She had, when she had returned to Los Angeles to begin filming, seemed herself: cool and British. But the camera made her seem cold not cool; the enigmatic British reserve seemed, in the viewing room, to be an empty shell, signifying nothing. The first tentative sex scene they had filmed was rubbish: he could never use it. He mused alone in the dark of his small private movie theatre. He’d made a mistake. Something that had been there in the work he had seen her do that had decided him to take a risk with her had fooled him, deceived him. He had taken a risk and a guess over her ability to do the particular kind of love scenes so important to this film, and he had been proved wrong. She couldn’t do it.

Age and desire. Bud Martin knew himself very well: understood why seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls were the only women to arouse him; his power and his fame bought him the one thing he didn’t have: youth. The film explored, better than most Hollywood films, if this might or might not be the same for ageing women... age and desire... and any actress should have killed for a chance to play the part.

And the young Clint O’Hara, the actor he had cast opposite her, should have been any ageing actress’s dream: he was not only young, he was good-looking and personable and even intelligent; had gone to some trouble to watch some of Juliet’s film work so that he would know something about her. She didn’t have to fuck him off-screen for God’s sake if she was one of those actresses who wanted to remain faithful to her husband and it certainly wasn’t in any way a pornographic film they were making, she only had to be – to seem to be – roused by him, affected by him. There were only intimations of desire, not the fulfilment of it; this was a good intelligent script, not a dog, the original had even been written by a woman for God’s sake (though they’d had to get in a professional to tidy it up). But it was a very very good script.

But proximity to Clint O’Hara seemed not to raise Juliet Lyall’s temperature one iota.

She could be gay, a lesbian, a dyke. He’d thought of that at once, there were plenty of them around though they tried to keep it quiet. But she was married and, what’s more, it had been all over the papers that she’d once been engaged to that well-known and now infamous Lothario, Terence Blue. Terence Blue wouldn’t fuck a dyke for fuck’s sake.

Perhaps it was the nervous exhaustion: her small breakdown before she began filming. But actresses were always having small breakdowns; the doctors, hers and theirs, had said she was perfectly well again.