It was at a party that this meeting took place; the party was given by a rather classy television director, for whom David had just played a flashy and well-paid role, and it took place in a top-story flat in Hampstead, with the most miraculous falling, fading view from its windows. David and I were just chatting with this man’s wife, a lady in purple trousers, when Wyndham Farrar approached us; I recognized him because I had seen him on television the week before talking about the theatre in the provinces, in some programme on the arts. What a world it is, where everyone’s face is continually before one, the loved and the forgotten and the about-to-be-loved, all there, falsely thrust upon one’s memory every night of the week. No wonder that I wanted to get my face on that dark receiving box myself, to join that intricate pattern, the celluloid drama that is played out there every night at the discretion of the programme arrangers: Sophy Brent and Wyndham Farrar and David Evans, my husband, and that bland-faced woman that should have been me.

Wyndham looked better in real life than on film, unlike my handsome husband: his face had seemed too large and shapeless for the screen, but in the flesh it had a bashed-about, deeply folded vigour and its shapelessness seemed to have planes of complexity which the camera had not shown. He was the same height as David, which is not as high by an inch as me, and thickset; one might say even fat, had he not been so broadly built. He had a thoroughgoing masculinity: his whole shape lacked any attempt at grace, and his clothes hung on him coarsely like appendages. He was the other end of the scale from our host, who was a long-shanked, carefully dressed, delicate gentleman. I preferred the look of Wyndham, who came up to us and said to this man’s wife, with the broad, self-possessed complacency of importance:

“Hello, Kate. Introduce me to this clever young man, will you?”

The wife introduced David and, inevitably, me. Wyndham did not so much as cast a glance in my direction, except when he took my hand: his eyes swept perfunctorily over my form and left it at that. I did not blame him. I would have done the same myself. I knew that I was disqualified. He congratulated David on his performance in this woman’s husband’s play, and they talked about it a little. Then Wyndham said:

“What about coming to Hereford with me next year?”

“What for?” said David.

“Oh, for the Festival,” said Wyndham. “Didn’t you know about the Festival? A nice new theatre I’m going to have, and if I get my own way I’m going to do some nice interesting plays. I can even think of a fine of parts waiting for you. You’re just the kind of person we want down there.”