
‘How was it?’ said Mum, when the cab had left me back in the forgotten adolescent silence of the Close and I’d let myself in, checked myself, incongruous in bow tie, in the hall mirror, as if with something to conceal . . .
‘I’m not sure why I bothered,’ I said – a lifelong habit of disparagement, a way of not telling her things.
‘Was the famous MP there?’
‘He was, and in his own eyes very famous indeed. Prime Minister in waiting.’
‘He didn’t say that.’
‘No, he said someone else had said it.’
‘Well . . .’ Mum said. She saw what was awful about Giles, but loyalty and obligation were strong in her too. We went into the kitchen and she made some cocoa, while I pinched one of Esme’s Alka Seltzers. It dropped swaying and fizzing and twisting in the glass, and I knocked it back with a shudder.
‘How is she?’ I said.
‘OK,’ Mum said quietly, ‘she’s gone down,’ as if she were a difficult baby.
‘I thought she seemed a lot better this afternoon.’
‘Oh, yes, well, she is getting over it,’ Mum said. ‘And she’s been so looking forward to seeing you.’
I was a bit drunk, and I put my arms round her and said, ‘She’ll be all right, Mum,’ with a stare over her head at the future in which I was wrong, and she wasn’t.
We sat in the sitting room, in our eternal places, and the large emptiness of Esme’s chair made the case for that other scenario, when a much bigger stroke, perhaps, would finish her off. Something perilous had entered the house, and their lives together.
I said, ‘I had a long chat with a man called Tony Bales.’
‘Yes, I remember his name.’
‘You’re amazing. He was the year below me. Followed me as editor of The Hive. He makes arts documentaries now. He said he’d like to make a film about me – well, about East Asian actors, but with a section about me in it. You know, beyond M. Butterfly . . .’
‘Oh, good,’ she said, in her practical way, and looked down as she sipped her cocoa. ‘I just think of you as an actor, of course.’
‘I know you do, Mum,’ I said, and took it as a compliment, an intimacy, and of course an evasion.
‘How did your talk to the boys go?’
‘Well, the boys were mainly girls, in fact.’
‘Oh, yes, of course!’
‘There were three boys, and six girls. Most of the kids had signed up to hear Giles laying into the Common Market.’
‘Is he still going on about that?’
‘I have the feeling he’s hardly got started – “a diet of Brussels” and so on. You know Giles’s sense of humour.’
‘I don’t really.’
‘He hasn’t got one. If he did he’d be groaning at the terrible joke of himself.’ Mum snuffled at this. ‘No, I got my lot to do an audition – Enobarbus or the death of Cleopatra – five minutes to prepare.’
‘Sounds pretty difficult.’
‘It was, wasn’t it. One of them, a Chinese girl funnily enough, was rather brilliant.’
‘Oh, good . . .’
‘Anyway, it was better than depressing them with stories about agents and not getting work.’
‘I should think the school are jolly proud of you,’ she said, almost indignantly.
I smiled at her, her face gaunt under the sewing light. ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘But I don’t think I’ll be going back.’
‘Am I slurring, a tiny bit? I think I am,’ Esme said the next morning, back in her chair, Zimmer frame parked beside her
‘Say something else,’ I said, as though I hadn’t noticed. ‘A tiny bit,’ I said, ‘sometimes. Nothing to worry about.’
‘What will people think!’ she said, and laughed in a way I’d never heard before, a sort of heartless chuckle. This was something Mum had told me about, and was hoping would die away before it stuck. Esme appeared to be just the same, aside from the fading bruise to her left cheek, where she’d collided with the dining table when she fell. She was large, robust, good-looking, looked fifty-five rather than seventy – she was the old inexhaustible Esme, and yet she was puffed and puzzled by the effort of crossing the room, and she laughed like someone we didn’t know at all.
I brought her a glass of water. ‘The doctor says you have to drink a lot more of this, Esme.’
She gave it an unrecognizing glance. ‘Fancy me having a stroke, love, eh! Just a small one, though,’ she insisted, as if I were pressing a real drink on her. ‘Could have been much, much worse, you know.’ She picked up the glass and drank it placidly. ‘Poor old Av, I scared her half to death’ – words I felt more aptly described where she’d just come back from herself.
‘I’m sorry I have to go straight off to London,’ I said. ‘I’ve got rehearsals this afternoon.’
‘Don’t worry about me, Dave. Your mother’s being an angel, and Jilly Wilson comes in every day now, for an hour or two.’ She reached out to take my hand, and gazed up at me quite tenderly. ‘It’s just a god-awful fuck-up, love, let’s face it,’ she said, and gave her deep mechanical chuckle.