Facing Martyn, on a huge easel, was a frame of photographs under a printed legend: ‘Opening at this Theatre on Thursday, May 11th: Thus to Revisit, a New Play by John James Rutherford.’ She stared at two large familiar faces and four strange smaller ones. Adam Poole and Helena Hamilton: those were famous faces. Monstrously enlarged, they had looked out at the New Zealand and Australian public from hoardings and from above cinema entrances. She had stood in queues many times to see them, severally and together. They were in the centre and surrounding them were Clark Bennington with a pipe and stick and a look of faded romanticism in his eyes, J. G. Darcey with pince-nez and hair en brosse, Gay Gainsford, young and intense, and Parry Percival, youngish and dashing. The faces swam together and grew dim.

It was very quiet in the foyer and beginning to get dark. On the other side of the entrance doors the rain drove down slantways half blinding her vision of homeward-bound pedestrians and the traffic of the street beyond them. She saw the lights go on in the top of a bus, illuminating the passive and remote faces of its passengers. The glare of headlamps shone pale across the rain. A wave of loneliness, excruciating in its intensity, engulfed Martyn and she closed her eyes. For the first time since her ordeal began, panic rose in her throat and sickened her. Phrases drifted with an aimless rhythm on the tide of her desolation: ‘You’re sunk, you’re sunk, you’re utterly sunk, you asked for it, and you’ve got it. What’ll happen to you now?’

She was drowning at night in a very lonely sea. She saw lights shine on some unattainable shore. Pieces of flotsam bobbed indifferently against her hands. At the climax of despair, metallic noises, stupid and commonplace, set up a clatter in her head.

Martyn jerked galvanically and opened her eyes. The whirr and click of her fantasy had been repeated behind an obscured-glass wall on her left. Light glowed beyond the wall and she was confronted by the image of a god, sand-blasted across the surface of the glass and beating at a forge under the surprising supervision, it appeared, of Melpomene and Thalia. Farther along, a notice in red light: ‘Dress Circle and Stalls’, jutted out from an opening. Beyond the hammer-blows of her heart a muffled voice spoke peevishly.

‘…Not much use to me. What? Yes, I know, old boy, but that’s not the point.’

The voice seemed to listen. Martyn thought: ‘This is it. In a minute I’ll be turned out.’