‘I say, that was terrific,’ he says warmly. ‘Very funny indeed.’

‘Thank you.’ The old terrible shyness clamps around her throat. She is still wearing the costume with the jacket and tights and she turns the saucy cap she has worn on stage between her hands, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on it. ‘Mr Tannar, the headmaster of the Royal School, wrote the script, so it’s nothing to do with me really.’

‘I don’t agree. A script isn’t any good without good actors. I enjoyed it. The laundry scene was very funny. Especially with the iron burning through all those “unmentionables”.’

His eyes drop to her legs. Elizabeth orders herself not to fidget but she feels ridiculously exposed and her smile is stiff.

‘Yes, Margaret and Cyril are very good.’

What has happened to the sparkle she felt on stage, she wonders miserably. She had been so determined to show him that she was no longer the gauche fifteen-year-old he had met before, but look at her: her tongue feels thick and unwieldy, any hope of witty repartee shrivelling in her throat. It was hopeless.

‘I thought you were very good, too,’ says Philip, but Elizabeth can’t help wondering if he would think she was good if she weren’t the King’s eldest daughter.

‘That’s kind of you,’ she says with a stiff smile, ‘but it’s Margaret who is the performer.’

‘You’re determined to turn aside any compliments, aren’t you?’ he says. He’s not exactly smiling but when Elizabeth risks a glance at him, she sees that the crease in his cheek has deepened. The sight sets warmth trembling inside her. She can feel it spreading outwards, blotching her throat and staining her cheeks beneath the greasepaint.

‘I don’t like being complimented when I don’t deserve it.’

Philip seems amused rather than daunted by her priggish voice. ‘What do you deserve to be complimented for?’ he asks, as if he’s really interested.

Being dutiful, that’s what her parents would say.

‘I have a good appetite,’ she says and remarkably, he laughs.

‘We have something in common then. I still think of the tea on the royal yacht when you came to the Royal Naval College in ’39. I had two banana splits.’

‘And platefuls of shrimps, if I remember right,’ says Elizabeth, encouraged by his laugh. ‘I’m surprised you weren’t sick.’

Philip grins at her. ‘It would have been worth it.’

His smile burns behind her eyelids and she looks away.

‘It’s hard to imagine a banana split now,’ she says after a moment. ‘I haven’t seen a banana since the start of the war.’

‘I’ve got friends who say that they dream of fresh fruit now.’

‘For me it’s soap,’ Elizabeth says and he raises his brows.

‘Soap?’

‘Before the war, when the soap got thin, we’d have a new bar to unwrap. It always smelt lovely, of roses or lavender. But now we have to use it down to the last tiny sliver, when it’s all cracked and grimy, and then it gets put together with other slivers so we can keep on using it. It makes us feel that we’re doing our bit, though it’s little enough compared with what most people have to do. So I always feel guilty about longing for a new bar all to myself. It’s a dream for when the war is over!’