Now I’ll be able to do it, Terence told himself, now it will be Nicky’s turn, to be happy at last. The others don’t understand yet, they’re so foolish to think I still want young girls, can’t they see I’ve had enough young girls, I want to look after Nicky because – and he thought again of what he had understood when he was barely conscious in the hospital – I know Nicky better than any psychiatrist ever could, I should never never have let them take her away from me. I want her to know that I do know the meaning of love. The others hadn’t known his father, the strong, religious, determined old man from the Welsh valleys, who had imparted something to his son, after all.

The agents had their heads together, discussing business.

Elvira leant comfortably against Stu, all was well at last, yes we’ll find Terry a new young wife who’ll help him forget the past, she thought again to herself, somebody pretty with energy and fun –that’s what he needs – to have fun again.

Joseph Wain looked at Pauline laughing with her son. Her life would now change so much, he wasn’t sure if she realised. Those hooded eyes that he knew had concealed her unfulfilled hopes for so long stared out now, clearer and brighter and strong. She looked extraordinarily beautiful.

Outside, across Stu’s soft rolling hills, snow lay white. It had got colder, the sky was clearer and stars shone. Sometimes a horse called; once Pauline caught the sound, suddenly thought of her father travelling with the circus from town to town in the darkness, and how the animals cried to the moon.

36

Terence had told the truth and nothing but the truth in the courtroom. But not the whole truth.

*

Juliet Lyall, engaged to be married to Terence Blue or so she thought, was still bleeding from her badly done, dangerous, illegal abortion when Terence Blue married Nicola Abbott. Juliet used sanitary towels and lost a lot of blood and played in Widowers’ Houses at night and rehearsed her part as Titania in Midsummer Night’s Dream in the daytime. It was months now, but what should she do? You couldn’t go to a doctor, the abortion had been illegal, you just hoped things would clear up in the end, that’s what they all did, all the actresses, all the girls who had been caught.

When Harry Donaldson sat beside the paraffin heater in the cold rehearsal room of the theatre and told her that Terence and Nicky were married and that Nicky was pregnant, Juliet fainted. She simply fainted on to the none-too-clean rehearsal room floor, Harry caught her or her head would have hit the heater, their woollen scarves entwined as he knelt awkwardly beside her, lowering her to the floor, blushing not at the warmth from the heater but at his own quite senseless cruelty.