The curtain rose and fell again, twice. Percival and Darcey took Martyn off and it went up again on Poole and Helena Hamilton, this time to those cries of ‘bravo’ that reach the actors as a long open sound like the voice of a singing wind. In the wings, Clem Smith with his eyes on the stage was saying repeatedly: ‘He doesn’t answer. He’s locked in. The b—doesn’t answer.’

Martyn saw Poole coming towards her and stood aside. He seemed to tower over her as he took her hand. ‘Come along,’ he said. Darcey and Percival and the group offstage began to clap.

Poole led her on. She felt herself resisting and heard him say: ‘Yes, it’s all right.’

So bereft was Martyn of her normal stage-wiseness that he had to tell her to bow. She did so and wondered why there was a warm sound of laughter in the applause. She looked at Poole, found he was bowing to her and bent her head under his smile. He returned her to the wings.

They were all on again. Dr Rutherford came out from the OP corner. The cast joined in the applause. Martyn’s heart had begun to sing so loudly that it was like to deafen every emotion but a universal gratitude. She thought Rutherford looked like an old lion standing there in his out-of-date evening-dress, his hair ruffled, his gloved hand touching his bulging shirt, bowing in an unwieldy manner to the audience and to the cast. He moved forward and the theatre was abruptly silent: silent, but for an obscure and intermittent thudding in the dressing-room passage. Clem Smith said something to the ASM and rushed away, jingling keys.

‘Hah,’ said Dr Rutherford with a preliminary bellow. ‘Hah—thankee. I’m much obliged to you, ladies and gentlemen and to the actors. The actors are much obliged, no doubt, to you but not necessarily to me.’ Here the audience laughed and the actors smiled. ‘I am not able to judge,’ the doctor continued with a rich roll in his voice, ‘whether you have extracted from this play the substance of its argument. If you have done so we may all felicitate each other with the indiscriminate enthusiasm characteristic of these occasions: if you have not, I for my part am not prepared to say where the blame should rest.’

A solitary man laughed in the audience. The doctor rolled an eye at him and, with this clownish trick, brought the house down. ‘The prettiest epilogue to a play that I am acquainted with,’ he went on, ‘is (as I need perhaps hardly mention to so intelligent an audience) that written for a boy-actor by William Shakespeare. I am neither a boy nor an actor but I beg leave to end by quoting to you. “If it be true that good wine needs no bush—” ’