She stepped out of the shower, not noticing her body in the long mirror. She wrapped a big green towel around herself and went back to the kitchen, got herself a long glass of orange juice. Cheerful jazz piano filled the kitchen and bright sunshine poured in through the open windows on to the wooden table where a jug of sweet-peas and a bowl of peaches stood by the coffee. It was a beautiful day.

But oh I would love to be working again thought Molly McKenzie.

*

At 10.30 am Juliet Lyall’s personal assistant knocked gently on the bedroom door, entered the room and quietly opened the curtains of the big windows that looked out on to a private Chelsea garden in the sunshine. She carried a tray which she put beside the bed. On the tray was a long glass of hot lemon and water, some fizzing vitamin C in another glass, a multi-vitamin pill, an oestrogen pill and a copy of The Times. And a flower from the garden, this morning a pink and white geranium flower from a plant that never stopped blooming no matter how long the summer went on. Juliet Lyall always insisted on a flower.

The personal assistant put on a CD of the Brahms violin concerto, not too loud, and left the room.

Juliet heard the opening bars of the concerto, opened her eyes. Sunshine again, she closed them quickly, when would this summer be over? She preferred a more gentle light. She felt for the telephone, punched in her agent’s home number.

She noticed her body always felt stiff now when she first woke, something new, some further sign of age. Where was Horton? Why wasn’t he answering his phone at once? She stretched carefully, holding the telephone. Saturday: the girl would be here to give her a massage before the matinée of The Seagull. But then she suddenly remembered: today was the day of the reunion and she’d promised to put in an appearance before the matinée, however brief, because, as one of its most illustrious graduates, she was on the London Academy of Drama’s Council and it would look odd if she wasn’t there.

Damn. The last thing she wanted was to mingle with a lot of ageing out-of-work actors. But it was part of the business, a necessity, it needn’t take long.

‘Hello?’ Horton was eating his breakfast but Juliet didn’t notice.

‘Have you sent it?’ Juliet wasted time on neither introductions nor preliminaries.

‘Yes Juliet, it went last night, it’ll be on his desk by now, his office is in his fabulous house up in the Hollywood Hills where I once had a martini and met Julia Roberts lucky me and I know he’s flying back there tonight.’

‘Horton I want that film, I want that part, you should’ve been able to arrange for me to see him today before he left.’