We caught the train to Dover, where we boarded what seemed to me an enormous ship, as impressive as an ocean liner, though Aidan said it was only a cross-channel ferry. But I was fascinated and awed by the Maid of Kent. It was too windy and wet to stay outside on deck, so Aidan led me down some steep steps to the first class lounge. It resembled a hotel foyer, carpeted and surrounded by large windows. Nestled in a chair as close to one of these windows as possible, I pressed my nose to the glass, eager to take in everything that passed.

Not much did. The windy weather whipped the waves into spray, riming the windows with salt. I saw some brave people battling to walk the deck but did not envy them. “Probably sick,” said Aidan when I pointed them out. “Fresh air apparently helps the old mal de mer. Do you feel all right?”

“Perfectly, thank you.”

“Then you won’t mind if I smoke?”

It was unusual for him to ask. “Not at all.”

When he was settled with his cigarette, I picked up the copy of the Tatler magazine that had been left on the table for the occupants of the first class lounge and began to flick through the pages. It was a magazine for rich people, full of photographs of society women in ball gowns. I liked to look at the fashionable clothes and the interiors in which the pictures were taken. Did aristocratic people really live in such places?

The faces of the women, and sometimes the men, fascinated me. Since my entry into the film-making world I had discovered a good deal about how make-up and costume could alter someone’s appearance, but it was still astonishing to see how the camera captured something that was not real. Although the caption on the photograph reported the person’s name, and often their parentage, their faces were like ghosts’, pale-cheeked and dark-eyed, with a look both haughty and haunting as they posed in silk dresses and rows of pearls. It reminded me how little of me – the real person – the cinema audience would ever see. To them I would be as ghostly and two dimensional as these visions in the magazine.

I began a sigh, but it turned into a gasp. I sat forward. “Aidan, look at this!”