Nicky Abbott lived, now, by the sea. Long ago, when she was briefly one of the most famous and glittering young actresses in England, when anything seemed possible and her star shone, she and her new husband had bought a house in Brighton.

Laurence Olivier had suggested it while in some theatre green room where a lot of actors sat together. Dear people it is an actors’ haven, and breathing the sea into our lungs is good for us all. And what’s more, he rolled his rrrs and ended in a declamatory tone known to half the British public from his film of Henry V, I’ve arranged kippers for breakfast on the early morning train to London.

Nicky Abbott’s house had been let for years, had grown shabby as successive tenants had passed through. One lot had painted the kitchen and bathroom walls orange. Nicky, now, very slowly, was redecorating her house.

‘How are you Nicky?’ said the social worker. ‘Managing all right are we?’

‘I think I’m managing,’ said Nicky in the dark, smoky voice.

‘Using the supermarket and the library all right? Managing the money?’

‘I’ve always known how to do that,’ said Nicky. She had done the shopping since she was eleven, when her mother first became ill. She was the one who’d actually arranged to buy this house in Brighton because the man she was to marry was away working. It was silly to think people would forget such skills just because, when they came back, everything cost more and there was decimalisation. She wasn’t a fool.

‘How do you feel Nicky?’ said the community psychiatric nurse.

‘I feel all right.’

‘Taking your medication?’

‘Yes.’

But it wasn’t true. She had stopped.

She didn’t say that, even with medication, being in the house had brought the memories back, sharp and clear. The things she had been cured of.

She didn’t say that she knew Terence Blue would come.

Neighbours didn’t know who this grey-haired woman was, they were new, they saw her sometimes up ladders, sometimes staring down at the sea, smoking a cigarette. These old and beautiful Georgian houses were in a crescent that encircled grass, away from where most of the tourists trampled as they poured out of the railway station and down to the sea-front and the fish and chip shops.

Sometimes the neighbours saw that she seemed to stare oddly at the grass, as if puzzling about something.