‘Nobody here can open oysters,’ said the boy mutinously.

‘But I can,’ said Laura. ‘Now scoot.’

‘You bloody Thornbys,’ said the boy, taking the money. ‘Bloody, bloody people.’

‘And bring an oyster knife and a lemon,’ Laura called after him.

Mavis had arrived early for the train. The wind penetrated her thick coat as she waited for the signal to turn green. She had been foolish to leave home so soon; but she had been consumed by train fever, crazy to be on her way in the Inter-City train which would take her to London where some day, not immediately of course, her name would be up outside a theatre in electric glory.

Terrence had wanted to see her off—he was taking her place in the wine bar—but she had told him to be sure to get to work on time. ‘Make yourself indispensable,’ she had said. He would be there now, she thought pityingly, wearing the apron he had stolen for a joke from a cafe on the school trip to France the year before last.

Her mother had said: ‘Why don’t you ask Claud to see you off? He’s only up there typing.’ Poor old Mum would not understand that part of this joyous departure would be Claud’s surprise when he heard that she had gone to work at her true vocation instead of eating her heart out taking orders from all those boring, barely literate vegetable growers, dull provincials who didn’t know, wouldn’t accept, that she was an actress. Had not Laura pointed her out to Claud in that joking way of hers which put one down? ‘You wouldn’t believe Mavis was an actress.’ Something like that.

‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ hummed Mavis, pacing the platform, seventy paces to the end, seventy paces back. I have got it all together, she thought with satisfaction. And Claud, how surprised would he be? She had not told him. Nor had she told anyone, least of all her mother, the world’s greatest blabbermouth in Mavis’ opinion, that the part she had so joyfully accepted was that of understudy. Understudy to an extremely healthy little actress often boringly described by the agent they shared as ‘a great little trouper’.

Mavis turned away from the wind. People were beginning to trickle onto the platform. Not too long now for the off.

I shan’t get paid much, she thought, lucky I’ve saved. Pity I’m not a man, they sell their sperm to make ends meet—a curious piece of information from Terrence who had learned it from a programme on TV. He had added nastily, ‘Doesn’t seem fair, does it, that girls have to prostitute,’ using prostitute as a verb; he had always sat among the ‘could-do-betters’ at school.