The following week, they started rehearsals. Holly travelled to Hammersmith every morning, taking her lunch in her bag and loading her phone with podcasts. Before she got up, Ben, who left before she did, doodled on her banana with a Sharpie: an all-capitals message along the lines of Ben is fit, or a dick-and-balls cartoon with a few straggly pubes. Genevieve deigned to join them in person, but remained brittle and aloof. In rehearsals she talked in a lofty way about ‘making an offer’, when what she really meant was coming up with a way to do something in a scene, like delivering a line while pacing about or dropping into a chair with a heavy sigh. During breaks she gave little away. That was the peculiar thing about acting: it was necessary to show vulnerability at times, but you were also very careful to keep some things out of view. Look at this, don’t look at that. Revealing and concealing, the two sides of the same coin.

Genevieve always left rehearsals as soon as they finished, never hanging around or coming to the pub. When the rest of the cast were going to a Turkish restaurant one lunchtime, Holly made a point of inviting her but she refused, saying she was vegetarian.

‘So am I,’ said Holly. ‘They have felafel.’

‘It’s okay. I should get going.’

It was around this time that she avoided Holly by the river. If that’s how you want it, fine, Holly thought afterwards. She wondered at the fact that she’d ended up in a play that pitted her against Genevieve for the attentions of some womanising dude. Both their characters, Anna and Sofya, were entangled with Platonov, a schoolteacher-cum-poet-cum-self-styled Don Juan. But Holly focused on trying to find her way into the play. It was part of a festival, the London ChekhovFest. Posters would soon go up advertising dates and venues. It was clear which theatres had the most sway. The big guns got the big trio, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters. Of course.

Miles was upbeat, bless him. They didn’t have enough people for all the characters, so he had one actor play all the leftover parts, with much changing of hats, lace caps and moustaches, et cetera. In his time at the Schaubühne, he’d absorbed something of the auteur-director style. This meant, among other things, a tendency to put objects like fridges and sunglasses in nineteenth-century plays. Keen to do something outside London’s West End, he had leapt at the chance to bring his vision to Hammersmith.