‘You’re still a virgin, aren’t you?’ It was true: there had been nervous fumblings at drama school, but the whole works had somehow eluded him. Shyness and an overbearing Evangelical mother had played their part in Tim’s lack of experience. When asked about it by Owen he had neither the desire nor the ability to dissemble. Owen threw back his head and laughed. As he did so, Tim noticed that Owen gave a quick sidelong glance at himself in the dressing room mirror. It comforted Tim to think that, while he was being humiliated, he had caught Owen out in a tiny but characteristic moment of vanity. Owen Probert was a Celtic Welshman with curly hair, black and shiny as wet coal, a wiry, compact body, and a voice that sometimes aped the overripe resonances of a Burton, or a Dylan Thomas. The perfect whiteness of his teeth, so triumphantly flashed in the mirror, were accentuated by his tan, which some members of the company wrongly assumed to be fake. Owen spent every daylight hour when he was not rehearsing for the shows ‘attending to the body beautiful’ as he called it, which meant either swimming or lying in the sun learning lines.
