The party had then broken up. J.G. sustained his new role of knightly concern by taking Gay home. Parry Percival left in a recrudescence of fury occasioned by the Doctor flinging after him a composite Shakesperian epithet: “Get you gone, you dwarf; you minimus, of hindering knot-grass made; you bead, you acorn.” She herself had retired into the wings. The stage-staff had already disappeared. The Doctor and Ben, finding themselves in undisputed possession of the stage, had squared up to each other with the resolution of all-in wrestlers, and she, being desperately tired, had taken the car home and asked their man to return to the theatre for her husband. When she had awakened late in the morning she was told he had already gone out.

“I wish,” a voice cried out in her mind, “I wish to God he’d never come back.”

And at that moment she heard him stumble heavily upstairs.

She expected him to go straight to his room and was dismayed when he came to a halt outside her door and, with a clumsy sound that might have been intended for a knock, opened it and came in. The smell of brandy and cigars came in with him and invaded the whole room. It was more than a year since that had happened.

He walked uncertainly to the foot of the bed and leant on it — and she was frightened of him.

“Hullo,” he said.

“What is it, Ben? I’m resting.”

“I thought you might be interested. There’ll be no more nonsense from John about Gay.”

“Good,” she said.

“He’s calmed down. I got him to see reason.”

“He’s not so bad, really — old John.”

“He’s had some good news from abroad. About the play.”

“Translation rights?”

“Something like that.” He was smiling at her, uncertainly. “You look comfy,” he said. “All tucked up.”

“Why don’t you try and get some rest yourself?” He leant over the foot of the bed and said something under his breath. “What?” she said anxiously. “What did you say?”

“I said it’s a pity Adam didn’t appear a bit sooner, isn’t it? I’m so extraneous.”

Her heart thumped like a fist inside her ribs. “Ben, please,” she said.

“And another thing. Do you both imagine I don’t see through this dresser-cum-understudy racket? Darling, I don’t much enjoy playing the cuckold in your Restoration comedy, but I’m just bloody well furious when you so grossly under-estimate my intelligence. When was it? On the New Zealand tour in 1930?”

“What is this nonsense!” she said breathlessly.

“Sorry. How are you managing to-night? You and Adam?”

“My dear Ben!”

“I’ll tell you. You’re making shift with me for once in a blue moon. And I’m not talking about to-night.”

She recognized this scene. She had dreamt it many times. His face had advanced upon her while she lay inert with terror, as one does in a nightmare. For an infinitesimal moment she was visited by the hope that perhaps after all she had slept and, if she could only scream, would awaken. But she couldn’t scream. She was quite helpless.

Adam Poole’s telephone rang at half past four. He had gone late to rest and was wakened from a deep sleep. For a second or two he didn’t recognize her voice, and she spoke so disjointedly that even when he was broad awake he couldn’t make out what she was saying.

“What is it?” he said. “Helena, what’s the matter? I can’t hear you.”

Then she spoke more clearly and he understood.

At six o’clock the persons in the play began to move towards the theatre. In their lodgings and flats they bestirred themselves after their several fashions: to drink tea or black coffee, choke down pieces of bread and butter that tasted like sawdust, or swallow aspirin and alcohol. This was their zero hour: the hour of low vitality when the stimulus of the theatre and the last assault of nerves was yet to come. By a quarter past six they were all on their way. Their dressers were already in their rooms and Jacko prowled restlessly about the darkened stage. Dr. John James Rutherford, clad in an evening suit and a boiled shirt garnished with snuff, both of which dated from some distant period when he still attended the annual dinners of the B.M.A., plunged into the office and made such a nuisance of himself that Bob Grantley implored him to go away.

At twenty past six the taxi carrying Gay Gainsford and J. G. Darcey turned into Carpet Street. Darcey sat with his legs crossed elegantly and his hat perched on them. In the half-light his head and profile looked like those of a much younger man.

“It was sweet of you to call for me, J.G.,” Gay said unevenly.

He smiled, without looking at her, and patted her hand. I’m always petrified myself,” he said, “on first nights.”

“Are you? I suppose a true artist must be.”

“Ah, youth, youth!” sighed J.G. — a little stagily perhaps, but, if she hadn’t been too preoccupied to notice it, with a certain overtone of genuine nostalgia.

“It’s worse than the usual first-night horrors for me,” she said. “I’m just boxing on in a private hell of my own.”

“My poor child.”

She turned a little towards him and leant her head into his shoulder. “Nice!” she murmured and after a moment: “I’m so frightened of him, J.G.”

With the practised ease of a good actor, he slipped his arm round her. “I won’t have it,” he said. “By God, I won’t! If he worries you again, author or no author—”

“It’s not him,” she said. “Not the Doctor. Oh, I know he’s simply filthy to work with and he does fuss me dreadfully, but it’s not the Doctor really who’s responsible for all my misery.”

“No? Who is then?”

“Uncle Ben!” She made a small wailing noise that was muffled by his coat. He bent his head attentively to listen. “J.G., I’m just plain terrified of Uncle Ben.”

Parry Percival always enjoyed his arrival at the theatre when there was a gallery queue to be penetrated. One raised one’s hat and said: “Pardon me. Thanks so much,” to the gratified ladies. One heard them murmur one’s name. It was a heartening little fillip to one’s self-esteem.

On this occasion the stimulant didn’t work with its normal magic. He was too worried to relish it wholeheartedly. For one thing his row with Dr. Rutherford still lingered like an unpleasant taste in his memory. Apart from the altogether unforgiveable insults the Doctor had levelled at his art, there was one in particular which had been directed at himself as a man and this troubled him deeply. It had almost brought him to the pitch of doing something that he dreaded to do — take stock of himself. Until now he had lived in an indeterminate hinterland, drifting first towards one frontier, then the other, unsure of his impulses and not strongly propelled by them in any one direction. He would, he thought, perhaps have turned out a happier being if he had been born a woman. “Let’s face it,” he thought uneasily, “I’m interested in their kind of things. I’m intuitive and sensitive in their way.” It helped a little to think how intuitive and how sensitive he was. But he was not in any sense a fair target for the sort of veiled insults the Doctor had levelled at him. And as if this weren’t enough of a worry, there was the immediate menace of Clark Bennington. Ben, he thought hotly, was insufferable. Every device by which a second-leading man could make a bit-part actor look foolish had been brought into play during rehearsals. Ben had up-staged him, had flurried him by introducing new business, had topped his lines and, even while he was seething with impotent fury, had reduced him to nervous giggles by looking sideways at him. It was the technique with which a schoolmaster could torture a small boy, and it revived in Parry hideous memories of his childhood.

Only partially restored by the evidence of prestige afforded by the gallery queue, he walked down the stage-door alley and into the theatre. He was at once engulfed in its warmth and expectancy.