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afforded to take one of them. She dismissed this as a weak moment. Struggling actresses couldn't afford taxis across town at nighttime rates, and she was determined to live within the means of her earnings—the absolute Equity minimum, not what inherited money made possible.
        She was equally determined to make her own success, not trade on the name of her family. And, within the theatre, the Prince family had quite a name. Her paternal grandfather, Sacheverell Prince, had been the Hamlet of his day despite looking, in all the pictures Darcy had even seen of him acting, like an irascible middle-aged man with a moustache. A far cry, she had always thought, from the volatile and indecisive teenage boy of Shakespeare's play.
        Her own mother and father were among the most celebrated classical actors of their generation and extremely politically committed. As a child, Darcy was taken to far more demonstrations than she ever was birthday parties and once suffered terrible fright at the sight of her father in handcuffs—by his own volition, it was quickly explained to her—and attached to the railings of a bank that had interests in the then-ostracized South Africa.
        At home, the kitchen seemed permanently full of people with impassioned eyes thumping the big wooden table, and, throughout her childhood, Darcy had rarely came home from school without wondering what ANC activist or Soviet defector would require her to give up her bedroom this time. Although some, admittedly, had seemed to prefer that she remained in it, an even less inviting prospect.
        Darcy had detected from an early age the fact that neither her mother, Angharad, nor her father, Caractacus, held her grandmother in particularly high esteem. Anna de Blank, Angharad's mother, had been a very successful light film actress of the forties and fifties, starring in Ealing comedies and Disney films. She had made the family fortune, although no one, it seemed to Darcy, was terribly grateful.
        Personally, she and the chain-smoking, purple-haired old lady, who drank at least half a bottle of champagne a day, had always got on tremendously well, although performing her grandmother's old song-and-dance routines at home was, Darcy had quickly discovered, frowned on.
        Theatre at Granny's may be fun and frivolous, but that at home was terribly serious and important. Both her parents had impressed upon her the fact that they were political artists and that she should be, too. "The theatre is the only thing," Angharad would declare in her trademark dramatic, husky voice, and Darcy would agree—as indeed she believed—that it was.
        Nonetheless, there were times, such as now, when the weight of ancestral expectation pressed heavy on Darcy's slim shoulders. Playing Cordelia had meant seventy-hour weeks during the rehearsals, of which she had never missed one, and now that the show had started, she worked six nights a week plus matinees on Friday and Saturday.
        Eventually the night bus came. Whenever her fellow actors asked her where she lived, Darcy always said West London, as if it were Shepherd's Bush or Hammersmith, and not, as it actually was, a penthouse in Queens Gate, a mere smoked-salmon-sandwich's toss from the gates of Hyde Park and with a fine view of Kensington Palace and the Round Pond from the roof garden. Turn around, and you could almost shake the hands of the classic-figure reliefs circling the great dome of the Albert Hall.
        Alighting at Kensington Gore, Darcy went down Queen's Gate. Despite the traditional, white-porticoed appearance of the entrance, you got in by using the electronic keypad beside the front door, or at least you did if you were Darcy and the occupiers of the two luxury flats below the penthouse. If you were Florrie, the nightclubbing German princess on the first floor, you forgot it almost every time, and, irrespective of the invariably late hour, simply hammered on the door