‘And I sent you five hundred dollars a month!’ said Anthony. ‘And you’re going to ask me for money to put on a fringe show and I slave away for you all—’ Both women laughed. ‘What’s all this about a fringe show anyway, and those dreaded words Performance Art?’

‘Don’t be so old-fashioned Daddy, it’s just a term, just an expression. We want to look at a play in another way, that’s all.’

‘What play?’

‘Look Back in Anger.’

‘Oh Jesus Christ!’ exploded Anthony. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, what, Look Back In Anger with singing and dancing?’

‘It’s already got singing and dancing in it if I remember,’ said Pauline mildly.

‘It’s our turn,’ said Viola. ‘That play’s over forty years old, we want to look at what made it relevant when it was written, see if it has relevance to now. People are always doing that to Shakespeare.’

‘What, dress up as ironing boards and make noises like irons? I never heard such ridiculous nonsense!’ said Anthony. ‘It’s a play of its time and I certainly won’t – Oh God,’ he got up suddenly, ‘I’ve left stuff in the car, I’ve got to work this afternoon, I’m doing a broadcast in the morning before I go back to Stratford, Benedict!’ and he strode out of the room.

‘He’ll come round,’ said Pauline.

‘What TV series Mum?’ said Viola.

‘A big, huge, expensive, international television series called The Immoralists.’

Viola’s eyes goggled. ‘And you’re going to be in it?’

‘Yes,’ said Pauline, and something glittered in her eyes. Viola looked at her carefully.

‘That’s great Mum,’ she said. But uncertainly. She knew quite well what had happened to her mother’s acting career; had had, since she was a teenager, a framed black and white poster with Pauline’s bare back on it on the wall of her bedroom, next to Bob Marley.

‘Are you sure Mum?’ she said.

And Pauline gave her daughter a strange look across the remains of their Sunday lunch, across the last piece of the apple pie that Pauline had made from the autumn apples in their Chiswick garden. Her daughter Viola, in all that happened to her afterwards, never never forgot how her mother had looked that Sunday afternoon, as Bonnie Raitt echoed in from the CD player in the sitting room and the Sunday papers lay spread across a chair in the corner of the big kitchen.

‘Listen to me very carefully Viola,’ said Pauline. ‘I love you very much but there is nothing in this world, not Portia, not you, not Benedict, and in particular not your father, there is nothing in this world that is going to take this last chance away from me.’

*

In the London Clinic Terence Blue was not conscious.