We did not mention Marjorie again, but she remained in my thoughts. When the waiter offered pudding and coffee I refused, thanked Aidan for dinner and bade him good night. He stood politely when I rose from the table. As I left the dining room I could feel him looking at me. Once in my room I threw my fur onto the bed, took off my hat and studied my reflection.

Striking. What did Aidan mean by the word? And when he used it to describe Marjorie, did he mean that I was not striking? I had called her glamorous, which I was sure I was not. So what was I?

David had said I was beautiful, though neither Aidan nor I had used this word to describe Marjorie. Was being beautiful different from being striking or glamorous? Marjorie and I were both young women – I estimated her age at twenty-three or -four – who took care of our appearance. We had both abandoned the long hair of our childhood for the “bob”, though Marjorie’s was a sleeker, shorter cut than mine and heavily bleached. I turned my head from side to side. Did glamour lie in bleached hair? She and I both wore cosmetics on our faces, though I had not gone as far as to pluck my eyebrows and paint them on in a more fashionable position, as I had noticed she had done. Did that make her striking?

I leaned on the dressing-table, cupping my chin in my hands. My hair could perhaps do with a tidy-up: as it was curlier than Marjorie’s and more liable to unruliness. But I could not see any further improvement I could make to my appearance. I could not change the colour of my eyes or the darkness of my lashes and brows, or the shape of my lips. My nose, which I now considered more carefully than I had ever done before, was exactly like Mam’s: short and unobtrusive, with small nostrils. It looked all right on her. Did it look all right on me? And would it look all right on a big screen, high above the audience’s heads?

Exposure, ridicule, censure. I looked away from the mirror.

All actresses must feel like this, I reasoned. Marjorie Cunningham must feel like this. Even Lilian Hall-Davis must feel like this. I put my hand over my heart, feeling it beating under my breast. The thought of Marjorie’s heart beating under her breast made me feel uncertain. She might be striking and glamorous, and maybe even beautiful, but she did not seem real. She was like something inanimate, designed by another hand.

David’s, perhaps?

I stole another glance at my reflection. My face was its usual pale self, but there was resolve in its expression. I would not allow David to prefer Marjorie, or any other woman, to me. Ignore her, I told myself. Show David that you scarcely noticed that he left with her without even introducing us.

I would not be so childish as to have a moment’s anxiety. David had taken me to the Ritz; he had kissed me beside the car; he had told me I was beautiful. In his company I felt grown-up, alive and sophisticated. Aidan, who made me feel like the eighteen-year-old I was, was just jealous. He had asked me to dinner because he was trying to get me to become his … I hesitated even to think of the word he had used about Marjorie and David … lover. It was not a word used at home. There, you could be a man’s “lady friend” or, less approvingly, his “fancy woman”. “Lover” conjured up connotations of illicit affairs. But David was the only man I wanted to be my “gentleman friend”. And surely – even in Aidan’s cynical estimation – beautiful trumped striking and glamorous every time.