‘Oh.’ Molly was very surprised. ‘I never saw one before, how peculiar, doesn’t it hate getting wet?’ The Producer now looked definitely uneasy.

‘Where is it?’ she had asked finally, looking around for a cat.

When she told this part of the story to her friends they accused her of making it up, but she wasn’t. She’d had a rackety and neurotic upbringing in Manchester before going to the Drama Academy but the use of the word ‘pussy’ for anything other than a cat was new to her.

The Producer had made spasmodic lunges at her for the next half-hour pushing against the taffeta petticoat but his heart, after that, wasn’t really in it, especially when she’d stared at him sulkily when he put his old hand on her young breast. She didn’t get the part, if there was a part, but remembered always the smell of the cigar and the aftershave and the way it seemed to linger in her hair long after she’d left Wardour Street.

*

Since that time she’d met many producers and had learnt that often they were neither fat, nor smoked cigars – she’d had affairs with one or two. Lately they were often from Oxford or Cambridge or Edinburgh and were, more and more often, somewhat younger than she was.

On this sunny Monday morning after the drama school reunion she’d been called into an office in Soho to see about a cameo role in a TV film based on the true story of a murder of a young bride in Scotland.

‘A cameo role,’ she groaned to her agent. ‘God I came out of the series to do proper acting!’

‘I know darling,’ said her agent, ‘but I did warn you, and you know the situation as well as I do, work in your age group is scarce; everybody thinks of you as Louise still, and anyway nobody’s interested in middle-aged women.’

‘Wives and mothers, wives and mothers, I know I know, but why, why, when middle-aged men are in their prime?’ But it was a rhetorical question and both of them knew it.

‘Why do we have to go over this Molly? You made the choice against my advice; this is how it is.’ The crisp voice crisped impatiently down the telephone line. ‘Glenda Jackson’s become an MP, Joan Collins started writing novels when she saw her first grey hair, and every single actress who has survived this long is available.’

Molly’s agent, Anastasia Adams (Ltd), was a middle-aged woman herself, and had recently very cruelly, but realistically, divested herself of four other middle-aged actresses on her books, keeping only Molly (who had been a TV star, at least) and a very fat actress who got an enormous amount of work doing voice-overs for adverts, made ninety-five thousand pounds gross in the last financial year, and spent a good part of her time in Ibiza.