“That’s the ticket,” he said. “Dry ’em orf, shall we?”

He advanced upon her and squatted to gather up the shoes. His hand, large and prehensile, with a life of its own, darted out and closed over her foot “ ’Ow abaht yer stockings?”

Martyn felt not only frightened but humiliated and ridiculous — wobbling, dead tired, on one foot. It was as if she were half-caught in some particularly degrading kind of stocks.

She said: “Look here, you’re a good chap. You’ve been terribly kind. Let me get on with the job.”

His grip slackened. He looked up at her without embarrassment, his thin London face sharp with curiosity. “O.K.,” he said. “No offence meant Call it a day, eh?”

“Call it a day.”

“You’re the boss,” he said, and got to his feet He put her shoes down in front of the gas fire and went to the door. “Live far from ’ere?” he asked. A feeling of intense desolation swept through her and left her without the heart to prevaricate.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to find somewhere. There’s a women’s hostel near Paddington, I think.”

“Broke?”

“I’ll be all right, now I’ve got this job.”

His hand was in his pocket. “ ’Ere,” he said.

“No, no. Please.”

“Come orf it. We’re pals, ain’t we?”

“No, really. I’m terribly grateful but I’d rather not. I’m all right.”

“You’re the boss,” he said again, and after a pause: “I can’t get the idea, honest I can’t. The way you speak and be’ave and all. What’s the story? ’Ard luck or what?”

“There’s no story, really.”

“Just what you say yourself. No questions asked.”

He opened the door and moved into the passage. “Mind,” he said over his shoulder, “it’s against the rules but I won’t be rahnd again. My mate relieves me at eight ack emma but I’ll tip ’im the wink if it suits you. Them chairs in the Greenroom’s not bad for a bit of kip and there’s the fire. I’ll turn it on. Please yerself, a-course.”

“Oh,” she said, “could I? Could I?”

“Never know what you can do till you try. Keep it under your titfer, though, or I’ll be in trouble. So long. Don’t get down’earted. It’ll be all the same in a fahsand years.”

He had gone. Martyn ran into the passage and saw his torchlight bobbing out on the stage. She called after him: “Thank you — thank you so much! I don’t know your name, but thank you and good night.”

“Badger’s the name,” he said, and his voice sounded hollow in the empty darkness. “Call me Fred.”

The light bobbed out of sight. She heard him whistling for a moment and then a door slammed and she was alone.

With renewed heart she turned back to her job.

At ten o’clock she had finished. She had traversed with diligence all the hazards of fatigue: the mounting threat of sleep, the clumsiness that makes the simplest action an ordeal, the horror of inertia and the temptation to let go the tortured muscles and give up, finally and indifferently, the awful struggle.

Five carefully ironed dresses hung sheeted against the walls, the make-up was laid out on the covered dressing-shelf. The boxes were stacked away, the framed photographs set out. It only remained to buy roses in the morning for Miss Helena Hamilton. Even the vase was ready and filled with water.

Martyn leant heavily on the back of a chair and stared at two photographs of the same face in a double leather case. They were not theatre photographs but studio portraits, and the face looked younger than the face in the Greenroom: younger and more formidable, with the mouth set truculently and the gaze withdrawn. But it had the same effect on Martyn. Written at the bottom of each of these photographs, in a small incisive hand, was: Helena from Adam, 1950. “Perhaps,” she thought, “he’s married to her.”

Hag-ridden by the fear that she had forgotten some important detail, she paused in the doorway and looked round the room. No, she thought, there was nothing more to be done. But as she turned to go she saw herself, cruelly reflected in the long cheval-glass. It was not, of course, the first time she had seen herself that night; she had passed before the looking-glasses a dozen times and had actually polished them, but her attention had been ruthlessly fixed on the job in hand and she had not once focussed her eyes on her own image. Now she did so. She saw a girl in a yellow sweater and dark skirt with black hair that hung in streaks over her forehead. She saw a white, heart-shaped face with smudges under the eyes and a mouth that was normally firm and delicate but now drooped with fatigue. She raised her hand, pushed the hair back from her face and stared for a moment or two longer. Then she switched off the light and blundered across the passage into the Greenroom. Here, collapsed in an armchair with her overcoat across her, she slept heavily until morning.

Martyn slept for ten hours. A wind got up in the night and found its way into the top of the stagehouse at the Vulcan. Up in the grid old back-cloths moved a little and, since the Vulcan was a hemp-house, there was a soughing among the forest of ropes. Flakes of paper, relics of some Victorian snowstorm, were dislodged from the top of a batten and fluttered down to the stage. Rain, driven fitfully against the theatre, ran in cascades down pipes and dripped noisily from ledges into the stage-door entry. The theatre mice came out, explored the contents of paste-pots in the sink-room and scuttled unsuccessfully about a covered plate of tongue and veal. Out in the auditorium there arose at intervals a vague whisper, and in his cubby-hole off the dock Fred Badger dozed and woke uneasily. At one o’clock he went on his rounds. He padded down corridors, flicking his torchlight on framed sketches for décor and costumes, explored the foyer and examined the locked doors of the offices. He climbed the heavily carpeted stairs and, lost in meditation, stood for a long time in the dress circle among shrouded rows of seats and curtained doorways. Sighing dolorously he returned backstage and made a stealthy entrance onto the set. Finally he creaked to the Greenroom door and, impelled by who knows what impulse, furtively opened it.

Martyn lay across the chair, her knees supported by one of its arms and her head by the other. The glow from the gas fire was reflected in her face. Fred Badger stood for quite a long time eyeing her and scraping his chin with calloused fingers. At last he backed out, softly closed the door and tiptoed to his cubby-hole, where he telephoned the fire-station to make his routine report.

At dawn the rain stopped and cleaning-vans swept the water down Carpet Street with their great brushes. Milk-carts clinked past the Vulcan and the first bus roared by. Martyn heard none of them. She woke to the murmur of the gas fire, and the confused memory of a dream in which someone tapped gently at a door. The windowless room was still dark but she looked at her watch in the fire-glow and found it was eight o’clock. She got up stiffly, crossed the room and opened the door on grey diffused daylight A cup of tea with a large sandwich balanced on it had been left on the floor of the passage. Underneath it was a torn scrap of paper on which was scrawled: Keep your pecker up matey see you some more.

With a feeling of gratitude and timid security she breakfasted in the Greenroom, and afterwards explored the empty passage, finding at the far end an unlocked and unused dressing-room. To this room she brought her own suitcase and here, with a chair propped under the door-handle, she stripped and washed in icy water. In clean clothes, with her toilet complete, and with a feeling of detachment, as if she herself looked on from a distance at these proceedings, she crossed the stage and went out through the side door and up the alleyway into Carpet Street.