She was met at Los Angeles airport by a chauffeur, arrived at the hotel to a large bouquet of white roses and a note from the director Bud Martin saying he was looking forward to seeing her for breakfast at 8 am. She had been travelling for nearly thirteen hours, fell asleep with the aid of sleeping pills so that she would not dream.

She got up at 4.30 am Los Angeles time, did yoga exercises, showered and showered till her face and body made some sense, made herself up expertly. When they buzzed her room at 8 am she was ready. She emerged from the lift looking like what she was: not a film star – they were ten a penny in Los Angeles after all – but an acclaimed and admired actress of a certain age with a still extraordinarily striking bone structure to her unforgettable face.

She walked, knowing this.

The grey-haired but balding director, seated in the lounge, watched her walking towards him. There was something enigmatic about her, some – he couldn’t quite put his finger on it – secret. Although he called it ‘English reserve’ it wasn’t that, he knew it wasn’t quite that. The tape from Horton had been waiting for him when he arrived back in Los Angeles. It could work, he knew it could work, it didn’t matter if the woman was English. But it was a risk. Most of the part he knew she could do easily, he’d seen her work enough to know, and with those bones she still looked wonderful on camera.

But to put it bluntly he had to know what kind of a woman she was in bed.

Not of course for himself, he liked young bodies – she was old after all and he didn’t like old women’s bodies with their used-up quality and flabbiness that couldn’t be hidden and falling breasts. But for the film. Under that enigma what would he find? For he would eventually find it, of course. Not this morning, but eventually. He had to find it for the part to work: age and sex in women – an interesting concept in Tinseltown. Well, that would be the challenge.

Bud Martin stood up, a big, powerful man. One of the most famous and successful and feared men in Hollywood smiled as the English actress Juliet Lyall came towards him.

‘Good morning Miss Lyall,’ he said and he took her hand in his.

They sat and talked in a small, private dining room over orange juice and thin pancakes with maple syrup and coffee. The foggy Californian sun shone in across the end of the table, across a beautifully arranged jug of magnolia blossom whose scent filled the room.

‘You’ve read the script?’

‘I have. It’s a wonderful part of course.’