As soon as I got back to the hotel I went to my room and slammed the door. And then, I am ashamed to admit, I sprawled on the bed and cried. I had been so certain that David liked me. I had even persuaded myself that he would fall in love with me and that we would be married and live on the French Riviera, or wherever film stars lived. But his attentions to me might as well not have happened. It was as if we had acted a scene, and now that it was over he had forgotten all about it.

He was interested in people like Marjorie Cunningham and the jewelled women who had greeted him at the Ritz, who hovered around the actors who hovered around me. But I did not care about any of these people with their shiny cars and cigarette holders and slicked-down hair, who looked like puppets when they danced that stupid dance that involved putting your knees together and kicking up your legs. I only cared about David. He would not make a fool of himself doing that dance, I was sure. He was sensible, grown-up and clever, and so beautiful that my heart raced whenever I looked at him.

These thoughts brought on a new bout of tears. When I had recovered a little I went to the basin in the corner of my room, washed my face and gave my reflection a stern talking to. Of course he likes sophisticated women. He knows tons of people. He’s a well-known film director. He has a house on an island and is a member of a London gentlemen’s club. He is so much older and wiser and more desirable than you, Sarah Freebody. However can you think he might love you?

But lecturing myself did not stop my love. Love is beyond logic; it is a kind of lunacy that rationality cannot penetrate. David had shown me attention, but he had given no sign of being in love with me. That was no barrier to my longing, though. I yearned for more nights like the one at the Ritz, when he had been so attentive and called me “princess”. And such fervent longing is so deeply painful, it is as close to madness as love itself.

I dreaded the darkness. Summer was fading; leaves were thick on the lawns in the hotel grounds and on the roadsides. Tomorrow morning I would rise before dawn, and tomorrow evening I would return in a different, dusky September darkness. But every day, I lived in a darkness of my own making, at the bottom of a deep well of impossible, irrepressible love.