‘Oh Pauly, we read all the time! Look at us: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Tennessee Williams, Euripides, George Bernard Shaw, John Osborne, we never stop reading.’ Molly waved a chip in the evening air before she ate it. ‘And also, we’re learning about ourselves—’ but then Molly stopped. ‘No. No, maybe that’s not right. I’m not absolutely certain—’

‘What?’ said Pauline, screwing up the newspaper, wiping her hands on it but stopping in the street also, looking at her best friend.

Molly stood still, grappling intuitively with something she didn’t yet understand. ‘I’m not certain Pauly,’ she said slowly, ‘that acting is how we find out about – about how our hearts work.’

*

Afterwards, after Pauline found out about Anthony and Molly, after that time of tears and treachery and pain, the two women still inadvertently met: at work, at first nights, or socially like at the Bonham’s garden parties to which all the members of the old class were always automatically invited. Once when Viola was a little girl she’d played Molly’s daughter in a TV series and in those days had called her Auntie Moll. So they had met, these old friends, every now and then, and they talked and smiled politely. And between them, always unspoken: this betrayal, which lay like a knife that sometimes twisted still, in a corner of Pauline’s soul.

But she wore a mask, that hid her heart.

She was extremely thrown nevertheless when the phone rang on the summer Monday afternoon so many years later and it was Molly.

‘Pauline, it’s Molly, I know this is a bit of a surprise, oh dear,’ and she gave a little nervous half-laugh, ‘I’ve sort of had a shock I – I think I was phoning Anthony but, Pauline, you’re probably more sensible and more use, have you seen today’s Standard yet?’

‘No. What?’ Why is Molly phoning me after all these years? What can have happened? Visions of Anthony, falling on his face on the Royal Shakespeare Company stage, drunk or dead.

‘You remember Terence Blue?’

‘What a silly question.’ Pauline had also kissed Terence Blue many times while at drama school but had not approved of Molly’s loss of virginity to him: Pauline had believed that love and sex and marriage were forever. Molly knew that.

‘He’s been charged with rape.’

‘Good God!’

‘It seems to have been after the reunion – well they mention the reunion in the paper – maybe it was someone at the reunion if you can believe such a thing. Anyway why didn’t you come Pauly, on Saturday?’ Pauly.

‘We had a dinner party.’