Kneeling fairy with large wings

The Pavilion ballroom has had a strange week since the Wednesday matinee, and I want to tell you before the mail boat takes this. Mrs Ferrier's company, the Silver Moths, came up from Margate with a fairy act. The wings are gauze stretched over wire, bigger than a kitchen table, and the girl who wears them, Ivy Marsh, never once clips the proscenium. I work the cloakroom, so I'm the one who ends up with their discarded things.

Last Thursday I found her in the cold corridor behind the stage door, kneeling on a folded army blanket with a tin of hairpins open beside her knee. A paper rose had come loose and she was trying to pin it back without a looking glass. The wings lay spread across the boards like a pair of wet leaves. She asked me to hold the lamp steady, so I did, and she told me the frame had been her grandmother's, and that whoever bent the wire had wanted them to look heavier than they were.

We talked until the band started up through the floor. She said the only thing that mattered on stage was looking as though you had all the time in the world. I said that sounded like a fib. She laughed and said that was exactly why it worked.

The company moves on to Hastings on Monday. I've kept the rose she left, pinned inside my coat, because a ticket stub is all anyone gets back in this job. Write soon, and tell me whether the sea is kinder off Malta than it is off here.

Your sister, Nell