There began to be the rewards of course, as she’d implied to Joseph Wain when they’d had lunch together: the reasons for staying, not going, were as complex as marriage itself. They began to have a very good life indeed, and she would have had to be blind to see it wasn’t like this for most other actors. People began to ask Anthony Bonham the famous actor and his wife to all sorts of interesting dinners and parties and occasions, Pauline often found herself with a painter or a writer or an MP of the kind she could talk to, found herself beginning to belong to a certain part of London artistic and intellectual society that she enjoyed, would have missed. And at first she was vain enough to be pleased to see how often she and Anthony were in the newspapers, photographed with a playwright or a Prime Minister; her vanity was pierced however when – Anthony’s star rising and rising – she began to be known as Mrs Anthony Bonham. Where was her own identity? Pauline O’Brien: Actress. Yet like her mother before her she did not complain out loud. This was her life: she must get on with it.

But she recognised something then. The ice in her heart – her inheritance from her cold stepfather – sharpening when she could not find her real father, hardening when she walked into the bedroom in Birmingham, seemed somehow to become part of her. She had tried to melt it but she could not. Her inscrutable mask became part of her stylish, fashionable, persona.

But she and Anthony loved their house, both deeply loved their children. When their son was born Anthony was a big hit at Stratford as Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing; the Evening Standard had published a wonderful picture of him in costume on the front page, holding the young Benedict in the air.

Pauline had started her antiques business on the advice of a sculptor she met at one of those fashionable parties, whose wife already had an antique shop. She was almost at once successful, that stylish persona was useful in the antique business and being married to a famous actor helped. Really, she had no thoughts of leaving. And Anthony was in many ways an entertaining man, was getting better and better at his job as he had the chance to stretch himself more and more, and still in many ways interested her more than any other man she met, although for Pauline their sex life had never really recovered. The thought of her husband and her best friend fucking – she made herself articulate the word, fucking – together would not go from a corner of her consciousness; hovered there: icy, curious.