He had had time to think: he was calm now, Martins not Rollo was in the ascendant. When a light went out in one of the windows and an actress descended into the passage where he walked, he didn’t even turn to take a look. He was done with all that. He thought, Kurtz is right. They are all right. I’m behaving like a romantic fool. I’ll just have a word with Anna Schmidt, a word of commiseration, and then I’ll pack and go. He had quite forgotten, he told me, the complication of Mr Crabbin.

A voice over his head called ‘Mr Martins’, and he looked up at the face that watched him from between the curtains a few feet above his head. It wasn’t a beautiful face, he firmly explained to me, when I accused him of once again mixing his drinks. Just an honest face; dark hair and eyes which in that light looked brown; a wide forehead, a large mouth which didn’t try to charm. No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins, of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life. She said, ‘Will you come up, please? The second door on the right.’

There are some people, he explained to me carefully, whom one recognizes instantaneously as friends. You can be at ease with them because you know that never, never will you be in danger. ‘That was Anna,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure whether the past tense was deliberate or not.

Unlike most actresses’ rooms this one was almost bare; no wardrobe packed with clothes, no clutter of cosmetics and grease-paints; a dressing-gown on the door, one sweater he recognized from Act II on the only easy chair, a tin of half-used paints and grease. A kettle hummed softly on a gas ring. She said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Someone sent me a packet last week – sometimes the Americans do, instead of flowers, you know, on the first night.’

‘I’d like a cup,’ he said, but if there was one thing he hated it was tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, ‘I never quite understand why English people like tea.’

He drank his cupful quickly like a medicine and watched her gingerly and delicately sip at hers. He said, ‘I wanted very much to see you. About Harry.’

It was the dreadful moment; he could see her mouth stiffen to meet it.

‘Yes?’

‘I had known him twenty years. I was his friend. We were at school together, you know, and after that – there weren’t many months running when we didn’t meet …’

She said, ‘When I got your card, I couldn’t say no. But there’s nothing really for us to talk about, is there? – nothing.’