‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘I don’t know at all.’ She turned away and with a childish gesture hid her face in the crook of her arm. In dismay and shame she set loose the tears she had so long denied herself.

‘There now!’ he said, not so much as if to comfort her as to proclaim some private triumph of his own. Out in the dark auditorium Jacko struck his hands together once.

Poole touched her shoulder. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘These are growing pains. They will pass.’ From the door in the set he said: ‘You can have the understudy. We’ll make terms tomorrow. If you prefer it, the relationship can be forgotten. Goodnight.’

He left her alone and presently Jacko returned to the stage carrying her suitcase.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘we go home.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Second Dress-Rehearsal

WHEN MARTYN opened her eyes on the second morning of her adventure it was with the sensation of having come to rest after a painful journey.

She lay quiet and looked about her. It was a bright morning and the sun came in at the attic window above her bed. The room had an air of great cleanliness and freshness. She remembered now that Jacko had told her he occasionally made use of it and indeed, tiny as it was it bore his eccentric imprint. A set of designs for Twelfth Night was pinned to a wall-board. Ranged along the shelf were a number of figures dressed in paper as the persons in this play and on the wall facing her bed hung a mask of the fool, Feste, looking very like Jacko himself.

‘There never was such a little room,’ Martyn sighed and began to plan how she would collect and stow away her modest belongings. She was filled with gratitude and with astonished humility.

The bathroom was on the next floor and as she went downstairs she smelt coffee and fresh bread. A door on the landing opened and Jacko’s clownish head looked out.

‘Breakfast in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Speed is essential.’

Of all the amenities, it seemed to Martyn, a hot bath was the most beneficent and after that a shower under which one could wash one’s hair quickly. ‘Lucky it’s short,’ she thought and rubbed it dry with her towel.

She was out again in eight minutes to find Jacko on the landing. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘In your woollen gown you are entirely respectable. A clean school child. In.’

He marshalled her into a largish room set out in an orderly manner as a workshop. Martyn wondered why Jacko, who showed such exquisite neatness in his work, should in his person present such a wild front to the world. He was dressed now in faded cotton trousers, a paint-stained undervest and a tattered dressing-gown. He was unshaven and uncombed and his prominent eyes were slightly bloodshot. His manner, however, was as usual, amiable and disarming.