When the curtain went up, I stopped thinking about Wyndham and Mike Papini and started to worry about David and whether he might turn out to be frightful. It was some time since I had seen him in action. He was not frightful: he was very good, and the best thing in it, so that cheered me. The production was mediocre and pageantlike, all fancy dress and robust comic business, but the audience loved it. The only disaster was poor Sophy, who was playing the lead, the clandestine bride herself. She was really bad: she looked enchanting, but she spoke in the most wonderful stilted twentieth-century way imaginable. The art of timing eluded her completely: she dropped other people’s lines with malicious innocence and mistimed her own in the same reckless way. Garrick’s sentences, like most eighteenth-century sentences, tend to be long, and Sophy had so little grasp of syntax that she never appeared to have foreseen the end at the beginning. Even a simple sentence like You see, Mr. Lovewell, the effects of indiscretion was too much for her, and she managed to break it up three times. It was painful to watch her: she was like a good tennis club player who had wandered into Wimbledon. Every time she opened her mouth, for the first three quarters of an hour, Mike muttered “Oh Gawd” and scribbled a note on his programme; and he was about as insensitive to the spoken English dramatic tongue as anyone of his profession could be.

During the interval I saw and briefly spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Scott, who said that they had heard Mary had been to see me and that she and her husband were not there as they were not too much of theatregoers, managing to imply in one breath that they themselves were right to go to first nights, that their daughter and her husband were right to stay away and that I was wrong to be there with a man whom they did not recognize and whom I did not introduce. Mike and I both had a double gin, and on the way back to our seats, as he propelled me through the crush at the second bell, he took hold of my elbow with his large bony fist, clasping it so tightly that he hurt. I was still standing and arranging the folds of my dress when Wyndham, returning to his seat, brushed past me; his dinner-jacketed arm touched my bare arm, and he turned and smiled and said:

“Sorry, Emma. Enjoying yourself?”

“Naturally,” I said, and the lights went down.