‘She didn’t tell me that,’ J.G. said anxiously and, catching Parry’s sharpened glance, he added: ‘I didn’t really hear anything about it.’

‘It was a repetition of last night. Really, one feels quite dizzy. Gay rushed weeping to Adam and again implored him to let her throw in the part. The doctor, of course, was all for it. Adam was charming but Uncle Ben produced another temperament. He and the doctor left simultaneously in a silence more ominous, I assure you, than last night’s dog fight. Ben’s not down, yet.’

‘Not yet,’ J.G. said and repeated: ‘I hope to God he’s all right.’

For a moment the two men were united in a common anxiety. J.G. said: ‘Christ, I wish I didn’t get nervous on first nights.’

Clark Bennington’s dresser, a thin melancholy man, put him into his gown and hovered, expressionless, behind him. ‘I shan’t need you before the change,’ said Bennington. ‘See if you can help Mr Darcey.’

The man went out. Bennington knew he had guessed the reason for his dismissal. He wondered why he could never bring himself to have a drink in front of his dresser. After all there was nothing in taking a nip before the show. Adam, of course, chose to make a great thing of never touching it. And at the thought of Adam Poole he felt resentment and fear stir at the back of his mind. He got his flask out of his overcoat pocket and poured a stiff shot of brandy.

‘The thing to do,’ he told himself, ‘is to wipe this afternoon clean out. Forget it. Forget everything except my work.’ But he remembered, unexpectedly, the way, fifteen years ago, he used to prepare himself for a first night. He used to make a difficult and intensive approach to his initial entrance so that when he walked out on the stage he was already possessed by a life that had been created in the dressing-room. Took a lot of concentration: Stanislavsky and all that. Hard going: but in those days it had seemed worth the effort. Helena had encouraged him. He had a notion she and Adam still went in for it. But now he had mastered the easier way: the repeated mannerism, the trick of pause and the unexpected flattening of the voice: the technical box of tricks.