‘You are a ducks. Thanks a million. Of course,’ the girl added, ‘I’m a real fan. I never miss any of her pictures and I do think Adam Poole—pardon me, Mr Poole—is simply mawvel-lous. I mean to say I just think he’s mawvellous. They’re so mawvellous together. I suppose he’s crazy about her in real life, isn’t he? I always say they couldn’t ect together like that—you know—so gorgeously—unless they had a pretty hot clue on the sayde. Don’t you agree?’

Martyn said she hadn’t had a chance of forming an opinion as yet and left the florist in pensive contemplation of the remaining Bloody Warriors.

When she got back to the theatre its character had completely changed; it was alive and noisy. The dock-doors were open and sunlight lay in incongruous patches on painted canvas and stacked furniture. Up in the grid there was a sound of hammering. A back-cloth hung diagonally in mid-air and descended in jerks, while a man in shirt sleeves shouted, ‘Down on yer long. Now yer short. Now bodily. Right-oh. Dead it. Now find yer Number Two.’

A chandelier lay in a heap in the middle of the stage and, above it, was suspended a batten of spotlights within reach of an elderly mechanist who fitted pink and straw-coloured mediums into their frames. Near the stage-door a group of men stared at a small empire desk from which a stage-hand had removed a cloth wrapping. A tall young man in spectacles, wearing a red pullover and corduroy trousers, said irritably: ‘It’s too bloody chi-chi. Without a shadow of doubt, he’ll hate its guts.’

He glanced at Martyn and added: ‘Put them in her room, dear, will you?’

She hurried to the dressing-room passage and found that here, too, there was life and movement. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in the greenroom, a bald man in overalls was tacking cards on the doors, somewhere down the passage an unseen person sang cheerfully and the door next to Miss Hamilton’s was open. These signs of preparation awakened in Martyn a sense of urgency. In a sudden fluster she unwrapped her roses and thrust them into the vase. The stalks were too long and she had nothing to cut them with. She ran down the passage to the empty room, and reflected as she rootled in her suitcase that she would be expected to having sewing materials at hand. Here was the housewife an aunt had given her when she left New Zealand but it was depleted and in a muddle. She ran back with it, sawed at the rose stems with her nail-scissors and when someone in the next room tapped on the wall, inadvertently jammed the points into her hand.

‘And how,’ a disembodied voice inquired, ‘is La Belle Tansey this morning?’