She bent over her film script for the next week’s shooting; soon the film would be finished; her performance, they said, was stunning: so infused with a kind of bleak pain that there was talk of Oscars even before the work was over. She knew that this film would probably be the triumph of her career and there would be many many rewards, of a kind. They were the rewards she had dedicated her life to, and she knew they had their own importance.

But on Christmas Day in Los Angeles, above the words on the page of her script, the memory of the young Nicky Abbott hovered. And most of all, the memory of the one man she had loved, Terence Blue.

Juliet Lyall had fooled Bud Martin. It was not age and desire she was playing, but memory: waiting there till she opened her eyes and saw a young face, and blue, blue eyes. The memory of what for almost thirty-five years she had tried so hard to push away with her anger so she would not have to think about it: the memory of youth, and love, and how they were lost.

It was that pain the camera saw.

*

Mabel Kitson tottered back down the steps on Harry’s arm at six o’clock when the taxi came for her, its headlights shining in the dark reflecting the white pavements, picking out the number in the street. She waved and called Merry Christmas as she was driven away.

Harry and Frances sprawled again, dozing sometimes as they talked, the television was still on but with the sound down.

‘She’s amazing, Mabel,’ said Harry.

‘Yes, I think it’s terrific she still feels she can manage on her own. She hasn’t got any money you know, about six hundred and forty pounds in the Abbey National I think.’

‘The vicar’s on to a bad thing then,’ said Harry morosely and Franny smiled into the pink carpet.

After a while, suddenly out of a drifting silence, she said, ‘I saw my ex-husband the other day.’

‘The dentist?’

‘Mmmmmmm.’

‘The laughing dentist?’

‘He wasn’t laughing,’ said Frances, ‘he had a wife and two teenage children and they were in Selfridges.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘I started to walk towards them, just sort of instinctively, but then I kind of stopped. I couldn’t think what I was going to say. It all seems so long ago, as if it wasn’t me, as if – you know, as if there’s nothing inside me of the person that I was when I married him. I couldn’t believe he would recognise me, well I’ve got different coloured hair and I don’t think he ever saw me with my new capped teeth after he punched me, I’d left by then.’

‘You recognised him, he’d have recognised you.’