‘And what,’ he asked, ‘can I do for the new dresser?’ Martyn delivered her message. ‘Cigarette-case? Have I got my wife’s cigarette-case? God, I don’t know. Try my overcoat, dear, will you? Behind the door. Inside pocket. No secrets,’ he added obscurely. ‘Forgive my asking you. I’m busy.’

But he didn’t seem particularly busy. He twisted round in his chair and watched Martyn as she made a fruitless search of his overcoat pockets. ‘This is your first job?’ he asked. She said it was not and he added: ‘As a dresser, I mean.’

‘I’ve worked in the theatre before.’

‘And where was that?’

‘In New Zealand.’

‘Really?’ he said as if she had answered some vitally important question.

‘I’m afraid,’ Martyn went on quickly, ‘it’s not in the overcoat.’

‘God, what a bore! Give me my jacket then, would you? The grey flannel.’

She handed it to him and he fumbled through the pockets. A pocket-book dropped on the floor, spilling its contents. Martyn gathered them together and he made such a clumsy business of taking them from her that she was obliged to put them on the shelf. Among them was an envelope bearing a foreign stamp and postmark. He snatched it up and it fluttered in his fingers. ‘Mustn’t lose track of that one, must we?’ he said and laughed. ‘All the way from Uncle Tito.’ He thrust it at Martyn. ‘Look,’ he said and steadied his hand against the edge of the shelf. ‘What d’you think of that? Take it.’

Troubled at once by the delay and by the oddness of his manner Martyn took the envelope and saw that it was addressed to Bennington.

‘Do you collect autographs?’ Bennington asked with ridiculous intensity—’or signed letters?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’ she said and put the letter face down on the shelf.

‘There’s someone,’ he said with a jab of his finger at the envelope, ‘who’d give a hell of a lot for that one in there. A hell of a lot.’

He burst out laughing, pulled a cigarette-case out of the jacket and handed it to her with a flourish. ‘Purest gold,’ he said. ‘Birthday present but not from me. I’m her husband you know. What the hell! Are you leaving me? Don’t go.’