Yet another media circus, she thought angrily, yet another attack on the luvvies. Izzy had recently read a newspaper article entitled ‘The Perils of Show Business’ that counted how many actors had gone mad and she had thought, smiling grimly to herself, and that’s only the ones they know about. She had taken to counting the number of derogatory stories that appeared in the newspapers about actors. But most stories weren’t about acting at all: the love lives of soap stars, an actor running away from a play in the West End, grand divorce announcements to the press as if actors thought they were royalty, Hugh Grant on Sunset Boulevard – drugs, sex and rock and roll, not acting.

She parked her bicycle as usual on Waterloo Bridge. She had talked to the actresses in her dressing room about the reunion; they would not have forgotten. She took off her helmet, walked slowly down the concrete steps and entered through the stage door of the National Theatre. She skimmed the noticeboards, checked that the people she was understudying had arrived: Hello darling, OK? See you later. She got to the dressing room first, sat down and began to work carefully on a tapestry cushion cover. At first, when she began understudying, she had tried to read, tried to teach herself Spanish even, in these long, long spells in dressing rooms. But she had learnt many years ago that that kind of concentration was not possible, that one’s ear was always half-tuned to the performance coming through the tannoy. She now made lots and lots of cushion covers and had begun to sell them, in a small craft shop in Archway. She would appear only in Act III this afternoon, no point in putting on the corset yet.

The two other actresses burst into the dressing room talking about Terence Blue, almost gasping with the thrill of such a drama in their already dramatic profession; first Hugh Grant and now this! One of them, clutching the Evening Standard, looked excitedly at Izzy.

‘You were there on Saturday Izzy, weren’t you.’

‘Yes.’ Izzy bent over her cushion cover with great concentration.

‘God! You said he was there didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Izzy plied her needle.

‘Did you – talk to him?’

‘Yes I did actually. I know him quite well. We were in the same class at drama school, and we both had religious problems.’

‘Religious?’

‘Yes.’

‘You and Terence Blue?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We both came from religious families. We knew what it was like.’

The calls came over the tannoy, the girls threw on their costumes, still chattering excitedly and looking at Izzy with new interest. They were young and doing their understudying and playing their small parts in the big company as their first job, seeing it as the first step on a shining upwardly reaching ladder; Izzy knew they looked at her as a middle-aged failure coming down.

‘Izzy?’

‘Yes?’