She recognized this scene. She had dreamt it many times. His face had advanced upon her while she lay inert with terror, as one does in a nightmare. For an infinitesimal moment she was visited by the hope that perhaps after all she had slept and if she could only scream, would awaken. But she couldn’t scream. She was quite helpless.

Adam Poole’s telephone rang at half-past four. He had gone late to rest and was awakened from a deep sleep. For a second or two he didn’t recognize her voice and she spoke so disjointedly that even when he was broad awake he couldn’t make out what she was saying.

‘What is it?’ he said: ‘Ella, what’s the matter? I can’t hear you.’ Then she spoke more clearly and he understood.

At six o’clock the persons in the play began to move towards the theatre. In their lodgings and flats they bestirred themselves after their several fashions: to drink tea or black coffee, choke down pieces of bread and butter that tasted like sawdust, or swallow aspirin and alcohol. This was their zero hour: the hour of low vitality when the stimulus of the theatre and the last assault of nerves was yet to come. By a quarter past six they were all on their way. Their dressers were already in their rooms and Jacko prowled restlessly about the darkened stage. Dr John James Rutherford, clad in an evening-suit and a boiled shirt garnished with snuff, both of which dated from some distant period when he still attended the annual dinners of the BMA, plunged into the office and made such a nuisance of himself that Bob Grantley implored him to go away.

At twenty past six the taxi carrying Gay Gainsford and J. G. Darcey turned into Carpet Street. Darcey sat with his knees crossed elegantly and his hat perched on them. In the half light his head and profile looked like those of a much younger man.

‘It was sweet of you to call for me, J.G.,’ Gay said unevenly.

He smiled, without looking at her, and patted her hand. ‘I’m always petrified myself,’ he said, ‘on first nights.’

‘Are you? I suppose a true artiste must be.’

‘Ah, youth, youth!’ sighed J.G., a little stagily perhaps, but, if she hadn’t been too preoccupied to notice it, with a certain overtone of genuine nostalgia.

‘It’s worse than the usual first-night horrors for me,’ she said. ‘I’m just boxing on in a private hell of my own.’

‘My poor child.’

She turned a little towards him and leant her head into his shoulder. ‘Nice!’ she murmured and after a moment: ‘I’m so frightened of him, J.G.’

With the practised ease of a good actor, he slipped his arm round her. ‘I won’t have it,’ he said. ‘By God, I won’t! If he worries you again, author or no author—’