The two young men had first met when they were playing in a repertory company some months ago. It had been Harry’s first job, while Edward, who had the excellent habit of taking any job that would give him experience and increase his range in acting, had had many, but they got on very well together from the word Go, because both were romantic and just a little bit silly under their veneer of men of the world, and they had the same beery and lowbrow sense of humour.

Both were solemn and almost religious on the subject of Keeping Fit, and both laughed at themselves for being so. Sophia used to say that they Kept Fit to drink more beer; they used to pant away on horrible exhausting runs and walks, and then undo all the good they had done themselves by falling into a pub and drinking beer until they were quite distended.

When Edward left the ill-paid job in the repertory company to take up his first part in the West End of London, he did not forget Harry. He got on with alarming quickness. A second important part followed the first, and he earned enough money to marry one of Mr Hensatt’s loveliest and most slender Young Ladies, but still he liked to creep round pubs with the amiable Harry, and to laugh at ingenuous beery jokes. He liked Francis too, and Sophia, though he thought she was a bit severe and clever.

She for her part was very grateful to him because of his unfailing kindness to Harry.

She knew well that her own standard of looks and grooming fell dismally below the awful purity and loftiness of Edward and Harry’s standard; and sometimes this depressed her, but she sensibly decided that, however well groomed they were, the girls admired by Edward and Harry could not write poetry. Meanwhile, she got on very well with Edward, who often told her she ought to be more romantic and not so intellectual and cold. He said that if she were more romantic it would be much better for her poetry. He and Harry, warm-hearted and easily beguiled souls that they were, frankly admitted to being very romantic indeed.

It was a nasty jar to Harry to see Aunt Maxine sitting in Pip’s eating egg mayonnaise, with a perfectly frightful and rather fat blonde friend in a silly little red hat. He darted back, but too late.

‘Harry, hi, here, here (it’s my nephew, Harry Garden, been out with Bloody Budgy – that must have gone phut, I suppose) here, where are you off to? Come and lunch with us. Miss Van Veek, my nephew, Harry Garden.’

Harry at once felt so sorry for Miss Van Veek’s peroxide curls and sagging jaw line that he came across to their table immediately, with his delightful smile, and made himself charming to both the ladies.

He had now been long enough on the stage to get over his first foolish and irrational supposition that anyone who was on the stage would sometimes want to talk about anything else but the stage; so he prepared himself to answer, in the minutest detail, all Aunt Maxine’s questions about the personnel, misfortunes, salaries and final collapse of Bloody Budgy’s tour.