‘All that,’ Jacko said with an ungainly sweep of his arm, ‘is of no importance. Gay Gainsford is still to play the part. She will not play it well but she is the niece of the leading lady’s husband and she is therefore in a favourable position.’

‘Yes, but her uncle—’

He said quickly: ‘Clark Bennington was once a good actor. He is now a stencil. He drinks too much and when he is drunk he is offensive. Forget him.’ He turned away and with less than his usual deftness began to set out his work-table. From an adjoining room he said indistinctly: ‘I advise that which I find difficult to perform. Do not allow yourself to become hagridden by this man. It is a great mistake. I myself—’ His voice was lost in the spurt of running water. Martyn heard him shout: ‘Run off and learn your lines. I have a job in hand.’

With a feeling of unease she returned to her room. But when she opened her part and began to read the lines this feeling retreated until it hung like a very small cloud over the hinterland of her mind. The foreground was occupied entirely by the exercise of memorizing and in a few minutes she had almost, but not quite, forgotten her anxiety.

She was given her moves that afternoon by the stage-manager and, at three o’clock, rehearsed her scenes with the other two understudies. The remaining parts were read from the script. Jacko pottered about back-stage intent on one of his odd jobs; otherwise the theatre seemed to be deserted. Martyn had memorized her lines but inevitably lost them from time to time in her effort to associate them with physical movement. The uncompromising half-light of a working-stage, the mechanical pacing to and fro of understudies, the half-muted lines raised to concert pitch only for cues, and the dead sound of voices in an empty house: all these workaday circumstances, though she was familiar enough with them, after all, laid a weight upon her: she lost her belief in the magic of the previous night. She was oppressed by this anticlimax, and could scarcely summon up the resources of her young experience to meet it.