Even now, it is painful to write about the events of that evening. My heart, still full of the torment David Penn inflicted upon it, will not settle. The words live on the page, pulling me back down into that darkness, as unwelcome memories always do. I wish, despite all that has happened since, that I had never agreed to go to Brighton with him. I wish I had been more suspicious of his too-ready acceptance of my insistence upon separate rooms.

I had been more innocent even than he knew. I had believed, with a naiveté beyond comprehension, that a man would take a woman away for the weekend and be content to meet her each morning in the dining room for breakfast and say good night outside her bedroom door. It still makes me blush to imagine what the hotel clerk must have thought when we registered as an unmarried couple and took separate rooms, albeit with a shared bathroom in between. That we were cousins? Or perhaps colleagues on official business? Or that Miss Williams must be an imbecile? David had called me a “little idiot”, and he was right.

I sat on the bed for a long time, my tears drying on my cheeks. I wiped my eyes and looked at my fingertips; they were smeared with mascara. My actress’s eyes must be a sorry sight. But I could not bear to get up and inspect them in the mirror. I did not want to look at myself. I felt too numb to do anything.

I still did not truly understand why David had done what he had done, but it was clear that I was now mixed up in the sort of affair that was discussed in Haverth only in whispers and never in mixed company or in front of children. There would be two versions of what had occurred in this room tonight – David’s and mine – and no one would believe my version. It would be the word of a … what did people call it? … a floozy, against that of a rich, respected film director. A floozy was an ignorant girl who went with men in order to get nice things – oh God, the bracelet! The dress! The dinners at the Ritz and the Café Royal! And in many people’s minds, as Florence had reminded me, an actress was little better than a prostitute.

I went on sitting there, my dismay increasing. How I wished I had taken more notice of my contract! By agreeing to its terms, whatever they were, I had taken a step into the hidden undertow of a world neither I nor my family understood. But there was no retreating now. I could not face my parents and Frank, and especially Mary and Florence. I could never go back to Haverth and be Sarah Freebody again. And how could I face Jeanette and Maria and Dennis, and all the other film people who knew David and whom I had trusted as I had trusted him? I could not go back to the Thamesbank Hotel and be Clara Hope either.

So where could I go?