‘And where’s Terence?’ she added, tears coming into her eyes. ‘He’s always disappearing, I thought he’d be back in London this weekend but I’ve phoned and phoned him and he’s nowhere, we may as well get married and he can have a damn baby.’

And, in the cold rehearsal room at York on that Monday morning in winter, Harry Donaldson did what he regretted for the rest of his life.

He thought he was doing it to be fair, to clear things up, doing what Terence wasn’t brave enough to do.

But in many dark nights afterwards he knew it was something else.

He was used to Juliet, had worked closely with her now since 1959, but he didn’t like her. He thought she was a selfish and confident actress on stage, he disliked working with her, had disliked it from their first term as students together. She grabbed the stage was the way he described it to himself, grabbed it and filled it with herself, often so there wasn’t room for other people.

But there was something deeper and darker.

He wanted to see what would happen.

‘Terence married Nicola Abbott on Saturday, she’s pregnant,’ he said.

26

Some weeks after her father’s funeral Pauline O’Brien Bonham very carefully polished a valuable eighteenth-century chest of drawers in her workroom. It was hard work, and it gave her great satisfaction. The workroom at the back of the antique shop always smelt of old wood and furniture polish, a warm and reassuring fragrance, something solid and permanent about it that Pauline liked. Her hair fell across her face as she worked; the gas heater purred, the rain fell on the roof. How quickly the winter had come, how quickly the long, hot summer had become just a memory. A series of Mozart quartets were playing on Classic FM, interspersed with irritating advertisements that she closed her mind to.

And as she worked, she thought about Joseph Wain.

And her husband. Who had not once mentioned The Immoralists and Joseph Wain’s plan for them to work together.

And the best friend of her youth, Molly McKenzie.

She had dealt with sexual betrayal all her married life; it hurt her less each time. But the first, most important one was always there.

After Portia was born, those Monday mornings when Anthony, family duty done, would race back to his exciting work in Birmingham while Pauline, only the previous year the toast of London, dragged the nappies and the pram to the local laundrette, had been almost unbearable. One afternoon, desperately depressed, she made an unannounced visit with Portia to see her husband. The landlady had seemed surprised to see her and a baby but had shown her in to Anthony’s room.

That room, in Birmingham, had haunted her for years.