Frances Kitson, good old Frances as her friends always called her, fifty-seven years old and one of the survivors of the class of ’59, would have given almost anything to meet a man who would love her.

*

In the next morning’s newspapers the play Lives and Emmy Lou received glowing notices in small corners.

The Sun and the Mail and the Daily Express all picked up the story of Juliet Lyall’s nervous collapse which the theatre had been trying to keep quiet but which someone had now leaked to the press. The Sun’s headline screamed: LUVVIES’ REUNION JINXED? and underneath in slightly smaller letters it said: BLUE’SEX-FIANCÉE JULIET LYALL IN BACKSTAGE DRAMA AND BLUE SIGHTED IN MARBELLA?

And in Juliet Lyall’s drugged mind the words danced.

It is beginning, she said aloud in the room in the private hospital.

25

When the whole world changes, people often automatically still do the usual things: Nicola Abbott still caught the train to Miss Grace’s house in Richmond the night in 1961 when Terence Blue came to see A Doll’s House. They walked, the two of them, down through Soho to Charing Cross and across the railway bridge to Waterloo station. Terence’s arm rested quite lightly across Nicky’s shoulders, as if they always walked together, as if it was all decided. There was time to catch the last train. They hardly spoke at all.

Till, at the train, last doors banging, the big hand of the platform clock moving through each minute, Terence said, I love you Nicky. I will love you for the rest of my life. He was twenty-four. The midnight guard blew his whistle but still Terence heard quite clearly Nicky say, in the voice that nobody forgot, I will never never never let you go. She was nineteen.

And the last train to Richmond pulled slowly out of Waterloo Station and into the darkness. They hadn’t even arranged to meet again.

*