She can’t bear not occupying the centre-stage, Payne thought.

‘Who is your publisher?’ Winifred asked.

Antonia told her.

‘I understand they don’t pay large advances.’

‘They don’t.’

‘I am no longer interested in money,’ Melisande said. ‘I intend to spend the next thirty years of my life educating my emotions. One doesn’t need money for that. If everything else fails, I’ll go into a nunnery.’ She glanced at her watch.

Does she ever mean anything she says? Antonia wondered.

Although their features were not dissimilar, one wouldn’t have been able to tell at once that Winifred and Melisande were sisters. With her demure chignon, virginal bosom and restrained, somewhat wistful manner, sensible dress and shoes, Winifred Willard might have stepped out of the pages of an Anita Brookner novel. Melisande, on the other hand, was highly strung, restlessly temperamental, brittle and ‘young’. Her eyes were a curious yellow-brown colour. She had good cheekbones, but clearly that was not enough – her face was heavily made up, her hair had been dyed copper; it was short and swept back boldly. She wore a little black dress, an Etruscan-style necklace and high heels.

More guests were expected to arrive at any moment, though not an awful lot, Melisande said. No other neighbours, no. She didn’t really care for the people who lived on either side of Kinderhook, she had to admit. They had made overtures, they seemed good, decent people, one saw them in their landscaped gardens at all times, building rockeries or hunting for moles, even in the foulest weather, but they were not her sort of people. No, no luminaries from the theatre world either – she was sorry if Hugh and Antonia were disappointed – it would be an intimate gathering – her fiance, her agent and a playwright friend, whose one-woman show Tallulah Melisande had performed a couple of years back, to spectacular acclaim.