Looking past Emma, Lou saw her own reflection; bedraggled hair, brown overcoat, heavy boots and skirt, all so ugly in this room of sequins, powder puffs and feathers. ‘I went for a walk,’ she said to her feet.

‘In this awful weather? What a funny thing you are. Sit down, won’t you?’

Lou lowered herself awkwardly on to the chaise beside the dressing table, her legs too long to sit comfortably on the seat too close to the floor. The instant she had settled, Emma spun around in her chair. Lou leant away, almost falling over the back of the sofa.

Emma threw her head back and laughed. ‘Oh, you really are a comical thing.’

The last thing on Lou’s mind was laughing. She was utterly absorbed by the sight before her. Emma wore a white silk robe edged in red, so sheer that it was almost transparent. The red ribbon of silk around Emma’s middle only just held the garment in place. It gaped at the top, exposing an expanse of pale, unblemished flesh from the swell of Emma’s cleavage all the way up to her elegant neck. Beneath the fabric, and filling Lou’s field of vision, were two dark circles topping off the mounds of Emma’s breasts. Lou tried not to stare as Emma crossed her legs, and the robe parted before settling so that her thighs were exposed.

Look at her face. For God’s sake, look at her face!

Emma took up a pink puff and in a haze of sweet powder, dusted her chest. She was as comfortable in her near-nakedness as Lou would have been in a fisherman’s cable knit, sou’wester and galoshes. Making no effort to readjust the fabric over her legs, Emma took a cigarette from a box on the dressing table. She offered Lou the box, but she shook her head.

‘What a stroke of luck you passing-by like that,’ Emma said, biting the end of the cigarette. With a click, she lit the tip from the flame of a large crystal desk lighter and blew a stream of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘I’ve been hoping to bump into you to see how you’ve got on with the little challenge I set you.’

‘Challenge?’ Lou echoed, her gaze fixed on the bristles of the hairbrush beside Emma’s elbow.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The little matter of a man called Tom?’

Lou’s boat, already rocking wildly, hit a wave as hard as a wall. Abandoning the oars, she gripped the sides, desperately fighting the surge threatening to tip her overboard.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘What on Earth has happened to you, Louisa? Has the walk outside frozen your mind? I thought women like you were always as sharp as a needle.’

Lou’s eyes snapped to Emma’s face. Women like you. What was that supposed to mean? Was Emma trying to belittle her, dressing up her dressing down as friendship? If she was, then it was the kind of friendship a little boy might have with a spider, just before pulling off its legs. Christ, she had even made her sit on a low seat so she could look down on her. And Emma was clearly getting a kick out of being naked. She exuded sex, it slid down her soft thighs, slipped from the folds of her nearly-there robe and sprang from her firm nipples, while flat-soled, dowdy, feminism clung to the creases of Lou’s matronly tweed and hung about her dishevelled hair like the ripe fug of a cowshed.