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so busy with pantomime rehearsals that he wouldn’t be able to get home for his tea. Too busy to get home for his tea, but not too busy to take the afternoon off, apparently, and not, from the look she had seen on his assistant’s face, on his own.
    Where was he now? Shacked up in some cheap hotel room with an even cheaper little slut, if she knew her husband.
    She wasn’t going to cry. Big plain women like her didn’t cry; it made them look even uglier than they already were. Besides, she was all cried outover her husband and her marriage. How could she not be when she knew what Con was and what a fool she had been to marry him?
    Properly taken in by him at first, she’d been, and no mistake, a big gawky plain motherless girl, whose father had made himself a nice bit of money as a theatrical agent and who had died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving it all to her, his only child.
    Con had come round to offer his condolences. She could remember now how her heart had thrilled when she had opened the door of the tall double-fronted Victorian terraced house at the top end of Wavertree Village where she had lived all her life, and seen him standing on the step.
    She had never seen such a good-looking man and she had certainly never had one calling on her.
    Six months later they were married. Con had insisted that it wasn’t disrespectful and that it was what her father would have wanted.
    She had been so besotted with him by then that she would have agreed to anything, given him anything, she acknowledged. And of course she had already done both. Better for them to marry quickly just in case anything should happen, he had told her after the night he had got her so inebriated on sherry that she hadn’t even realised they were upstairs and in her bedroom with him undressing her until it was too late.
    She had been grateful to him then, too stupid to realise what it was he was really after and why he was doing what he was doing to her.
    Of course, that had all stopped once they weremarried and he had what he wanted, which had been access to her father’s money. Her father had more sense than her, though, and he had put most of it safely away in investments, bonds and things, and a bit of a trust fund that couldn’t be touched. And that brought her in a good income even now. Good enough to keep Con still married to her, that was for sure. Married to her but bedding other women – younger, prettier women. And they, for all their pretty faces and slender bodies, were no better at seeing through him than she had been herself. Actresses, chorus girls, singers, those were the kind that appealed to Con. Just as she had done, they took one look at that handsome face of his, those laughing eyes, that slow curling smile, that thick dark hair and those broad shoulders, and they were smitten.
    Con knew all the ways there were to make a woman fall in love with him and then break her heart. He had certainly broken hers more than once in the early days, with his protestations that it was her he loved, and his pleas for forgiveness.
    But not even Con’s unfaithfulness had broken her heart quite as painfully and irreparably as the discovery that she could not have children.
    Emily loved children. She had ached for babies of her own, dreamed of them, longed for them and cried the most bitter of tears for her inability to conceive.
    Now, a sound in the alleyway caught her attention. It often seemed to Emily that the stage door to the theatre was symbolic of theatrical life itself. The face it showed to the world on the main streetwas the face it wanted to be known by. Out in the front of house, where people queued to pay and watch the show, everything was shiny and smart, but go backstage, use the entrance those who worked within the theatre used, and it was a different story: peeling paint, a narrow alleyway blocked by bins, guarded by marauding cats and sometimes, poor buggers, the odd tramp poking around hoping to find something to