‘Oh – yes. I’d forgotten.’ Pauline looked up suddenly and gave Molly a half-friendly smile. ‘You gave us a bedspread which I chose at Selfridges. It was green, your favourite colour.’ This was the first time the two had spoken openly together since those days. Then Pauline sighed, leant back in the deckchair, closed her eyes. And then, not knowing she was going to say such a thing after thirty years of not saying anything at all, she suddenly said, ‘It messed up my whole career of course.’

‘I know Pauly, I know it did.’

Pauline suddenly sat up and said very fiercely, very strongly, ‘I was better than Anthony.’

‘I know,’ said Molly.

‘God I miss it.’ Pauline’s face was suddenly alive: taut, tense. ‘Actors do get better, the more often they work, and Anthony has worked and worked and worked and got better and better and better while I seem to have stood still, that’s the irony of it all.’

‘I know. But you still work sometimes.’

‘Not much. Less and less. It was as if I – missed my time. There’s always a time, and you have to catch it.’

‘Except that if you’re our age and you’re a woman,’ said Molly, ‘there’s nothing much to catch any more. Look at Anthony and Terence and Harry Donaldson and all the other men in their fifties – in their prime – playing wonderful leads. But we’re considered old.’

Pauline sat back in the deckchair, but the tension was still there in her face. ‘I know. I know. At least I can be an old antiques dealer.’

‘What happened to the old days?’ said Molly wistfully. ‘Think of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford, they didn’t have to become MPs or retire gracefully, they were valued, films were built round them, even as they got older, so of course they still looked good.’

Pauline nodded. ‘Barbara Stanwyck,’ she added.

‘Last year,’ Molly went on, ‘last year I was invited to attend a workshop of actresses, and we worked on Hamlet, just for fun, just to see how it would be. I played Claudius – not boring old middle-aged Gertrude which I’ve played twice but Claudius, powerful middle-aged Claudius – and the thrill, oh God, I can’t tell you the thrill of all that wonderful, powerful poetry coming out of my mouth.’

‘But of course,’ said Pauline:

‘There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood;

And, I do doubt, the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger; which for to prevent,

I have in quick determination

Thus set it down: he shall with speed to

England...’

Molly looked at her in great surprise. ‘How do you know it?’

‘But my dear I know Claudius and I know Iago and I know Benedict and I know Macbeth,’ said Pauline dryly. ‘I know all the wonderful parts. Who do you think hears Anthony’s lines?’