It was all over the papers – Pat had been passing notes between Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville West. Both Violet and Vita were married to men, but, according to Pat, would rather be married to each other. It made Enid blush. Girls were often violently mad about each other, but this was different, and everyone knew it. This was a vice unsaid. Violet had been banished to Italy and Pat had been making the situation worse by going out there and delivering Vita’s letters by hand. Joan was loving every minute, landing a balance between intimate and unsullied, in the thick of it yet clean. The gossip had careered around the table until pudding when their mother had said she just couldn’t bear the thought of what poor Alice, Violet’s mother and mistress of the King, or Denys, Violet’s husband, were going through, and Enid, not a friend of any of them, had gone to bed. She’d woken this morning with the same heavy curl in her gut of being neither fashionable nor scandalous. She was tired, frustrated and alone and no amount of connection made it better.

It was hot. Fagus tugged heavy in her hand as Joan and Pat collapsed onto sun loungers, their arms to their brows. Snippets of their conversation and snorts of their laughter drifted across the garden. It made Enid mad. They smoked Turkish cigarettes, drank endlessly, and behaved as if the world would provide for them forever. Their lives glittered, they thought only of now, today, this minute. Not tomorrow or next year. Not who would care for them when mother died or their friendship rotted, not where they would live when they were old. She’d seen to that.