Helen stepped back and looked at Pansy’s glowing face and tousled hair. She was wearing a very short flared skirt and layers of bright woollens, so that she looked like an ice-skater still flushed from frosty air and exercise. It was impossible not to respond to her. Helen had thought of asking, Why should we need to be friends? but instead she said very quietly, ‘Of course.’ She stifled the impulse to ask about Oliver, anything, just to know what he was doing and perhaps whether he ever mentioned her.

Pansy hugged her again and went away humming.

In the end, she asked Chloe. ‘Have you seen him?’

Chloe frowned, concerned at Helen’s hopeless eagerness.

‘Them,’ she corrected her. ‘Don’t think about him any more, Helen. They’re always together.’

Pansy and Oliver.

Helen’s grey eyes didn’t flicker. ‘I’m not. Not in that way, anyway. But I want to see him so that I can thank him for what he did. The money. To let him know that I know, and how much it matters. But I don’t want it to be a big performance. I just need to meet him somewhere, casually.’

Chloe thought for a moment.

‘Look, why don’t you come on Sunday? There’s a preproduction lunch party for the As You Like It people at Stephen Spurring’s. You’ll be able to see Oliver, and there will be hordes of other people as well, so it’ll seem quite natural. Do come. I need some support too.’

Chloe had agreed to help backstage with Tom’s production. At first it had seemed an easy way to see more of Stephen, and then she found herself enjoying the work for its own sake. She ran about willingly as the director’s dogsbody and proved herself invaluable at handling all the tedious little tasks that no-one else wanted to take on. Part of her reward was to be caught up in the enthusiasm that Tom generated around him, the rest the chance to be near Stephen and to slip off afterwards with him for a drink, or even for a snatched hour in his rooms.

‘Please come,’ she urged Helen again, and at last Helen nodded. It would not be the first party she had been to at the hospitable Spurrings’, nor the first time she had seen one of Stephen’s girls covertly appraising his wife and home. The thought of Chloe in the role disturbed her, but she put it out of her head as far as she could. Loyally, she told herself that Chloe wouldn’t do anything damaging or dangerous.

On Sunday morning Chloe and Helen drove away from Follies together in Chloe’s smart little Renault.