And gradually, over days and nights, she realised what quality it was that Banjo had given her, shared with her. It wasn’t, after all, his youth although she had enjoyed that.

He was a happy person.

The thought, when it was properly formed, so surprised her that she stopped crying.

Banjo was a happy person.

Until now, almost all the thoughts she had of him, all the memories of their time together, made her smile. He saw life as a pleasant thing. He had had a stable, ordinary, uneventful, happy childhood: two sisters and a brother and parents who loved him. He went home to Essex continually to see them, talked to any of them on the phone for hours about this and that. His granny had been a cook; he had told Molly about going on holiday once to Whitstable: his granny had seen him swimming one morning and had come rushing into the caravan they were staying in saying to his mother I can see his ribs I can see his ribs and had immediately made a huge meat pie for morning tea. He was surrounded by uncomplicated love. And he grew up happy.

And I expect he will make his children happy as he made me happy.

And I am an actress. And what makes me good at my job, and I am very good sometimes, is perhaps the very fact that I didn’t have that stable and uncomplicated childhood; that I ran home from school often with my heart in my mouth in case my mother had carried out her latest threat; that when I was at primary school I found strange men in my mother’s bed who wanted to buy me sweeties; that I grew up damaged and complicated and have had lots of men in my bed too, over the years. They fuck you up your mum and dad even if you don’t have a dad. Someone should do a survey of actors’ childhoods. Banjo said he didn’t want to have a life like mine, but he didn’t see: he never had a life like mine.

I am as I am.

I am as I am. Somehow the thought comforted her.

*

The next day she went to her hairdresser.

‘I’m sick of being blonde,’ she said, ‘I despise those actresses who stay blonde long after their sell-by date,’ and burst into tears.

Her hairdresser, Fifi, had known her for years – from when she was a junior tinter at Vidal Sassoon and her name was Diane Lloyd. She pretended Molly wasn’t crying. She pulled bottles and potions from cupboards. She shouted at juniors in her Chelsea salon to bring peppermint tea, tear up silver paper, tidy the Vogues, sweep hair off the floor.

And then she set to work.