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and I want her up in Manchester for a trial fortnight, and I want her there alone. Can you manage it?’

      ‘I’ll try,’ I said.

      ‘And when she comes to London I want that man kept away,’ he continued. ‘It’s a great chance, Miss Oliver. Do what you can, won’t you?’

      ‘Of course I will,’ I said, and because I was so happy and because he looked like a rescuing angel I forgot he wasn’t his father and I kissed him.

      He looked very uncomfortable and went off upstairs.

      Louie came down to me about an hour later. She was bubbling with excitement as she told me the whole story all over again.

      ‘I can do it, you know, Polly,’ she said. ‘I can do it! I know I can. These new kids to-day aren’t the war-tired lot who wanted to be sung to sleep. They can stand a bit of noise, a bit of the old stuff. I’m going to do it. Oh, Duck!’ she said, and threw her arms round me. ‘Oh, Duck, it’s going to be all right!’

      We both had a bit of a cry, I remember.

      We started talking about the arrangements, how to raise her fare and what to do about her clothes and so on, and then I said:

      ‘I’ll look after Frank.’

      She looked at me and I saw her openness disappear. It was as though a shutter had been drawn down inside her eyes. She looked at me warily.

      ‘Frank’ll come with me,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to be left at home. You can understand it. I shan’t mention it to Mr. Ferris—you know how difficult these new managers are—but Frank can come up and stay at different digs. He’ll keep quiet, Polly, he’ll keep quiet.’

      ‘Now look here, my girl,’ I said. …

      I talked to her for two hours by the clock and had lunch late for everybody and in the end she agreed with me. She had to see it.

      ‘He’ll be difficult,’ she said. ‘You know what he is, Polly.’

      ‘Yes, I do,’ I said, ‘and that’s why it’s suicide to take him. If I had my way I’d keep him under lock and key the whole engagement.’

      She nodded gravely. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But we couldn’t do that. He’d get out. You don’t understand him.’

      ‘You put your foot down,’ I said.

      There were tears on her cheeks when she gave me her promise.

      Half an hour later he’d got round her again.

      There were fourteen days before she had to go to Manchester and we had time to get busy. She had to rehearse and we had to get her clothes. I think we both realised how much depended on it. It was the last chance, you see; the last life-line.

      I made up my mind I’d see to Frank. I tried arguing with him. I tried pleading. In the end I tried to bribe him. It wasn’t until I thought of frightening him that I got him to listen to me at all, and then I saw how it was going to be. He’d agree with me, they’d both agree with me, they’d both promise, and then I’d find him brushing up his best suit and taking some of the money we’d scraped together for her stage clothes to buy himself a couple of fancy shirts, old and horrible though he was.

      I saw him beating me and I got the idea of him as a vice more clearly in my head. I had a father once who used to drink, and all that business came back to me as I struggled with him and I struggled with Louie. There was the same cunning, the same promising and going behind your back, and the same utter hopelessness of it all.

      Once when she was out he came down and sat on my kitchen table and laughed at me.

      ‘You’ve tried to separate us all your life, haven’t you, Polly? You’re not going to do it, d’you hear. I made her. I put her where she was and she’ll never do anything without me. We shall be together at the end. She’s been a bitch to me, Polly, but I’ve stuck her … and I’m going to stick to her. And if we go down together, well––––’ he nodded his little round head, ‘—well, we go down together, see?’

      ‘Yes, you’re a millstone all right,’ I said.

      He looked surprised.

      ‘A millstone? I’m her lifebelt.’

      And I could see by the way he said it that he’d deceived himself and he believed it.

      It was then, as I lifted the suacepan off the fire and put it on to the draining board, that I began to make up my mind how I was going to kill him. It was a question of who was going under, you see; him, or all of us together.

      It’s not easy to kill someone in your own house if you don’t want anybody to know. I didn’t see how I was going to do it, and the need was so great it became a nightmare to me, growing more and more desperate as the days approached and I saw him and her, too, making little sly preparations to get him to Manchester.

      If he’d only let her have her chance without him! Just a start. But he wouldn’t, and I had to hurry.

      I’d let my second floor, which is very nearly self-contained, as all my places are, to Ma Pollini and her family, who had booked up a seven-week engagement on the Stuart Circuit. She was a monstrous old girl who looked like a bull. She used to be in the act herself and still kept them all together, Pa and the three boys and their wives and the two kids. I never knew a woman who was so clean. I wonder she didn’t have the paper off the wall. She spoke English all right but not too well and you had to explain things to her very carefully, but there wasn’t much her little black eyes missed and I knew I’d got to be careful with her.

      Young Ferris used to let Louie go and rehearse up at some practice rooms he had over the theatre. There were pianos there and a clever accompanist, so she was out a great deal and it was good to see her coming back bright and hopeful and to feel her pat my shoulder and say: ‘It’s going to be all right, Duck. Oh, it’s going to be all right.’

      I thought ‘Yes, by God it is, if I can get rid of this horror for you.’

      I’d begun to see him like that, like a cancer or a monstrous deformity that was dragging her to death before my eyes and taking me with her—because I knew I’d never let her down however much I argued with myself.

      While she was out I used to go up and clean her rooms in the attic and although I got used to him talking I did wonder why she hadn’t gone out of her mind. Idiotic lies—dozens of them! Continuous tales of his importance and his cleverness which didn’t even sound true. Nothing was too big for him to have done, nothing too small. I happened to mention an act I’d seen that was new to London, a fellow flinging himself down from the flies without a wire or a net or anything, and immediately he caught me up.

      ‘That! …’ he said. ‘God, that was an old trick when I was a boy. I could do it … have done it a hundred times. Though I’m an old man I could do it now.’

      I didn’t say anything at the time but it gave me the first real helpful idea I’d had.

      I went about it very slowly. It began when I started shaking the tablecloth out of the front attic window, that is to say out of their living-room window. I had to fling it wide because it had to miss the parapet, and the crumbs—I saw there were plenty of them—used to float down on to the little balcony outside Ma Pollini’s sitting-room. I knew it would annoy her, and it did. We had quite a set-to about it on the stairs and the whole house knew about it. I was apologetic because I didn’t want to lose her just then, but the next morning I did it again. There was another row and the third morning I shook the crumbs into a dust-pan as any sensible woman would.

      But the fourth morning—however, I’m coming to that.

      I am not usually a chatty woman. In my experience the less you say the less people can repeat. And if I’d been the most talkative person in the world I wouldn’t have talked to him. But I spent a lot of time

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