She had her first – and only – affair with the sculptor who had told her to start her antiques shop; she felt guilty of course, but she couldn’t help enjoying the sex in particular. Oh is this what it can be like? she said to him rather shyly, nude on a sofa in his studio in Greenwich as he knelt before her. She was younger then, in her late thirties; he had loved the long curves of her body (his wife was very short); had smoothed the long back once admired all over London, had spent hours caressing her buttocks in particular, his hands feeling over and over the firmness and the roundness, had finally penetrated her from behind very gently at first so that he did not hurt her and she had surprisingly found that she had not disliked it. I’d like to know more about sex, she thought, I’d like to have more affairs. I think.

But the sculptor and his family moved to America where his round, curved pieces were very popular; Pauline bought all his wife’s antique stock before they left. And somehow she didn’t have other affairs after all, as if she wasn’t, really, that kind of person. Until now perhaps when she found herself over and over again thinking of Joseph Wain and the wild, beautiful hair that used to stretch up to the sky and the days when they were young. But, of course, it was unthinkable: he was trying to cast her in The Immoralists but it was professional business, it was work. He was always slightly formal with her, now.

She sighed now and stretched, just for a moment ran her hands over her now older body, bent again to the chest of drawers.

She knew, with absolute certainty, as she had said to Joseph, that Anthony might have affairs till he died but he would never leave their life: he needed the security.

But the thought of Molly around again disturbed and angered her: Molly who had come to visit her in the sunshine as if it had all been over so that Pauline had stupidly allowed herself, just for a moment, to think they might be friends again. It felt as if Molly had cheated her twice.

Just as she was removing the third drawer in the antique chest the phone rang.

‘Pauline,’ said Joseph Wain, ‘the scripts for The Immoralists are nearly ready. We’re going to be getting down properly to casting and contracts.’

‘Ah,’ said Pauline very carefully, ‘scripts and contracts.’

‘Now listen Pauline. I understood you that day of the garden party, and when we had lunch together. You want this badly don’t you?’