She had touched the raw centre of her anxieties. Under any other conditions, she told herself, she would have welcomed the appearance out of a clear sky and, one had to face it, under very odd circumstances, of this little antipodean: this throw-back to some forebear that she and Adam were supposed to have in common. Helena would have been inclined to like Martyn for the resemblance instead of feeling so uncomfortably disturbed by it. Of course she accepted Adam’s explanation but at the same time she thought it rather naïve of him to believe that the girl had actually kept away from the theatre because she didn’t want to make capital out of the relationship. That, Helena thought, turning restlessly on her bed, was really too simple of Adam. Moreover he had stirred up the already exacerbated nerves of the company by giving this girl the understudy without, until last night, making public the relationship.

There she went, thinking about last night’s scene: John Rutherford demanding that even at this stage Martyn should play the part, Gay imploring Adam to release her, Ben saying he would walk out on the show if Gay went, and Adam…Adam had done the right thing of course. He had come down strongly with one of his rare thrusts of anger and reduced them to complete silence. He had then described the circumstances of Martyn’s arrival at the theatre and had added in a voice of ice that there was and could be no question of any change in the cast. He finished his notes and left the theatre, followed by Jacko.

This had been the signal for an extremely messy row in which everybody seemed to come to light with some deep-seated grudge. Ben had quarrelled almost simultaneously with Parry Percival (on the score of technique), with Dr Rutherford (on the score of casting), with his niece (on the score of humanity) and, unexpectedly, with J. G. Darcey (on the score of Ben bullying Gay). Percival had responded to a witticism of the doctor’s by a stream of shrill invective which astonished everybody, himself included, and Gay had knitted the whole scene into a major climax by having a fit of hysterics from which she was restored with brutal efficiency by Dr Rutherford himself.