So Harry reluctantly agreed. Along with a cleaner who was often asked to do these things he signed the papers in the Pimlico register office and congratulated his classmates Terence Blue and Nicola Abbott; saw how it was with the two of them. Terence was wearing a dark blue suit that somehow brought out the blue in his eyes; although it was a cold day Nicky stood signing the register in a simple cream dress and carrying one red rose, she looked absolutely wonderful. Happiness shone from them as they looked at each other. Harry thought that he saw for the first time in his life what happiness was. For a moment, standing alone at the train station afterwards, a pain of longing overwhelmed him. Would he ever feel like that, even briefly, himself?

That same weekend, after the last performance of Widowers’ Houses, Juliet Lyall drove herself home in the car her father had given her, hiding the bleeding as best she could, to see her father who had phoned and said he wanted to talk to her.

‘Is it about The Red Dress?’ she asked excitedly.

‘Come home,’ said her father.

He lived with his fourth wife, this one younger than Juliet, in their eight-bedroomed house in Wiltshire; his first wife, Juliet’s mother, lived in France. Juliet wanted to tell her childish stepmother that she needed some help, that she had been bleeding after an illegal abortion for weeks and weeks and weeks, that something must be wrong. But her stepmother pouted at her father, wanted him for herself as soon as lunch was over, was not interested in a stepdaughter older than herself. Over that Sunday lunch, her father told her the news: the executive producers on The Red Dress had been shown the rushes of Heartbreak. They were absolutely adamant they wanted nobody but Nicola Abbott for the new film.

Juliet wept with disappointment and rage and envy and anger, and in desolation too: she could have had Terence’s baby, after all. She phoned and phoned the flat he stayed in when he was in London, there was no reply.

Back in York on Monday morning, during the last run-through for the next play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a story of self-deception and enchantment and misunderstanding and love, she pulled angrily at Harry Donaldson in the coffee break, making him follow her.

‘Nicola Abbott, Nicola Abbott, it’s all I ever heard from the day I started at drama school.’ Juliet was shaking with emotion in the theatre rehearsal room, a cold room with two paraffin heaters. She and Harry sat apart from the others, on two chairs in a corner near one of the heaters, holding their hands round their mugs of coffee, wearing jerseys and scarves because it was so cold; they weren’t having a dress rehearsal in their costumes till the evening.