“Why should I? I know what I want.”

“Do you?”

“On the whole. Yes. On the whole, I think that I do. It’s usually quite straightforward. If other people don’t panic.”

“It’s a good play,” I said.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? I think so. They don’t think so. They all like doing it because they all think they’ve got the best part, though your husband is the only one whos right about thinking it, but they don’t think much of the play. They think it’s a load of rubbish.”

And he sat there for a moment more in the semidarkness, and although I knew it was impossible that he should sit down in this way for no purpose, and impossible that he should make these remarks to anyone just for the sake of the remarks, there was still enough doubt to make me sit hard and clenched and frightened, just in case this was one of those tiny, unexplained loopholes in human behaviour, just in case he was not going in the direction in which I knew that he was going. And doubt being the essence of excitement, I was excited and happy as I sat there. He got up and went a moment afterwards, saying no more, and the rehearsal continued.

At one o’clock in the morning I was still sitting there, and the action of the play had progressed by two acts. I had gathered that Viola White, who was playing Zanche, the black servant, was on the verge of an affair with Neville; that big kind Michael was after thin sad Julian, who did not like to oblige or to disoblige; and that David was going to be very good.

He is sometimes extraordinarily good. I was also more impressed by the play than I had expected to be: it still seemed an odd choice for a festive season, but it had far more real strength and coherence than I had hoped for. I wondered how much of the clear shape and intention were due to Wyndham Farrar, and I hoped much of them, but I am not one of those who can decipher with ease where an actor or a designer or a director has gone locally and specifically right or wrong, at the expense of or to the benefit of the others concerned.