“It is a closed world, that’s precisely how I did manage to get in on it. I had a friend, you know, who happened to be a good photographer. And all that.”

“Lucky you, how terrific. Have you given it up now?”

“I suppose so. Temporarily. After all, there isn’t much scope in Hereford, is there?”

“You could travel up and down.”

“I have two children,” I said, not that I expected the implications to strike home.

“Oh well, yes,” she said, “I suppose you must be quite happy in the house, but I couldn’t exist for a moment in a place like this unless I were working. I would have died this evening if I hadn’t come round here. I can’t face the look of my flat, I really can’t.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “you could carry a couple of platefuls through, and we can get started.”

“Oh, oh yes,” she said, and came away from the wall with a slight swoop. She picked up the nearest two plates and went back into the other room, where no doubt she sat down to eat one of them, as she did not come back to carry any more. And I thought, how pernicious it is, she is now prepared to respect and dislike me, to treat me as a serious and possibly harmful person, and only because she knows that I have some right to exist in a world which she herself would not mind entering; whereas if I had had pretensions to nothing, if I had had no interest in the theatre, in entertainment, in modelling, in television, she would have been quite happy to like me. And I would rather have her dislike than her affection.

In bed that night, when David had switched out the light and we were each of us lying still in our private churning silences, I said to him, “David, did you mean all that about being yourself? Do you really think that it’s enough, just to struggle on at being yourself ?”

“What else can I do?” he said. “I don’t see what else I can do. If I don’t be what I am, then I’m not being anything. And if what I am isn’t good enough, then I’d better find out, hadn’t I? If I fall off somewhere, I want to know where. I don’t want just to get by.”

“But, Dave,” I said, reaching out and taking his hand, “how can it be as simple as that? I know you’re serious about being an actor, I know you want to be a good actor, I know that’s why we’re here, but surely if you take being an actor seriously you ought to pay some attention to what other actors, you know, the great actors, have done?”

“I don’t see why.”