‘Oh Jesus!’ said Molly and impulsively she leant over and touched Pauline on the arm and Pauline closed her hand over Molly’s, as she had done so long ago.

For just a moment the two old friends sat very still in the sunny garden. Then Pauline took her hand away, leant back.

‘Well – Anthony’s succeeded; my career’s more or less over now. And anyway I understood all this long ago – I became a realist and stopped hoping. I saw what it is for women, how destructive except for the lucky few. And even destructive for the lucky few, look at Juliet Lyall, a walking disaster if ever I saw one – those watchful eyes and that funny marriage to that weird stockbroker who’s always abroad and no children.’

‘Not everyone wants children,’ said Molly.

‘So I found other things. I make a lot of money from my antique shop you know. And the children have given me lots and lots of joy, after all.’

But suddenly Molly shivered again, as if she were ill; suddenly remembered one grey, cold November afternoon visiting Pauline in Vauxhall, out of work. How they’d gone to do some shopping, in their shabby coats and the baby Portia in a second-hand pram; how they’d passed the school crossing, the lollipop lady, all the mothers in the drizzling rain, waiting for school to come out as it grew winter dark, standing there. Like Molly’s mother used to stand, waiting. And suddenly a feeling of such depression as she’d never felt in her life had shaken Molly and she had stared at her best friend, pushing the pram. Never, never never this, for me Molly had vowed to herself, never never never never never never never as she and Pauline and the baby in the pram moved on in the grey afternoon, past the mothers, past Woolworth’s, past the vegetables spilling on to the pavement from the Indian shop, past the people standing at bus stops in the rain.

From that grey afternoon on Molly was sure: only her work as an actress was real, she would never be trapped like Pauline. It was almost as if (she suddenly thought now) it was because of her best friend Pauline that she had made her choices, as if Pauline’s life had shaped Molly’s. She arranged, almost at once then because it was 1966 and it was easy at last, to go on the Pill. It was soon after that she had got the contract for Birmingham. It was only natural that she and Anthony, graduates together, playing leads together now, would gravitate towards each other: within a week their tumultuous affair had already begun.

‘I’d better go,’ said Molly, standing up abruptly, and the warmth of the afternoon was broken.

Pauline peered up at her from her deckchair, squinting against the sun. ‘And what about Terence?’