It was a newer, cooler Molly: light brown hair streaked with honey lights that hid the grey, and a flash of gold at certain angles. When Molly, amazed at the transformation, went to pay the bill, Fifi put her hand over Molly’s.

‘It’s on me,’ she said. ‘For your new life.’

As Molly opened the door of her Clapham house with her new streaked hair, her nose red from the biting cold, her phone was ringing.

‘Darling where were you?’ said Anastasia Adams. ‘You haven’t got your answering machine on and I’ve been phoning all day.’

‘Is it the new series?’ asked Molly almost eagerly. ‘Is it The Immoralists?’

‘No it’s not. I have talked to them several times, to the producer, a man called Joseph Wain, and he said they were certainly considering you, but that it was a long-term project and nothing had been decided and he’d get back to me. But he hasn’t, though I’ve called him several times and not been able to get him. I’ll get back again, after we’ve talked about this, but listen darling, the Royal Shakespeare Company have been on to me about you for their new season.’

Molly’s heart lifted. There were still a few good parts in Shakespeare for women of her age: vital, interesting. Emilia, as she had seen in Othello, Queen Margaret. Not Gertrude, she hoped it wasn’t that drifting, obedient woman, she’d much rather play Claudius now that she’d studied the play from his point of view.

‘What parts Anastasia?’ she asked.

‘They are doing a new production of Romeo and Juliet. They want you to play the Nurse.’

‘The Nurse?’ The Nurse? She remembered Sybil Thorndike, white-haired in the role, when she was a child. She remembered the old woman, now dead, who had played it at Bristol when Molly, almost straight out of drama school, had played Juliet. ‘I think that’s a ridiculous casting idea,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what the casting director at the Royal Shakespeare Company can be thinking of, she knows my work. I’m not old enough to play the Nurse.’

‘Ah Molly,’ said Anastasia Adams, ‘I think you are.’

*

Frances Kitson grieved also, for her friend Emmy Lou Brown. One day she went to the little white flat and reluctantly began clearing out Emmy’s things. Emmy hadn’t left a will, there was a cousin who asked Frances to clear the flat and take anything she wanted; the flat was to be sold.