Nicky was sick one morning on the set of Heartbreak, vomited quite unexpectedly and quietly over a chintz-covered armchair; they rushed in the studio nurse but Nicola Abbott said she had had oysters for dinner the previous night. She knew anyway that she was pregnant; believed it had happened the first time Terence had come to her dressing room. There was no such thing as the Pill and Terence may have had a condom in his back pocket but quite simply never thought to use one.

Nicky rejoiced; she would have her own, own, real, beautiful family at last, they would live in a house with a garden. Now that she had spoken about it aloud, just a hint of a thought about her mother’s death filtered into her mind; just there, on the margins of her reality she sometimes now caught at the streetlight shining in through the Venetian blinds on to the double bed where a schoolgirl in uniform sat holding a pillow. Now she would be a mother, like her mother. How odd. Then the thought was gone.

She sent Terence a telegram to Fort William.

For a moment Terence felt as if his heart had stopped when he received the telegram. He was delighted, joyful. But he remembered what had happened to Juliet. This time things must not go wrong, he loved Nicky too much, they must get married at once, he must tell Juliet of course, somehow he must deal with his Welsh religious family who thought him engaged to Juliet Lyall, and would be devastated by the shame of a hasty marriage to someone else. His father was a strong, white-haired, still physically powerful man of the Chapel: right and wrong were absolutely clear to him, and he had always made them absolutely clear to his only son. He would be very, very angry. For it was 1961 still. Although Beat poets recited their poetry in pubs and in a few years the Rolling Stones would explode it was still shameful for an unmarried girl to get pregnant. Not only Terence’s family but Miss Grace and her mother would have been absolutely horrified if they had known.

Nicky told Miss Grace she had found a flat in town. What she and Terence actually and quietly did was buy a house in Brighton, as Laurence Olivier had suggested expansively to young actors in theatre green rooms. Nicky arranged the mortgage while Terence was in Scotland, discussing it with him excitedly from telephone boxes. Miss Grace had expected to help her furnish the London flat, choose curtains and tasteful pictures and furniture; felt instead Nicky drawing away from her, closing her down was how she described it to herself, hurt for the rest of her life: she closed me down.

‘She has survived,’ said old Mrs Grace briskly, ‘leave it. As I told you, most girls survive.’