They went to bed together on Christmas Eve not too soon after dinner but when they had both had just enough to drink to think it an excellent idea.

There weren’t many preliminaries, he had an erection before they even lay down on her bed; when he did lie down he immediately popped up again. He fumbled at once with something in the pocket of his trousers which lay on an armchair and she saw it was a condom. She hadn’t seen one for years.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, but not loudly, remembering that it was her room they were in and that the walls of the hotel rooms were not designed for indiscriminate fornication. ‘Does this mean I am so old I’ve gone the full circle and am back on condoms again?’

‘Yes,’ he said, breathing heavily, pushing the condom down on himself in a way that reminded her of someone putting on a glove.

‘Listen, I’m part of the Permissive Society. In about 1964 we threw away condoms.’

‘You’ve come out the other side then,’ he said pushing at her with his now rubber-covered penis, ‘welcome to the era of Aids.’

‘I came in at one end with delight at all that freedom’ (and she thought of Anthony and the Pill and how easy it all seemed, as if there were no problems once sex was safe from pregnancy), ‘then I fucked my life away, and, bloody hell, here I am coming out the other end as if the Permissive Society never existed!’

‘Yes yes yes,’ he said, excited by her use of what his wife called the f-word, ‘that’s right, yes, fucked your life away,’ busy pushing against her, entering her (entering, she thought, as they say, as if this part of me is a doorway to a funfair, not the key to my lonely heart. Oh Banjo).

‘Yes yes,’ he repeated, moving faster now, ‘yes yes.’

She moved with him in a spirit of cooperation and Christmas goodwill, her head bumped against the books on the bedside table, the television script and the Shakespeare and the novels.

‘Yes!’ he cried. ‘Ah! Ah! Yes!’ his voice echoing into other, more respectable, Christmas rooms.

And to give him a Christmas lift (but not clutching at the bedhead, she decided that was going too far) she gave a little bit of a gasp and a moan also, entering into the spirit of the thing as best she could, in all the circumstances.

She was an Actress, after all.

*