He sat in the house like a trapped animal. Nervousness distorted his features. His chin began to twitch. Before he stepped out in the mornings he stood a while behind a slit in the closed curtains searching the garden and the road with his eyes. A knock on the door once night fell was never answered.

It was during this period of isolation that Catherine made her first appearance on stage. She joined the chorus in the school production of Annie Get Your Gun and was soon drafted into the lead. Sara played her leading man. The teachers were amazed at how seriously the Adams girls took the business of learning their lines. From the first day they’d attended the auditions and read out the parts chosen for them, the script had never left their hands. They went into swoons of exaggerated pathos. Each rivalled the other’s cowboy drawl. Maisie made the small red tight-fitting dress that Catherine would wear for the finale from bed-sheets soaked in raspberry dye. She corrected the bodice a number of times to suit her daughter’s taste. For Sara an old school blouse was transformed with gold-stitch embroidery into a Western dandy’s shirt. A cowboy hat was bought in Woolworth’s. In the world of make believe the women suddenly found themselves at home. The living room, with its bulletproof glass and bars, was turned into a Wild West wardrobe.

Annie Oakley’s hillbilly costume was made from bald velvet dyed brown. Old riding boots were found that went back to Jonathan’s father’s time and into them he inserted cardboard insoles cut from ammunition boxes. The toes he stuffed with newspaper. One night Jonathan Adams came home to find his daughter, in leather boots to her thighs, standing in front of the mirror practising her draw with a silver six-gun he had carved in the long afternoons at the station.

“This is too much,” he told Maisie.

“They want you to come,” she replied, “on opening night.”

“I can’t.”

“They will be very disappointed.”

“It’s too risky,” he said. “We’ll see.”

Catherine started gargling. She practised voice exercises. She changed her walk. She stopped eating chocolate when she heard it prevented proper delivery. She began dreaming unashamedly of fame. She perfected a male stance by opening her knees wide as men do. She hunched her shoulders and took large comical strides. Then, when she donned the dress, she made two cute false breasts from rolls of tissue. She perfected a small maidenly walk for her forthcoming wedding to Frank Butler, her sister. Before the mirror in the drawing room she tried out her various roles as man and woman, and then, with her knees far apart, sang:

You can’t get a man,

Oh, you can’t get a man . . .