He finished his drink quickly and began to grease his face. He noticed how the flesh had dropped into sad folds under the eyes, had blurred the jaw-line and had sunk into grooves about the nostrils and the corners of the mouth. All right for this part, of course, where he had to make a sight of himself, but he had been a fine-looking man. Helena had fallen for him in a big way until Adam cut him out. At the thought of Adam he experienced a sort of regurgitation of misery and anger. ‘I’m a haunted man,’ he thought suddenly.

He had let himself get into a state, he knew, because of this afternoon. Helena’s face, gaping with terror, like a fish, almost, kept rising up in his mind and wouldn’t be dismissed. Things always worked like that with him: remorse always turned into nightmare.

It had been a bad week altogether. Rows with everybody: with John Rutherford in particular and with Adam over that blasted little dresser. He felt he was the victim of some elaborate plot. He was fond of Gay: she was a nice friendly little thing: his own flesh and blood. Until he had brought her into this piece she had seemed to like him. Not a bad little artiste either and good enough, by God, for the artsy-craftsy part they had thrown at her. He thought of her scene with Poole and of her unhappiness in her failure and how, in some damned cockeyed way, they all, including Gay, seemed to blame him for it. He supposed she thought he had bullied her into hanging on. Perhaps in a way he had, but he felt so much that he was the victim of a combined assault. ‘Alone,’ he thought, ‘I’m so desperately alone,’ and he could almost hear the word as one would say it on the stage, making an echo, forlorn and hopeless and extremely effective.

‘I’m giving myself the jim-jams,’ he thought. He wondered if Helena had told Adam about this afternoon. By God, that would rock Adam, if she had. And at once a picture rose up to torture him, a picture of Helena weeping in Adam’s arms and taking solace there. He saw his forehead grow red in the looking-glass and told himself he had better steady up. No good getting into one of his tempers with a first performance ahead of him and everything so tricky with young Gay. There he was, coming back to that girl, that phoney dresser. He poured out another drink and began his make-up.