‘Mmm.’ She gave him a wobbly smile. ‘You have to be mad to do this job.’

‘It’s a bit weird, isn’t it? Pretending to be other people for a living.’

She let the script drop onto the coffee table. ‘This play makes Chekhov look like the patron saint of false starts,’ she said. ‘Which is encouraging, I guess. It shows you that even Chekhov didn’t start out being Chekhov. He started out being slightly crap like the rest of us.’

She handed him a photocopied page from some loose papers on the table. ‘Look at this. At the time he wrote Platonov, he was having trouble publishing his short stories. This is from an editor, get this, “You are fading before you blossom. Great pity.’’’

‘Sick burn.’ He squeezed her shoulder and shuffled off to have a pee.

She went back to bed soon after. Tried to dispel her doubts, which were many and varied. About her work, her so-called profession. She had come to acting as if following a magnetic field. It was her calling, she felt, but what was a calling really, except a sense of predestination? It was absolutely crazy when you thought about it. By most rational measures, the path she had chosen did not make sense, and yet she was compelled to keep treading it all the same. Her passion was her passion, and she could not imagine herself without it. It was at the core of who she was, not just an overwhelming need, but her organising need.

Her thoughts veered to her successes. Now, though, she was forced to feel guilty about those too. Hadn’t she built her career on that chance to do Miss Julie? In her accounting of her life, she had to make room for this possibility, at least. And now doubts crept in about her own behaviour. Had she been wilfully blind to what she didn’t want to know?

This was the big, persistent question about which the others swirled. She kept coming back to it then cycling madly away again, not wanting to think about it: the question of what she, Holly, knew or should have known.

Some acts happened offstage, unseen. That was what life was like. The death of Pickles, for example. They never saw the fox, the culprit. She saw no disappearing tail, no paw prints in the gutter. And maybe it didn’t matter whether they saw it or not. What did it matter what sort of fox it was, a thin fox or a fat one, good or evil or in between?

Maybe what mattered was what came next, what you did about it, Holly thought. But that was no comfort if you hadn’t a clue about that either.