Palace of Tears

Established identity and circumstances

Steve is twenty-one, from Southwark, the only child of Mavis Percival, and the son of a deceased soldier whom he barely knew. He attended the City of London School for Boys on a scholarship and then studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at St Radegund’s, Cambridge. His academic performance suffered because he devoted much of his final year to writing Event/Horizon (“Tenison Road,” 18 December; “Berlin,” funeral scene).

He is initially unemployed, living in a poor Tenison Road bedsitter and surviving on savings, money from Ginny, and eventually a £500 gift from Mavis. He later becomes Gary’s assistant at the Festival Theatre and an emerging playwright. After Mavis’s death, he inherits the Trinity Church Square flat and a life-insurance benefit intended to clear the mortgage (“Berlin,” 1 April).

Desires, pressures and conflicts

Steve wants to write, to be recognised as a serious artist, and to escape the passivity and self-doubt that he associates with “old Steve.” He also wants love and belonging, but repeatedly allows other people to define the terms of his relationships.

His pressures are unusually numerous:

grief over Ginny’s departure;
rivalry and unresolved attachment involving Angie and Rob;
financial insecurity;
dependence on Grace;
the demand that he become the biological father of Grace’s child;
guilt over sex outside his relationship with Grace;
anxiety about his mother’s concealed professional life;
pressure to perform as a courier in East Berlin;
uncertainty over the status of his poetry and playwriting;
fear of failing Gary, the actors and the Festival Theatre.

His decision to accept Collingwood’s courier assignment is consequential. He does so partly because he feels he is acting as a surrogate for Mavis, not because he is convinced of the operation’s legitimacy (“Berlin,” 10 March). This distinction is important: he is brave enough to proceed, but his motives are mixed with guilt, filial identification and deadline pressure.

Relationships

Grace: Their relationship begins after Grace’s marriage to Peter breaks down and after Ginny leaves Steve for Peter. Grace first presents the relationship as a possible temporary arrangement involving sex, lodging and research assistance. She then explicitly proposes that Steve father her child, while asking him to acknowledge paternity publicly and remain involved socially and legally.

Steve accepts these terms, but the relationship remains unstable. Grace is simultaneously his lover, former teacher, landlord, intellectual mentor, prospective co-parent and, after Mavis’s death, a possible maternal substitute. He feels protected by her but later says he feels “less safe with Grace” than with Ginny. Their relationship ends abruptly after the first run of Palace of Tears. Grace states that she wanted Steve’s seed rather than Steve himself, although this is also a partial explanation shaped by her intelligence work and by her desire to spare him the full truth (“The Festival Theatre,” 25 May).

Ginny: Steve remains emotionally marked by Ginny. She has influenced his art, domestic habits and self-understanding, and he describes her as frightening, beautiful and mentally powerful. Their hotel encounter in London confirms that the relationship is not emotionally dead. Ginny says she is pregnant and asks him to accept that the encounter can occur without harming the baby. Steve knows that Ginny is publicly presenting Peter as the father, while privately Ginny and Peter know Steve is the biological father. The text therefore establishes Steve’s biological paternity in the characters’ private knowledge, not merely as a suspicion.

Angie: Angie is Steve’s first love and former partner. His feelings for her remain active, though she is now committed to Rob. Steve’s attempted invitation to bed is rejected. He recognises that he has no right to treat her as “his” but still experiences jealousy regarding Rob.

Rob: Rob is Steve’s friend, rival and literary champion. Steve envies his publishing success and his relationship with Angie, while also recognising that Rob is generous and hardworking. Rob’s claims that Steve is a “real poet” are supportive but also interpretive; they do not prove the artistic status of Event/Horizon.

Jude: Jude rescues Event/Horizon, sleeps with Steve and then produces a letterpress edition of the poem. Their relationship combines sexual attraction, artistic exchange, leverage and mutual uncertainty. Steve breaks into her room and takes her manuscript, then returns it. He later has sex with her after deciding he does not want the poem back. Jude’s later return to Cambridge and her acquisition of a senior post at Vanguard Books restore an active connection between them.

Mavis: Steve loves his mother but has neglected her. Her death forces him to confront how little he knows about her. Her letter describes him as loving, supportive and capable of becoming a good father, but this is her maternal judgement rather than objective proof. He also learns that her apparent secrecy was professional rather than simply emotional avoidance.

Agency and effects

Steve’s consequential choices include:

accepting Ginny’s relationship despite her warning that it would not last;
destroying and then unsuccessfully attempting to recover Event/Horizon;
inventing “new Steve” as a strategy of assertiveness;
accepting Grace’s proposal to become a co-parent;
choosing Gary’s theatre job over Grace’s research-assistant arrangement;
sleeping with Jude after deciding to end the relationship;
breaking into Jude’s room;
accepting the Berlin courier operation;
leaving the ten-D-mark note for Inge;
writing and revising Palace of Tears;
admitting to Gary that “George Dent” is his pseudonym;
refusing to conceal the nature of his Berlin encounter from Grace;
accepting Grace’s final rejection without becoming physically coercive.

His agency is real but inconsistent. He often acts decisively under pressure, then reinterprets the action as something that happened to him. His repeated claim that women “make” him act risks becoming a self-exculpatory story. At the same time, the narrative shows that Grace, Ginny, Jude, Sheena and others do deliberately manipulate the circumstances around him.

Voice, behaviour and distinguishing features

Steve is intellectually quick but socially uncertain. He is erudite, self-deprecating, prone to elaborate analogies and often comic in his attempts to sound worldly. He thinks through literary and philosophical references, but his references do not always clarify the situation. He is physically attractive without seeing himself as such, and women’s interest in him repeatedly unsettles him.

He has a lively conscience, but conscience does not prevent misconduct. His remorse often comes after the event. “New Steve” is a persona rather than a fully separate identity: it gives him permission to act, but the underlying Steve remains present.

Development

Steve moves from unemployed, passive undergraduate and failed poet towards an active theatrical role. He learns to defend a script, negotiate with Gary, identify casting problems and speak to professional actors. His first play is staged successfully enough to receive applause, several positive notices and BBC interest, although the run is financially disappointing and the BBC adaptation is later stopped.

His development is deliberately incomplete. He does not become a stable adult or an accomplished spy. He becomes more capable of making decisions, but also more aware that decisions can have moral consequences.

Knowledge, concealments and misunderstandings

At the end of the supplied material, Steve knows:

Mavis worked for the British intelligence services;
Sheena was Mavis’s lover and the “S” who wrote the letters;
Sheena was present in Berlin when Mavis was injured;
Mavis’s accident may have been an assassination, though this is not proved;
Müller was the person for whom he carried the documents;
Inge was probably, though not yet certainly to him, a student intermediary;
Grace had worked as an informant for British intelligence and is being reactivated;
Grace has been ordered to cultivate Müller and end her relationship with Steve;
the British services consider Müller’s loyalties equivocal;
his play was allowed to run partly as an operational deception;
the BBC adaptation has been suppressed.

He does not know the whole truth about Inge’s role, the extent of Müller’s duplicity, or the precise institutional responsibility for Mavis’s death.

Position at the end

Steve has been expelled from Grace’s household, left Cambridge socially and professionally unsettled, and is temporarily living with Jon and Tamsin. He owns or is due to inherit the London flat, has money from Mavis’s estate, and has an emerging theatrical reputation. He is sleeping with Becky, but compares her unfavourably with inaccessible Inge. His future as a playwright is open, as is his possible recruitment by the intelligence services. His relationships with Grace, Jude, Ginny, Angie and Becky remain consequential but unresolved.