‘Just think, when we are married, we can do that every day. Two or three times, if we like.’ She threw out a wide, eager beam; she was keen to give the impression that she’d enjoyed it as much as he had, because no one liked a moaning Minnie.

‘You funny thing.’ He buttoned up his trousers, adjusted his braces. Then kissed her nose. ‘Come on, we have to get you back before anyone notices you are missing.’ He led her by the elbow.

They met her mother on the stairs; the three of them stood in shock. Distrust and disgust seemed to ooze from Mrs Foster. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. A bloodhound, sniffing the air.

‘Looking at the portraits in the hall.’ The lie slipped out glibly. Vivian felt rather proud of herself, her ability to protect Nathaniel. To conceal. It felt adult.

‘You should be dancing.’

‘I was tired.’

Mrs Foster stared coolly at Nathaniel. He’d dropped Vivian’s elbow. They were apart again. He wouldn’t meet her mother’s gaze. He looked at his feet. Vivian wished he’d stare back. She wished he’d tell Mother to leave them alone; that they were an adult couple now, that they were going to get married, that Vivian would be a bigger society success than her mother and that she didn’t need to breathe down her daughter’s neck all the time. He didn’t say any of this; he said, ‘If you will excuse me, I had better return to my party. We’ve spent far too long looking at the portraits. I think I’m engaged for the last waltz.’

Mrs Foster stepped aside and he dashed off.

‘Who?’ Vivian called after him. She meant with whom was he engaged to dance the twenty-fourth? He couldn’t dance with anyone else. Not after that. ‘No,’ she added, but he didn’t hear her; he was halfway down the stairs. Her mother shot her a look that made it clear she ought not to say another word.

‘Who are you dancing with next?’ she demanded.

‘I am not engaged for any more dances.’ An unheard-of occurrence.

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t agree to any.’

‘You’ve managed the evening very badly, Vivian.’ Mrs Foster tutted and slid her gaze over her daughter.

‘You don’t know,’ Vivian spat back. Mrs Foster gave her the queerest look, as though perhaps she did.

It surprised her how quickly everything collapsed. The urgent expectation, once quenched, seemed to have immediately ceased to exist, and nothing replaced it. She felt irked and rebellious. She felt as though everything inside her had shifted, but not in an emotional sense as she’d expected. Hoped. Simply a physical shift. She felt stretched. She needed her bag; there was a handkerchief in there. Where had she put her bag? She was sticky. Sore.

‘It is time to go home,’ snapped her mother.

As they hailed a carriage, Vivian could hear the strains of the band playing ‘God Save the King’. The evening was over.

4

THE CARRIAGES CAME at eleven and took the audience away, a buoyant, satisfied mass of humanity who had enjoyed the passion and deceit of the evening as it had been confined to the stage. To speak of carriages was a euphemism; nowadays the tinkle of the hansom was often drowned out by an electric brougham or the engine of a car, but the theatre respected tradition. At the top of the programme ladies in the pit and gallery were requested to remove their bonnets, and at the bottom there was an instruction that carriages ought to be called for eleven. It was archaic, quaint, but so what? Howard allowed that the theatre could be what it liked. It did not have to be modern or move with the times like so many other industries; it was a magical place above and beyond the demands of reality or progress.