Catherine moved into a spare room over the Arts Centre. The attic roof sloped over the single bed. At night she was the only human being in the building, and sometimes it scared her, being there alone. She’d hear sounds from the kitchen in the basement. A lamp creaking in the theatre. Footsteps on the stairs that came to a standstill on the landing. And she’d wonder about these faceless men, these violent creatures of her imagination, who were gathering outside her door.

She did stage management. She served behind the coffee bar. She cooked vegetarian meals. She closed the theatre at night, then sat with a bottle of wine reading Anaïs Nin. She read The Wide Sargasso Sea and exulted in the erotic details of female conspiracy.

Since he’d left, Catherine had been followed by terrifying memories of the risks they’d taken by living together.

Her dreams were mainland dreams. Dreams of drowning. While the roar of the engine at sea would produce in the fishermen dreams of rare silence as if their consciousness was struggling to rid itself of the mayhem of straining pistons, on land all of the noise from the sea seemed to travel directly into the sleeper’s inner ear. Catherine’s themes were desertion, betrayal and outrageous sexuality. All of the men she had ever known returned as lesser demons over whom she had complete control.

Wakening was always distressing. To find herself reaching out to Matti Bonner in a scandalous dream. To be tucked away in the spare room beneath the stars and then wake to hear the first of the trendy theatre workers arriving. And sometimes to wake, disorientated, on a settee in a girlfriend’s kitchen where a radio was still playing, a cat she didn’t know sitting disdainfully on a window ledge, another woman’s dress hanging on the back of the door. It seemed an act of treachery that all the things she had collected – her books, her records, her diaries – should end up being stored backstage in view of all the theatre crew.

Some nights she’d find items of her personal belongings used as stage props. Her books sat on a shelf in a one-act play by Seán O’Casey. A woman wore one of her scarves in The Factory Girls.

The status her feminist principles had once given her had begun to wear off. She could still draw cruelly on her politics to taunt those men she worked alongside in the theatre, or in the BBC where some afternoons she’d go to record short plays. She walked past rooms in Broadcasting House that contained news items that would never see the light of day. Her cynicism made her many enemies, but her politics kept vigil over her hurt.

“You’re using feminism,” said a drama producer there, “like those bastards use Royalism. In a few years you’ll be ashamed of all this.”