Molly’s tights, and the baggy green cardigan she’d always worn at drama school, lay entwined on the narrow bed with Anthony’s jockey shorts, and a packet of contraceptive pills lay on the windowsill. That was how Pauline found out.

Pauline replaced one polished drawer back in the old chest carefully, just as carefully removed another.

At the time she thought that she would never recover. She wanted to leave Anthony, but he worked hard, persuaded her it was an aberration because he missed her, took to phoning her every single night after the performance to see how she was. It’s all over darling I was a fool, I am so truly sorry and I love you, he would say. None of the other betrayals, the small, regular, tacky treacheries, hurt her anything like the first one had; sometimes she was able to persuade herself they weren’t happening at all.

By the time she finally realised the pattern of their lives, Anthony was starring in a very popular television series about life in an office of which more and more episodes were made by popular demand; they were richer than most actors they knew and had moved to Chiswick to the beautiful house by the river. And she was expecting Viola and she hadn’t been on stage for nearly five years. The swinging sixties were almost over: the Rolling Stones had already given free concerts in Hyde Park, young girls had ironed their hair on ironing boards to look like pop stars. But Pauline felt as if, in some unaccountable way, although she’d lived through them, she’d missed the swinging sixties, she was too unhappy, and too busy at the laundrette and the kindergarten and the doctor’s surgery, and with Portia’s bad bout of whooping cough that seemed to last forever. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll weren’t so easy for a pregnant ex-actress with a demanding young daughter. With whom she’d never really had an easy relationship: my fault Pauline always said to herself, I loved Portia of course but I resented her coming.