When we got back to the flat I spread my purchases out on the bed. Although they were lovely, especially the striped cardigan, it gave me an uneasy feeling to see them lying there, waiting to be worn and admired. David had bought me things, spending money for no other reason than to woo me and use me for his own ends. I wondered if I would ever wear the beaded dress or the bracelet again. I was so glad he had not bought me my beloved fox fur! But the clothes spread before me now, which Aidan had paid for without demur, served to point up the difference between the two men. Aidan seemed to care nothing for the trappings of the film business, which were so important to David. Aidan lived modestly, employing no housekeeper, possessing no motor car. His clothes were good but few, and some of them were so old they made him look quite poverty stricken. He smoked and drank, that was true, but not cigars and champagne. He didn’t go to nightclubs or casinos and had seemed uncomfortable that night at the club, and not just because Simona had been flirting with him. It was as if he wished to distance himself from the unabashed acquisition, and display, of wealth.

And yet he must come from a wealthy family. I pondered over this. David had ruined Aidan’s mother in more ways than one; he had taken her reputation and her fortune. I thought about the cruise she had been on when she died. “Someone suggested” she take it, Aidan had said. Had the “someone” also paid for it? What had she felt like, boarding the ship at Tilbury, embracing her son, then watching him go back down the gangplank and join the crowd on the dock to wave goodbye?

What had been in Aidan’s mind, and in his heart? Did his disgust with David extend to disgust with the entire business of acting and making films to the extent that he was considering giving up altogether?

There was a knock on the door and I heard Aidan’s voice. “Are you changing, or can I come in?”

“Oh, I’ll come out!” I began to fold the new clothes back into their tissue paper. If he saw them arrayed like this, he might think I was as obsessed by clothes as the people he despised. “Just a minute!”

When I opened the door I noticed he’d gone into the kitchen, where he stood with a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other. “I would have brought this to you in your boudoir, madam, you know,” he said with the sort of arch look beloved of stage actors. “Madam likes red, does she not?”

“Yes, please.”

I perched on the kitchen stool, hugging my knees. I had to make myself as small as possible because the kitchen was not designed to contain more than one person at a time. Aidan poured us each a glass of wine and held his up. “Chin chin.” We clinked glasses. “To Italy.”