But when Izzy (already in love with a shy schoolteacher called Peter, already thinking tremulously of marriage, children, a future) asked Emmy Lou what she thought about the dark-haired boy Emmy had looked impatient. Of course he’s nice Izzy but of course I can’t get seriously involved with anyone. And she had bent over the next play to be learnt.

Izzy, whose heart fluttered with joy and longing when she kissed Peter in dark corners in Salisbury in the night, couldn’t understand Emmy Lou. Because I’m an actress, said Emmy simply, and that is all that is important to me. There will be time enough for other things later on.

But they were already twenty-four, Izzy had thought. When would later on be?

An impatient lorry-driver hooted at her at a corner along the Strand. She did what she always did: smiled and rang her bell, a plump middle-aged helmeted lady on a bicycle.

And another deeper, more disturbing thought haunted her sometimes still: had she fallen in love with Peter so easily, so quickly, because she had discovered she would never be the actress she’d once hoped she would be?

It was that kind of profession: it sucked you in, made you hope and dream, then rewarded you with nightmares and jealousies and insecurities. And even if you were really talented it let you down because there were no rules, no exams to tell you that you had passed, that you were qualified – only luck, and how you looked, and who you knew, and where you happened to be.

And most of the time you were frightened. Frightened when you were working that it would all go wrong; frightened when you weren’t working that you would never work again. Because this was the most overcrowded profession in the world and no one not in the profession, no one not an actor themselves, really understood the day to day lives and the waste of the people who had stood speaking too loudly in the smoky music room, the class of ’59.