Every night after the show, sometimes dashing in from filming even as the curtain was coming down and the applause filled the theatre, Terence appeared at the door of the Number Two dressing room. Sometimes people came round after the show, congratulated Nicky on her performance. She thanked them shyly in her dark voice; they would note the blue, blue eyes of the boy waiting by the door and how the eyes of the young actress devoured him. Nicky would be always in her rather prim, pink candlewick dressing gown: underneath it was, but only Terence knew, just the funny little singlet. Terence locked the door now, Charlie Evans the stage door keeper knew they were there now. On the floor of the Number Two dressing room, what Nicky had known instinctively she learnt now from Terence; there under the spotlit mirror, there with the smell of make-up and cleansers and wig glue and corsets and the Victorian costumes that she sweated into every night: the tools of her trade. And there in the theatre one night she told him what she had never told another person so that the words came out in relief at last, one night when they were almost ready to leave and they stared at themselves in the mirror, about the death of her mother.

Charlie knew they would be out in time for the last train to Richmond; he sighed sometimes, went back over the racing results, rattled his keys in his pocket. Sometimes his leg hurt and he would mean to be short with them but then he caught the look on Nicky’s face and he had the most extraordinary feeling of memory, of when he was young, as if for a moment she gave him back his past.

‘Goodnight,’ he would say gruffly, but somehow not cross, after all, ‘see you tomorrow. ‘ Charlie was, like many stage door keepers, an inveterate gossip, seeing and knowing what was going on in the company better than anybody else. For some reason he could not exactly put his finger on, he told nobody.

Of course this strange trysting could not last, lasted perhaps for ten nights, not more. The director flew in from America, wanting Nicky with him at dinner after the show; she began filming Heartbreak, picked up in a studio car from Richmond at five o’clock every morning. Terence was sent on location to Fort William in Scotland where the rocks leapt high into the air and where he stood on clifftops like some latterday blue-eyed Heathcliffe, thinking of Nicky. And began, despite another appalling script, to be a star.

*

Miss Grace and Juliet Lyall did not yet know what had happened.

*