‘Oh no Harry, no Harry,’ she said.

He opened the envelope.

My dear friends,

I am so sorry because I love you both more than I love anyone else in the world. It is true you were my family for me. But I suddenly found I couldn’t hang on any longer. Merry Christmas and have a drink for me and please don’t be angry with me or sad about me. I simply couldn’t go on, I know you will understand.

Em

The small sad face was slightly turned away from them as if to say: I have already gone.

‘It’s not fair,’ cried Frances, ‘it’s not fair, it’s not fair.’ She threw herself into Harry’s arms, he held her tightly, the two of them stood there, both shaking and crying, beside the body of their friend.

‘This fucking profession, this cruel fucking profession it simply breaks people’s hearts.’ Harry was suddenly shouting, he broke away from Frances and with his arms swept the voice books off the bedside table. To think of voice production books as Emmy Lou’s night-time reading was utterly unbearable.

Frances stood rocking with grief in the middle of the room, her arms around herself. Across the street in someone’s window she saw an old man bring his wife a cup of tea on a tray. Beside them, on the windowsill, a rather wilting pink geranium stood in a pot.

*

Somehow the papers got hold of the story of an actress’s suicide, found that she too had been at the reunion.

So Emmy Lou’s face also appeared on the front page of the Sun under the headline: JINXED REUNION DEATH. And underneath, in the slightly smaller print: ANOTHER OF TERRY’S LOVERS?

Frances grimaced in pain as she saw the headline in the newspaper shop remembering how both she and Em had of course kissed Terence passionately but innocently too: happy, remembered kisses, part of their youth. She sat in her flat on the sofa where you could still see slightly the coffee stain on the pink carpet from My Night With Milton.

Finally she rummaged around in her old record collection in a cupboard until she found what she wanted, put on an old Dory Previn record that Emmy and she used to sing when they were young, when they believed the world was still waiting for them.

Mary Cecilia Brown

Went to town on the Malibu bus

She climbed to the top of the Hollywood sign

And with the smallest possible fuss

She jumped off the letter H

Because she did not become a Star

She died in less than a minute and a half

She looked a bit like Hedy Lamarr.

Frances sat on her old sofa and wept, for the loss of her friend who told the dole office she would learn Chinese, and for the rest of the song that they had sung so often, and laughed at: