One week before her already overwrought daughter’s A level examinations, Mrs Shand – thin, wide-eyed, emanating the particular smell that goes with cancer and death – begged her doctor to give her enough morphine not just to ease the pain but to let her die. Intense and still, just in from school with her school books still in her arms, Mary Shand heard her mother screaming, if you can call the terrible sound that Mary heard screaming. The doctor did not know the daughter had come in; after a while she heard him let himself out the front door as usual. When Mary went into the bedroom her mother was almost asleep. She looked at Mary with an unfathomable look in her eyes. Mary forced herself to walk over to the bed, sit beside her mother. When Mrs Shand fell asleep Mary picked up the pillow from the other side of the double bed and put it over her mother’s nose and mouth. She didn’t push down on it. She just kept it there, her hand holding it firmly. She kept it there still when the streetlights came on: Mary could see them shining through the Venetian blinds. She kept it there when the churchbells rang as they always did on a Monday night at 8 pm for five minutes. She kept it there when she heard them switch off the new television set in the flat next door. Finally she must have dozed off: she woke stiff and cold in the darkness. She left the pillow over her mother’s face, cleaned her teeth, changed out of her school uniform into her pink nightie, went to bed.

In the morning the pillow was still there.

Mary Shand removed the pillow at last and rang the doctor: Mrs Shand was pronounced dead, the doctor said gently to Mary: it was a blessed release.

Mary sat her A levels.

While waiting for the results, which turned out to be almost alarmingly excellent, Miss Grace, who had arranged for Mary to come and stay with her and her elderly mother, helped fill out applications for all the drama schools and to apply for grants for financial assistance; but anxiously, seeing again the girl’s fragility.

Even old Mrs Grace could see.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I saw them occasionally, you are right. When I was a teacher this was the kind of girl I feared for also.’

Mary Shand became a student at the London Academy of Drama the following spring.

‘We would like you to live with us still,’ said Miss Grace gently.