When she had suggested to Joseph Wain that they might get a very famous film star instead of Anthony to play the British Prime Minister in The Immoralists, Joseph had looked at her in some bewilderment. When she had told him that she thought she might get Terence Blue to agree to play the part, if she appeared as a witness in his defence at his rape trial and said he was impotent, Joseph’s mouth actually dropped open in astonishment and he looked disbelieving and dazed at the turn of the conversation. When the full implications of what she was suggesting hit him his hand went for his mobile telephone. Wait, she had commanded, I’ll have to talk to Terence first, and he’ll only agree if it looks like he’ll be convicted and if he thinks it will stop Nicky Abbott being brought to trial. I’ve got a lot of talking to do.

This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of, I’ll come with you, Joseph Wain had said, and his car had met hers in Darlington and followed her to the remote farmhouse where Terence was living.

And now she, Pauline O’Brien, was to be in this incredible television series, she and Terence Blue, the golden boy who had kissed her on the stairs when she was young. Those few days before she left England she couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing pictures of Terence and herself smiling at each other.

The part was fantastic, the secretly good and courageous woman amongst all the immoralists, she had six fat draft scripts on the table beside her bed on the island of Maui. She had forgotten that wonderful feeling, of a pile of scripts waiting to be brought to life. She read them, immersed herself in them, her creative work already beginning. She would be filming in Africa and Europe and Asia and Tonga and America. At last she would be working again as an actress. She would be alone, but she would be working. Her life, since that morning of the reunion when she stared out at the river in her blue silk dressing gown, had changed completely.

And so, of course, had Anthony’s.

He would find at last what it felt like to have his security taken away from him, at work and at home. She shook her head wryly, it would be a difficult adjustment: he liked ironed underwear and shiny bathroom taps and shopping lists. But of course he would manage, somehow.