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had to conceal from Randall Birley, standing awkwardly at the door, the truth about her emotions. The rage and disgust were too raw and could not be admitted at this point. As to the fear, that might be wrongly ascribed to first night nerves: pride forbade Millie to show more than a conventional apprehension.
    Randall came and put an arm around her shoulder. Normally his slightest touch gave Millie a charge; now she felt nothing.
    T hate her," she was thinking, "Madre is dead and it makes no difference. I still hate her. I always thought I would be free..."
    "Darling, she would be very proud of you' It was not the right thing to say.
    "Madre? So proud that she went and killed herself just before my first night?"
    Randall Birley tightened the arm. "Darling Mill, you've had a horrible, horrible shock, and by the way fuck the first night. Audience, critics, the lot of them. You're going to be terrific. You are terrific'
    Millie turned to him and saw them together reflected in the long mirror. She noticed that Randall had composed himself into an elegant picture of masculine consolation. In her velvet suit and flared trousers, she herself had the air of a Renaissance boy being comforted by his patron, rather than a late-twentieth-century woman in the arms of her lover.
    Suddenly an unbidden image from childhood came to her: her mother, so tiny and feminine, weeping in the arms of a man. It must have been Burgo Smyth; who else would have had Madre in his arms? What scene had she, Millie, interrupted? Had it been a farewell? Or just a common or garden scene? Even as a child, Millie had understood that her mother had a capacity for making scenes. Where on earth did that memory come from? It must have been jolted and stirred from the depths where it had lain for years, by the hideous events of the last twenty-four hours. She put the strange image away from her. Then for the first time it occurred to Millie that Randall, with his height and rugged dark looks resembled Burgo Smyth as she had once known him. Well, it was proverbial that actors and politicians had a lot in common.
    "She jumped," said Millie abruptly. "Madre jumped. She went up to the top of the house some time after we left.
    And jumped from the old nursery balcony." She added: "Madre was terrified of heights. And the dark. She hated the nursery and she hated the cellar. She never went into the nursery and she had the cellar shut up."
    Then Millie started to cry in earnest against the gloriously ruffled shirt which Randall wore with his black velvet dinner jacket. "They found her lying in the square. Madre's last night, my first night, in that order. A dramatic last exit, Olga called it. But then you know what Olga thinks about the theatre." The last was said half laughing, wholly crying. "Dramatic is not a term of praise with my sister Olga. Nor my brother-in-law Holy Harry."
    Millie could see Olga's card on a modest bouquet of pink garnet roses among the first-night flowers on her dressing-table. It read (in a florist's handwriting): "Good luck tonight. Olga and Harry Carter-Fox'. But Olga knew perfectly well the theatrical superstition by which you did not use the words 'good luck' in advance, since Millie had often explained it to her. So maybe Olga had brought the bad luck... If so, Millie had to admit that it was bad luck on Olga too. And on Holy Harry.
    "My poor Harry! On the eve of this very tricky election!" Olga's expressed reaction had been quite as un filial as Millie's. She had even gone further and muttered something about having to cope as usual while Millie enjoyed the applause on stage. Both sisters understood (if Harry did not) that beneath such comments lay not only a deep shared anger at Madre's last exit, but a deep shared guilt. And then there was the fear, which they also shared, about what had happened the night before.
    Images. Madre's hysterical weeping. Her screams turning to little animal-like cries as she staggered round the filthy decaying